The Future of the Marketing Organization: What Should Firms Build Now?

Speaker A: Foreign m.

Speaker B: You're listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent. Thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Malicki and Jeff mckay.

Speaker A: Okay, Jeff, I always have a question for you, but are you a fan of Scooby Doo? I like Scooby Doo. I was a huge fan of Scooby Doo growing up. I loved that show. I would watch it all the time. And I actually have a son who's an even far bigger fan of Scooby Doo than I ever was. But I guess what I always liked about Scooby Doo was, one, it was funny, but two, you know, you kind of go on this little journey in a little episode every week or every day whenever you're watching it, and there's a big reveal at the end, and you find out who the masked villain was and what the. What the. You know, how it all came together. You know, I've always loved a good heist movie. I'm a big fan of the Ocean's Eleven series, too. I think I've watched Ocean's Eleven at least 20 times.

Speaker C: No kidding.

Speaker A: Oh, gosh, yes. You know, I mean, I love that movie. I love everything about that movie. It's one of my favorite movies.

Speaker C: Um, as you watch it, do you learn anything new each time? See, uh, an additional plot twist, a detail that maybe you missed in the prior 19 viewing times?

Speaker A: You would think that. It is amazing, by the way, and we're getting way off subject, but it is amazing when you rewatch something or re read something, how much nuance you forget and how much new you pick up every time, you know, whatever it is. I've always found that really fascinating. Like, it's like, how did. How did. How do you forget so much of something that you've maybe seen many times or read many times? It's crazy.

Speaker C: It's a human condition.

Speaker A: It's a human condition. So, okay, so why am I talking about Scooby Doo and Ocean's Eleven? So we are actually doing a. I guess I'm going to call this a live research initiative. Uh, we're doing research to understand where marketing. The future of the marketing organization, where marketing is going, and how firms should respond. How would you build a marketing organization if you were building one from scratch for tomorrow, not for today? I'm describing it as a live research initiative because we're going to do a series of interviews with people we respect and we admire. We're going to do them live. We're not live, but we're going to record them on the show to Find patterns and identify what we think are the most likely scenarios for what the marketing organization of 2030, 2031 is going to look like. Did I do a very good job of describing what we're doing here?

Speaker C: I think you did. This is a big question in a changing world. You know, we covered a topic, um, not too long ago on the podcast about how much should you invest in marketing? I think most people that listen to us ask that question. I get that. Of all the questions I get, that is probably at the top of the list. And it's a multi layered question. And this conversation isn't going to be talking about the programs and initiatives in it. This is going to be talking about the marketing organization itself.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. As we've talked, thinking back over the last two and a half, three years, since, I guess, AI kind of took the world by storm, we've talked a lot about the impact of AI on marketing strategies and tactics, how it's, you know, upended the um, classic inbound model and how we've kind of, I like to say we've exited the content era. Now we're in the AI era and marketing is going through a renaissance or a transition just like it did at, uh, the birth of search back in the mid-90s. But this conversation isn't just about strategies and tactics. It's about the organization itself. Why do you have marketing in the first place and what capabilities do you need to be successful over the next five or six years from a marketing perspective? And I also think some of it should be about is, uh, what I want to understand in this research is also, um, what capabilities are inside, what capabilities are outside, what skills should you be outsourcing and what skills should you be keeping in house? I think that was actually fairly clear for the last 25 years. I think it's getting a little murkier.

Speaker C: I think it's getting a lot murkier.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so why are we talking about this? Why does this matter?

Speaker C: Well, if you're a firm, you got to write a check. So you're making investments in growth. It's important to understand where those investments are, are going to be placed.

Speaker A: Usually you just make them out to rattleback in corporate. That's my. Am I right?

Speaker C: There you go.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Or outsource it to a fractional cmo.

Speaker A: There you go. That's all you have to do.

Speaker C: Take care of it. You know, one of the things as

Speaker A: we were talking about this, I was thinking about, I feel like marketing has been under duress or under the cutting block for like the last two or three decades. You know, it's the first place you go when times are bad. The first budget that gets cut. And it's the first budget that gets raided whenever there's a, uh, new investment that needs to be made. Um, if you're technology. Right. The marketing budget has been completely hollowed out for the technology budget over the last couple decades. And I'm wondering if we're at a moment where this might start to change a little bit. And what I mean by that is I feel like when you think about what AI is doing, it's sort of, I don't want to say commoditizing. I think that's a little too extreme. But it's commoditizing expertise. It's making expertise much less differentiatable. Is that a word? I don't think that's a word.

