Webflow’s CMO: Stop Chasing More Content! Win AI Search! End Silos!

Speaker A: Their hypothesis was for the 2000 sites that we took a look at in terms of AEO maturity, ChatGPT and Claude and perplexity and so on. Content and authority mattered more than the technical parts of the website. And what we learned shocked us, to be honest, when we looked at the data, it wasn't the content, it was the technical parts of the website.

Speaker B: Goes against the narrative that I constantly see on LinkedIn of, uh, you just need more content, flood the market. They need content to find. So you just need to be pumping out articles all day long.

Speaker A: The requirement of how much content that I'm looking for you to produce numbers that look like 30, 40, 50, 60 pieces of content a day. In order to do that, we gotta do more than one blog a week. We have to do a couple, maybe three, maybe four.

Speaker B: Volume of these AI generated news sites is multiplying fast all around the world. Today my guest is Dave Steer, the CMO of webflow. Dave has led marketing at companies like Twitter, Facebook, eBay, PayPal, Cloudflare, and now runs a platform with courtside seats to what's happening on millions of websites.

Speaker A: What we found out was among those 2,000 websites, the median score was 2 out of 5. So that's a failing grade. The job to be done with AI discoverability and AEO overall is not something that any one person or one function can do. Content itself qualitatively feels like it's getting worse, where not only everything looks like it's being written by AI, but also what is their point of view that is different than other people's point of view? Internal links, metadata and schema, uh, bylines and sources. Certified freshness for your content, if done right, reverses a trend that I see on the Internet right now. And because the rest of your categories and competition are out of two, you could actually find huge opportunity focusing on the basics.

Speaker B: Okay, what's next after you get that one set?

Speaker A: Teams that know how to do this will beat the teams that don't know how to do this.

Speaker B: Dave, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me. That's great. I'm excited to be here. Stephanie.

Speaker B: I'm super excited to have you as well. So. So, as I just mentioned, uh, you've worked at a lot of companies, you've seen a lot, I can tell.

Speaker A: I've seen a lot. I've seen a lot.

Speaker B: Yeah. I'm wondering what you're thinking and seeing right now. If we zoom out and look at the market and the role of the CMO and everything that's happening in your world, what are the big shifts that you're seeing now that are different than ever before?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, first of all, you're right, I've seen a lot. We're really ground zero and a lot of technical changes that happen over time. The change to social media, which was a completely different way of, like, interacting with your audience, the change to mobile, new technology coming in and how you think about different form factors and surfaces, all of these have been, like, really exciting to be a part of the shift from traditional B2C to B2B and the, um, importance that they have in the company, all of which have been really exciting parts to be in. But I don't think I've ever seen things shift as much as they're shifting right now. And so it's not just the amount of things that are changing, but it's a speed at which they're changing is causing a lot of us to kind of hold on to the core principles of our job, but also rethink how we do our job. And to be specific about that, we'll of course talk about AI, but above and beyond AI, uh, the role of the CMO itself. As a result, the people who occupied that seat had time span on job on average of around 18 months. Because there's only so much campaign work that you can do to actually get across today. CMOs. The shift that I'm seeing is the mindset about the job is fundamentally changing from campaigns to systems. How do I build the systems in place? Almost like a CTO or a CIO would think about their job? How do I build the systems in place to make sure that our teams can actually do the job in the era that we're in right now? So that's one of the changes that I see among a myriad of other things that are happening in an AI context.

Speaker B: I mean, when I look at the space that we're in now, it feels like previously these shifts would impact, let's say, you know, we'd have this whole D2C industry come up and a lot of the shifts would come from, like, one specific area. And then the big enterprise shift, and then all these different shifts were very siloed, I would say. But now when you look around, it feels like actually just everyone, everyone's experiencing it. It's not just for the enterprise companies are feeling it or the smaller businesses are feeling like everyone is feeling it at the same time. Would you agree with that?

Speaker A: 100%. I think it's everyone, everywhere, all the time. I also think it's one of the reasons why marketing is so exciting right now and feels more like a community than it ever has before, because the overwhelming chances that the issues and challenges that you as a marketing leader face, that I face with my own teams and how we go to market. Nearly every other CMO is facing the same issues. And so now you don't need to just go to people in your category to share notes. You can go to people in any category and they are fundamentally, you know, dealing with the same issues. And what I love about it is it enables people to get together and share notes about what's working and what's not working. It enables marketing leaders and their teams to work with agencies who can pattern match across many, many different folks. In fact, we just had our annual big conference and we held it in Boston. It was amazing. For the folks tuning in over here who couldn't make it, nearly all, if not all of the content is online for you to take a look at. And what you'll hear and what you'll see is a bunch of marketing leaders, technical leaders and agencies coming together and again, sharing the state of the state. Like, what's working and what's not working with proposed solutions.

