Scaling Back to Move Forward | Ryan Morel

Welcome to Revenue Talks, the show where we get real about what it takes to build pipeline and drive expansion as a go-to-market team. I'm Justin Keller, the Vice President of Revenue Marketing at Drift. And on this show, I'm here talking to folks across the entire go-to-market organization, which means marketing, sales, and customer success, about how they use conversations, technology, and cross-functional alignment to build more pipeline and drive expansion. because revenue is everyone's business now.

Hello, everybody. It's Justin. Welcome back to another episode of Revenue Talks. Today's guest is Ryan Morrell, who is the vice president of marketing for Flex.

That's Flex with an E at the end if you want to look this up at some point. They deliver technology-powered omni-channel logistics programs, and they've got a really cool website, I must say, so you might want to go check it out anyway. But throughout his career, Ryan has held sales, partnership, product, and marketing roles at both small and large companies. And today on this episode, we're going to get into a little bit about the diverse background that he's got and how that helps him make an amazing marketing leader.

So let's get into it. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us on Revenue Talks. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Of course. Do you mind? I mean, we're going to get into your background throughout this, but maybe give us the quick TLDR on your background and how you've gotten to where you are today. Yeah.

So I don't know that there's a quick way to give it. Other than what you already said, which is I started my career in sales and sort of worked my way through different startup organizations and technology companies. I found myself doing everything from sales to partnerships, to product management, to marketing, to being a founder and CEO of a company, which has given me just a whole wide breadth of experiences across, again, both small and larger technology orgs. Amazing.

And I'm definitely going to click on that, especially just because you've got such like, I mean, marketers have strong opinions on what marketing does. And then I feel like everyone else in the business has different opinions on what marketing does. So I do want to click in on that. But you've been at Flex for about seven years now, right?

Yeah, just over seven. Yep. Gotcha. And I saw in your medium, which by the way, I love anytime a company has a medium, much respect for that.

But we were doing our research and saw maybe three or four years ago. And one of the things you posted was how your leadership style has changed over the years from leading by doing right and like proving that like I'm the boss because I know how to do everything really well to leading by setting expectations. And I think this is for a lot of people listening to the podcast, you know, at different stages of their career and their stage of their leadership, kind of a tough thing to get a handle on.

And like, it's a tough realization to make. So you've been at Flex for long enough. They have grown significantly since even, you know, you had that Medium post. How do you think your leadership has changed starting from leading by doing to leading by setting clear objectives to now?

Or is it kind of different splashes of those things in different combinations? Yeah. And I'll answer the question, but I have some background context. A lot of people ask me this question like, God, you've been at Plex for a long time.

How come? It's a long run to be in a technology company, especially a startup, right? It is. It's a really long...

Congrats on such a long run too. That's rare. Yeah, it is. And the interesting thing, especially after being here for so long, and ultimately, the important part about why I'm still here is that you end up working for a different company every 18 months when you're growing really fast.

So when you're really small, there's a small set of people, you get to do all the things You get to wear all the hats, execute on everything, and then you get a little bit bigger and people start to focus. And then you get a little bit bigger and the company changes even more. And then you get to the size that we are now with about 500 people and 20 plus people on marketing. It's a totally different company than it was two years ago, let alone seven years ago.

I think that is both the fun and interesting part of working for startups is that you get to be a part of something that change and adapts and gives you an opportunity, most importantly, to change and adapt. your style and how you approach the work on a day-by-day basis. We talk a lot about the need to effectively tear everything down every few years and start from scratch. And I think that it's dramatic to make a point, but it's also kind of true.

And it's true not just for the company or the go-to-market motion or the marketing team or the sales team. It's also true for each of the individuals. You have to be willing to question everything you've done and everything that's worked and be willing to throw it all away. When I think about sort of leadership style and management and how I approach the world, it frankly hasn't changed all that much.

Like I still really deeply believe in setting clear expectations, having real, real clear priorities, and importantly, being clear about what we're going to say no to, and then creating mechanisms or mental models or whatever sort of terminology you want to use to help people make those decisions on their own. It's always a work in progress, right? Sometimes we find ourselves, I find myself probably too far in the weeds. I just need to remind myself to pull back out.

100%. I love what you said, and it's especially true. It's probably even shorter for some people in earlier stage companies that you join a new company every 18 months. And so that definitely, I'm sure, it keeps it interesting, right?