Speaker C: I'll take it. I'll take it. I understood what you said.

Speaker A: It's less of a differentiator. That's what I'm looking for. And the point of separation is going to be client experience. And I see marketing as the front edge of client experience. That's the first interactions you have with a firm are generally through its marketing. And so the first chance you have to try this firm on for size is right there. And if that's your biggest point of separation, then I'm wondering if this is a moment in time when that starts to shift. It's a hypothesis that I sort of have going into this. Maybe it's just hopeful wishful thinking, but I just, I feel like this is a window where senior leaders might wake up to that and say, well, wait a minute, you know, we're. The most important thing we have is client experience. And the most important piece of that at the very beginning is marketing.

Speaker C: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that makes a lot of sense. Sense. I think you need to be clear about how you're defining marketing in those terms. Some people might interpret that, oh, you need a really great looking brochure.

Speaker A: Are we still there? Does anybody even have a brochure anymore?

Speaker C: Oh my gosh, yes. Yes. People love their brochures. Um, consultants love their brochures. I'm not sure that clients love them, but yes, people still want their brochures. And I don't know that that's what we're talking about when we're talking about marketing being the tip of the spear. But, uh, to your point, client experience is going to be the differentiator and marketing is the tip of the spear for that. I agree with you. I agree with you.

Speaker A: I do think that kind of, to your point, that frames what you're investing in. So if you're thinking about building the marketing organization that you need for the next five to seven years, you're not thinking about building a marketing org that can crank out brochures. You're thinking about building a marketing org that knows how to frame client experience. Build it so it's differentiated so that you can get the growth that you want. Right. Something along those lines.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right on that front. We've talked a little bit about this over the past year or so. When we talk about the IC triad, uh, my language, that integration of sales, marketing and delivery. But when we're talking in this series, we're not talking about the IC triad generally. We're talking specifically about marketing contribution and structure within that IC triad. I think that's an important distinction that we are carving out. A very specific part, I think, of the professional services operating model.

Speaker A: Agreed. Uh, I was just thinking. My head was bouncing around. We did that whole series around the unified commercial engine and the idea that can all these three things collapse into one entity? And you certainly see firms anointing chief client experience officers, that kind of things, with the idea that they're unifying these things. I've not actually seen anybody really doing it. I've seen a lot of chief revenue officers carrying the title, but when I peel back the vest, it's just a sales job, sales leader, um, most of the time, that's what I've seen. So I do think that it's wise to say, let's focus on how marketing is changing and needs to change. Let me ask a very clarifying question for anyone listening to this conversation. What's this research going to look like? We're saying we're going to do some research on this to identify patterns and try to get some clarity on this. And I think the goal ultimately is to help us all agree on, well, what should we be investing in today to build what we need for tomorrow? Um, because I think that's still fuzzy. Do you agree?

Speaker C: Yeah. I see this very holistically. It's not just a marketing question. I've already talked about the fact that we're trying to make investment decisions and allocate capital to grow the firm. But there's, uh, really important questions, and I think in these terms, as a CMO and having spent so much time in the human capital, this is really about talent, strategy, as well as we've talked about AI, we've talked about the evolving pyramid structure and we've hypothesized what that shape is going to look like. There are very specific talent related questions that need to be addressed. You know, who are you hiring, when are you hiring, what are the skills that they need? So I think that's, that's critical. But also what does that organizational structure look like from a marketing perspective primarily? But how is that integrated into the IC triad? I think those are all really big questions instead of just saying I need to hire a digital marketer or I need a PR person. And I think that's why this is an important conversation to have for our listeners.

Speaker A: Now the research itself is going to be, uh, qualitative. It's a series of interviews to get pattern recognition and we're going to do this over really probably the balance of the year. What do you think we're going to learn? What's your hypothesis or hypotheses? Share some of the things you think you expect to learn from this, this work?

Speaker C: I wish I had all the answers. So I'm, these are pure hypotheses, pure speculation. But maybe that's not true because I'm starting to see some of these indicators as a fractional cmo. So I, I think I formulate these hypotheses based on my own preliminary research or experience. And the first thing is, uh, I think marketing organizations are going to get smaller and I think they're going to get more productive. I don't see how they couldn't. I'm amazed at the size of some of the marketing organizations I see in the professional services space. I'm dumbfounded by how many people are on some of these firms teams. It just seems like a waste of money. And I think a lot of these people's roles, roles, jobs are going to go away.

