Season 9. Episode 1: First 90 Days of a CMO, Elina Vilk, CMO, Hootsuite

Jeff Beathowitz, President and CEO of the Edewoods Group. Today is our guest. We have Alina Bill, who is Chief Marketing Officer at U-Tweet. Alina, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jeff. Who are you? Oh, great, great. So glad to get you on the program.

We've been talking to you now for a couple months to do this. And you've had quite a rolling. You've only been there for a few months yourself. Tell us all about it.

What's it been like? It's been, it has been a rolling, but it's been so much fun. The culture at Hootsuite, nothing like I've ever done before. And it's a really fun company overall.

And it's a fun space. I think if you're a marketer and you work for a marketing product-based company, you are customer zero. So you have that whole intimate feeling. And it feels more innately you understand from day one versus some of the other companies where there's a bigger ramp, I feel like.

We've found for years that, of course, CMOs are constantly under pressure to perform. But I think even worse on real, though, that first 90 to 100 days is critical. How do you approach it? What are you doing to make an impact?

I have a framework that I like to use for the first 90 days. And the framework is really around understanding the business. There's this window of opportunity that I think you have, whether you're a CMO or whether you're in any role, I would say. Like the first 90 days in a company is critical because you form those opinions.

It's like when you meet someone for the first time and the first 30 seconds garners your opinion of the human. The first 90 days is that on steroids in a company. And the thing about it is I use this analogy called the balcony and the dance floor where you're on the balcony. And you're watching everyone doing their dances and you're trying to see where do people, where are people running into each other?

What's happening at a bird's eye view on the dance floor? And then within a few months, you're going to be out there on that dance floor dancing with everybody else. And you're going to miss the forest through the tree. So the first 90 days are a superpower and really allow you to take in the business in a different way.

So I use a framework and I call it the four C's to assess the business and really highlight for myself, what are the key opportunities in a business and the best way to do that in the night. So I'll go through them really quickly with you. The four Cs are customers, company, culture, and competitors. Starting with customers, I have a series of questions that I like to ask about the customer.

Who are they? Why are they there? Do we have the right customers? Do we have the right ideal customer profile?

A lot of times you'll be able to understand the highest LTVs, the highest stickiness, the highest GRRs across a very specific set of customers. Why are these customers those customers? Are we targeting them the right way? Are we building marketing to them the right way?

Are we thinking about them the right way? And are we interviewing them? More than just blanket interviews, more than just that. I like to talk to customers.

I've already spoken to over 40 customers, 50 customers, I think, in the first few months. and ask them these questions. Why are you with us? What are your pain points?

So this is really important. Company, this is around understanding the lingo. Every company has their own vernacular. I know you go walk into this and there's a lot of words you don't understand, right?

Everyone can relate to this. Like you come in and there's like a whole nother language. You're learning French or Spanish or whatever when you walk into a new company. So I like to really understand the vernacular.

And I like to do that by first understanding the outcomes. What are the metrics we're driving? That's the first question I'll ask. I'll dig into our numbers.

What are the last, whether it fits a smaller company or if it's a company, what are the numbers you presented to the board? What are the numbers you're measuring on a regular basis? Why are you measuring the numbers you're measuring? And then how do you call those numbers?

What are the outcomes? Are there specific acronyms that we're using? Are there things that we use all the time? What does that look like?

So what are the metrics of the company? How do we define what good looks like? What are the outcomes we're trying to drive as a company? This is really important to hone in really early on so that you can start focusing your teams against those areas.

The third is culture, and I can't overstate this one enough. A lot of times, this is something that you react to. This is something I think is really important for folks to be proactive about, because the culture of an organization is more important than I would say anything else, because if you embrace and understand that culture, you'll be able to perform in that culture. So an example of that is Hootsuite.

We have an owl. We call him Owly. He's a big part of who we are. We have a lot of lingo around it.

You're part of the nest. You're welcomed into the nest when you come into Hootsuite. There's a lot of these sort of cultural moments and cultural norms. We call them perch days.

You come in a few days a week to the office. There a lot of cultural norms What is behind those cultural norms Why are people doing what they doing What the historical background of this company What are the interactions There certain employees who have been there a long time. I like to talk to them first. Why have you been here?

What keeps you here? What are the things that make you tick? So that's really important. And the last thing is competitors.

I don't like to over-index here. So this one's understated for me. So competitors, the reason I look at competitors at all is because I want to understand product market fit. So I want to understand where we are because our customers at the end of the day are going to go to look at those gardener things, are going to look at those reviews, and they're going to compare you to other companies.

That's natural. So I like to see where we fit and where we don't fit. What are our differentiators? What might differentiate us further?

How do we lean into those customers? Once you understand the customer, competitors are the last thing you do because you really want to understand where you're facing in lieu of your competitors and where you're driving towards your ideal customer profile. So those are the four C's and that's why I like to approach the first 90 days. And I'm still continuing that journey beyond 90, but it definitely helps form some opinions.

