Why the best CMOs think like CEOs

Speaker A: In a Fortune 500, you're really trying to optimize what you have, and in a startup, you're trying to optimize for what you can get to.

Speaker B: You can't always change things in a four week period when something's going wrong from a marketing standpoint, you need to

Speaker A: build a culture of AI practitioning where

Speaker B: the data tells a story that's gotta be told.

Speaker A: It's the art and the science getting the numbers right.

Speaker B: Brandformance. Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of brandformance. Today I'm going to be speaking with Sam Allen, who's the CEO of Iterable. That is an AI powered customer communication platform that works with top brands like Priceline, Fabletics and Nando's. Before Iterable, Sam spent a decade at Salesforce, most recently as an executive Vice president and global chief Pipeline officer. So we're going to get into all of that, his experience at Salesforce, what it's like to be CEO at idripal, and how marketing and marketing technology is changing the world today. Sam, welcome so much to this podcast, brandformance. I feel like I have so much to learn from you, so thank you for joining us and excited to dig in, but what a foggy day today. I was driving up from Belmont, I live in Belmont, and I was like, I couldn't see anything, but it's actually kind of warm. So it's, it's a weird day.

Speaker A: First of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, the weather's been a bit nuts. I had a dinner in the city last night and um, I lived down in the peninsula as well, and I went out to my car at 9 o' clock at night and it felt like it was 65 degrees. So I felt bad for our, our sisters and brothers on the, in the northeast right now dealing with the, uh, you know, snow bomb that happened this past week.

Speaker B: Indeed. All right, Sam, I have so many questions for you and I think this is going to be a special one. The first one I have for you is actually about the last job you had because your title there at, if I'm not wrong, at Salesforce was a chief pipeline officer. How did you come up with that title? What was that all about?

Speaker A: So, uh, it's an interesting story. It, uh, I didn't come up with the title. Mark, uh, Benioff did the challenge we had at sale. This is going back probably two years now. You know, Salesforce has to generate north of $45 billion of pipeline and as you know, Pipeline has many, comes from many places and it comes from your product team, it comes from your sales team, your BDRs, marketing partners. It just, it's a, it's a, it's a milieu of, of sources and each one of those might have a person looking after it, but there was nobody looking over the collectible. And the pipeline performance at the company started to slip a little bit. And when Mark asked, well who's responsible for this? There was a lot of kind of cross finger pointing. Not because people were shirking responsibility, just because there was not a single owner. And Mark um, is obviously uh, a very successful and respected individual. And um, he uh, for a lot of good reasons. And so he doesn't like vacuums. And so he said I need someone at this company who understands all of those components, who understands product and marketing and sales and partners. And I want them to wake up every day thinking about the overall pipeline picture at Salesforce. I want them to build a reporting engine. I want them to come to my staff meeting every week and explain what's going on and then drive a deep culture of inspection, of inspecting the pipeline. Because as you know you can, anybody can create pipe. Is it going to convert? And so it was a fairly short conversation because there are few people in the company that had that breadth of experience but also had the kind of, this is going across egotistical and I apologize, but basically had that leadership gravitas that the rest of the company would listen to. And I've always uh, had a leadership mantra of just doing what's right for the community, you know, myself. So I don't put myself first. And so it was uh, very, it was literally a 24 hour period. Mark said, we need this. I wasn't in that meeting. Three different people said my name at the same time. Mark said, great, Sam will be our new chief pipeline officer. And then my boss at the time was in the meeting and wrote me a text and said hey, congratulations on your new job. And having been at Salesforce over a decade, I'm like, okay, what now? Okay, great. I don't know what you're talking about but uh, so it literally happened in 48 hours and then yeah, it was uh, it was a very uh, interesting, compelling thing. Cause that's not a role that really exists um, in most companies. And so.

Speaker B: But well that's a very fun story. Lots of memories for everyone around the table when that decision got made. Now segueing a little bit. So you have been now at Iterable as a CEO for the last couple of years. And you know, the thing that strikes to me, uh, obviously Iterable. The scale of Iterable is quite different from Salesforce. Right. And so you've run multi billion dollar P and LS inside these Fortune 500 sort of top, you know, SaaS and cloud companies, but you've also operated in startups. What is the mindset shift that you had to make to go from that, you know, salesforce environment to an iterable environment or even sort of other, you know, startups that you've been part of?

Speaker A: Yeah. So just clarification. I've been here for six months. Um, There we go.

