Kim Scribner - Deep Dive into Agile Marketing Podcast (Episode Thirty-Five)

Welcome to the Deep Dive into Agile Marketing Podcast with your host, John Kass. Together, we'll take a closer look at the ins and outs of marketing through an agile lens. You'll learn from interviews with top agile thought leaders and practitioners and gain fresh new insights for your journey. Let's get ready to dive in.

Welcome to the Deep Dive into Agile Marketing. I'm your host, John Cass, here in Boston, Massachusetts. Today, I'll be interviewing Kim Schneiber, who is the Senior Director, Change and Organizational Coaching at CMG. Welcome, Kim.

Thanks for having me, John. Well, it's great to have you on. I've had a long relationship with CMG. You were some of the earliest folks in the industry to recognize the importance of agile for marketers?

Yeah, so I've been with CMG about nine years now. It's longer than I imagine. It goes fast time these days. And my kind of origins to agile ways of working actually started in software development.

So I did not, in fact, start in the marketing space. I did start in the software development space and in the DevOps space, working with teams using both Scrum and Kanban in kind of the early 2000s. Great, great. Was it difficult to make a transition from the technical space to the marketing space?

Yeah, so I thought it might be difficult. Kind of the way that I came about that is when I was working for Deluxe Financial Services, I was running their Agile DevOps shop. And we actually hired CMG Consulting to work for Deluxe Small Business. And I was part of the conversation of bringing CMG.

And that's how I actually met the CMG team. And so the transition was less challenging than I thought. You might hear me say in conversations you and I have had in the past that I'm not traditionally a marketer. I am traditionally a business analyst.

That's kind of what my training and my background is. And I think part of what we're going to get into here today is, isn't marketing just business? And so the transition was easier than I expected. Oh, that's good.

That's good. So could you describe a little bit about CMG and the work that you do there? Yeah, absolutely. So CMG Consulting is a boutique-sized consulting firm.

So we're small and mighty. We've got offices in Durham, North Carolina and Georgetown. Um, we work with, uh, in the strategy space. So we help organizations with strategic planning, with pricing strategy, with market analysis, as well as ways of working leadership, coaching, and organizational design.

So the way that we like to talk about that is it's both the strategy side and the execution side of problems that organizations are having, because if you have really great strategy, but you're not executing well, the strategy almost doesn't matter. And so that's why we help organizations on both sides of that equation. Great. How have you seen marketing as a function ending up with a reputation problem inside organizations?

Yeah, I love this because you and I had a little bit of a debate as we were preparing for this conversation together. And I think it is maybe less so than it was five years ago, let's say. But the problem that I see marketing still has often is that they're not acting like business folks that can have impact on real business problems all of the time. I wouldn't say that's always, but some of the time, it's more of a we're taking orders to execute on something that was somebody else's idea.

We may bring the creative as the marketing team because we've got the design expertise, we have the brand expertise, but we're not necessarily demonstrating the expertise in impacting business results. And so I think that's where the reputation still has opportunities to be improved for marketing. well you know it's interesting you say that because i always think as a marketer the problem is is because the c-suite thinks that marketing is a certain way which is what you had actually described yes how the marketer is reacting which is oh there's an order and i need to fulfill it rather than coming with a set of processes and the marketing concept uh and a marketing engine if you were, to try and teach and instill into the organization a marketing framework.

And so for me, the reason why Agile is so important is it gives marketers the ability to have a conversation around it because of precisely what you said, which is the marketers are failing to communicate what they do. I mean, do you think that's valid? I think the frameworks that exist under Agile do help those conversations when done well. And those are a lot of ifs in that statement that I just made.

When you think about impact to an organization, we're talking about revenue, we're talking about operating income, we're talking about number of new members acquired by an organization, we're talking about making sure that we don't lose members or customers of an organization And so traditionally marketers have looked more at engagement metrics who opened an email Who clicked on a social post Who forwarded something Where that often breaks down in my experience is between the engagement metric and attributing that to we gained a new member from that engagement tactic.

And so So they've got to bridge that gap. And what Agile does is it helps drive to those results, right? When we start doing things like writing user stories, as an example, we're always positioning who we're trying to impact. So the persona, if you will, that we're trying to impact, what we're trying to do, and what we want to be possible when we're done.

And so even having that framework of a user story and more kind of traditional scrum terminology, or a strategy statement, even in today's world, so that it orients the marketing team to not just sending an email so that we get a click or an open or some sort of engagement, but that we actually get that person to convert to a member. You may know you're listening to this show along the Marketing Podcast Network, but did you know there are other great shows on MPN to help your business?

Heather Eck hosts an amazing show called Your Radiant Spirit. Heather, tell listeners about the show. What if the colors you're drawn to, the creative urges you ignore, and the quiet, intuitive hits you brush off are actually trying to tell you something? Your Radiant Spirit is the podcast that helps you listen and live with greater clarity and purpose.

And where can people subscribe? You can find and subscribe at hethereck.com slash yourradiantspirit on marketingpodcast.net or search for it wherever you get your podcasts.

