Paul Knegten of Beeswax on why CMOs last 18 months, and whose fault it is

Paul Knegten

Hey, what's going on. It's nice to be here.

Paul Knegten

Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me. I have a strong tie to Israel and the startup scene there. I can trace the beginnings of my professional success back to being in Israel. I graduated college when I was 23 years old. First thing I did was get on a flight to Tel Aviv, and I never came back, let's say, that's the story the way my parents would see it. I wound up spending five years building a life and a career there. My first real job, not including teaching English and the kinds of things Anglos do when they move to Israel, my first real job was working for a biotech startup in business development, and I happened to have majored in biology in my undergraduate studies, so it kind of made sense, but the real reason they hired me was because I could speak English really well and I could write, and that was kind of the angle for a lot of the Anglo immigrants to Israel.

I owe that whole exciting time, and if you remember, I think it was called GarageGeeks, was just getting big then, it was like 2004, 2005, 2006, they had the best events in Herzliya, maybe in the whole area. I don't know, Tel Aviv maybe had good ones too, but yeah, I think there was really no other place on the planet where you could see that density of exciting things happening. I don't think people in the startup scene today can fully appreciate what that was like, but I had the privilege to be part of that scene. I wound up working, after the biotech startup, you know it's a great industry but you find out if the thing works after 10 years, I was a little bit too long of a cycle for that. I wound up working for an Israeli tech startup called Dapper. It was founded by two amazing people, Elan Sheer, who is now the COO of and founder of Nexar, and El Eisen, who I wound up starting a company with after.

That company was a quirky Web 2.0 tool to move content around the web by pointing and clicking on websites, this is back when there were websites people went to, not everything was an app, and that pivoted into an ad company. I pivoted into a marketing role because that's what we needed, and I immersed myself in advertising technology, now called adtech. I was just a 28-year-old kid thinking, okay, I must know everything about this, and I started a podcast and interviewed people, and that's how I got to know a friend who introduced us [me] to Guy [spelling not verified], who's obviously the founder of Outbrain and [unclear @ 03:20], an amazing, amazing visionary. From there, we wound up getting acquired by Yahoo, spent some time there, kind of the minimum possible, and then I wound up being the VP Marketing at a much bigger company called MediaMath, and forged my path in advertising tech. Moved back to the US, started my own company in a completely different field, B2B SaaS, selling to real estate agents. It was a product that helped people navigate the process of buying a house. Learned a tremendous lot there.

We wound up raising a little over 20 million from Accel Partners and a few others. We recently sold that company this year, and tens of thousands of real estate agents use it. The through line, if we're trying to learn something from all this, I think of my marketing career, is this notion that you have to get people to care about you as a company, or you as people, on their way home from work. You could imagine a time when people used to drive home from work or ride the bus home from work, now a lot of people in our industry work from home a lot of the time, but this notion of how do I get them to care about us as people, how do I get us to resonate with them about their own lives and their own careers. Let's say they want a promotion, let's say they want to get coached by a competitor, how can we be responsible for that happening, how can we help make that happen.

A lot of that manifested in, instead of worrying about things like how do we increase our percentage of lead conversion and how do we generate a more efficient funnel, how do we get this person up on stage talking about the solutions to the industry they sit in, how do we get their profile raised, how do we make them heroes. I think that's really been about how do we build a crusade. I've gotten some criticism over the years for using the word crusade, for what it means in the Middle Ages, lots of people getting killed and trying to take back the Holy Land, but put that aside for a second, it's about how you build a movement. When you look at successful companies in Enterprise or B2B more generally, I like to point at Salesforce.com. Look at what they were able to do: they made the most boring thing, which is CRM software, exciting for the first time, and they made it about a crusade against software you install. I think there are so many lessons to be learned from that. I owe my whole career and the successes I've driven to that type of mentality, and that's what I try to bring to CEOs, that's what I try to bring to the companies I work for: less about focusing on marketing as a math problem that needs solving and measuring, more about how do we build a crusade around the thing you're passionate about, how do we take that and turn it outward and get everybody as excited about it as you are. I think that's really the key. I don't know if I answered the question, I kind of meandered through some different topics.

Paul Knegten

That is both the most difficult to answer and the most poorly explained, or poorly understood, question in marketing, especially B2B or enterprise marketing. This is why we're having this podcast, to try to address it. I'm not dodging the question. I'd say that is the most difficult thing for us to answer, as practitioners, as an industry, as a marketing function. I think it's the most important one we should be discussing. It's the one that leads to that cliché about the CMO's [tenure], like 18 months. I think this is one that has caused a lot of doubt in whether marketing really works. It ranges, so this is going to be somewhat of a long answer, but I promise I'll get to the point. It ranges all the way to "I'll know it when I see it," the finger in the air, which way the wind blows. The way I like to illustrate that one: when a CEO or founder just really doesn't know if marketing even matters at all, I'll often ask them, okay, if you walked into a sales meeting and you smelled really bad, how would that affect the outcome?