Speaker B: All right. Six months roll.

Speaker A: Yeah, the role in August. There are days when it feels like it's been years, but, uh, it's been, it's been pretty awesome. Look, that's a really interesting question. And I, I have had that question put to me by friends and, you know, other podcasters. And I think the first thing to begin with is you have a hell of a lot less resources and every resource really matters. And so in a Fortune 500 or a Fortune 100 or whatever, you're really trying to optimize what you have, and in a startup, you're trying to optimize for what you can get to. And so it's a, it's a completely different mindset shift. And you've really got to be very, very. You have to maximize every resource you have, every dollar, every hiring decision, every ounce of energy you have. Is it really focused on the right things are going to move, the right needles at the pace that you need to move. And so there's just a lot more clarity in what you have to do. And, uh, frankly, there's a lot less excuses because everything's kind of right there in front of you. You know, last thing I've. I've given this advice to people, um, over the years, and it's really easy to get a meeting when you have a Salesforce logo on your business card or a Microsoft or, you know, at this, at this stage, anthropic. It's really hard when no one's heard of your brand. And what that takes is a level of tenacity that people just aren't really ready for. And so you've got to kind of look yourself in the mirror if you're going from a large enterprise to a company like this one. And I wouldn't call ourselves a startup. We've been around 12 years, 1200 customers, you know, a couple hundred million plus in revenue. But we're certainly not a big company yet. Um, and so that tenaciousness is really a requirement to work at a company like this.

Speaker B: Makes total sense. And I can relate. We are much, much smaller, 25% company startup. And that tenacity, I'm reminded of that every day now. Was there something particular that attracted you to the iterable job and did you, you know, when you were sort of entering and now having been there for six months, are there one or two things that you believe that needed to change? And it's also just such a crazy environment. Right. Like every, every week we hear about X, Y and Z is dead.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So I'm very curious to hear your perspective in the unique role that you have, um, at. At interable.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, let me kind of start with that last comment. Like I've been in the valley since the late 90s and so I've seen my fair share of dot com busts and financial Armageddon and you know, most of us went through Covid. So I've seen this roller coaster. I've been on this roller coaster for almost 30 years and so I feel pretty comfortable about maybe sanguine about these short term kind of market shocks. I do believe what we're going through now with SaaS Apocalypse as they're calling it, I think that's a massive overcorrection. There absolutely are companies in that basket that are going to struggle and if they don't lean in and become AI native are going to be in probably short term trouble. But there's also companies in that basket like Salesforce that are being really unduly punished right now. But you know, it is what it is. And so I actually had a all hands call this morning with my leadership organization about this very topic saying hey, stay on mission, stay focused. We're not a SaaS company. You know, we're a uh, we're an AI native marketing technology company. But we get grouped in like everybody else anyway. But you know what really drew me to Interbowl was when I was sitting at Salesforce. I'd been there for over a decade, amazing company. I loved every minute I was there. But there were, there was a professional reason and a personal reason that made me start looking around. And the professional reason was I felt like the technology couldn't move faster and I felt like there was an opportunity to get out and drive a innovation team harder and solve problems for customers faster. And you're just not going to do that at a large company. And then when I looked at the market Kind of, that's kind of my thesis then. One of the areas of the market that I really, really enjoy is the marketing technology stack. I've always kind of been around it. I love it. It's very compelling. It changes all the time and every single company. I don't care what you do for a living, you need to drive engagement with your customers and your prospects. I knew of Iterable as a, as a brand. It obviously was competitive with the Salesforce marketing cloud product. I really liked the brand tone. I liked what they were trying to do. The former CMO of Salesforce is on the Iterable board and so I spoke with her about it and when they reached out to me, it just felt like there was a great connective tissue, um, with what I saw, where the technology was going from an AI perspective and where the market needs that technology to go. And so there's this great opportunity to really drive this business to fit that need. From a personal perspective, I felt like I needed to just shift and do something different. I had been at Salesforce for over a decade. I spent five plus years at Cisco Systems. Like I've been in these large companies. I've also been in smaller companies and I don't believe that one's better than the other. I believe it just depends on where you are in your career journey. And for my personal career journey, I felt like my personal growth had slowed. I just wasn't learning enough. And um, I don't ever want to be in a position in my career where I feel like I'm done or that I'm not ready to learn. And I just felt like I needed to push myself. Things were a little as chaotic and crazy as Salesforce is. And I mean that in a compelling way. Things can get easy when you're there a long time and just me walking in a room and using my, my. The weight of my reputation, I could solve problems and that just wasn't kind of scratching my itch. And so I really felt like it was time for me to do something different. And so those two things came together in the opportunity to be the CEO of Interbowl. And I'm so glad I jumped on that. It's been an amazing six month journey so far.

