Building Effective Marketing Engines for Technical Audiences With Matt Lyman

Speaker A: Foreign. Podcast where we feature top leaders in business, marketing, technology and more and share their amazing stories. Now let's get started with the show.

Speaker B: Alex Clues here. I'm um, the host of Revenue Engine podcast where I talk with top leaders in business, marketing, sales tax and more. We have a great guest for you today. Super excited. This episode is brought to you by TA Monroe Digital. At uh, TA Monroe, we built world class revenue engines for B2B SaaS and tech companies. Matt, what that means is we do everything behind the scenes to generate you tons of qualified leads, opportunities and customers. We build highly effective marketing systems and scale them profitable through our demand generation strategies. We think scientifically how to scale your demand and revenue. We bring decades of experience and expertise. Email me at alexiamanro.com or visit tmonro.com today to schedule a strategy session. Learn more about mission. We have a great guest for you today. Super excited. Hey Matt, nice to have you here.

Speaker A: Hey, thank you so much Alex. I'm excited to, excited to be on.

Speaker B: Can you do a brief intro of who you are, what you do?

Speaker A: M sure. Um, my name is Matt Lyman. I am the VP of marketing at Flowsome Flow. Uh, some is an enterprise platform for Salesforce DevOps. Really um, allowing our users um, to really build data protection and governance into what they're already developing in their Salesforce platforms.

Speaker B: Nice. Nice. So let's start, uh, how did you get started? What did you go to school for, Matt?

Speaker A: Oh, this is my favorite question. Um, not marketing. I went to school um, for theater actually. Um, I have a bachelor's of a Bachelor of arts in acting and secondary, um, focus of playwriting. So went to school for that. I really enjoyed theater. It was just kind of that fun thing as I was going through college or through high uh, school and then um, in college, just kept going through that. Loved getting into sociology classes. Um, and after college, ah, moved in with my now wife and we moved to Seattle. Realized we aren't gonna really ever make money doing any. Just not even trying to make money but not make a living um, doing theater necessarily. So uh, I had to get a big boy job and ended up doing uh, collections at a bankruptcy law firm for about two and a half years.

Speaker B: Nice. I used to do collections too.

Speaker A: It's not fun but for, I'd say for marketers especially it's a good idea of what an SDR goes through every day. Right? All of the cold calls that they're doing or even warm calls that they're doing, um, bashing your head against a wall For a while.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, um, you've been in Florsome for several years now. And when we chatted uh, before the past podcast interview, so we talk about actually technical audiences and your company and your product is very technical in nature from my understanding. So most marketeers run from technical audiences. You kept running towards them. What did that world teach you? That the more traditional B2B role never could.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, so I've been across many different industries. Um, that bankruptcy law firm that I started at, ah, was in the financial industry. Uh, it's where I then ended up doing marketing. So that's how I got into it. But then I went to another financial services and after that, um, I ended up doing marketing at a company called Chef Software. Um, they were from 2015 till about 2022 I was there um, through a sale. So we actually were, we went through an exit. Um, and I was at the new company for about a year and a half. What I will say is I learned there the power of community and the power of what has been started to be talked about as B to H marketing. And after, after Chef, I went, I was at Lean Data which is um, not super technical but it's in the Salesforce ecosystem and it's selling to rev ups, you know, um, and you get the flowcharts and things like that for, for matching and routing. And then I came back to the DevOps ecosystem in Salesforce um, about a year ago with flows. But why I keep coming to that is there is a lot between a technical product that you have to really understand your audience and you have to also understand the top down and the bottoms up motion. That's where the B2H, the business to human comes in. Because you're going to have to sell to an enterprise executive in one way they care about how it's going to help them and their bottom line, how it's going to keep them from having to talk to the board because something went wrong and they lost tens of thousands of dollars. Um, you know we walked in today and all of our um, opportunity data was gone. In our Salesforce system, who do you talk to? The sea level, right? And it keeps going up and up and up. But then you also have to be able to talk to the people who are using it because your tool is very, it's a technical tool but. Well, uh, I won't go into a sales pitch but the way we do it is you can have the quote unquote non technical Salesforce admins using it as well. You don't have to have a, a degree in computer science, but the point of it with marketing was always about how are we telling that story and how are we talking to those people and the technical side of things. And I will even say that while I have a very inquisitive brain, I cannot write code. I am not a tech, an extremely technical person. But I enjoy talking about it with people and helping to pull what their problems are out. And as I said that that human aspect of tech has a very. It's almost like a big puzzle when you're trying to market it. How are you talking to people? Who are you talking to? What do they need to have? What do they need to hear and read and see to get into that sales motion?