Speaker A: I hear what you're saying in large firms, um, I've definitely seen in some large firms that there is an incredible scale of an org that exists with specialists in every possible discipline you can imagine. And things move very slowly as a result of the scale of the org. Uh, so I agree there that I think you are going to see that you're going to see marketing leaders realize that some of the specialist roles that they've carved out, whether it's email marketing or SEO skills or very transactional things. In really large firms you see specialists whose whole job is web publishing, all they do is just publish content, are better served by an AI skill or an AI agent. Or a digital, um, employee. Basically, when I see small firms, I already think that they're running so tight and so lean and so productive that there's really no more squeeze there. And what I see happening in those small firms is what you said, not happening at all. Um, the squeeze will be on from the partners to squeeze out the last drip from the onion in those firms and marketing will completely, well, not completely will underperform enough that they say, okay, we need to rethink what we're doing here because they're not going to get the growth they want by squeezing it harder than they've already squeezed it. So I think that some orgs are going to get smaller because they're bloated. I think a lot of orgs are going to shrink and then basically bounce back like a rubber band right to where they were with probably different skill sets, um, different people doing different things, but no smaller. Um, in fact, they might even get bigger.

Speaker C: That's interesting. I'll be curious to see what, uh, what people think. There's two components in this hypothesis that I think we'll look at. One is size, number of people on a marketing team, and two, what are those set number of people producing. And that equation, I think will be the thrust of the conversation. If you have two people on a small marketing team and they're producing X, X is not, uh, the sustainable amount you need to get to Y or to Z with the two people.

Speaker A: I think you're a wrong way of looking at it though. So I think that's actually the problem of where we are is that everyone is looking at AI and they're saying, hey, we're getting X output from our marketing team. Um, we can cut headcount 20% and we can get 1.8x. But the problem isn't the output, it's the outcomes. So what, uh, firms have to think about isn't how do we get this marketing unit to be more productive and produce more with less people. It's how do we get to better outcomes? And that's going to be the big separation point over the next five years is we've left the content game behind the volume content player. That's done. So now it's like, how do you do better to get more outcomes that might be less? You might actually find that firms that orgs are less productive in terms of the outputs, but the outcomes are significantly better.

Speaker C: How can I argue with that?

Speaker A: Because I'm right. You can never argue with me. I'm always right.

Speaker C: No, you made the assumption When I was talking about productivity, that I was talking about brochures, um.

Speaker A: Oh, I didn't make that assumption. I just made the assumption that you were talking about outputs. Because that's really what productivity is. Right? That's outputs.

Speaker C: No, productivity is results.

Speaker A: Yeah, it should be. It should be.

Speaker C: Right, right. So I, uh, agree with you. I agree we're arguing over something that's,

Speaker A: we're splitting hairs, as you said earlier.

Speaker C: Well, I feel like you're,

Speaker A: you're just

Speaker C: trying to make up a point that I assumed was already there.

Speaker A: That's fair.

Speaker C: So I agree. Outcomes is what we're trying is the measure of productivity. And that outcome is more pipeline, more sales, revenue growth, faster sales cycle.

Speaker A: But actually you said it was a point that was assumed. I don't think it is. I think a lot of organizations, a lot of firms that listen to this would are thinking in terms of outputs. Absolutely.

Speaker C: Sure, sure.

Speaker A: The marketing unit. Right. Is how many case studies are they pumping out how many articles? They pump it out. Like that's, that's how they're, that's how they're measured.

Speaker C: Yes, yes, your point is taken. I, I was speaking in those terms. So if you're a listener and you're thinking in terms of outputs, of number of brochures and blog posts, that is not the proper way to be thinking about outputs and outcomes. So when we have this conversation with CMOs, we will pay attention to their language and ah, how are they describing it?