It's kind of a new adventure every six quarters. But I think it could also have the opposite effect on a lot of people like, oh, this is not the company I joined anymore What do you think it is that kept every 18 months having that reboot interesting and a new adventure versus something where it like well you know I burned out or this is not what I signed up for anymore I mean and this is more of an abstract question for you I think for the people listening because I think that probably is something a lot of people listening to this have a challenge with.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you brought up that Medium post and I hadn't read it in a long time. So I had read it before we jumped on here.

And, you know, those same four things that I said in that Medium post are true today. Right. And at the end of the day, you have to define what your North Star is and what you care most about as an individual and constantly check back against those things. It might be true that your North Star changes.

That's fine, but you need to be clear about what that is and reflect on, is this meeting the goals that I have or if the goals have changed, is it still meeting them? And if it is, then keep going. If it's not, then it's time to think about doing something different. And for me, it's always been like work with smart people, get to work on something really big or the potential to be really big, have a chance to learn a lot.

And I learned by doing and learned by being around smart people and then have a chance to win. And you've worked in startups, you know, that winning can be hard. So when you're winning, it's really good. It's much better than not.

It is. I totally agree. So one thing you said that was also really interesting is when you're setting clear expectations and objectives, saying no is important. And I would posit that it's probably the most important thing.

In fact, one of our recent guests said the most important part your strategy, your marketing strategy is the things you say no to. And when you are in an earlier stage company, it's so hard to say no to anything because everything could unlock a growth lever, could be the thing that changes how the business performs. So saying no really early, really hard. But as you've scaled up with Flex, has that become any easier?

Has your criteria changed at all? Or is it always a tough? It's always hard. It's always hard.

Okay. My favorite definition of strategy is that once you have struck everything off of the list of all the things that you could do, whatever is left is your strategy. And I think that applies to marketing team. It applies to product team.

It applies to companies in general. I think it's like a really good approach to creating priorities. When you're really small, your constraints are really obvious, right? Like you have one or two people or call it five, whatever, and you know what everybody's doing.

So you just have your limitations are really clear. As you get larger, it gets farther away from the day-to-day of what's actually happening. I think it gets an order of magnitude harder. Because we've got...

There's, I think, 20-plus people on the marketing team here at Flex. And that seems like a lot of people to me. I think that can do a lot of things. And what gets hard about saying no when you have that many people is you acquire...

Debt is not the right way to frame it, but I'll use that word. You just create a lot of work that perpetuates over time. And so people can fill their day, 50% of their day, really easily with just the day-to-day ongoing work that you set in motion 18, 24, 36 months ago. And so it's hard to account for that oftentimes, in my opinion, which means the list of things you say no to on a per-person basis actually gets larger, right?

You just can't quite do as much per person as you could in the past. And that's okay. It's just a matter of really identifying like, okay, are we doing all of the right things? Are there any programs or projects that we shouldn't be doing anymore because they're not getting us the value that they once were?

Right. It goes back to saying you got to tear everything down every 18 to 24 months. Right. Just because we did something two years ago doesn't mean we should be doing it today.

And we constantly need to be thinking about that. Exactly. And I think that's easy. If you're the head of marketing and you join a new company, it's easy for you to come in with fresh eyes and be like, yeah, we're not doing any of that anymore.

This is what we're doing now. Right. But when you've been in one spot for so long, being able to take an honest, sober look at everything that's going on, everyone's priorities and saying, okay, we do have to actually stop doing this is a lot tougher because A, that was your decision or you're part of your world initially. And it's rare that you have someone that has such a heritage at a company for so long that I imagine that's got to be a little extra tough for you.

Yeah, it certainly can be. My personality happens to be one where I don't attach much value to or have much bias for things that we've done in the past. I often tell people, especially during like the interview process or folks on the team that we have no dogma, like just because we're doing something, it doesn't mean it's the right thing and we should constantly be questioning it. And that's, that's totally okay.

That's very how I am too. Like I think marketing is very much an ephemeral thing. Like it's, if it's not constantly changing, then something is going wrong. But I think maybe it's not 18 months and maybe the word teardown is a little strong, but I think having that very regular, like, do we need to reset?

Do we need to do a hard restart on our marketing program is a fair question for a marketing leader to be asking themselves. Yeah. So you mentioned our website, right? So we had built a brand very early on and we had done a really good job making our logo, especially in sort of color scheme, like really noticeable in the industry.

