Why Your MarTech Stack Is Broken—And How to Fix It Without Starting Over with Rebecca Nackson

The biggest one that sticks with me till today is the product mindset. My team is so tired of hearing me say this, but the job to be done right, instead of being so solution oriented, of we need this tool or the one that we use today is the one that we're going to use tomorrow, or we couldn't possibly do that. And so asking the team, well, why couldn't we possibly do it right? And we don't have enough people or we don't have enough training and like, what if we get more people? What if we get more training? That is so much of what I do internally with the team. Welcome to How I Grew this, where we dive into the world of digital marketing and connect with leaders in the space about how they're scaling, evolving and growing. All right, hello. Welcome to How I Grew this. I'm so excited about our guest today, Rebecca Naxon. Hello. Hello. Great to see you. Amanda. Great to see you. And we have Adam here, of course. Rebecca and I go way back and it took this to get us to catch up. But I met her when she was leading marketing at Bandsintown, and even then she was the person that knew everything happening, the tools, the trends, the conferences, who's building what and why, and she's made a career out of that. She's gone on to found and lead notable as their CEO, where she helps companies make sense of their growth stack. So we're going to dig into all of that today. And so excited to have you here. I'm really excited to chat about all things awesome. Well, there's one fun little thing that I noticed about your career that I just have to get into because I mentioned bands in town, but you also worked at Audible and iheart, so I'm seeing a thread of music and I want to know what pulled you into that world. Luck already. As I was thinking, when you were like, I noticed something about your career, I was thinking, most likely it's just going to be a coincidence because I spoke on a panel a while back where somebody defined these as career squiggles. And I totally run with that expression. It's a career that's not a straight line. It takes all these squiggles and it makes all the sense in the world in hindsight. So I am really happy to say that I've had jobs and I've worked at companies where if you had told me, let's say when I was in high school, that this is what I would work for them and do that. Exactly, I would have said yes. All right. I'M excited to do this, but none of it was intentional, and it was kind of the opposite of that. So going to work at Audible, and nobody had heard of Audible, and I would have to explain. And I think the number one customer care call that they would get was people asking, when are my tapes or CDs going to arrive in the mail? Oh, honey. And just so you know, if you want to talk about how old this was, the iPhone did not exist. So it was a total whim. I applied to a job on monster. Com. Figured that my resume was going into a black hole. Was shocked when they called me CEO. Called you? Yeah, you're right. Not far from that. It was a small organization. And actually the person that I went to work for, his department was investor relations, PR and community relations. And not long after I came to work for him, he left to kind of return to more of the investor world. And I was just sort of aimlessly working there. They hired their first VP of marketing, and we got along. And he was like, I don't have headcount to hire, but since you're here, it would be fine for you to work with me. And he would take me into conference rooms and train me on marketing. Wait, that's incredible. Lisa, you kind of fell into that as well. Totally fell into it. Somebody who I worked with and became very friendly with went to work for a company, a startup that was building Spotify did not yet exist in the US So they were basically building that. And he was like, I think you would like it here. And I went there. And then, by the way, when I was at Audible, they were acquired by Amazon. So I was there very much. You know, most of my career was the before, but then I also got to see the after, which was a really interesting experience. Went to that music startup, and after some time being there, they were acquired by iHeartradio. But of course, once you're in one space, it's easier to find your path there. And, you know, it's the same with my clients now. Right. It's like once you're working with one type, one vertical, then other companies. Right. Want to work with you. Awesome. So you fell into marketing sort of too. You held roles as like head of product. Head of marketing. Product marketing roles. So I want to just take a little bit of what you still carry from those experiences now into leading notable, which we'll talk a lot about in a second. So again, if I go one step back, I was a philosophy major in college. I studied logic, so again, had no idea but it was the whole, you know, you're writing like, if what I want to happen happens, here's what happens. What is everything a customer could get wrong, right. What is every scenario that I need to anticipate? So I think that was my training to then work into product and really bounced back and forth between those two. And so when you talk about notable, I would say that the through lines are number one, being on one side and then going over to the other side. Right. So being a product person who understands the marketer, being a marketer who understands the product person. And then I think the biggest one that sticks with me till today is the product mindset. My team is so tired of hearing me say this, but the job to