Speaker B: And here's what technical market teach you in traditional B2B doesn't because buyers who actually understand the product, they, they will tell you immediately if the message is wrong. There is no polite noddling. They just move on. And that's actually a gift. Real feedback, fast, like in demand gen. That's exactly what we're trying to engineer. Fast feedback loops.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Every ad, every landing page, every CTA is a test. And the companies that we have come from technical market already think this way instinctively. They don't treat messenger like a brand exercise, they treat like a hypothesis. You run it and see what the market says, then you adjust. That mentality is honestly rare. And then client comes in already thinking like that, everything moves faster.

Speaker A: Absolutely. I also think that, um, one of the things that we had at Chef was this really huge community. Um, and people were very passionate. Right. Just to go back to exactly what you said with the they will tell you right away if it works or not. Um, you had to grow a bit of a thick skin because you knew right away that any email you send out, you're going to get something picked apart, either by an engineer on your own team M or someone external. I mean, I remember very specifically getting an email back when we promoted an ebook and getting an email back to our main email. Out of 100,000 emails we sent one that came back and said, this is four pages long. That's not an ebook. Like they'll, they'll catch you on anything. Right. And so, um, you have to be able to go through and understand, yeah, we're testing this, we're learning this. And then as a leader, you have to be able to help your team understand that, that mistakes are going to happen, you're going to go through and fail. Um, I love using baseball as an example Baseball. If you get three hits out of every 10, you end up in the hall of Fame. That's just how it works. Um, and so you want to make the right bets, but you also have to be able to, to make, to strike out sometimes.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Um, another thing you brought up by events, uh, the booth question. Guerrilla marketing. Big how do you actually make that call? When the pressure is on to show

Speaker A: up everywhere, it's hard. So there's two different motions. There's two different. Where you come into a company and they say here's your budget and then you sit down and you work with your team and you work with um, the subject matter experts, the stakeholders, all that to say which ones do we have to be at. You look at historical data, you see how things converted, what your CPL was, but really what your cost per opportunity was. Forget the CPLs and events.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Because I could go around and scan everybody. That doesn't matter. It's the opportunities that come out of it. So there's, that's one piece. A second one is when you are building your budget from the ground up and you have to actually identify the ones that make the most sense. When you actually are going to do a booth, it has to be done right. You have to have complete coordination between sales and marketing, between BDRs and the event manager. Usually depending on size, it's probably the campaigns person. Really like diving into events is very, it's important for brand building and it's important for brand consistency. But it's also a uh, big expense in both time and money because you have people on that floor that could be doing other revenue driving things. Guerrilla marketing on that side is interesting because it really depends on how you're going to do it, uh, what you're going to do and where you're going to like who your audience is. You're not going to want to go to a developer conference and do some sort of guerrilla marketing that would be more targeted towards an enterprise audience. Right. And, and then vice versa. And then you also have to follow lots of rules around like, like how we, you know, I mean the Salesforce ecosystem, you'd be very, very, very careful on what you do. In the Salesforce ecosystem you can't just go around and put your logo on a bunch of random things or go to your competitors site, uh, competitors booths and put your sticker on it. You can't do stuff like that. And I've seen people do it and get kicked out. That's why I use those specific examples and even to an extent where you can't be on the corner outside of without their approval. So you have to actually do that. You have to have a really clear plan and be very specific. And so making that call, as you said, when the pressure's on to show up everywhere, I think really comes down to corporate targets, your overall company targets. It comes down to historical context and it comes down to all hands on deck. Um, my CEO right now is great because he understands that marketing needs to happen and he knows that we have to go to these events. But he also understands that he actually said it this way and I thought it was great. He said a booth is a booth. That's not the be all, end all. We've had lots of strategic conversations about the messaging and the design and what we're going to do. But what he means by that is we also have to drive people to that booth. And it's not all on the marketing team. It's on the sales team to drive people to come by and talk to us. It's on the customer success team. It's on BDRs, all of the, all the people. And so that's really where you have to dive into is which ones are you actually making your bets on based off of the audience, um, based off of the success in the past, based off of even how far out you have. Because if there's an event next month and I can do it, but it's a really big one, are we really going to do that well at it now? If it's a smaller community style, there's a difference. But um, it really is about sitting down and having that we all, we call everything playbooks. Right. But having that playbook on. If you've got an event coming up, what are the things you're going to do to try it out? We actually had, um, we've been to a couple events already this year and we had a retrospective this morning on the last two. Um, really diving into it. I think that's also very important is what worked and what didn't. What are we going to try? Um, because the worst thing that could happen is you get all of these great meetings set up beforehand, nobody shows up. You get all of these great leads coming from the event. Nothing happens. So. Yeah, and coordination.