Speaker B: Uh, I love that. I want to dig a little bit more into, like, what's working, what's not. Because I know when I saw that you were coming up as a guest on the show, at first I was like, wait, we're customers. This is awesome. I can ask questions that are my own personal needs of like, I want answers to these things. And then I'm like, Dave has insight into millions of websites. I want to kind of get into that of like, what are you seeing, what is working right now, what's not? Because this has been a big conversation on marketing trends. People come on, they have lots of ideas. But I'm like, actually, Dave knows the answers to this because so many, uh, websites, like, you know what's happening. So I'd love to hear, like, what are the things that you heard were working and what's not working?

Speaker A: Well, first of all, thank you for being a customer. The number one thing I love to do is talk to customers about their experiences on our platform. A lot of people turn to webflow to build these amazingly brand immersive experiences that drive growth at the same time. And we call ourselves agentic web marketing platform for a reason, is because these teams, both marketing teams and agencies, really turn to the platform not just to publish a website, because that part has become the easy part, but to do the harder thing which is what happens on day two after the publishing of the website and beyond. How do you make sure, back to the point that I raised earlier, that as a cmo, you're not just thinking about campaigns, you're thinking about systems. How do you think about the system that you're putting in place to make sure that you're driving growth and building brand? The two fundamental jobs of any marketer that's out there. And so that is just the way of saying what I see working right is when people embrace the core principles of the job and then look to a platform like ours to help them do their job. When it doesn't go right, I see one of two things happening, maybe three things. The first is misunderstanding of the trend that we see online overall. We are going into an Internet or a web that has come alive. It is a like it's a two way Internet right now. It is not one way. And the way that we DO marketing in 2026 and beyond has to have that as a fundamental truth. You know, right message, right customer, right time has never been more achievable. Now you can create these infinite expressions of your brand but still hold the constant the same. When I see it not going right, it's like a lack of really understanding that as a major shift that's going on in the market. The second thing is really around that building for day two and beyond. When it goes right, I see teams really focused on not just the launch, but they're building the systems in place to take advantage of a platform like ours, to rapidly experiment, to do a lot of conversion rate optimization. Again, personalize their digital experience to all of the different audiences that are going to their site and creating a closed loop over time where they can consistently get better and better and better. Which leads to the third thing. AI ah is fundamentally rewritten by our journey that people are going through like under our feet. And so when I see it going wrong, the way that people try to perform an answer Engine optimization or aeo, looks more like the past than it needs to look like in the future. And so we talk to companies a lot about that.

Speaker B: Yes, aeo, this is the area I want to dive into with you because this is one that, I mean, I will say I've probably been talking about it for two years on the show. I was an early person coming in, talking about it, bringing this up, but I still don't know if I know what doing it well means in quotes for people who cannot see me. So what are you seeing? I think I saw that you all scored 2,000 websites. Some of them were your customers, some were not. And you got to see very quickly who was doing this well. And so I'd love to hear more about, like, how do you do aeoli and are people even doing it? Well? They've had enough time at this point. Like, are they doing a good job out there?

Speaker A: I think it's an emerging field, you know, and it's interesting that AEO two to three years ago was an unknown field now. Now it's a budget line on most cmos budgets. It's rapidly evolving. I think the best practices are being shaped now. We've internalized it to basically say there is a model that marketing teams should look at to help them assess whether or not they are like mature in their AEO adoption, uh, best practices. And it's basically four areas. There's the content that you create, there is the technical component of your website or digital experience, there's the authority that you create off of the website and then there's the measurement, uh, that you put in place to see if you're making progress towards the goal that you have. So it's those four things. The first is AEO is a team sport and it's unlike SEO of four dance as I call them. SEO could be one person or one function operating on their own and making sure that the technical details of the site are correct and you're ranking for the keywords that you want to with. Again, primarily one algorithm that you paid the most attention to. AEO is a team sport because some of the interventions that you need are happening in your digital experience or your website and some are happening off of the website. So on your website you need to have all the technical details that are important. You need to tag the right things, but off of the website you need to engage with your communities and you need to provide them with value in a way that the answer engines will look to that and say this company has authority over what they're talking about based on what I'm seeing out there and based on what I'm seeing on their site. And so that means that it can't be any one person's job anymore and it actually can't be any one functions job anymore. A lot of the work that we do over here is how you bring teams together towards a singular goal aeo, but through multidisciplinary ways of doing it.

Speaker B: Okay, so when you were looking at all of these sites, you just mentioned earlier the technical piece of it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I think I remember Seeing that was one of the key missing areas. Just like the basics of having a website that can be found. But I'd love for you to talk more about what was the score when you were looking at all these, Were there any surprises? And why did you even want to score these websites in the first place?