Speaker B: That's fantastic to hear. Now you have this interesting perspective, Right? So you were the chief pipeline officer and. And I have to imagine that has a lot to do with marketing. Not all of it, but a lot to do with marketing. You are now at a martech company, an AI native martech company. And serving marketers and CMOs and, you know, other product sort of, uh, folks, uh, that are trying to solve their sort of issues at companies like, you know, I'm looking at the list and it's, you know, lot and lot of sort of, uh, consumer companies like Fabletics and Priceline and Nando's and many, many others.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, and you obviously have, you know, dealt with CMOs your entire career. The question that I have for you is when you see CMOs struggle inside of a board meeting or inside of an executive sort of environment, what do you think is usually happening? What is the reason why that struggle happens? And the reason I ask is, you know, I've been a VP of marketing in my career before starting Paramark, and I've been in those shoes where things get. Things get interesting and tense. So I'm curious what your take is from. From your vantage point.

Speaker A: It's kind of the eternal struggle. But, uh, I think if I had to put a point on it, I think it's time horizon tied to results. And this is dramatically exacerbated by what AI is doing. And to be more specific, you know, boards and CEOs, I throw myself in the mix. You expect to see immediate roi. And I talked earlier in the conversation about the focus on everything matters, and you have to really husband your resources. And so you expect to see ROI with things. And marketing, I think marketing will always have an art to it. It's never going to be pure science. And when you need to go build a brand campaign, that brand campaign has to be in market for a while. And anything you do around top of funnel doesn't have an immediate, you know, ROI associated with it. That can put people sideways. And, you know, the second issue is around uncertainty. And we're certainly in a very uncertain era right now because what, what is AI going to do right to my job, to my company, to my customers? And it's shifting very fast. And then the consumer behavior beneath that is also shifting very fast. And so these are setting some expectations. And, you know, you're a board member, you're reading the Wall Street Journal. You're looking at company A that performed a certain way, and you're like, well, why can't we perform like that? It's like, well, we're different. We're a different sector. We'd sell to a different customer. So there's a lot of education that CMOs need to do, I don't think. And the reason they struggle sometimes, I don't think they're allowed the platform to do that, you're walking to a board meeting. I had a board meeting yesterday. I got a amazing new CMO. Love to talk about Prita Gill. She had a 25 minute slot presented to the board. They're not gonna see her for 90 more days. Right. And so you just get this challenged environment where it's really hard for CMOs to get the airtime they need. And so my advice to them is to, you know, be that same assertiveness and tenacity I talked about earlier is really important, like champion your brand and what you need to do as an enterprise. The last thing I'll say on that, and it's kind of coming out of both sides of my mouth a little bit, is when you are a smaller company, it is hard to spend dollars on things like brand awareness. You need to focus more mid and bottom funnel. And that can create a bit of a challenge because if you're not feeding the top of the funnel, how do you optimize the center? It's just hard for smaller companies to spend, you know, millions of dollars on brand awareness campaigns. And that creates a challenge also.

Speaker B: Totally. Okay, that was a. So I'm excited that you have a new cmo and I'm very curious now to maybe have you and the CMO together in six months and we can talk about how the next six months go. It'll be fun. On that note, what makes a good relationship between you and your cmo? What do you think are the ingredients that help? You know, you mentioned tenacity. I get that that's more of a culture behavior type of thing, but other ways in which you want to engage with your CMO that might be different or insightful for audience.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I do, I, I feel like I was blessed and I, I was given the opportunity to hire a cmo. Like most of my management team, I adopted and they're great. Um, um. But to be the CMO of a martech m company is a unique position. So, uh, I felt like I had the lucky position to hire that. And Priya, again, has been an amazing hire for us and what kind of put a finger on it is. And to continue that analogy, I need the CMO to have her finger on the pulse of the market.

Speaker B: Like, uh, she's.