Speaker A: I just think outputs and outcomes have been actually very much linear for decades. Right. Like the amount of outputs you had increased your outcomes. I'll come back to, this is super random, but I'll never forget I always made fun of it. HubSpot did this research initiative where they, this was back in like, I don't know, 10 years ago. And they said, well, if you have more landing pages, you get more leads. And I always would joke about that. Right. That was the one I always made fun of. And I was like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But there was absolutely a correlation between the volume of stuff you put into the world and the, and the volume of stuff of what you got back. Leads and pipeline or whatever. I think that's broken. And it's. And that's probably the biggest thing that's changing right now is that that relationship is going away. And as a result, I think it just changes marketing orgs a lot. And maybe I'm being overly semantic about it, but I see a lot of firms where that's just still the metric is like, well, we got to get all this stuff done because our belief is that this stuff is going to lead to the outcomes we want and may or may not be true.

Speaker B: You're listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Malicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms, and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy Prudent Petal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on itunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Speaker A: Let's move on. I don't want to beat this one to death. I think there's other hypotheses you've identified that are equally more important.

Speaker C: Yeah, this is the second hypothesis and I'm seeing this play out, uh, uh, already. And I think the people that we talk to will probably say something along the lines that strategic judgment is becoming much more valuable. The execution is easier, cheaper, agentic. The production is much faster and easier. But being able to discern what's relevant and where to invest in growth is going to be the premium quality of a marketer, I think, um, moving forward. So less tactical, definitely more strategic. And by more strategic, Let me define this definition before you jump in and take us down. Another tangent not intended. Strategic to me means broad understanding of the business and its growth drivers.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's. I totally agree. I totally agree. I think this actually is, uh, a logical sequence of what we just talked about is execution is going to get cheaper and cheaper, which means that coming back to the conversation about productivity, that just because you can do way more than you ever did before doesn't mean you should. And it's going to be harder for some firms. I mean, some firms have to have to wake up to that. Right? I mean, I'm not saying that there's a lot of firms, but there are definitely firms that are looking at this as like, oh my gosh, we can flood the zone now. Right. And that's not. But it's not going to help you.

Speaker C: Yeah, and I think that's the point of having strategic marketing guidance is less, ultimately could be more. And being able to make those decisions is going to be the critical attribute of a strategic marketing function because there's so much you could do but you shouldn't necessarily be doing.

Speaker A: Reminds me of during the content area of the last 10 years, how many times did you hear the whole conversation of, and this is still going on. How many different content types can you get out of this one asset, we did this research. How many different ways can we get this research in the market? We did this podcast. How many different slices of video can we get out of this one podcast? And that was a huge part of content marketing was how do you take one kernel of an idea and then blow it out into 7,000 different channels? And that noise, AI can do that like no marketing unit ever. Right. But as a result, that's the AI noise. And so that kind of stuff is, I think, going to be far less valuable. And so the strategic judgment about what to do and what not to do. I totally agree. Is going to be the most, maybe the most important thing that a marketing leader or a marketing organization can bring to the table for the firm. You know, that's the essence of strategy. You always say that, you know. Right. What not to do. The essence of strategy. Exactly right.

Speaker C: You know, that's exactly right.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker C: And I think it'll be much more valuable. Discernment.

Speaker A: Yeah, agreed.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: What else do you think we're going to learn or we're going to.

Speaker C: Third hypothesis. I think specialization will decline and we will go back to the generalists, but I don't know that for sure. I think there may be AI specialties, but I think a lot of the traditional marketing specialties, and you alluded to this all already when you started talking about SEO, maybe even web design, some content production and writing, those things are going to disappear because AI can do them fast and cheap. Uh, but I don't want to say that specialization will disappear. I think some of the specialized roles that exist, exist currently, will definitely disappear.

Speaker A: You're talking about skill specialization, right? Like, yeah.

Speaker C: So for example. For example, I think if you're a small marketing organization and you only can employ a certain number of bodies, it's going to be more fruitful for you to employ a body that understands the firm's business and the practice or an industry at a strategic level more than it will be somebody that is a specific technical writer or SEO person or a social media person. I think, at least I'm thinking I would rather have that next layer up, uh, of business understanding both a general business acumen and an understanding of the practice or the solution or industry that I'm taking to market.

Speaker A: It's almost like you're describing, not that specialization is going to decline, but that it's almost shifting from skill specialization to industry solutions specialization, something like that.