Speaker A: Like any digital marketer, I like to have a hypothesis and then actually test it out. My team did a great job. They had a hypothesis going in and then they wanted to test out that hypothesis by looking at 2000 websites and how those websites both ranked in and go through that. So their hypothesis was in terms of AEO maturity, content and authority mattered more than the technical parts of the website. For the 2000 sites that we took a look at, sometimes your hypothesis is confirmed, oftentimes it's not confirmed and ultimately it's about what you learned in the process. And what we learned shocked us, to be honest. What we found out was among those 2,000 websites, the median score was 2 out of 5. So that's a failing grade in terms of like, what's. It's a bummer. Womp, womp. Sorry everybody, but there's a lot of work to do. I'm an optimistic person, you know, like I, I watch a lot of TED Lasso, so it just comes out of me. I think that there's a lot of work to do and people are pointed in sort of the right direction when it comes to this. But they're starting from a base, uh, of two out of five. Problem diagnosis goes deeper. Now why is it two out of five? When we looked at the data, it wasn't the content, it was the technical parts of the website. Again, I'm a glass half full person. That means that actually if you are a company who has a great content management system and has the processes in place to have the technical details of your CMS right, then you will perform well from an AEO perspective. And because the rest of your categories and competition are out of two, you could actually find huge opportunity in actually just focusing on the basics from that perspective.

Speaker B: I love this already because it goes against the narrative that I constantly see on LinkedIn of uh, you just need more content, flood the market. That's how like ChatGPT and Claude Content to find. So you just need to be pumping out articles all day long. So I actually love this way of thinking of it, uh, of like go back to the basics first, make sure your technical abilities on your website are sturdy and then, okay, what, what's next after you get that one set and

Speaker A: so AI love that too, right? Because if done right, reverses a trend that I see on the Internet right now, which is like chunking out more content. The content itself qualitatively feels like it's getting worse. Which is just to say that in order to produce all of the content people think that they need to do, they are using AI to do it. And sometimes that AI is not grounded in their brand context and brand standards and their tone of voice and actually grounded in, like, what is their point of view that is different than other people's point of view. And so the result for the consumer that content is kind of a reversion to the mean, where not only everything looks like it's being written by AI, but also the underlying thoughts aren't actually unique to the brand that is putting them out. So I like this trend from that perspective because I think it's going to reverse the dynamic that we see in terms of like, like content flushing everything. The marketing job, like, the core purpose of the job is the same. Build brand, drive growth, full stop. But how we do our job changes. The marketers that I see today, they're actually builders. They have this builder ethos to them, and I find that extraordinarily exciting. One of the things that I find exciting about it is their curiosity in technology is much higher than it used to be. When I started my career, you have, like, marketers on our teams, on my team specifically, who are like, great, I'm going to roll up my sleeves and start building workflows, or I'm going to look at the technical details of our, uh, website and make sure that they are up to snuff. And so I find that really exciting as well.

Speaker B: I love that. So I want to get into the technical basics. Like, if I'm a marketing leader right now, and I'm listening and I'm like, one, I'm probably maybe thinking, I already have that covered. I've got the tech team and they did it. But just in case, I would love to walk through some of the basics on a site, if you have a couple things to look at and just make sure that they're good so that we can rank more than a 2.

Speaker A: I want to come back in a year with the freshest data and I want to say, hey, Stephanie, it's now a 3.5 because of all of the things that your audience has done.

Speaker B: Yep. Yep. We're changing lives over here.

Speaker A: So we're changing lives. We're changing the world. One website, one digital experience at a, uh, Time. No, we're building a better Internet. That's what it's all about. A few things that I'd encourage everybody to do tomorrow or today, if you're listening in the morning, first, look at your internal links. Make sure that your internal links are accurate. They're linking to the right places. When we looked at that data again from the scan of 2,000 sites, we found that 62% of those links are broken. That is like website hygiene101. Just go scan all of your internal links, make sure that they're functional, that they're not broken. The second thing is look at your metadata and your schema again. What I love about marketers today is that they're builders and they're getting into the details. All schema is, is really the tag, the tags that you put in place to signal out to the outside world, either to the search engine or the answer engine, the nature of the content that you have so that they can easily take a look at it. When we did that, our scan, I said that 62% of internal links are broken. 60% of schema and metadata just, like, missed the basics that are supposed to be there. Those two things alone will have an outsized impact on your ability to score better and do better and be more competitive in aeo. Uh, I would then take a look one level deeper, which is look at bylines and sources. Like I said earlier, answer engines. You know, these bots are coming onto the website and they're trying really quickly to understand, can I trust this source? And one of the things that we found is that when you have bylines and sources in your content, think about a byline as like, traditionally on a blog post, you'll have a photo of a person and their byline. Consider doing that on your product pages as well. That actually really helps out. The answer engines feel like this is a credible source and not just a bunch of, like, slop that's out there. And this is really important. Content freshness. Think of Rotten Tomatoes and how they have, like, certified fresh. Do something like that for your content itself. And this has been an area that marketers over the years, myself included, I'm like, you know, criminal number one. We'll end up creating content and then we'll just, like, leave it out there and we'll move on to the next thing. Engineers have this thing called technical debt. I call it marketing debt. When you just have content that you put out there and you haven't actually done anything with. The problem with doing that. Let's take a uh, pricing page as an example is that answer. Uh, engines will look at the pricing page and whatever you have there, if it's not up to date, they will actually take that and put that in as a source of truth. And now your prospects are looking at out of date pricing information. So again, internal links, metadata and schema, bylines and sources, and have certified freshness for your content. Do those four things, I guarantee you'll score better.