be done right instead of being so solution oriented of we need this tool or the one that we use today is the one that we're going to use tomorrow. Or we couldn't possibly do that. And so asking the team, well, why couldn't we possibly do it right? And we don't have enough people or we don't have enough training and like, what if we get more people? What if we get more training? That is so much of what I do internally with the team and it's kind of all of what we do with our clients is like, let's just take a step back. Not too far of a step back. Nobody wants to hire an agency that's like, let's get big picture. So, Rebecca, can I actually take a step back and ask. We're going through your career and then we started talking about notable. For those of us who don't know notable, can you give us an explanation of the business you started? I'm sure I'll have some follow up questions about that. Yeah, yeah. Marketing changed pretty dramatically in that period where I was learning about it. And I think more than anything else when I was at iHeartRadio, the switch to digital. And so I was there working on the app when the majority of the people that sold advertisements at Clear Channel in the time that I started, ads in the app were value add thrown in free of charge. Everybody wanted to be on what they called terrestrial radio or on billboards and we had to convince them to just try out. And then it completely flipped in my time there where that's all anybody wanted. And along with having that, the old expression in advertising was, I know that 50% of it works, I just don't know which 50%. And digital changed all of that because suddenly you could start tracking some things about these people. Well, just because that flipped in what felt like overnight didn't mean my expertise did. And I did not get into marketing because I was a particularly data oriented person. But I had to learn a lot of it. And so I felt this sense of there's a huge need here. There's like a re education that's going to have to happen for marketers to allow them to still do the things that they love about marketing and to bring the strengths that they bring to this. But you can't afford to not understand the technology and also take the best of, like, now you can know what's resonating and you can target accordingly. Right. You don't have to have one giant audience and pick the message that's gonna hopefully resonate with the entire audience. You can start targeting. So I know what was confusing for me, I know the kind of help that I needed. And so I don't wanna now throw that away and get back to the stuff that I'm working on. I kind of actually want to stay still in this spot and help other people, as I say, avoid a lot of the mistakes that I learned the hard way. So that was the impetus for starting the business that was like, hey, this is. I want to become an expert. Yeah. The real impetus is I went to a conference, I saw great things. Every boss that I had was kind of fighting with me. Like, they would hire me to do this thing that they didn't know about, and then they would not feel comfortable letting me do that thing. And I saw great things happening. And I thought, you know what? The number of people who know how to do these things is smaller than the people that need that kind of help. So if I go into consulting, I'll have a greater chance. And if it's terrible and they don't actually let me do that thing, projects end. And so an agency that I had once tried to hire, when I decided I wanted to consult on this, they said, we're growing the team. Come here and do it here. And less than a year after I started doing that, they were acquired. Story of your life. Someone's got to hire you and then they'll get their business acquired. It just happens over and over. Thank you for picking up. Because when you were talking about the common thread of music, I think the bigger. I have a. The bigger thread is helping companies get acquired. Hey, that's a pretty cool superpower too. I don't know, because when I was, you know, three years out of college going to work in this, but I did think this audible thing sounds like, so you know how to find things that are on the edge. And that's kind of a theme. Then maybe it's like, you can also find customers that are on the edge of this great brink of success. They just need a little tinkering. Well, I definitely think I see patterns. And as you do things longer, you start to see, like, oh, not everybody sees this pattern. And that's essential for an agency because I think some people look at things like, each one is different. And it is, but I see a common denominator beneath it, and I see the sort of 80, 20 of, like, yeah, the last mile or the first mile is very specific if this company is a restaurant versus a streaming product. But I actually see a lot more common, which means every time we do something, we're getting another pass at that thing. It's like a snowball. And so if we work with you this year, we know more than we did last year, and next year we're gonna know even more than that. And I keep coming back to this totally inappropriate scene from Dazed and confused where Matthew McConaughey says, like, I keep getting older, but they stay the same age. And I just keep coming back to that scene because it's like everybody, when they're coming to us, they're facing this for the first time, and they have all of the anxieties, and we are like, we have seen this a hundred times before. So it's those patterns that maybe in ways I don't even realize that I'm picking up on something that has been an aspect of my career. So notable as an agency or