Speaker B: Yeah, coordination. And you, you touched on so many important things, but the pressure to show up everywhere in general for marketing is one of this everlasting and always being there the foremost. So. So say. And uh, nobody wants to be the person who skipped the conference with their three of Your best practices were in the room. The fear is real, but it's budget. And time gets spread so thin that nothing works well enough to learn from it. Um, we kind of seen the same thing in paid media. Companies running late, different channels because they're scared to miss something or to appear somewhere. And at the end of the quarter, they can't tell you which channel actually move the pipeline because when you spread too wide, you lose the signal. You can optimize where you can isolate. So the way I think about the events is the same way I think about channel selection. Start with who's actually going to be in the room. Not the rough category, the specific profile, others. Uh, your actual buyer or the people adjacent to the decision. That, that one question, uh, among others you mentioned already, Matt, that changes everything.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Um, that actually just reminds me too, like we were just speaking with, um, with our EMEA sales team and when they look at me and they say, hey, I think we really need to be at this event in a couple of months. They go into it and they'll dive in and say, These are the 10 accounts that I have that will be there. I know that they will be there. And some of that's based off of location and level. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep sticking to the Salesforce ecosystem. But Dreamforce, you know that everybody's gonna be at that thing. You don't know if it's gonna be the right people, but you know every company is gonna be there. That's just the way that it is. But when you get into the Salesforce World Tour events or some of their dream in events, the community ones, it is heavily based on location. So World Tour New York, for example. It's in New York. It's one day you are going to have some people that travel in, but for the most part it's going to be people in the area. And you have to be able to say, look, do we have these accounts in this area? Do we know that that's the headquarters, the people that we know, um, or the buying group in our. What we're looking for, are they going to be in that area and we can push them to something? And so I think that's. That's another really big piece of that is it's not just the ones that we think we need to be at, but is it the ones that will have the right concentration of who we want to talk to?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So after, uh, building demand gen motions across multiple companies, um, and industry like you mentioned, Matt, what's the leading indicator that tells you pipeline trouble is coming before it shows up in the numbers.