Speaker B: I love that. That's the clip right there. I like it. I mean, when I hear these things, I'm like, it actually doesn't feel that hard. And can AI help just to do these basic checks, like, go look at my mission website, or maybe webflow already is doing this and we just haven't taken advantage of these functionalities.

Speaker A: We are 100% in that space right now. One of the fundamental things that I love about the age of marketing that we're in right now is we've got two types of teammates. We've got the people and the humans. But now we've got AI as part of our team as well. I treat them as like interns, very eager to please, and you have to make sure that they have all the context. But some of the more mundane work of scanning your entire site and coming back with an analysis of how it's going to perform. And not only things that you can have AI, uh, help you with. We at, uh, webflow Conf, we talked about upgrade and new capabilities to webflow aeo. So for our customers, sometimes they don't want to go to a third party to do the AEO work that they need to. What we've done is we baked it right into the platform itself so that as you have a website on, um, that is like running on webflow, you can do your AEO searches or AEO like health check, and not only will it tell you the things to fix, but because it's on webflow, it's a closed loop. So you could just go right into the cms, make the updates, and all of a sudden you're, you're performing better in aeo.

Speaker B: Oh, great. Lucky me. Yeah. That was my first thought where I was like, I don't want to put too much pressure on Dave, but I wanted to be like, can you just fix it for me? Whatever's happening on the mission website, let's just.

Speaker A: And the answer is yes. And the answer is yes.

Speaker B: Oh, I love that. Okay, so the technical piece I feel good about. We're at a 3.5 now on average. I'm going to call it in six months at least. The Webflow customers, they're bumping up real quick now. What, what's the next jump to continue to get closer to the 5.

Speaker A: The job to be done with AI discoverability and AEO overall is not something that any one person or one function can do. I think as you crawl, walk and run and then go to sprint after that. The teams that are in sprint mode are the teams where they've broken down silos within sort of the marketing team and they created what we've done internally. They've created task forces around a singular objective, but they've brought the team together. That was one of the best practices that we started in the early days. The beginning we had created a, uh, Reddit task force because at the time Reddit was the primary place, one of the primary places that we knew answer engines looked at and we needed to make sure that our strategy for Reddit was entirely cross functional and comprehensive. So we brought together community manager, the person and people running AEO and SEO, product managers, content people, et cetera, all in a team. They met every Monday and they had that type of cross functional dialogue about here's what we're seeing on Reddit, here are the things that we need to do to intervene, some of which was on our website, much of which was on that platform and then they ran the play and then they rinsed and repeated and rinsed and repeated and we saw data uplift in terms of like impact on platform and all of that. It's become more interesting in my opinion because it's not just Reddit and in fact answer engines are changing their sources where they wait more. And so Today for example, YouTube actually matters quite a bit. So for us, the same task force that came together for Reddit now is just expanding their scope and looking at other platforms that we think are really important. So again, in the spirit of you know, crawl, walk, run. But like the teams that are sprinting are the teams that are highly cross functional in the way that they're approaching aeo.

Speaker B: Uh, okay, so for the Reddit piece, because this has been something my team's also looked into, everyone becoming very aware of, like this matters, we gotta be in there. Oh no, we don't have Reddit accounts, we don't have any credibility. No one's going to listen to us, we're going to get flagged. But then this month I think I saw that the citations dropped for the LLMs. We're not looking at Reddit as much as, at least for the Past, let's say six months or so. That was a heavy focus for a little while. Is this a meaningful shift and what other platforms are you looking at? I know you mentioned YouTube. Where else are you looking right now to make sure to stay ahead of this?

Speaker A: I mean, I don't work for the Frontier Lab, so I don't, I can't tell you if, if I know. So I can't tell you if it's uh, a, like a meaningful shift, if it's long term or if it's a short term thing. I think a lot of things go into it based on my experience that this goes back to the basics that we talked about earlier. So earlier we were talking about basics from a technical perspective. Make sure that your website is technically accurate, you've got your links all set and all of that. I also think that they're basics on sort of the other side of the marketing mix, which is how do you engage in the outside world? How do you engage with your communities? How do you join communities that are out there, add value to those communities versus what I see a lot of companies do today, which is assume that everyone is part of your community. I think I've learned that distinction over my career having worked at places like ebay, you know where that is a platform built on a community. But the reason why it worked was ebay went to the communities to make it thrive. So when I say going back to basics, the expectation that I put on my team and the expectation I put on myself is be a meaningful contributor wherever your customers and prospects and your other stakeholders are gathering in a way where you're giving back, where you're investing in them, where you're sharing. Again, what I said earlier, you're sharing what you're seeing, your point of view of the world and inviting people to provide feedback into it. That's the type of thing that will outlast the trend of is it this platform or this platform or this platform? It's a whole mindset. Shift back to the basics of engaging with your community.