You heard her. Go subscribe. Let's go to our sponsor. So what does marketing look like when it's treated as a driver of impact instead of a producer of outputs to sort of fall on from that?

Yeah, so you get more authority, right? So as soon as you start demonstrating that you're impacting business results, you get a seat at the table. So for CMOs, for example, you want to be as important as the chief growth officer in those conversations. And so if you can demonstrate the impact that your team is having, not just on awareness of the brand.

Awareness of a brand is very important, but that's the first step is awareness. when you can be partners. Like the best case I would say is if the chief growth officer and the chief marketing officer are best buddies in an organization, then they know that they're doing something well because they rely on each other and they're partnered in long-term outcomes. What would it take to build trust in marketing as a strategic function rather than a cost center?

And I think I'm looking at it from the framework of how you would put it, which is that marketers aren't always succeeding in communicating about the marketing concept rather than just being the order taker. So how is it from that framework from the marketing? So maybe you look at it from the marketer's perspective, but then also outside. So I think from the marketer's perspective, it starts with your discovery conversations with the person who's making a request of you to do something.

So if you are starting those conversations from the perspective of, you know, what's the due date? How many people is something going to? Then you're missing the important elements of discovery, which are what's the problem you are trying to solve? Person who's requesting it from me.

So it's taking it back to creating a problem statement or an opportunity statement if we want to be more positive about it so that you are understanding what the objective is of the requester instead of what they're requesting. Right. So oftentimes internal partners might come to marketing and say, I'm going to use a big example. I want a billboard.

Right. I just I want a billboard and I wanted to tell people this. Well, marketers can come to that conversation and say, well, tell me what you're trying to accomplish with a billboard. Are you trying to get people to I work with a lot of health care clients, right, in health care systems?

Are you trying to get new patients? How do we think a billboard is going to convert new patients? So when marketing takes that discovery conversation down a discovering what the problem is and what solution the requester is trying to drive to, instead of only focusing on the creative element and their specific expertise, they become more of that business partner that is required. because when someone comes to you, most marketers will say, oh my God, I hate the request for a billboard because they know that people driving 75 miles an hour down a highway are not necessarily thinking about where they're going to the next time they need to go to the hospital, right?

So that allows the marketer to demonstrate their expertise. They understand that all different tactics have all different implications and can have different impacts on results. and they start to show up as that kind of thought leader in their space rather than just executing on exactly what the person asked for. You see, I think the way that you answered that indicates the essential issue for marketers, which is that you had an example of someone who is a business leader in the organization saying we want to do this and assuming that they right But you also made a good point I think there which is that where the marketer gets the opportunity to show and ask questions to find out well is this, you know, is that the right choice?

That's essentially what they're saying. They're not asking that question, but they're, they're trying to delve into it, right? And through, and it's a consultative conversation, right? It's, it's not telling the request or they're wrong, It's doing it in a consultative way and oftentimes bringing data to that, right?

So that's where some of our agile frameworks really help. We're making data-driven decisions. And so if you bring data to that conversation with the requester, it's actually even better than you saying something yourself because the data speaks for itself. Here's the tactics that have worked for this thing.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I also, I mean, I've used it as a device, but I've also sort of incorporated in my thinking over the last year or so. It's this element of there are two factors that say folks in the IT space, I mean, they do experience this, but they don't experience it so viscerally, I think, from a business perspective for marketers because they're right there, which is you have customers who are always changing and they've got different needs and they don't do what you want them to do because you know they have different needs and then you've got competitors who are who are reacting to those needs and so it's a chaotic environment right and so so therefore you've always got this dynamic and i and i think it gets to that point which is you can have a conversation and i think if you bring in the customers and you bring in the competitors, the other folks that you're having that conversation with, they're much more willing to listen to what the customers are saying and what the competitors are saying than what the market is saying.

Yeah. Customer data is huge, right? Understanding which tactics have worked for which types of problems in the past and bringing that data to the conversation. Also, you just touched on something that I think is important in this conversation, which is the transition from software developers and IT don't really get the same kind of questions because I think there's a little more mystery around the work that software developers do.

And it feels like not anybody can do it. And I think sometimes there is a perception that anybody can do marketing. And that really is not true. It is a very specific discipline that builds on very specific pieces of expertise.

demonstrating that expertise is what helps change that reputation. Right, right. I agree. How can agile frameworks provide the scaffolding for the tough conversations teams usually avoid?

Yeah. So I touched on one earlier, which is in Scrum, there's user stories, which is as this role, I want to do this thing so that this impact happens. That's an extremely easy way to frame up a problem statement so that we're demonstrating we understand the problem, right? So after we have that discovery conversation, we then have a statement that we can put in front of them and say, is this really what you're trying to accomplish?

And it helps us carry that conversation forward. The other bit of kind of agile mindset, not necessarily practice, is there's a lot of experimentation. So we don't want to just say, we've got this plan and we've got this list of tactics and we're going to go deploy it. And we're deploying it exactly as this list of tactics says, no matter what we learn in between.