Speaker A: That is a really good indicator, really difficult and really, I think it's nuanced for everybody. Um, you know there's, I like to, to say there's no silver bullet with marketing. Right. You can't just say this is going to work. Um, I had a boss once that she um, was always like, matt, we can't just say we're going to go viral. That's not how it works. I'm like, yeah, I know, I know. And so I think when you start looking at it, it's, it has to be a mixture of things. Um, yes, I've built demand gen motions across several different companies. I've augmented different ones as well. What it really starts to boil down to are all of your leading indicators which are going to be very different for every company. But I like to look at um, obviously website visits and hits specifically around uh, new people. I like to look at health interactions are happening, um, either on our social media channels or other channels like that. How are people engaging with our paid? And seasonality obviously has a really big chunk of that because that's one of those things like if you're international, you're going to start seeing in June, July, those are all kind of going down because people are taking vacations. And so you can tell in our normal sales cycle, we know that from um, uh, the time that they hit our site, we may have 25 days before they actually turn into a lead. We may have two months before it becomes an opportunity. Those are areas where you can look at, say yeah, uh, that's, that's going to lead to blank, but it always has to be adjusting. So this question itself, I think it's a great question because we need to understand if there's going to be pipeline trouble. But I think that also understanding the seasonality and changes in the environment are also very important for me right now. Um, the pipeline trouble one is always going to be meetings booked and even to an extent, demo requests. I am a very firm believer in not looking at demo requests week over week because what ends up happening is someone says how do we increase demo requests this week? And that's not something you can actually do as it needs to be monthly to quarterly. But if you're seeing a sharp decline, you could start diving into why. If you don't have demo requests coming in, you can look at historically where they were coming from. Look at your UTMs, identify where they were coming from, what campaigns Sourcing all of that. Did you stop an ad that was working without you really identifying that it was working as well as it was? Did you turn off some LinkedIn advertising or even just stop posting about the same stuff on LinkedIn? So I think it does very much depend on your business and what your numbers look like and then putting it all together, building out your algorithm, the trigonometry that we all love to do, whether we like it or not. I really think that for me it's a mixture of things trying to get as close to where the pipeline goes and then working back I think is the important piece.

Speaker B: Yeah, and we had a lot of discussions about this internal with our uh, clients as well. But one of the things we like to bring attention is the mid funnel engagement drop offs. Sometimes top of the funnel could look fine and leads are coming in and kind of everything looks okay. But when the people who downloaded your content attended your webinar or engaged with sales or any sort of activities, when they people suddenly go quiet, that's the signal. Um, like you mentioned, sometimes it's seasonal but also there might be a big gap and it means they will warm something changed. By the time that shows up, it's pipeline gate, you're already two months behind. The problem is that the point isn't the pipeline. The pipeline is just the card. The problem happened uptrend. So in the message, in the targeting, in the offer, something stopped resonating. Nobody caught it because everybody was looking at the lagging indicators. And I think especially nowadays with everything changing so fast, so fast. Right. You might be focusing on one problem, one feature, one solution and something else came out. Right. So you, you have to be able to really be able like you said, being nimble, being agile, um, constantly review the leading indicators, live in the middle of the funnel. And so those numbers tell you what's common before the pipeline revenue really does.

Speaker A: And again that can be really tough especially like as you're building it out. But those it's so important for us to look at it also will help you identify if there's holes in the physical funnel. Right. Not just your funnel, not like oh, the engagement is dropped or this piece you'll actually start to identify. Oh, look at that. We weren't reporting this correctly or something disconnected between our map and our CRM. Right. Like that's where we can start seeing that stuff as well. Um, and sometimes it's hard to like document. Not everybody has, you know you can go in and in your um, analytics and your GA4 and you can annotate something, but you can't really do that across 15 different platforms. And say, this month we built up a BDR team, and now all of a sudden things are whatever. Um, and so I think it's, it's important to be looking at those. Um, and honestly, for most marketers, finding the time to look for those is really important. And building it in a way that I think AI is helping with a lot of that, being able to pull stuff together. But finding the time is always difficult.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I hear you in this. We always having these conversations. And yes, there was a conversation, was like, basically, well, now we have AI and it's supposed to save time. Actually, we have less time than we used to. At least it feels this way because