Speaker B: Oh, I love that. That's such a better answer than just picking one and trying to stay ahead of the trends, which I was trying to see if I could get you to do. But this is a way better answer of where do your customers hang out? Go there and actually engage in a way that's meaningful and don't just try and keep gaming the system, which I do feel like I've seen that the past year of like, how do we gain these LLMs? How do we, you Know, open up thousands of Reddit accounts and constantly be doing this thing and then you're so focused on a platform and then you forget like, oh wait, actually my clients don't hang out on Reddit and I was doing that because everyone else said it was important. So it's a good reminder to yet go where your customers are and just be a human and have a good time with them and help them and support them and love on them.

Speaker A: It's an outlandish concept of a company being human and engaging with customers and providing value back to them. This is like what I say, it's such an exciting time to be a marketer because what we do as a profession, this is where our superpowers are. There's a quantitative aspect to it too. Like, I think it is important to create smart, well run experiments on different platforms so that as marketers we can again create a hypothesis of what types of content and what types of engagement work best in Reddit versus YouTube versus LinkedIn. And so I don't want to undermine that. Marketers today who think left brain and right brain, who think brand and demand at the same time, those are the ones who are going to win. So I do want analytical rigor on teams as they explore different channels and what works and what doesn't. And I want the overarching principle to be give back to the communities that matter.

Speaker B: So in thinking about this cross functional world we're in now, you mentioned it earlier how you're bringing all these teams together, teams that maybe historically didn't work together and come together in the room to really talk about the different platforms and what they're doing, but you need all of their skills together. How do you think about building a team that works? In the back of my mind, I'm like, leaders everywhere for a long time have been saying we don't work in silos. And but you'd look around and you're like, well, we still have a lot of silos here and then a lot of silos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then bringing in different efforts to try and bring them together. And uh, I think you mentioned that you brought in a certain role that you thought was gonna be one thing to kind of help with this, but it turned into another thing. And so I'd love to just hear how you're thinking about creating teams that talk and work well together and are not in silos.

Speaker A: I think the thing that gets me up in the morning each and every day is it's kind of a personal mission, which is to Unlock people's true potential and opportunity in front of them. And I think there's no better place to do it than high performing teams. So I'm a nut when it comes to, like, how do you create the dynamics for teams to work effectively together? And so typically what I do, because I am, um, culprit also who's like, let's break down silos, let's break down silos. But I found that just saying that doesn't really break down the silos. There are cultural dynamics at play when you're building high performing teams that I, first and foremost, I lean into the most. I take a lot of this from a coach that I worked with. Her name is Katrina, and she taught me a lot of these, like, psychological tips about how to create high performing teams. One is based on this thing called the Tuckman model of high performing teams. And once you hear it, be able to see the pattern everywhere and every team that you're in, teams form teams, then learn how to storm teams, then norm, and then they can perform. And so you might have heard it from a form, storm, norm perform perspective, but it dates back decades in terms of, like, how groups of people come together, create teams and what enables them to succeed. And so one of the things I work on super closely with my team is the conflict phase, how to storm, how to create conflict with each other. Because in my experience, teams that know how to fight well, those are the teams that are going to win in the future, the teams that are too nice that they don't go in a conflict zone. And so I do a lot of work with my teams. How do we find the conflict? How do we put the conflict right at the center and how do we engage in a, uh, healthy debate about what we should be doing? In part because I think that's how you break down, you know, kind of those silos without just being the person saying break down silos. Break down silos exist because of conflict and conflict aversion. If you get people comfortable with conflict, then the silos break down almost naturally.

Speaker B: Wow. Okay. How do you. Asking for a friend? Also for my company, how do you think about bringing in conflict or finding it and showing the teen that you know, this is okay and how to healthily debate things and bring them up.

Speaker A: Number one, practice in a psychologically safe spot. Conflict is really scary for a lot of people, myself included. I'm a very conflict diverse person. And so I've had to learn over the years about how to get comfortable with it. And I think one of the Things that I've learned is the importance of creating psychological safety on the team. And then as the leader. The leader has an outsized impact on how you get people to conflict, which is to kind of normalize it and use words as signals to people like, Stephanie. We don't agree on this thing. I just want to call it out before we get into it. This is a good conversation for us to have. It's normal, it's healthy. We'll actually be better, you and I, as a team, if we can go into it. Is that okay with you? And then you say, wherever you're taking

Speaker B: me, I'm a yes.

Speaker A: Yeah, you're a yes. And then we dive into it. The great thing about conflict, it's not only a, uh, logical thing. You can actually physically feel it. And when you're in conflict as the leader, sometimes it's really important to kind of diffuse it a little bit to find where that line is and depressurize it by again, saying, everyone, can we just pause for one second? What we are doing right now is super important, and it's normal that we all feel this way. It feels uncomfortable. That's a feature, not a bug. Let's keep on going. And saying things like that as a leader makes the world of difference. I've seen teams transform themselves in their ability to engage in conflict and find better answers because of those types of things.