Speaker A: I've got a billion things I'm doing. I really need her to keep her head up a little bit and look downfield and tell me this is where we see the market going. And it takes a lot of input to do that. She has to understand the signals she's getting from her marketing demand gen strategies. She needs to understand the signals she's getting from our account executives on the sales team. She needs to understand what our existing customers are telling us, right, about how they're interacting with the platform and what needs they have. And she's gotta take that and synthesize it into a set of feedback, uh, that then goes into our product roadmap. And so at the core of all that has to be a very, very strong lever of trust. And I have to trust that she's gonna manage all that well. And by the way, that's a statement you can apply to anybody in an executive position. Cause you, they're, they kind of have to deliver. So that's a really, really important um, thing for me. The other thing that's really important and underpins that trust issue is because she's got her finger on the pulse. You really, the CMO and the CEO have to have a very open relationship in terms of, this is what I'm seeing that's going well, fine. This is what I'm seeing that's not going well. And so that feedback on where you're starting to overcorrect in one area or another has to come from the cmo. And the CMO has got to be not afraid to share that. And so that relationship is really important that you have just a trusted bond and be very truthful, um, with one another. And then the last thing is there's this classic, you know, triumvirate between the CEO, the CRO, you know, CMO helping kind of, uh, the CMO needs to be not just a participant at that table, but needs to really guide a lot of the conversation about how you're going to perform as a, as a small body like that.

Speaker B: Okay, that's a really, you know, important one to dig into because the way you described the CMO role was very much like a general manager, like a true sort of leader of, of the business. And it's not, we didn't just talk about advertising and marketing and the distribution side of it, but we talked about sort of all the traditional 4Ps of, of, of marketing. What becomes hard is then reconciling that with your earlier comment that you do have to drive short term results, right? So this makes it a very sort of tenuous and hard job. And, and then you add a CRO in the mix and now you're like, you know, okay, we need to feed the beast, right? We need to feed the engine and have pipeline. If you had to think about uh, the you know, the portfolio of the cmo. How much like roughly attention do you want them to pay on that core strategic job versus you know, hey, we need to generate pipe and make sure that you know we're actually hitting our revenue numbers.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I'm curious like if you even think about them as like separate things or like you know, I'm curious to hear your philosophy on that.

Speaker A: Yeah, my philosophy is, you know I've given this advice to people over my career and like everyone, not everyone, a lot of people want to be an executive. They want to eventually be a CMO or chief product officer. And what I tell them is be careful what you wish for because we it uh to operate well you have to operate in and business. So I need her to a hundred percent focus, not a hundred percent. I need her to focus on pipeline. I need her to focus on brand. I need her to focus on maturing pipeline for the sales team. You know she has to do all these things. She's got to have deep influence on our pricing and our packaging. She got to define the narrative. She has to go reconfigure and architect our website for now agent based search. She has to do all of these things. It can't be. I'm going to do one for three months and then another. They're not iterative and so it's a uh, it's, it's a hard burden to carry. So. And also you also then have the macroeconomic around you. So how is our, how is our business performing? Do we have a short term gap on pipe gen and if so she needs a pivot resource to help solve for that. The hard part for the CMO is that that person and I mentioned this earlier in the relationship question, they always have. They need to be thinking downfield and if they completely overreact to what might be happening in a quarter, that pivoting can cause damage longer term. And so you need that person to really be vocal about hey, you want me to pivot these resources? Here are the trade offs and here are the pros and cons. And so that's why I'm really kind of uh, you pulled it out of my, my answer but the general manager part of the job is a really important one. Like you've got to understand the business and manage the business like a P and L thinker and I think some CMOs struggle with that.

Speaker B: Such a good answer. And I personally think the CMO job is the hardest in the C suite. Do you agree or disagree? Obviously the CEO job is Very hard. But I'm like thinking about all the other ones.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I, I think, I think they're all uniquely.

Speaker B: I put you on the spot. Yes.

Speaker A: I'm trying to cop out. I think this, the hard part about the cmo' is, you know, it's interesting when you're having a great quarter, um, and I'm gonna throw some salespeople under the bus and I get happy about it, but they're like, oh, we killed it, you know, we crushed it. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, marketing, for setting up a great event, but, you know, it's really on us. And when they're having a tough quarter. Where are my marketing leads? Why are my leads qualified? Why aren't you doing more for me? And so it's almost one of these. Thank you. But what have you done for me lately? Jobs.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And because a large part of what marketers do, what they do well, isn't super quantifiable, especially in our data driven world. It does make it hard. Like, the CFOs got a really hard job, but the CFO is, It's, you know, I can understand everything in a spreadsheet. Right. And the salesperson's very. The sales job is incredibly hard, but it's also very black and white. Either you hit your number or you didn't. And if you didn't, you can understand why it's harder. It's just more nuanced with marketers. And because of the art of the role that I talked about earlier, you know, different CMOs have different. They're going to practice. They're going to practice their art in different ways, and that's going to end up with different results. And many of those you just can't tie hard numbers to. And so that's why you often see CMOs kind of tap dancing, which is probably why you asked the question, is it the hardest job? And in many ways it is.