Speaker A: it's, it's, it's a lot. Yeah, we have to learn the AI. Like, that's the thing is.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And most marketers, especially in tech, are thoughtful and we experiment on stuff and we want to be innovative. And so you're not going to get a lot of them or us that are going to say, I don't want to do AI. Right. That's not. Um, I was talking to somebody. We actually, um, just brought in a new director of Demand Gen. Um, and during the interview cycle, somebody asked me what I've learned over the last year. And I think the thing that I've learned, the biggest learning that I've had, is that you have to let your marketing ego go with AI. And my. What I mean by that is anybody who's in marketing has had to write a business plan or a marketing plan for something. They take time, they take effort, they take, I'll say skill, but that's just in how you're communicating it now. You have tools that you can feed in all of the basic information and the basic data and it'll write it for you. And maybe it takes you three hours to edit as opposed to seven days to create. And that's one of those things where you've had to say, okay, look, I can have it. Write a draft for me. It's okay. I can let my ego go on the. Well, no, I'm supposed to be able to do this. This is my job. This is why I do. This is why I went back to school for my mba, like all that jazz. Um, and so I think that's, like, now you're learning about them. Um, you're doing the things, and it can make you more efficient, but you still have to be able to do it and review the content.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. We still all of us learning each day as we go and adjust things. So uh, just to change, to change the topic a bit. Matt. So one thing I've been thinking about a lot is the lead quality conversation. So because it comes up over and over and over again, almost, almost a weekly we have either internal again or the conversation with our client. And the patterns is pretty consistent. Volume might look okay on paper, but sales is frustrated. Pipeline has accounts in it that never going to close and there's usually a lot of finger pointing between marketing and sales. But when you actually dig into root cause it almost always traces back to the paid setup. Um, audiences too broad messages trying to speak to everyone. The conversion path is optimized for form fields rather than actual intent. And the fix is usually not more spent, it's more precision title audience messaging that speaks to specific roles and to specific paths and simply path to conversion. When those things come together, the quality of what comes through changes pretty significantly. Um, you mentioned before that getting the right lead to the right person at the right time with the right contact is really the whole game. In your experience across the companies you have been where does paid media often break down in that chain?

Speaker A: I think there's multiple different areas that it can and where I have seen it the most is the context portion. Now let's, let's actually I want to take it to, I want to take a step back a little bit. With paid media around you should have an internal strategy of what that paid media is trying to do and you should have it broken out. One of them is like we'll just use the two primary pillars. One is going to be the demand gen lead gen slash demand capture, however you want to call it. And the other one is brand awareness. And you have to have that defined and have your goals specifically set up for each of those. Your brand awareness is not going to be how many leads came in. Right. However it could be uh, I know I just completely contradict myself but it could be because it could be we need to get this brand new piece of content out that really tells who we are and what we do to the world. And you start targeting areas and people, um, and you use things like Google to really get your, the Google Ads, Bing ads, all that to really get your information out there. Where paid breaks down is when you're trying to get into the actual demand generation portion of it and you don't have the right context for who you're talking to. That's where you get a lot of the conversation around ABX you know, abm, but, you know, across the board, you get a lot of that conversation. Because if you know those accounts and who you're talking to, you have to have the right context for them in those ads. And then it needs to go to a landing page that has the right context from that ad for them. You see a lot of breakdown from an ad strategy that just sends to the same demo request page you'll have. Maybe you're talking about, um, widget A over here. Then it goes to a demo request page that doesn't talk about widget A anymore. And people go, wait, I thought I was doing that. You're going to lose some people, people there. You also have the strategy breakdown where, as we talked about earlier around, um, the executive leaders versus the actual practitioners of your tool, if I'm doing the messaging around, you're going to save a ton of money. But it's hitting the practitioners, they don't care, right? And if I'm doing, you're going to save a ton of time, the leaders may not care about that. And so it's really identifying those areas. Um, and so having the right strategy and structure and build out of that is really important. Is ever changing, right? Because it's going to be based off of your campaigns. It's going to be based off of changes in all of the algorithms. It's going to be, uh, based off of just kind of everything, um, in that. And so keeping an eye on that, having those meetings. Like we have this conversation and I kind of in my head right now, I have somebody from my team is going to listen to this and be like, but are we doing that? And I'm like, yes, we are. We're constantly doing that, right? Everyone's constantly doing that. Um, but because it changes so fast, you have to be paying attention to the context that you're giving people. Um, if it's tying into your campaign. And then it goes back to the. How we pinpoint what's working if we're seeing drops and stuff, right? Um, and then go back to the brand awareness piece. So very specifically at Flowsome, um, back in October, after Dreamforce, we, we made some big changes to how we were doing our advertising. And we 10 xed our leads in a month. We also, um, I want to make sure I get the number right. We 100 xed our impressions in a month. And that's a big. It went from a big A, uh, pretty okay number to a really big number by a hundred. Xing it wonderful. We have seen, um, content which I do believe in ungating content, but there's areas where I want to gate it, especially if I'm paying for it. Um, we have seen really good content download views and all that stuff. We've seen people going through this, this entire cycle of looking at different things and all that. But once we started doing that, the emails became personal emails. Not so money, not so much on the business. And that happens a lot in the tech side, especially in the developer community. Right. And so now it's, you have to update your process and your plan and your strategy of. Okay, great. We just got this month, 900 new people downloaded a thing. Great, wonderful. They just downloaded this thing with Gmail addresses. What are we doing with them? And that's where I talk. We talk as a team. Okay, guys, what do we do with them? Great. They're going to go into a nurture stream. Wonderful. But we also have another really cool piece of content. Are we sending it to them? We have a webinar coming up. Do they have that communication and are we talking to them based off of it? Yes. I didn't dive into the tools of, you know, can we de, anonymize them? Do we get intense signals and all of that? That stuff? I'm talking just very high level how we're handling that. Because that's when you start talking about better leads and the conversion. Because these are not real numbers. But let's say you're getting 10 leads a month and seven of them are converting into meetings. That's Pretty good, right? 70% conversion into meetings is pretty good. And then if you increase that to 7,000 leads per month and 10 of them are converting into meetings, you start having to look at that. We do know with demand gen it all takes time. So maybe you watch over time and if you got two months to watch it, maybe you actually watch as those cohorts increase and grow. Um, but that has to be part of your strategy. It's gotta be about the context, the timing, all of that. And if you're giving top of funnel content to people, they're not ready. So it's going through and looking at where they are in their cycle, where they are in your funnel and how you're actually speaking to them about what they need.