Speaker B: Wow. Okay. I love this. I feel like I'm learning a lot just listening to this and thinking about how this could actually break down silos by getting comfortable with, like, pointing out things, you know, in other orgs that normally you would be like, I'm not trying to fight with that. Or again, that manager over there. And it's going to become a thing versus, like, it becoming part of the culture to point things out and be okay with the tension and it being uncomfortable and then saying it, like, how simple. Which I'm like, I love these, like, simple, uh, tips that you're giving of, like, point out the thing and point at it. Don't let it just, like, stay under the rug and, uh, quietly just go on without people really being like, hey, this is uncomfortable. I'm feeling uncomfortable. And that's okay, too.

Speaker A: That's okay, too. I should say that I'm married to a therapist, so some of, wow, this

Speaker B: is so lucky for you.

Speaker A: So lucky for me. So a lot of this gained by interactions, uh, that I've had with her where I'm like, wow, that's just like the, what you do for your clients. Of course applies to the way that I think about leading teams in an effective way. So that is like the team dynamic part. There are also like organizational strategy or design strategy ways of thinking about this, which is a question that you asked me earlier. When I first started, I saw the silos and even though I believe in creating psychological safety and getting people through it, there is no integrated marketing function if we just hire for that role or that spot that almost automagically having a person in that spot will lead to a more integrated team. I hired one of the best marketers I've ever worked with. I've worked with her in past jobs to fill that role. We came to the conclusion a couple things are true. Thing number one is simply having a function called integrated marketing does not create integrated marketing. The problem with the lack of integration is actually deeper than that. It's about lack of strategy that is universally understood and held with teams. And so she came to that conclusion and she's like, look, I think deeper than this we need to much better at aligning everyone on strategy and then calling out roles, responsibilities and interdependencies between teams and being super clear with everybody about what role they play and who they depend on for what. And so what she ended up doing was changing the nature of the job description to number one, I'm going to be the person who's going to help people figure out where those interlocks are. Number two, for big moments, especially like webflow conf that we just had, there does need somebody with a bird's eye view on everything that's going on, almost like program management. But number three is the most interesting, which is especially in an age of AI where you can bring your agent teammates along for the ride, a lot of her job has become orchestration. It's really been about how you enable every part of the team to be integrated in their work because they don't have to depend on on other parts of the team to move the ball forward. And so to make that concrete, one of the first things she created was a uh, skill in Claude, actually workflow in cloud to basically create a creative brief. Let's say the revenue marketing team doesn't need to bug product marketers and content people to just create a creative brief for their campaigns. They can actually go to the skill that she's created. It is an integrated skill because it's being fed by our positioning strategy or messaging strategy and a variety of other things. And now all of a sudden revenue is integrated with uh, essentially the rest of the team. So that's just one example of you take a role like that, you make it about orchestration and then you make it about self servicing the other parts of the team. And then you start to see impact

Speaker B: nice and different way of seeing the shift in a role like this. I know I mentioned when we met last time that I had this cross functional role when I was at Google trying to get people to talk to each other. And now hearing you talk I'm like oh, psychological safety wasn't really there. Definitely. Everyone was like nervous about teams getting mad and uh, so it was just, that wasn't happening. So of course you needed someone who's like, come on guys, let's all work together. Give me the thing I need so I can give it to this person. You guys don't even have to talk, don't even have to make eye contact. And now, now listening to this, I'm like oh, where were you? That would have been good thinking about like how do we create this in meetings? And also just with all the work looking at the market now, I feel like there's so much more data about psychological safety in the workplace and uh, respecting people's nervous systems. Also them checking in. I know this is something I've been doing with this other company I'm leading called Omya. And every meeting we have one of our team members opens up with a meditation, breath, work, mindfulness, something which when I first started doing this I'm like, this feels a little woo and like this. See I don't know what's gonna happen but watching how important those first five minutes were for everyone just like sink in and like settle for a second to then be able to start talking about big important things. I'm like, I would have never been doing this 10 years ago but because now knowing there's so many pieces to a human when they show up at work and how we can be supportive of each other before getting into dicey conversations or conflict. That's like a fun world that we live in now that this is even out there and people talk about it.

Speaker A: My maybe spicy prediction, but I don't think it's too spicy. Is that skill set that you just brought up gonna be at a premium over the next few months and years? Especially as more people spend more of their time looking at their AI companion or an agent in orchestrating workflows that the ability to think on the human side, how humans connect with each other. My sense is like that's going to be the thing that people interview for. That's going to be the thing that people get hired for. That's going to be a, uh, LinkedIn endorsement or a skill that you put out there and you, as individual, that will be your competitive advantage. And then abstract that even more. The teams that know how to do this will beat the teams that don't know how to do this full stop. And so I think that is exactly where the world is going. And I'm just extraordinarily fortunate and grateful to be a part of that world.

Speaker B: Oh, man, I love that. I mean, I love thinking like, the teams and the people who know how to be more human will be the ones that win. Like, that's such a cool advantage in a space that we're in right now. And, um, I was actually talking with Lacy last night. We were at a brewery and I was telling her, I'm like, man, I look online and I see all these people, especially in Austin, so much around biohacking and, like, come and work with your nervous system and red light therapy and supplements, all these things and thousands of dollars. And I'm like, you know the number one way to support your nervous system? Another human hugging, community, partnership, friendship, come together. And that's how you can support your nervous system is syncing with another human and letting them ground you and calm you and sharing. And so it's. Yeah, I love thinking, like, getting more human will be an advantage. That's the ones who will win. Finding the other humans who want to do that, like, that's what's going to stand out in the future. That's just a fun thing to imagine and already see happening right now.