Speaker C: Where

Speaker A: your marketers are. I mean, this goes back to your other hypothesis around strategic judgment. Your marketers are More business people than maybe they have been in the past or the expectation is that they need to be. They should be. Yeah. When you threw this one out I was kind of like, I don't know where I was. I don't know was like. I just don't see specialization ever really going fully away. Just because when you think about the breadth of marketing, it's hard to articulate what I mean. But if you think about how you might market a business 30 years ago versus how you might market it now, it's like you're talking about two totally radically different worlds. It's like in world one you've got a, you know, you've got a. I'm just thinking of what comes to mind. You got a swimming pool in your back backyard. In world two you're running an aqua park in Orlando. That's the difference. Right. And so I just, I can't see specialization fully going away just because on some level so much of what plays out is you've got, you need someone with some technical nuance to whatever that is. But I agree that I think it's shift. I think it's going to shift. I think you're going to see some specializations being far less valuable and other ones be far more valuable. And to your point, business prowess and industry prowess or understanding of clients and client types is probably going to go up in value as a specialization, I would think.

Speaker C: I think so. I see that playing out already. And uh, you can just think terms of B2B, B2C, subdivide B2B down into its various sub industries. I think a deeper understanding of what makes those industries tick and how marketing is most effective in those is just going to be really valuable. Um, and I think that aligns with the solution structures of professional services. I think it will get even more interesting as um, more firms move to productized solutions, value based pricing and things like that. I think that that opens up some areas of specialization as well.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. What else? Any other hypotheses you have?

Speaker C: This one and this one is not self serving but I do think it is definitely real that CMOS become more strategic and operational at the same time. Like we said with the specialization hypothesis, I think it applies particularly to CMOs. The real value from a CMO is not just going to be the ability to orchest or uh, to uh. I think orchestration is going to be an important one. Not just to operationalize but to orchestrate and to bring a much more strategic perspective. Like we've already discussed a Much deeper and broader understanding of the business. When you look at a, ah, lot of CMOs in the professional services space, they really are functional leaders. They are not business leaders. And I think the CMO of the future is going to be by necessity a business leader, not a functional leader.

Speaker A: What do you mean by operational? Define that when you say what do you mean by they're going to be more operational?

Speaker C: Uh, I think this kind of speaks to our earlier conversation around the IC triad, the integration of the marketing sales and delivery functions and understanding how that works. Um, instead of just being a GSD marketing ops person that knows how to take inputs and produce outputs as we talked talked about. I think when you look at most CMOs they're really good at cranking out stuff. The cranking out stuff is not what is going to be needed in these businesses operationally. They need to understand the whole business.

Speaker A: I agree. I mean I agree but I don't know if that's new. Right. I think that's always been true, it's just not, it's been rare. And ah, I think the question isn't whether or not that's changing, it's whether or not the likelihood um, of that goes up, meaning that firms demand it. The real question I think no longer

Speaker C: going to tolerate it is probably the best way of articulating.

Speaker A: Well I think the real question around that is going to be where do those people come from? What I see a lot of firms do is take a senior partner and turn them into a marketer and figure they can figure and assume they can figure marketing out and that never really works. And most of those organizations have a very under developed marketing organization because the person leading it doesn't really understand the full context of what marketing is and can be. And on the flip of it, to your point, you know, in some orgs you have a very capable senior marketing leader that doesn't really fully understand the business but is really good at running this large team that knows how to produce the output that the firm has been asking it for for a very long time and they're struggling to prove ROI and tie it to outcomes. Right. They're struggling with that because they don't really know how to do that. That's because candidly, because it's hard. Right? All fairness, it's actually not easy. Um, especially at scale if you've got a big firm it's really hard to kind of figure out how to attribute this stuff. So to me it's not a question of if that's true. I think it's 100% true. It's just a question of how are we either going to find those people or maybe more importantly, how are we going to develop those people if we're a decent sized firm? Because what's been done up till now hasn't worked real well would be my argument. Either of the two paths to senior marketing leadership I've just described has not yielded what you're saying firms need. And so what do they need to do differently to get there, I think is the real question here.

Speaker C: Yeah, that was the point of, uh, my earlier comment around these are talent strategy questions as well.

Speaker A: Agreed.

Speaker C: Is how do you invest in the development of the business understanding of your marketing person? Most firms do not make that investment. I would say no firms make that investment. CMOs and high performing CMOs take it upon themselves to learn the business. They proactively reach out and dig and learn and grow in their understanding of the business. I've yet to see any firm that makes a significant investment in marketing people to deeply understand the business.