consultancy, or is it both? That's a hot topic. Or debatable age old C. Yeah, I was trying, too. We both tried to come up with a combo of the word. It's not a natural fit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the things that's really key is that we are capable of doing everything that we're advising about. And the funny thing about starting notable is I got to work at this agency, thank goodness, for just under a year before I started it. Prolific. Yes. But it's very common that people start a business because they are good at something. Right. They work for somebody else. I read a great book about this. They paint houses, and they're like, man, the company is bringing in this amount of money, and I'm getting paid a lot less than that. I could do this. Right. And so they start a business because they were great at painting, but not necessarily great at running a business. Right. That's always the surprise. And really way too much of my day and more than I wish is spent sometimes on that side of things instead of getting to do the work that. The painting. The painting. But I bring it up because it took me a while. I suffered for a long time of that feeling of there must be something I don't know stopping me. And let me tell you, looking back now, there was so much that I didn't know, and thank God I just didn't know that I didn't know it. Yeah, they say that a lot about starting a business is. Wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't. And if I knew what I didn't know, I would have been way too scared to do it. But if you enjoy seeing patterns and trying to get to the essence of a problem, which again, brings me back to the philosophy background of life. But why? But why? But why? Right. I enjoy the running of the business in that regard. It's the same as when we're working with clients. And it's why I have such a, you know, it's so cliche, but empathy. Both because I've been literally in their shoes, or I shouldn't say I've not literally. Unless you actually wear their same shoes yet. Yeah, I haven't. I haven't yet. We could do a kickoff of like, I want to wear your shoes. I want to actually. And the kickoff is a perfect name for it. So ultimately, that's right. But also because, like, I can appreciate from running my business, that whole thing of, like, there's a million priorities. What is the actual top priority? And the thing that I can always say to our clients is that everybody on the team has had to learn these tools as well. So for some people, it's more recent than others of when they knew nothing about how a particular tool worked and now they know it like the back of their hand. But we all remember that experience of saying, I have absolutely no idea. They're all pretty complicated. And I do think we should spend time for our listeners kind of talking about specifically like, hey, you were in these same shoes of running a marketing strategy or running product marketing for these apps, these businesses, and you're saying, hey, I need a martech stack that's going to help me grow. What tools do I actually need and how the heck do I get from buying the tool to getting it working? So can you talk me through that whole process and how you now have made that into noteable and how you help your customers? That sentence that you just said of going from buying to using it and Making it useful. It's that step that I think is the most likely to be skipped. And it was. What I thought was, this is so lopsided on one side. These tools have healthy sales budgets and marketing budgets. And if you do so much as raise a hand or poke your head in to say, I might be interested, there's a whole infrastructure. The way that I talk about it is we're not exclusive to any one tool, but we do have a small set of tools that we work with and recommend because we would trust them. We have used these tools before. It really is like, which is the right tool for your team and your circumstances. It doesn't matter what your vertical is. Right. Because that's a misnomer. I think my competitor did this, so we should do the same thing. Even though we have a different team and a different. Slightly different audience and definitely a different product, it's not a priority right now. Oh, wait. It came off at a big meeting. Oh, gosh. Right. Tell me all the reasons why your product is great, but I don't have any time to tell you anything about me. And it's that where we initially come in, because you have to do a little bit of both. RFPs are written in a way or evaluations are designed in a way that the prospect gets to say as much about themselves as they would like to. And then what winds up happening is when you're asking people, can you do these things? You get a bunch of, like, yeses and nos, very little nos, because everything is usually possible, but you don't get any sense of, like, what will actually be involved and what will it cost you. And you also haven't prioritized which of those features are you going to start using right away and which one are you not? And the biggest issue comes in because you're up to the last second you're deciding between these two, and your CFO is negotiating. And finally a decision is made, the contract is signed, and now the relationship comes back to, okay, well, now the clock is ticking. You're paying for this product, and you need to implement it. And now you're doing this scramble to, like, get the implementation instructions over to your engineers. And so what we recommend is if you start thinking about the tool that you need and the job that you need it to do, and you think about it through the lens of what's broken