It's very comprehensive. So how do you balance that why you're following in a story area though? How do you balance out some of the things that you need to invest in on a long-term basis? Maybe it's brand development or a more comprehensive go-to-market plan with that never-ending pressure to get results in the short term.

So these things go hand in hand. The first thing that I worked on with our CEOs was our corporate strategy and helping her realize that vision and looking at the long view. At the same time, we have this short-term pressure, as you noted, every month to deliver and to execute. So it's not like I could take the 90 days to do these four things.

These things happened inside of executing every single day. but they were conscious things that I spent time on. So you really do have to look at the long view to understand the short view but the problem is if you're too short-sighted you're never going to get the long view. And for us it's really important to actually look at both and then make the trade off have the trade-off conversation.

We know we're giving this up. This is going to this is going to hurt us in six months but we need to do this now. Most people don't acknowledge that. You've gone to accompany and you're really reactionary a lot of the time.

You need to know where your long view is to be able to understand your short-term decision. It's fine to make them still in spite of the long-term, but just know that you're doing it consciously. I think that that's a good transition into, I know another topic they're passionate about is attribution and looking at one more in a different way. So let's talk about that.

What do you mean? I love you asking that question with that book right behind you that you wrote. No pressure to me. I love looking at the funnel in a totally different way.

So from my perspective, I spent many years looking at the funnel wrong. And what I mean by that is just setting us back to the earlier question. I was really reacting, especially earlier maturity levels of my career. I was really reacting to the short-term pressures without having a long-term view.

And as you think about that, all you think about are last-click attribution metrics because they're easy wins and they're easy things you can showcase to a CFO and say, hey, we did this, right? But the reality is if all you look at ROAS, you'll be investing in the wrong part of your business. You're investing on the thing that gets credit last versus the thing that originated that thing in the first place. I can give you many examples of this, but I'll start with telling you what I think the funnel should be.

And to me, the funnel should be very customer-centric. So rather than looking at the funnel from the viewpoint of metrics and outcomes come inside of each area, I look at it from the standpoint of the customer. And from the standpoint of the customer, if you really zoom out and think about the customer view, the customer at any given point is becoming aware of your brand. You're relevant to them or you're not.

And if you're really lucky, you're going to be significant to them. So awareness, relevance, and significance are the way I like to look at the funnel. That's based on the customer, not based on your outcomes. so awareness is really important because awareness is something that lives nascently this has brand building implications this has implications so 95 percent of b2b businesses for example are not buying at any given point in time so only five percent are buying but when they're ready to buy they're aware of the company they're buying from so yeah so it's like you're not you're not in the awareness arena.

You're not in the game at all. So the idea is our customer is aware of you. Then when you get past awareness, the idea is relevance. And are you relevant to them?

This is where we spend the majority as marketers of our time. This is the stuff that, okay, website visits, time spent on page. This is ROAS. This is a lot of the metrics that are really near fundamental metrics that we look at.

But to me, relevance is much bigger than that. Relevance is a factor of time and money. Somebody aware of you then they move into relevance They spending time on you Then at some point that time becomes money They spending money So your first transaction lives in awareness irrelevance And then a small percentage of your top buyers, like 10 to 20% on average per company, have this world of significance. And they represent like 70% of your overall revenue.

these are your buyers that are you're really significant to them you're a big part of their world and so the way I like to think of this if you just look at it in human terms is awareness is I'm meeting you for the first time I don't trust you yet I'm looking into you relevance I'm asking you on a little copy date I hey would you like have a drink would you like to have a cup of coffee let's meet up for a while significance you're like my best friend i'm going to ask you to help me move i feel really comfortable i feel really comfortable pick me up at the airport i have termites at my house can i stay with my two kids over at your house did that fine yeah so i think any friendships the thread in there is trust all the way through and it's about building that trust all the way from awareness to relevance to significance.

And there's a lot of OKRs inside of each of those. But at the end of the day, you're building relationships with customers. How does that help marketing, though, when it's constantly under fire to prove how much revenue it's brought into the business? How does focusing more on the relationship help marketing?

At the end of the day, if you translate numbers, everything you do in marketing, there's a person at the end of that number so at the end of the day whether you're a b2b business or you're a consumer business there's always a human purchasing from you and a human at the end of that decision so whether you know it or not you're building a relationship with them some of it's obvious where you have a sales team and that you're flying them all over the place to get them to meet with these top customers and some of it is self-service or a sas-based recurring revenue business where you feel like they're coming in and they're in a funnel, quote unquote, right?

But even if they're in a funnel, or you're self-serving them, they're still a human making a decision and they're building a relationship with you. Whether you're active in that relationship is your choice. But they are at the end of the day, building a relationship with you. And it comes out in numbers.

The way I like to think of it is how significance is the ultimate measure of how strong your relationship is and is the foundation for your business. So if you're really significant, that means 20% of your customers are driving more of your revenue, right? Like 80% of your revenue. You're significant to that.

Do you have any example of what recovery is doing as well? Jeep. Jeep is amazing. Think about significance.