Speaker A: I love that. What a great story. Next time, invite me. I will join the two of you in said brewery and we'll have these conversations.

Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, we were having a great time. IPAs, uh, some blood orange beer. It was awesome. So when thinking about brands and putting content out there and getting that score up, how do you think about brands having a point of view nowadays when it comes to the content they're putting out there?

Speaker A: So I'm about to roll out to my team, basically, an open letter and a policy. It's been about six months since we've rolled out our AI native marketing team blueprint and the things to do. And I've noticed that the team has worked really fast. That's great. I think we're entering a phase two and I think the phase two is all about trust because what happened in phase one, a lot of content, it goes back to this, like, content thing. One of the Things I'm rolling out to the team. Everybody in marketing is a guardian of trust. It's got one basic core principle to it, which is your name is your guarantee that if work goes out with your name on it, you own every idea in it. The structure, the emphasis, the numbers, the conclusion, the craft work. And you should be able to defend it. And so what I'm trying to do there is get across this idea of like, but a brand is people who are driving that brand. The people have to have that point of view. You can't delegate that. So when we did the scan, we noticed was the impact of the webflow platform and customers who are using it. And then the data went even deeper. We saw the impact of our customers versus non customers using webflow aeo, uh, and the data was super clear on the impact. We saw 70% more mentions in AI engines and get this, 120% more citations. So that's real data that CMOs and marketing leaders can bring back to their executive teams and their boards about the impact that they're having when they get the basics right.

Speaker B: Uh, I love that. All right, so skip now the next section. So one thing I wanted, uh, to round out the episode with some very optimistic questioning, which is, is the CMO role dead? What do you think?

Speaker A: You're so optimistic, Stephanie. Wow.

Speaker B: I know.

Speaker A: Maybe I don't want to hang out with you guys.

Speaker B: I was bringing you up to bring you back down.

Speaker A: I don't want to hang out with you guys in a bunch of IPAs.

Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know where I can take you. I'm not sure. No promises.

Speaker A: No, the CMO role is not dying. I think the CMO role is transforming for sure. And I call it really around the difference between, let's say CMO 1.0 and CMO 2.0. I talked about earlier the importance of CMOs thinking about systems, not just campaigns. The unfortunate fact that, um, CMOs don't really last long in the executive suite. And one of the reasons why is they become very campaign focused versus thinking about the systems that they need to put in place to create high performing teams, much of which we talked about. The other thing is the role has gotten even more complicated. There are three expertise sets I think that CMOs need to have. They need to be expert in brand and storytelling. They need to be expert in driving pipeline, AI transformation. Those are three huge jobs from my perspective. I think there is no one human that is world class at all. 3. I certainly am not. And so the thing to do I think for CMO 2.0 is really find the two where you spike and you're going to go deep on and then make sure as a great leader, you're hiring the people around you who are going to compensate for that third area because that's what your board is looking for. It's what the rest of the executive team is looking for. It's the rest of the company is looking for meaningful progress in all three of those components.

Speaker B: I love that. So when going from campaign level thinking to systems thinking as a CMO or marketing leader, what is the skill that a CMO needs to unlearn to make that transition?

Speaker A: They need to unlearn short term thinking. There's a whole desire, and I get it, to get points on the scoreboard really quickly. The problem with that is you either get some points on the scoreboard, but they might not be the most strategic ones that you could get, or you try really hard and you get nothing on the scoreboard and then that becomes the reflection not only of you as the leader, but the team that you lead. Unlearning that habit, which requires effective navigation and communication with the rest of the executive suite and your board and the company to really reset their thinking about the role of marketing and what we do, I think is one of the most important things that you could do when you, when you take this kind of job.

Speaker B: Oh, I love that. Tell me how you've gone about doing this and aligning um, with the other C levels and the CEO, because I think you have to have everyone on board to think in, you know, longer time periods than did you drive revenue up quarter over quarter.

Speaker A: I got a compliment from somebody on the team the other day that one of the things that I do well and I practice it a lot is I try to communicate often different stakeholders in different ways, but also just make sure that everybody's in the know about what we do, what our thinking is, and also do it in a way where it opens the door for people to give feedback. Marketing leaders, they might communicate a lot. It's a one way communication versus two way. I think one of the things that I really try to do is I try to make it two way and I also try to make sure that I balance ensuring that the people that I'm speaking with know that I have a point of view. Oftentimes another failure mode is the CMO or sort of the marketing leader who comes to the table and basically is a consensus driver that they're not showing up with a point of view of what we should do. I like to hold my convictions strongly, but not too firmly so that we can get into dialogue and we can get into conflict on that.

Speaker B: Okay, it is time to shift to the lightning round. This is where you have a, um, minute or less to answer a question. Are you ready, Dave?