Speaker B: That's really good advice. And you brought up so many great things, Matt.

Speaker A: And yeah, you did tell me I could ramble. So.

Speaker B: Yes. No, no, I love that, I love that. This is, this is my jam. I talk about this stuff all day long. So this is, this is definitely my jam. And yeah, I think it's. And you even, you know, um, you have to be really understanding the basics of it and the uh, different user group, different messages again, and then different journeys too. I think, um, a lot of people fail because they might even understand the journey starts differently, but it kind of starts going the same way. And that's why a lot of drop off happened. You know, like you're saying, even driving people to the same demo pages, um, that could be one, one of the factors, which is kind of like not a lot of people think about it because you're like, okay, well we want to get attention. We want somebody to start scrolling or whatever or click and then go to the page and provide them the value. And then if they're interested enough, they go to the demo page. But once they go to the demo page, it might be too generic or not to that or even if they convert later. What is the nurture like? Like you mentioned, wow, this is maybe, you know, if it's a personal Gmail, maybe you need to, you don't want to talk corporate. Maybe you do need to kind of uh, you know, talk like peer to peer and understand the nuances of that. So that's really good. I really like that. Um, so I have a few more questions for you. So if you had to bet on one growth lever in 2026, what is it?

Speaker A: I think it's people. And I don't mean hiring that that is right for some, but I mean it's people. And I mean that internally and external to your team. So we'll start with the team. We talk AI all the time. Everybody's talking. We've already talked about AI. You can use AI to adjust everything now, to clean stuff up, to build things, but you still need that human to think through it, to strategize it, to edit it, to review it. Um, you still need a person to go in and say, this is a good idea. And then externally, externally. I've already mentioned communities and people before on this, but I think that building community is something that people, like people want especially. I know there's a lot of companies asking for return to office, but there's still so many remote companies that communities are still big. We've seen growth from those in several different areas. So when I say community though, I mean big C and small C community, where you can go out and build really good relationships with some of your partners that have nothing to do with the partner marketing team. Go out and have conversations and be like. Or not. Uh, I don't even mean partner marketing team, but the partner team, you don't have to have contracts in place. You can go meet some people and say, hey, look, we're in the same space. We don't compete. We're all friends. Let's do some webinars, let's do some podcasts, let's have a conversation and really help each other out. Um, then you build those relationships and they come out and they say, hey, next month we're going to be launching something. Would you guys help us promote it? Yeah. There you go. Great. And I also think that communities around. And again, developer communities are always important because people need help, right? Um, Reddit is popular for a reason, because people can go and get help, right? Um, yes. And they can be a little bit snarky if they want to.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Um, but community is huge. And I think that that's one of those areas that, um, it may feel almost redundant now because I think it's been growing for several years that people want those. And if you can really, like, tie into. It's almost like you're humanizing, um, a company. If Flowsome goes out and has a really great community engagement strategy, then all of a sudden everybody at Flowsome is a member of that community. And the Flowsome handle responds to someone. They go, oh, cool, that was great. Like, we've seen that, like, when really good social media stuff from big companies. So I do think that community, that community aspect, that person to person is really important either, uh, digitally, like through these conversations, through webinars, through video chats, through whatever, or be it in person. Uh, one of my favorite things ever is being on the floor at a conference with one of our solutions engineers and having somebody come by and go, oh, my gosh, is that. Is that Keith? Uh, that just happened guy, one of our team. They're like, oh, my gosh, I've seen your post. I think that I love that for them and I love that for the person who came up to it.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, definitely. I love that advice. Honestly, we have to be mindful of that and keep working together and really striving for better altogether. I think that's the only way to move forward, especially the crazy times we live in. Great, uh, advice. Matt, I have one last question for you. Who were your mentors and the best advice they gave you?