And so what Agile does best is it helps you learn really fast, right? So from that, we're going to do small pilots of things. We might do more testing than we did previously. And we're not just talking about A-B testing.

We might be talking about testing to an audience in a specific segment and then moving beyond that segment once we see results. And so those frameworks and those bits of ways of working help us learn more so that we can be even more impactful. The other thing that helps through kind of some of those tough conversations is bringing the data to that conversation and maybe bringing the requester into what we would call a backlog refinement session or a story mapping session. So a backlog refinement is when a team is going through the list of items that they are trying to accomplish and they're making sure that they understand what the definition of done is.

How do they know when they're successful? And that really, working that and creating that in partnership with a requester could be a good way to bring out things that maybe you hadn't thought about initially. The other part of that is making sure the requester sees things early, right? So that early collaboration, which is part of the Agile framework, is critically important to what we're talking about here.

From the producers of Baby Reindeer comes Alice and Steve, exclusively on Disney+. I wish I was in love. You're my best friend. Anybody would be lucky to have you.

Meet Alice and Steve. We've known each other for over 30 years. When Alice's daughter starts to date Steve... Mum, I want to keep seeing him.

things start to unravel. Your mum just tried to shoot me. What? Steve!

Alice and Steve, a Hulu original series, exclusively on Disney+. 18 plus subscription required, T's and C's apply. Let's go to our sponsor. What kinds of data actually shift conversations from opinion to clarity And I think it goes back to what you would the example that you had given which is oh, we should have a billboard.

That's what's going to work. Yeah. So, you know, data can be manipulated. We all know that.

And so you want to first make sure to not manipulate your data so that it is bringing that actual clarity. but you have to speak in the language of your requester. And so when we, let's say we have a dashboard and it says CTR, which as marketers we know is click-through rate. Well, a business person doesn't understand even necessarily what click-through rate is.

They don't understand what an impression is from a social media perspective. So when you're having those data conversations and you're bringing the information, I would say part of that conversation has to be bringing it into language that other business areas will understand. Explaining that an impression means somebody is scrolling through a page versus a like and a social post means they're engaging. A forward is even better.

A comment is even better so that business people start to understand, you know what you're talking about. That's your demonstration of expertise. The best kind of data that brings clarity is simple. So make the data simple.

Don't paper people with information because that will make it more confusing and they'll be less likely to trust what you're telling them. What would marketing look like if organizations truly understood its purpose? I love this question. So I've had clients who do this really, really well.

And what that looks like is when they are sitting lockstep with, had a client who was working on moving people from coming to the emergency room when they really didn't have an emergent issue. Okay, so this was a hospital system. And you would think, what does marketing have to do with that, right? How can they help with that because the patient's already there?

But what they did was they helped design communications both for the emergency room as well as on the website of the hospital system. And they also worked with other partners on how to best communicate that if you have a non-emergency room issue and you just need, let's say you have a sprained ankle, as an example. You don't necessarily have to go to an emergency room. you can go to an urgent care for something like that.

So they worked on messaging and they set real goals together of how many patients they would transfer from an emergency room into an urgent care facility instead. And they measured that data every week together. And that to me is an example of where marketing is using their expertise, which is communications, content, in order to impact a really important goal because hospital systems that have patients that come into the emergency room, those patients cost more money for the hospital, and it means they can serve fewer patients, which means it has an impact on the community.

So in that case, marketing was solving a real business problem that affected not just the organization, but the community that it served. Well, I think it also speaks to that question of value for the customers, right? It's at the core of it. And value doesn't mean that we throw out resources and budgets and stuff like that.

There's constraints there that are always determining what you can provide and what the negotiation is. But I think it's a really good metric. I think it's a really good example to provide people. Thanks for sharing that with the community.

But I don't know. I mean, I think this question really gets to the core of things for marketers And it's the reason why I really like Agile as a framework to give to marketers to have a conversation, you know, because I think half the problem is that marketers aren't explaining what our purpose is. And you've done a good job today, I think, of sort of showing how it's by educating, you know, the other folks that aren't marketers that that's how it can help. But what are your thoughts about that?

I mean, do you think that's the biggest issue in marketing? Yeah, I mean, it's demonstration of impact and impact that matters to business partners. And so one of the things that I do with my marketing clients is I train the strategist, the marketing strategist to think like business analysts. I actually do a session with them of here's business analyst tools so that they can think more like from a business impact perspective.

And it helps them have these conversations that we're talking about here in a different way. Well, that's great. That's great. Well, thank you, Kim.

I really appreciate you joining us on the deep dive into agile marketing. Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for joining us in the deep dive into agile marketing with John Cass. My thanks to Kim and we'll see you next time.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Deep Dive into Agile Marketing Podcast. Be sure and subscribe to our show and leave a review. Let us know what you thought of today's episode. This podcast is heard along the Marketing Podcast Network.

For more great marketing podcasts, visit marketingpodcasts.net.