today, like, what brings you here? Then you start to both inform the sales team to tell you how it's going to solve those things and what it will look like. For your business and even some degree of what it will cost. And that's all information that you're going to need once you are implementing. So you get a more specific sales process that lets you make better decisions around, like, what is this truly going to cost and what of our own resources are we going to need versus not need? And you are somewhat prepared to then roll that forward into your implementation instructions. So that's just one example of how you can just reverse it, because it's something that you're ultimately going to have to do, but it makes your sales process better for you. I mean, I remember one time when I was buying, I wanted this tool, and so I would feed the use cases to the rep, and she was like, thank you. This makes everything so helpful. It's like, it's helpful for me, too, because I want us to have this tool. My boss at iHeartRadio was like, Enlist the salespeople to help you get your job done. And so I did. Starting when I was at iHeartRadio, I went from feeling like I don't know this ecosystem at all to soaking all of that up and feeling like, oh, I actually now can advise other people. That's really interesting. And just to read that back to, what you're saying is there's good salespeople and bad salespeople, and everyone talks about that, but there's also good customers and bad customers. And a good customer will enlist the salesperson to help them get their job done. I would say there's those that are working smarter versus harder because there's no such thing as a bad customer. But I think there's a misguided customer, right? There is a kind of customer who enjoys, I don't know if that's the right word, but some degree of, like, I'm in charge, you work for me. And that's definitely true in agencies, right? Like, I'm the client. And then there are those clients of ours or those buyers who are like, you know, Amanda, we were kind of riffing that they're like, I want this tool. I want a tool. Maybe it's this tool, right? But I want this sales process to succeed in the sense that I make what I need clear. You respond, and if this thing is something that's needed, I'm going to be more successful in my job. So I want to put everything out there that's going to help you help me. May the best seller and tool win. So I think, like, let people do some of the heavy lifting, and it doesn't change how much you need to do as the buyer, but it's going to definitely change the outcome. So there's another element of this. Right. Because maybe there's a buyer that sits in one portion of the team and then there's probably a disconnect with the other side. Yeah. The term that I've just heard so much is connective tissue. We just wind up acting like this connective tissue. It's this dysfunctional family that hasn't talked to each other, particularly as teams are even more distributed than ever before since COVID I know a lot of remote here we all are remotely. So, you know, they'll say like, oh, yeah, that team. I don't even interact with them. I don't even know who the person is that I would talk to. And so we reintroduce them to one another. Meet your paid marketer. Lifecycle marketer. Hello. And it is like that. And it's also like you are two sides of the same coin and the job. And again, this is like the part that we can do and the part we're not always successful. But really what we want to show is if you know more about where these customers came from and the ads that they clicked on or the journey that got them here, you're going to have a much easier time marketing to them and vice versa. And that you guys can actually help each other. It's not that you're enemies. Right. It's not that, like, oh, we can't do anything with these users. They're total garbage. And the other team saying, we spend all this effort bringing people in and that team can't even hold on to that. Keep them. Yeah. Adam, did you want to get into some of the future? I have one question because I think we're running short on time. You spend your day in the Martech stack, what do you see changing the most in the next? Call it two to three years. And how should marketers prepare? Two things, and I think they're related. 1. And frankly, I have felt this way since the beginning, but this is all accelerated that people are going to be thinking about the solution versus a particular tool. And some of the tools might than be less relevant if necessary at all. Because all of these tools are just very friendly interfaces and logic, but they're doing things that technically exist. I do a lot of vibe coding, a lot of stuff on Claude. Right. So I built something for myself that when I was showing somebody last night, I was saying, this is something I would have had to hire a team of engineers. And it would have taken them months to do. And I'm able to do this overnight. So I suddenly don't need that tool. Right. That I would have once paid for. And I do think that the line is going to blur between like, do you need to buy the tool to do automations or can you take your mail client and just build those kinds of automations? But the build versus buy thing has been going on since the beginning of time. And I can make plenty of arguments of why you might want to buy. But I do think for some companies, the ability and the resources that you need to things custom to yourself is changing. And so I think the nature of the conversation will change even more to like I want to be doing automation or segmentation and I don't need to even know