And it was a really hard decision and we had to get a lot of people on board and sort of let go of the path to make a pretty dramatic shift from where we were two years ago to where we are today. Those are hard decisions to make because people, you attach emotion, you attach the work you've already done. You got a bunch of bias and that tough But when you get to the other side of making that decision it gets easier to make the next one than the next one You sort of just got to make it every once in a while Absolutely William Faulkner once said that you know in order to make a story good you have to kill your darlings Right And then a hundred years later Game of Thrones came and said you got it And it killed everyone But I think that important Like not holding anything sacred is important And you do need to be able to make some really bold choices to keep things interesting to keep yourself relevant and current You are listening to one B2B professional's take on what it takes to accelerate revenue in 2023.

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Let's click in because, again, I don't think we've ever talked to anyone on the show that's had such a long stretch. So again, congrats on that. But can you tell us over the last seven years and under, you know, I would call it two, three minutes, what's the scale-up story been like? How has the go-to-market engine evolved?

Maybe that's really the question. How has the go-to-market engine evolved in the past seven years as you've grown and as the company scaled so much? For a long time, our approach, at least from a marketing perspective, was like, hey, we just need to make people aware that we exist. We invented a new category.

This is an entirely new type of offering. So we just need to hammer people with logo, brand, thought leadership, et cetera, just so that they become aware of us. And then we slowly started adding, okay, now we need to really help the commercial team drive opportunities and accounts through our revenue process. And that can be as simple as, hey, we actually have to help them make presentations and have presentations and we have to make proposals and we have to do pitch, right?

Like all the things that go along with helping their commercial team. And a couple of years ago, we really deeply integrated the sales and marketing team. So we now report to the same leader with the intention of really unifying our go-to-market between sales and marketing. And so the big shift for us was this integrated sales and marketing approach where every activity that marketing does is reinforced by sales activity.

And every activity that sales has is reinforced or enabled by marketing activity. You sort of mentioned it before about how sometimes in the business, folks don't really know what the marketing team does, but they have a different perception of what it is. And that's a hard thing to get over. And we focus one of the ways that we do that is through talking about the impacts of what happens when our accounts or our contacts have both sales and marketing engagement.

How much faster do we push them through the funnel? How many more deals do we close? Right. And that's a pretty dramatic shift.

And a lot of companies talk about how they have an integrated sales and marketing approach, but I don't necessarily think they do it. I know you guys do. Even we do, but even it's one of those things where it's so walking the walk is so much more difficult than talking the talk when it comes to that sales and marketing alignment. And I think honestly, it breaks down if you've got different objectives, right?

But if both teams ardently care about pipeline or revenue, then I think it becomes easier. But even then, people's opinions on what marketing is doing and how is that actually going to help to me, the salesperson, hit my quota, can start up arguments, right? And everyone has to trust that everyone's operating with their counterpart's best interest at heart. But especially when times get tough, it can be easy to needle on and start to pick apart and create some bad blood.

Yeah, it can. Absolutely. So we were talking earlier about sort of my guiding principles and the need for people to have them generally. I think it's 100% true for teams as well.

Your team has to have a North Star, and it has to be aligned with the sales team's North Star. And the activities that you take need to align to that North Star. I have an analogy. Have you ever seen the movie 50 First States?

I have seen the movie 50 First States, yes. That's what I think an integrated sales and marketing approach is like. You have to remind each other of its importance and the value every single day. You've got to kind of fall in love all over again every single time.

And it's worked. But when it works, it really makes a difference. You're absolutely right. And I think it bears repeating that you're a marketer.

You market to the whole world, but you're also marketing internally, right? You have to constantly be reminding your stakeholders in your company what you're up to, why you're doing it, why it's at their service. Otherwise, the whole thing doesn't work. And I think especially a scrapped marketer or a strapped marketer is going to have trouble creating the bandwidth for themselves to market themselves internally.

Yep. So as someone who has been a founder, CEO, a salesperson in partnerships and now a marketing leader. I've had the either curse or blessing of being a marketer the whole time. So I have that perspective.

But as someone with a much broader background, how has that informed the way that you run a marketing team, how marketing markets itself internally and externally? Because I imagine it's got to have a much rounder perspective. Yeah. Yeah.