Speaker B: Love that answer. And I didn't want to put you on the spot. You don't have to pick between your. Your favorite children. Right. Um, I get it. Um, hey, folks, thanks for listening to this podcast today. If you're enjoying the show and if you're getting value out of it, we'd really appreciate if you drop us a five star rating on your favorite podcasting app. So let's talk about AI and agents and what's happening in the ecosystem. One of the things that, you know, as a small startup where 25 people, it's relatively easy and straightforward for us to see. Hey, here are the things that are happening in the ecosystem and then adapt. Because we are not operating with a lot of legacy, right? We're not operating with a bunch of baseline that we have to reconfigure. I imagine that it's actually much harder for larger businesses because you have so much sort of, you know, existing infrastructure. What is the advice that you give to CMOs to rethink how they're operating in a scaled environment when they have a team of 50 people, 100 people, and you know, millions of dollars of, hundreds of millions of dollars of pipe being generated? Are there things that they should do differently from an org design perspective in terms of like how they think about their team?

Speaker A: So, uh, let me back up one second. What I'll say is, first and foremost, every leader in the org, not just the cmo, needs to really be thinking through this right now and should be thinking about not just org design, but org makeup. Like, who are you hiring today? And so hiring for AI proficiency. I don't care what your job needs to be a baseline. And I just implemented that here at Iterable. Um, I also tasked our CISO and our head of hr. Cause some of this is cultural, right? Like you need to build a culture of AI practitioning. Um, they are coming up with a set of um, initiatives for the company. Because it's one thing to come and say everyone, go be an AI practitioner, go download Claude or you know, pick your, pick your model. But it's a different to teach them how to do it different than teaching them how to do it. And so what we're doing is we're actually building programs around AI proficiency across like, I can't remember the terms they use, but you have a newbie, right? And then people have never really used it or maybe use ChatGPT for some documentation. Then you have kind of a, uh, practitioners, you have a thought leaders. And so we're actually building a tiered enablement capability inside of Iterable because it's going to make your career better. And so I think that that is, that is really important. But when you come back, tie that back to your question. You need to optimize for people who really can think and structure problems in a way that they can leverage AI to help solve for them. And on an org design perspective, making your org really focused on outcomes as opposed to specific activities is really critical because I think people are getting hung up on everything from oh my gosh, these agents are going to take my job to, uh, my CEO Sam says I have to be a practitioner I don't know how to do it. And they get caught up on these tasks and it's like, okay, what's the outcome you're trying to drive and how do you leverage the capabilities to get to your outcome? What I think is going to be really interesting is the role of the middle manager who used to manage a lot of people. I think the manager level role is going to think m the word manager will exist, but that doesn't mean you manage 7, 8, 10, 12 people. I think what it manage means is you manage outcomes with a mix of people and agents. And I think that's where some people are getting hung up too is on the whole job issue, my job's going to go away. I'm like, well, your job will go away if you don't learn how to go deep in your domain and leverage AI to make you an expert. So that's where I think organizations are getting hung up. So I think getting in front of that and operating on your front foot and not being afraid of this, you know, this, this. I'm um, gonna probably overstep my bounds a little bit. This technology in many ways is no different than every other technology shift. You can go back to the cotton gin, right. And it comes with the relevant fears and all that. The difference this time is the speed. I mean it's literally overnight. And that's really what's getting to people. But I was making a joke with my chief product officer last night. We were talking and I said, you know, there's no stenographers anymore. You know, there's no horse, uh, and buggy maintenance companies. And um, yeah, some roles are going to disappear, but there also didn't used to be prompt manager, you know, a prompt writer, two years ago and now there are. So I think really being forward thinking and um, aggressively adopting what we see around us is going to be really important to org design for cmos and everybody else for that matter.