which tools are involved. Can I read that back to you in a way that kind of the next step, which is the software that exists today, is basically our GUI wrapped around the technology to get it done. But with automation, that GUI and software may not be needed. Yeah, it moves the barrier of like what resources you need to have and what expertise you need to have in order to start building things for yourself. It's not like build is better than buy. That argument still exists. But if you are prone to building or if you want to at least dip your toe into there, it's a lot easier or at least to do it temporarily than ever before. So I think that's going to raise the bar and I'm already finding it happening of like what those tools need to provide in order for it to be worth you buying from them. Every time I'm about to cancel a tool that I use in our business because I'm like, why can't we do this ourselves? They tend to launch something three weeks before that. I'm like, okay, wow, God, is this. That's something that I can't do. Right? So that's been a positive for consumers. And of course, what AI means in terms of automating and having agents do work versus teams. I mean, I have really embraced AI. I use it so much in my business and in my recommendations. And so it is certainly in the same way that it's changing people's perception of what software or tooling or technology they need. It's clearly having an impact in how people are running marketing teams. But if anything, it has just actually increased our work. Look, I'm ready to take a vacation, so I'm not afraid of being replaced. But it just hasn't been our experience. Well, the strategy is still Very much in the marketer's brain it is because if anything, it just now multiplies the answers and the choices that you have. So somebody, they still need help cutting through the noise and just knowing what's tried and true and. But what I will say is its ability to automate things or its ability to connect the dots makes our job of serving as that connective tissue so much easier. It allows us to make a much more personalized and ROI based case. So that's why I'm so bullish about it, even though I'm sure I'm writing my own funeral or whatever. But for me right now, it actually has just helped us do our job better. And as I often say, you can't scale what you don't trust. So it's there to help accelerate and take some of the burden off of you in doing the things that, you know, work. But if you just turn it on with no sense of what it's doing and what you want it to do, you're just going to get a ton of noise and not have great results. So I'm excited about what it means and I've always loved that about this industry is that there's one part of me that feels like, wow, I've accumulated like nothing scares me. I got it all under my belt. Oh, I'm ready to go. There's nothing new, right? And then meantime, I'm writing down notes because somebody's talking about something that I have never heard of before. So it just keeps it so fresh and so interesting. Awesome. Okay, I know we are really running up on time, but one last question for you. Amongst the apps and customers that you work with, what's the theme that bubbles to the top of what they're doing well, what the great ones are doing well, and what advice do you have from those experiences to any marketers or practitioners listening? The ones that are succeeding, it is because they have a system. It is the full circle of we have an idea and we run something that is going to answer a question that we have one way or the other. We think if we onboard in a certain way. We think if we run a loyalty program, right? We think if we reach customers at this point, it will increase conversion or it will increase the amount that they spend and they run a test in a way that's like, we'll know that this was a success if, we'll know that this did not work if. And what's our plan as soon as we realize that it is working to scale it and what's our plan as soon as we realize that it's not working to take it down and what are we going to put behind it and just go through that. And what I say is the teams that are succeeding are doing that piece. Teams that are not doing that, I do not believe that they are growing and teams that are even keeping that loop relatively small. I think it's like a 401k where each week they're gaining a little bit of interest and it's these incremental wins but they always end the year higher than they started versus other teams that are just taking these big swings. And even if it goes really right, nobody has any idea what it was that went so right that they should implement beyond that one thing and even worse if it's really wrong. Perfect advice. Awesome. And I can't help but notice that it kind of goes back to your early days and your philosophy major. I can't help but notice that either. And AI too. My parents would jab me to say like, are you going to be a chief philosophical officer one day? Look who's laughing now. Huh? Look who's laughing now. Yeah, we're going to need those. Okay. Well, I just absolutely love anytime I get to connect with you. You're such a great relationship builder and I'm sure that is a big reason that you've been so successful. But thank you for sharing all of this with us today and with our listeners and so great to have you on. Oh, this was so great. Thanks for calling me successful. Hey, take the moment to pat yourself on the back. Thank you guys. This was really fun. Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this and share with someone trying to grow their career or their business. Until next time, keep growing.