So Jeep has a ton of amazing communities and so much so that if you own a Jeep and I'm over at Florida, there's a lot of Jeep owners over here. They have the duck movement. I don't know if you've heard that. Yes.

Our son has a Jeep. Yes, we understand that. The ducks on the Jeep. And then they also, they have social media meetups.

That's the connect and the meetup and social media. It's based on the brand and the brand has created so much stickiness and so much value. These people are lifers. They're going to continue buying Jeeps.

They're going to buy Jeeps for their family members. they have so much brand loyalty that it definitely comes out in the numbers, right? Because you're repurchasing that car. And this is a high involvement purchase.

And they built that through community and they built that through intangible relationships that they built over time. So I think a lot of companies do this well on the B2B side. It's almost easier because there's less customers that you have to manage than in the consumer business, especially if you customers on the sales enabled side. You can really build communities and really build stickiness.

I've done it before through customer advisory boards, through building various communities when I was at Meta. So there's a lot of ways to do this. Social media has been around for the biggest, close to 20 years now. So the app and Facebook have started to mature in some ways.

how has the role changed for today's social media manager compared to a few years ago yeah so look i was a social media manager really early on in my career before it was called that i was a digital manager back in those days i've been in this game for over 20 years not to age anyone here but we'll talk about that yeah i remember putting on the very first social It wasn't a career back then. It was a tactic that we didn't understand. And I would say maybe we still don't fully understand.

56% of social media managers say they even boss doesn't know what they do. It's changed a lot in that the audience numbers are stagnant. There's 4.9 billion people in social channels spending 2.

5 hours a day. Wow. So as a marketer, if I told you you could reach more people and build a stickier relationship with them, loyalty, and it can cost you less than any other channel, what would you say? Sign me up Sign me up And yet what do we do We spend most of our money and resources and time in what I call the relevance funnel which is the last click attribution which is like SCM Most marketers spend most of their time and budget on SCM, search engine marketing.

So I would say that this job of a social media manager is probably the least understood in the marketing world. They have many jobs. They are a graphic designer. They are crisis management.

They are customer serviced. They understand every topic in their company. They have to be responsive. And at the same time, be a marketer and be proactive and go viral.

Yeah. Can you just make that go viral? That's like the number one. Can you produce like a TikTok with a million hits on it?

I certainly am not going to name names, but I certainly have had that request. Could you do this? could you do this youtube for me could you just make it go right i need like a million followers by next week please thank you their job is not an easy one at all and because there is no one job and they're underfunded and under resourced uh because the value uh the linkage in terms of attribution for social media and the roi side is unclear it's not as obvious as a roas attribution metric that you have in SEM, for example.

Fascinating. So you would advocate then that social media is more important than SEO? I would advocate, well, first of all, social media and publishing through social media has a direct implication on your search engine optimization in terms of the algorithm. So your SEO folks will tell you that.

But I would say social media, it's the freest channel. Good. Where you could reach the most number of people and you can build a relationship with them. So for me, it's a big point of investment because I would say I can't do, I would have to pay so much more to get the reach and the connection that we're getting with people that we do on social.

Anywhere else in marketing. All said, so, and I think what 25% of the most budgets are going to tech. And why don't I have a hard time arguing the ROI from that? Maybe you should shift a little bit more into social.

So you have, if you start to think about decoupling your social, there's a few things that are in there that I don't know that is as understood. So first and foremost, the people that are engaging with your posts, that are positively engaging with your posts, if you zoom out and do some analysis on that cohort, you'll probably find that those are your top buyers. A lot of your media planning for everything else can happen from that. Also, based on where they engage, this is your test channel.

so before you spend a dollar on doing ads we test everything in our social feeds concepts ideas all of it is like intent tests creatively they happen in social first because we can move quickly we don't have to spend thousands millions of dollars on campaigns if we know that they're not going to work through social so top buyers identify those through social that's a significant single intent tests get through there and then the new update and and the other pieces around starting to build the roi funnel at the significance lens being able to create stickiness with social campaigns with your top buyers you can have expansion through that as well from an roi standpoint that's one way utms are another way tagging things you post in social can actually funneled back to your sales funnel, to your lead gen through MQLs, through a bunch of other things that you're doing.

On the flip side, there's customer care, your detractors, your folks who are going to leave you. And they're not only in social, but they're going to give you the best and most real-time signal as to what's happening in the rest of your business before you even have to do a ton of analysis. You can see what happens in a week in your social feed. Like 62% of individuals that go into your feed and ask you for a question, expect an answer within one hour.

So there's definitely this customer care element there. There's definitely a detractor element there. There's a churn analysis there. So from a customer account perspective, you can really start to look at that and look at all your issues management happening on the flip side of that.

So social can provide insight to both of those things. Social. There's a reason why it's so powerful, right? And you're one of the best companies to do that.

Alina, we're under the time for today, but thank you so much for being on our program and I wish you all the success over at Hootsuite. Thanks so much for having me. Have a great one. Come back soon.

Thank you.