So I don't think there's any right way or wrong way to do anything. This just happens to be the path that I have gone down We tend to optimize for sort of aptitude and attitude So and we do that sort of up and down the entire organization And ultimately that sort of starts with, comes from my background of like deeply caring about learning, deeply caring about executing at a really high level, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My personal experience has been that as I've gotten experience across a broad set of functions, it's enabled me to think not just about the impact from a marketing perspective or what marketing might care about, but what might the rest of the organization care about?

And if we're going to undertake a marketing program, I at least have a sense still, even though it's been 20 years since I've been a salesperson, I at least still have a sense of how I might perceive that as a salesperson, how it might help me. When I think about how we do product marketing, my experience as being a product manager effectively has made an impact on that. As a former founder CEO, again, a long time ago, I understand the importance of being able to clearly communicate data and value and the implications of it.

And that helps us frame, I think, I hope, the impact that marketing has across the entire organization. For me, it's been really valuable and really impactful to have that broad set of experiences. And that might not be true for everybody, but it has been for me. But I think it backs up what I was saying earlier, that marketers got to market, right?

And what's rule number one of marketing, know your audience. And that doesn't mean just your potential buyers, but internally as well. And so I think that holds really true. And you've probably just got a more high fidelity or high resolution view of that.

We've talked a lot about setting expectations, setting objectives, having a North Star and agreed. Yeah, we need to have one North Star that we're all marching to. But at some point that has to trickle down. I mean, this is a super tactical question.

How do you atomize that? How do you atomize your expectations across your teams? like an OKR or a V2 mom or what? Yes, we start with our North Star.

We actually have two North Stars, whatever. And then we move down into every six months. I fundamentally don't believe in 12-month planning cycles, like at least at the detail level. I'm sure most people in the startup world agree.

So we start with six-month initiatives and objectives. The objective is obviously what we're trying to achieve. Initiatives are some of the new things that we're going to do to help us achieve those objectives. Those start at the marketing level and those are done in coordination with myself, my sales peer, our leader, and then my direct reports.

Then we've got a nice condensed set up here as our top five priorities. And then each of the functional groups creates their version of that same set of five on both an initiatives and an objectives level that roll up into the overarching five for marketing. So initiatives, OKRs, we track and measure them every month. The important part, and this gets back to saying no, and I think you used the word happy feet or shiny object, everybody gets it.

So to me, it not only comes down to being really clear up front and bringing everybody into the tent, so to speak, to create those initiatives and objectives, but just being really consistent with how you talk about them and a willingness to kill them if they don't make sense anymore, because that happens too. Yep. Thank you for answering that. I think very tactical questions or people that listen to this podcast love that stuff.

And I think it helps to my like one of my first questions is, you know, how do you say no when you do have those really clear objectives? And when you kind of laddered them all the way from the bottom, all the way up to the top, it's easier to spot like that duckling that doesn't fit. And you can say no to that. Right.

And there's probably I'm sure times where it's less clear, but it does help to shortcut that a lot. Oh, OK. Well, Ryan, we're coming up on the end. We have got a signature revenue talks question that we ask every single podcast that we have.

So here comes for you. What is the number one thing that your team is focused on to accelerate revenue this year? Everybody's facing like headwinds, challenges, right? Constraints, right?

Everybody's concerned, conservative. What we have found, again, is that when we take an integrated approach and we do it really well, we win more. That accelerates revenue. So our focus, hyper focus, and basically all of our initiatives and objectives are aligned around us for this year is to more deeply integrate the sales and marketing approach.

So we have sets of activities or events. We're calling them moments planned with pre and post sales activities and materials and enablement and conversation starters that the commercial team can take advantage of to drive sales engagement after we've created that marketing engagement. Because at the end of the day, we all need to drive revenue. And so that's our focus, double, triple, quadruple down on our integrated approach.

Yeah, that answer lines up with the rest of these. So clearly you've got your own objectives in place. I think this has been a phenomenal conversation, Ryan. Thank you so much.

Again, kids, just say no. And if you have a clear set of objectives, it's a lot easier to say no. Ladies and gentlemen, Ryan Morrell from Flex, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me.

This was fun. Thank you so much for listening to Revenue Talks. If you liked this episode, please consider leaving a review wherever you're listening. You can connect with me on Twitter at Justin Keller and the entire Drift Podcast Network at Drift Podcast.

Remember, revenue, it's everyone's business now.