Speaker B: I love what you said about the middle manager becoming more of an outcome manager with a combination of humans and agents. I do see that being the way we are operating as well. Right. And how I'm thinking about operating. Right. Like, hey, it's all about the outcomes because we can have all this output if it doesn't drive top line or bottom line, what are we talking about? It's all just productivity theater. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I think just one more thing to add in there. Uh, you know, the org design in the org structure and how you roll out the roles is all really important. But I think Tying it to a system. Accountability is really critical also. And so it's at interval. I just rolled out the um, the V2 mom methodology. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's a Benioff tool that I'm a big fan of and that really drives and ties off the um vision with what we need to accomplish, the vision and the values by which we're going to drive our decision making. And you know, leveraging your AI capabilities in that construct has really been really important for, for us.

Speaker B: I love that. I've heard a lot about V2 mom. I don't think I've ever operated in that way. But, um, maybe this is the time I will go look at it again. Okay. Two questions to kind of bring it to a, to a close. And I have a, you know, a couple of interesting questions to close it out. One is when marketing and sales. So you're, you're a CMO and you're a CRO. If they disagree about lead quality or follow through, um, there's always going to be some tension. And some tension is good in that environment. Right. Um, right. How do you think about intervening or do you not. And I'm curious, like, what is your philosophy on managing that, that relationship as a CEO?

Speaker A: Yeah. So first of all, I am a believer in some healthy friction. You know, we need to hold ourselves accountable. We need to push one another. I will let peers try and solve problems. I will kind of observe. I may ping them and say, do you need me to lean in here? And if they do, then I try and get more context. But when I do need to lean in and solve it, you know what I really generally that friction between the CRO and the CMO goes back to that. I mentioned earlier that in quarter performance in the middle of third quarter, let's just say this all hypothetical. Your enterprise team in the eastern half of the United States is going to miss their number. The CRO is like, man, we cannot miss that number. I need marketing to dramatically pivot. The CMO has got a couple million dollars of budget that she's going to spend in the fourth quarter for this event. Fourth quarter doesn't matter right now. The third quarter does. I'm going to take that money and deploy it. And the CMO is like, I can't do that because I have to think of a broader vision and what that's going to implement. And I do need to think about a multi quarter set of activities. And the CRO is like, well, you don't really care about my business, then that's literally the kind of general way that goes. What I try to do at that point is if it becomes intractable is I do jump in. I'm like, look, here's what we're going to do. You know, we're going to potentially maybe pivot some capability, but what's the root cause of why we're here? And if the root cause is a marketing failure, then that's a different conversation than, hey, we just didn't execute on pipe generation for account executives or something. So really understanding the root cause is really important. There's always going to, it's always nuanced. There's never a simple answer. Sometimes, you know, this is something I told my leadership team when I got here and we started to get to know one another. I said, look, I am an inveterate decision maker and every time you make a decision, there's someone on the gaining end and someone on the losing end and just accept the fact that you're going to end up on both sides of this equation. And maybe in that, that scenario, that hypothetical scenario, I brought up that I do say, yeah, we are going to pivot some dollars, but we're not going to pivot from the event because that's too important. We'll pivot from some other, some other bucket somewhere I think, you know, helping the negotiation. So that, because the CRO is not going to have all the context of where the dollars are being spent. I saw this happen at Salesforce a lot, by the way. Cloud or a region with like, why are you spending that money over there? When I'm in pain, you should be giving me that money. But they don't have the context of why that budget was created and uh, and manage the way it was. And so me coming in and kind of saying, okay, we're going to pivot some dollars, but not from that bucket. And here's why. I think that kind of education of, you know, rising tide, lifting all boats is really important. So I do try to educate both sides as to what the concerns, uh, are and why they're acting the way that they are. But this has kind of been a theme in this conversation. Like the cmo, if they overreact to an end quarter issue, it could have longer term impacts. And as you know, being in marketing, sometimes you can't fix something in four weeks with marketing dollars. It just doesn't work that way. And this kind of goes back to the question you had earlier about friction that CMOs might have with boards or Something like you just, you can dump a bunch of money into some sort of campaign. It takes time and there's a hundred years of research around buyer behavior to prove this out. So even if you did have a rough quarter and you're trying to pivot dollars, at the end of the day, are you really going to make a change, are really going to make a shift. And so I tend to come in and just try and educate folks on why we are or not going to do something.