Speaker A: No, no, I want to take that even one step further. I think that, ah, we talked a lot about the pyramid, uh, structure of most firms. Right. The up and out model that's defined professional services in a lot of firms for decades and how AI is changing that. Right. Like we've talked a lot. There's all these hypotheses about what that looks like. Is it a diamond, Is it a column? The gist of it is that there's going to be fewer junior staffers in these firms operationally and there's going to be fewer junior staffers in the marketing function as well, based on what you said earlier. Right. So the implication is you've got to be way more purposeful about your training programs now because before it was kind of like you'd throw 100 people in a room and just see who rises to the top on their own with very little guidance. Now it's like Your pool's only 20, so you better put some money behind them to figure out, uh, who's going to merge from the 20. Or you're not going to have a firm, with all due respect, or you're not going to have a marketing function, with all due respect, that does anything of any value. Right.

Speaker C: Okay, I agree. And to me that's one of the biggest challenges. And one of the things that I want to probe with our guests is how are you going to develop these people? Because it's the biggest challenge. Well, I think number one is finding somebody with a learner mindset, ambition and drive and business acumen. That's the raw material. And then how do you develop it, motivate it, grow it in what is a very flat organization? I think it's going to be a fascinating challenge.

Speaker A: Yeah. To me, the biggest thing that I see that needs to change, and I am hoping we will see change on this journey, is a reactive mindset to that problem, to a proactive mindset to that problem. The reactive mindset was they're just going to emerge and that's not going to be true anymore because the pool is shrinking. So you're going to have to be more proactive about it than you were before. Any other hypotheses you want to share? These are all good. I think the last one mistake on the productivity, but other than that, it's all good.

Speaker C: I think the last one kind of speaks to how we want to set up the series and the research is we don't want this to just be AI technology alone is driving this. AI technology is a big part of it. But there's a lot of other dynamics that are going on right now that I want to explore, uh, as well. But I think one of the big things, and we've alluded to this in our conversation about the IC triad as well, is how does the organization change and adapt? How does it restructure? How does it take these decades old mindsets about what marketing is or isn't? You know, whether you come from the productivity school or the growth school of, of marketing, or, you know, pick your sales school. How does that evolve organizationally? And how do we begin to blend these different roles that before were highly delineated? Right, that's, that's marketing, that's sales, that's delivery, where now they're all starting to blend in so many ways. I think that'll be fascinating conversation.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I agree, I agree. I'm excited about it. I think it's going to be a fun series. I think it's going to be interesting to hear where senior marketers, leaders, heads are on this topic in all the different firms we have lined up to join us in conversation. And I think, um, it's going to be even more interesting to try to discern the patterns from it, because that's really where all the action always is. Know you have 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 conversations, and what are the patterns that you take away from that I think is going to be really, uh, exciting. So what, what, how, how do you want to, how do you want to cliffhang this? Because we're going to cliffhang this. We're not going to unmask the villain today. I'm sorry. We don't know who. We don't know who is behind the Taro monster mask.

Speaker C: Well, I guess I would. I would put it this way. If you've ever wondered what's the marketing organization you should be building? This is going to be a great series for you because we hope to answer those questions about where to invest, what does the talent strategy look like? What are the roles? What is the org structure? If you only have set amount to invest, how would you invest it to get the highest roi? I think it's going to be a fascinating conversation, and we're going to have some great guests, I think, with some very strong opinions about the answers to those questions.

Speaker A: Good news is we don't have strong opinions at all. So I don't think that'll be a problem. All right, man. Well, I'm excited about it. I think it's going to be a really interesting initiative. And like you, uh, I am curious to hear how marketers are thinking about this and how senior marketing leaders are thinking about this, because I do think we are at. I've said this a lot over the last couple years. This is a pivotal moment. Um, the way we've marketed for the last two decades is under significant change. And what you do right now will define whether or not your marketing organization is viable and thriving in three or four years or if it's completely atrophied and you're way behind. And so I don't think there's a more important conversation to be having if you're a firm leader from at least as it relates to your marketing and growth strategies, or a marketing leader, for that matter. Obviously. So thank you for, for, for, um, designing it, I guess I'll say. I'd say you're the lead designer on this. On this research, so.

Speaker C: Well, let's, uh, get to it.

Speaker A: All right, man.

Speaker C: I'll talk to you later, buddy.

Speaker A: See you.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal. Divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Find content related to this episode at rattleandpedal. Com. Rattle and Pedal is also available on itunes and.