Speaker A: I have had some really amazing marketing leaders that I will call my mentors over the years. Um, I don't know if we never said, hey, thank you for being my mentor, but, um, I have three really good Pieces. Um, and if they hear these, they're gonna go, oh, really? Uh, but one of them is a man named, uh, Tony. Tony Del Fierro. He was my first marketing leader 20 years ago. Um, but he taught me to look for differences and nuances. Um, I've already mentioned baseball. I like sports. Um, I like sports for the team building and for the data. It's just how my brain works. And I'm in Seattle, and so the Mariners have been perennially bad and all these things. And he said to me one day, matt, we need to come up with the next Moneyball idea. Uh, but for marketing, what is that data point that we're at? What is that thing that we're doing right, and that ties into so many areas that everybody does, right? Maybe it's your account scoring, maybe it's whatever. But finding that thing for you and for your team. So that's always made my brain sort of go. Um, I had another marketing leader who once told me, stop finding reasons to not market to people. And what that meant, that was really around, um, it was nurture streams back in 2016, 2017, and we were identifying people to remove from the streams. And his point was, no market to them. And that's really, when you look at it now, you want to segment out more, you want to do more here, do more here. But if you only have one, there's no reason not to put them in there. Right? Start small, get the stuff moving, and then start to build it. Right. Um, and I think those are two things that have really stuck in my head for most of my career. Um, just around marketing, I've had some really great, um, mentors that told me things around how to hire. Right? Hire for ability, not skill, because you can teach skills, you know, that kind of thing. But for marketing, it's always been like, how do you find that really cool data point that's going to help you move forward? And how do you stop looking for ways to numb? Um, is that a double negative or a triple negative? But how do you make sure that you're not looking for ways to not market to people?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great advice. So we might. To redefine abm. Always be marketing.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, don't even get me into the ABM thing just because, um, I mean, I think the last couple of years have really shown that nobody thinks as ABM is just marketing anymore, which is great, because it's not. It can't be. Um, but anyway, thanks, Matt.

Speaker B: Ah, we've been talking to Matt Lyman, VP of Marketing at Flowsome Map. Where can people learn more about you?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, thanks. Um, I'm. I'm on LinkedIn. Um, I don't post as much as I should. Um, but feel free to look me up. Find me. You, um, can learn m about Flowsome, but you can also learn about the non profit my wife and I run, which is super fun. Um, but yeah, feel free to look me up on there. Um, I'm on other social stuff, but it's all just family and friends, so there's no reason for you to find me because I probably don't. You probably won't see any of my posts.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah. Uh, and for listeners you would like to learn about how we can help you build marketing revenue. And should that empower crow, visit TM and RAW. Contact me on LinkedIn as well. All right, Matt, thanks so much.

Speaker A: Thank you very much appreciated. Thanks for listening to the Revenue Engine podcast.

Speaker B: We'll see you again next time.

Speaker A: And be sure to click subscribe to get future episode.