Speaker B: That's a very nuanced answer and I really appreciate that coming from a CEO, uh, because I completely agree. You can't always change things in a four week period when something's going wrong from a marketing standpoint. And uh, you have to think about which also makes like the whole idea of forecasting and planning multi quarter from a marketing perspective so much more important. And I feel like that is something that gets a little bit, um, let's just say it's not core, uh, it's not a core capability and a skill set within the marketing organization.

Speaker A: The one thing I'll add to my answer is, you know, I think being really intelligent about what does move the needle and a demand generation campaign won't have enough time in market or uh, out of home or something like that. But if you think about maturing pipe, not creating pipe, that's often where CROs get lost too. It's like it's all about leads. Well, Mike, you have an existing pipeline. How about if we actually take a small amount of dollars but do a really nice Bespoke event for 12 CIOs at an event, take them to a Knicks game and a steak or something like that, have a guest speaker that actually is not super expensive. It can be enacted very quickly and has a lot of value to it. And so, you know, that's an example of where you come in and say, look, we can't do enough in the quarter to drive pipe gen, but we can actually mature some pipe here by these tactics. What do you think about that? Um, and that can tend to help.

Speaker B: Completely agree. Okay, last one before we go to our speed round. Okay, you've mentioned that you dislike certain marketing buzzwords. So um, which one is the absolute worst? And maybe give us some of the other ones that you dislike.

Speaker A: Well, you know, it's interesting. So this is not a buzzword and I'll answer your question in a moment. But right now look what AI is doing to SEO and semi. Oh yeah, and you know, it's just like cratering, like thousands of Websites performance. And so people are kind of running wild uh, trying to fix that. So it's not a buzzword but it is interesting. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a tried and true term search engine optimization that all of a sudden has like been flown on its head. But uh, you know, there's one that, that is going to come across sounding like antithetical to how you do good marketing. But when I think about the word Persona, um, because you know, I see I did this salesforce when I was there. We had I think nine major clouds. Each one's a billion dollar business. You know, and I'd go into a pipeline inspection meeting and they have this slide with these Personas and they were like, you know, these kind of cute icons on a screen. And this is Susie and you know, she's uh, a, she's a influencer. And this is Jonas. And Jonas. And I'm looking at this and thinking to myself, this is just fluff man. Like I, it's, it's cute and I get it and it checks the box and it's like CMO jargon. But what are you then actually doing to go drive behavior? And are you being overly targeted? You really have. And I'm going to be over simplistic and I might upset some marketers, but you've got existing customers and you got prospects. And in my mind like those are the two Personas you need to go worry about. And really within, in the confines of a, of a um, of an icp. Like I think that's, that focus is super, super critical especially for marketers. But um, in a smaller company like Iterable or a startup, focus on those two things. Focus on your existing customers, making your product sticky, making them happy, evolving their experience and then focus on your, your prospects and getting them convinced to join your community. I think is where marketers need to spend their time.

Speaker B: I personally agree. I've never loved the idea of these, you know, caricature Personas. I do find value in some labeling or you know, segmentation of your prospects. That's fine, right? You can say like, hey, you know, like Paramark supports E Comm customers and retail customers and fintech customers, perfectly fine. But to your point, if you start to get like individual people and like how they, what their attributes are and there must be some value for that in like the traditional, you know, market research and behavioral psychology and all that fun stuff, but when it comes to practical application, I don't think it works. And that's what you're describing 100%.

Speaker A: And I do agree there's. There, every, there's. I'm sure there's plenty of great use cases for those. But when you tie it back, the first thing we talked about, which is having high fidelity around where you spend money, and all of a sudden you have a CMO telling you you got nine Personas to support. It's like, that's just peanut buttering.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, your capability. And I, I just, I kind of have a bit of a gut adverse reaction to that. The other one you asked. For others, this will also sound a little antithetical, but everyone, I mean, everyone, everyone lays potato chips. Probably has a commercial about being AI enabled. Right?

Speaker B: Oh, my God, yes.

Speaker A: So, and you, you drive up from Belmont. Every single, um.

Speaker B: Drives me nuts. All the billboards.