Speaker A: I'm ready, but, you know, uh, to be honest, I have not studied the lightning round, so you're going to get it.

Speaker B: It's good because I also have not. And I'm just going to add my own questions that I just want to know myself. What is marketing strategy or tactic that you think is completely overrated right now?

Speaker A: Marketing strategy that is completely overrated is content development for the sake of content. I don't think it's about quantity of content. It's about quality. Everyone needs to go deep on a point of view. I think point of views are the things that are going to differentiate brands in market. So content for the sake of content, I think is overrated.

Speaker B: Yes. Plus one on that. If you could add one subject to every school curriculum in the world tomorrow to prep the kids for the future, what would it be and why?

Speaker A: I would add emotional intelligence training.

Speaker B: Yes. Dave, I love you. Uh, you definitely have a therapist wife. This is so good.

Speaker A: The generation that we're in right now is going through the hardest challenges that they've ever gone through. But I do believe that the world is changing so quickly. And I see this with my own amazing kid who's 19 years old, who goes to Tulane. Her ability to navigate the world because she has focused on high eq, high emotional intelligence has been a game changer for her and how she navigates relationships, how she thinks about her role in the world. Too few schools are given the bandwidth and the funding to do this. Too few people have the opportunity to get that kind of training.

Speaker B: Okay, I've got to say, can I

Speaker A: just say one last thing on this one?

Speaker B: Yes, you can. Yes, you can.

Speaker A: I. The reason I feel so strongly about this is not just because I've got an awesome family and my wife is a therapist, but when I was at Facebook, early Facebook days, we got an opportunity to work with some of the best academics out there on things like emotional intelligence. Like, for example, Mark Brackett, who recently came out with a book on emotional intelligence. I highly suggest that book, which is called Permission to Feel. It's, uh, a. It's a book that enables people to really understand the feelings that they're going through. It turns out that our feeling vocabulary is not that deep. And so getting in Touch with, like, how you're feeling and what's prompting it is really important. A lot of my passion for this comes from early social media days where thinking about emotional intelligence and how humans engage with each other has a material impact on the experience that they have with your product.

Speaker B: Oh, um, man, I love this. I'm definitely checking out this book for sure. Okay, what earlier you mentioned coming to your. The other leaders at your company and, you know, strong opinions, weakly held, but coming with an opinion. What is a belief that you used to hold onto pretty strongly that you completely backed away from?

Speaker A: A belief that I held on pretty strongly that I had to back away from. If I was just persistent in arguing a point of view that everyone would come around to that point of view, and I've had to let go of it because it's, number one, hubristic to think that my point of view is the right point of view. And number two, it fails the communication test. Like I said earlier, great communication is two way. And so if all I did was come to the table and pitch you on something and I wasn't actually, like, starting with great discovery and great listening and really high empathy on what your perspective is, then the conversation goes nowhere. And so I used to have that perspective. I've had to let it go. I think that's a hard thing to let go because it's a very vulnerable feeling. But what ends up happening is it becomes a source of strength.

Speaker B: Yep, yep. I love that. Okay, what's a personal wellness or health practice that you're embracing right now and why?

Speaker A: I exercise a lot. Both for the exercise for the body, but also for the mind. So six out of seven days, I'll go for a run early in the morning. I try to cook a lot because I like to get my hands on things. You know, so much of our day is spent in a computer, you know, in an LLM or on Zoom. I like to be done with my day and then cook a dinner and serve that dinner. Uh, some of the greatest joys out of doing that, you know. And then on weekends, I've got this super, really important hobby that I hope everybody adopts, which is I like to take naps. Lots and lots of naps.

Speaker B: That's nice. I want that in my life, more of that. Other cultures get this all the time. Why is America so anti naps? I don't get it.

Speaker A: Bring naps back. I, um, mean, naps were never here, so bring naps.

Speaker B: If you bring them in general, vote

Speaker A: for me for president and I will get rid of the penny and introduce naps into our daily schedule.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's your T shirt. Okay, last question. What is the one thing that you are most excited about over the coming. I'm just going to say six months because one year is like so hard to predict. So, like, over the next six months, what are you looking forward to most?

Speaker A: I just love working with this team that I'm a part of and we're facing some of the thorniest challenges that I've seen in the market since I got my start in this profession. And so being in it details with them, um, figuring out the right way to navigate a market and bringing our vision for this product that we're building to market, I think is one of the most exciting things that I've ever experienced. It gets me up every day. It is the place where I get to focus on the thing that I like doing most. Taking a bunch of people who have outstanding skill sets and and unlocking their true potential.

Speaker B: M I love that. That is a great way to end this episode. Dave, thank you so much for coming on. Where can our listeners, our viewers, find out more about you and what you're up to?

Speaker A: Well, of course. Please visit webflow.com to find all about the amazing agentic marketing platform that we have. And then for me, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn again, like I've said earlier, share what's working and what's not working. That's where a lot of joy comes from.

Speaker B: Amazing. Thank you, Dave.