Speaker A: Yes, every billboard, for those of you not familiar with Bay Area along 101 is just. Every single one of them is AI. Right. And, and so it's just this noisy. And of course, of course we're AI, you know, and so, you know, I have to tell customers, look, it's been an AI native company, you know, for years, and we have AI capabilities going back half a decade before this was a. I mean, AI was a term, but it wasn't what it is today. And so it's just, it starts, it just, it just makes a lot of noise for the customer and they don't know what's what and it's hard for them to make decisions. And then you get into this issue of paradox, uh, of choice, because there's just way too many brands and it's. The whole thing just comes to a stop.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Um, okay, on that note, we talked about billboards. Uh, two questions. One is, is there a brand? Could be a B2B brand, could be a consumer brand that you are jealous of right now.

Speaker A: Jealous of? Wow, that's a good question. Um. Oh, uh, man, I'm sure there is. Nothing's popping right in my head who's doing good marketing.

Speaker B: Right. Like when you think about that drive from the Peninsula up or.

Speaker A: I think, I think Anthropic is doing great marketing. I think they are focused on, you know, kind of where their value is and what's important. Um, I think they're a, they're, they're. It's, it's more outcome based. Uh, if you look at their big competitor, um, OpenAI, their marketing's good too, but it's all about, like, very kind of simple things like how do I do, how do I get better at Pull Ups, you know, and it's like mass market.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's mass market versus anthropic. Coming in with, like, a very specific point of view.

Speaker A: Yeah, Right. And I'm a technologist by nature, so of course I might. But I just, I think a lot of the things that they're doing are, are, are really, really intelligent. And if you give me a minute, I'll probably come up with another one. Um, um, I need to think more about this. You're not the first person to ask me this, and I should probably spend a bit more time thinking about these brands. I. You know what's interesting?

Speaker B: You have so many brands in your portfolio, so you got to give, uh, one of them a shout out, you know.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I love to talk about Pete's Coffee because I'm a coffee nut and I'm just. By the way, I'm just black coffee. I don't do anything fancy with it.

Speaker B: Same here. Same here. Yep.

Speaker A: Hot and dark and, uh, I'm good to go. Look what they've done with their, their app, uh, if you use it. And their customer engagement is really compelling. Of course, we power that. But I love that brand. Drava is a fitness app that I use. I think it's fantastic. If you're into cars, this is actually, actually going back. This actually helps answer your question. I love Volvo. I, I love their brand. Um, I've driven their cars. Their cars are amazing. I think their marketing is excellent. Um, and, uh, they're, they're. They're a customer, uh, of ours. Well, and so, you know, there's a, There's a lot out there, I do think, oh, one more relevant. So I'm a huge Olympics nut. I'm a sports nut in general. I, I love the Olympics. I just love it. You know, I'll be, like, completely immersed in a sport that I won't pay attention to for four years. But when it's on in the Olympics, I just love it. And, um, NBC Universal is, Is a customer of ours and what they've done around Peacock, you know, because that's where you have to go watch some of these more esoteric, um, sports has been. Has been fantastic. So, um, I think they've done a great job with their platform and their branding and content and all that. It's been really fun to watch.

Speaker B: That's a great set of brands. Fantastic answer. All right, we're going to bring it to a close. Sam. This was very fun for me to hear from another CEO who's been There. Done that and is doing it again at Herbal. Very excited about the journey. And, uh, thanks for joining me on this podcast.

Speaker A: Yeah, wonderful. Thanks for having me. I'd love to come. I'd love to come back with Priya or have Priya or cmo.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Come on. She'd be great. Give her a couple more months to get her feet settled. You know, folks, hopefully follow me on LinkedIn. I put a lot of thought pieces out there. Um, I just wrote one on the Olympics and then Fantastic Twitter handle at Sam Underscore Iterable CEO, if folks want to follow me there.

Speaker B: You called it Twitter. Is it Twitter or is it X?

Speaker A: What do you.

Speaker B: What do you do? It's X, man.

Speaker A: I. There's. There's certain things about Sam Allen, I guess you're not going to change. Uh, it's not a. It's not a. It's not that I have an aversion to it. I just, you know, I just called it life and.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Well, everybody go follow Sam Allen on LinkedIn on Twitter or X, whatever you call it. Um, I've been following you for a couple of months now and loving your takes and excited about maybe having you again. And we'll. We'll do something fun with you and Priya and talk about, you know, how marketing is changing in six months or so.

Speaker A: That'd be great. Love it. Thanks for having me. This was awesome.

Speaker B: All right, folks, that was Sam Allen, the CEO of Iterable. I learned a ton from this conversation about the right way to structure a CMO and CEO relationship. If you want to follow more conversations like this, tune in again next week to brandformance. See you then.