I can generally get them to say that's not going to be good. Okay, but how do you measure that? That's the far end of the spectrum, "we know it when we see it." We're doing influence operations, these things deal with the psychology of human beings, we're not always going to know what made them pick up the phone and call us, or what made them fill out a form, even if it has an attribution attached to it, that's often going to be [wrong]. There is so much over-attribution to the last action, or the most measurable action, empires are built and lost on that. I really don't like it. That's the whole other end of the spectrum, which is: we're going to build a machine, every single touch point is going to get its own interaction, we're going to micro-target and segment everything, we're going to build this complicated web of interactions you might call full-funnel marketing, the whole life cycle. It's like, okay, but what are we saying to them, that generally gets a lot less emphasis, but it's all measurable, we're going to show you graphs of your lead volume going up, your MQLs and SQLs and all that.

That's the far end of the other spectrum, and at least in enterprise-type companies I often find that gets a lot of head scratches and shrugs from the CEO, because why is our revenue growing, it works until it doesn't. I think it's necessary but insufficient, and fails to tell anywhere near the full picture of the effectiveness of the marketing you're doing. So those are the two extremes: we'll wing it and know it when we see it, or we'll measure every pixel firing everywhere, attribute everything, boil it all down to charts and graphs. In practice, what I generally see, let's talk about enterprise marketing first because that's what I know best, then we can go down to self-service B2B SaaS, which I know quite a bit about having founded a startup in it and struggled with it, to be honest. You learn a lot from things you're not the best at, I'll try to pass some of that on.

In practice it comes down to: do you have a bond of shared understanding with your CEO, with your board, start with the CEO first, and then the board has a really interesting question too, because founders have to face their boards, and the board is going to ask questions about CAC and LTV that their marketing lead should be able to answer. I'll tell you a short story. I'm friends with the CMO of a medium-sized public company that's very successful, he's been with the company a very long time. I was having coffee with him and asked him about this spectrum, from "we'll wing it, know it when we see it" to "measure every touch point everywhere all the time," and he said: Paul, we just acquired three other companies with all their own Salesforce instances, some use HubSpot, some use these other things, do you have any idea how hard it is for us to even know who owns a lead, let alone what touch points they've had, we're nowhere near able to do that. I said, okay, you guys are doing really well, how do you keep your job, and how do you know it's working? He told me: it's because my CEO is a sales guy, he believes in this stuff, he knows this stuff works. How does he know it works? I don't know, but every time he's been CEO of a company he's taken it from this level to this level and grown the revenue several times over, so he must be doing something right.

I saw that at Freewheel too. When Beeswax got acquired by Comcast we became part of a company called Freewheel, which is a supply-side platform, it manages the supply of TV inventory for the type of TV you watch and streaming, and they're the biggest player in that space, owned by a huge telco with access to all that inventory. They're not tracking every little pixel firing everywhere either, so you know how do we do this, it's like, we know who to have golf with, we know what that's got to feel like when we have a huge activation, we spend a million bucks on it, we know how to make people feel a certain way about it, and that CEO gets it. I think it's a little bit of a dodge to say on the far left end of the spectrum, "we know it when we see it," but that's kind of how these highly successful companies are growing.

I've run into other CEOs who are more skeptical of that, and you walk them around Cannes or CES or something, and they're like, God, they're just lighting money on fire, do you think they're stupid, or do you think it's because they're doing a billion dollars in revenue with high margins and they know exactly how to make their potential customers feel, they know who they are, they're good at taking a big list and turning it into a small list and focusing on those people with the right message at the right time. I don't know, they measure things a lot more vibes-based than I think we're prepared for. Boards are another beast. We're talking about mature companies here doing huge marketing programs that cost millions of dollars. Let's shift focus: you've got a startup, you raised a Series B, and you brought on an investor. This is from actual experience: when I was at Beeswax, [name unclear] was on our board, they were one of our investors, they were awesome, they invest in SaaS companies, they thought they were investing in a SaaS company.

Beeswax superficially was a SaaS company, but we were what's called a demand-side platform, the portal through which people buy programmatic inventory on the internet, a lot of CTV, the streaming stuff. Instead of charging the way a lot of other DSPs charge, which is a percentage of your spend, it was: you're going to own your own DSP, and you're only going to pay for essentially the operating expenses of bidding and everything, it was almost like a flat fee. It was nominally a SaaS company, but the kind of customers we were selling to, yeah, they were buying it through SaaS, but it was still the same dynamics as an enterprise sale, some contracts were $150,000 and some were $1.5 million. That investor invested in a SaaS company, so what they wanted to know was what's your LTV to CAC, how does that look. My CEO, Ari, who's awesome, a marketer at heart, was the kind of person who, by the way, you could just tell knows it when he sees it, he's the CEO of [unclear @ 14:55] now, which is a really awesome podcast.

My board wanted to see these unit economics, and having run a startup and had a board and all that, I knew really well how to calculate those, but it was like, look man, the variance here, what LTV is, is so all across the map, I don't think there's anything meaningful to tell them here. It's really important to understand why your board wants to know this: they want to know what your unit economics are because they're investors who put money into a machine, they expect to print more money at a certain multiple. If they see unit economics with an LTV to CAC greater than X, let's call it X, they think, okay, we should be deploying more capital against this, you've found a machine.

I think a lot of their brains have been burned out by how successful companies like Facebook were at doing this, I think this is much harder to find now, which is why you're seeing venture investment go down and exits go down, but they were looking at us to understand: how are you deploying your capital, have you figured out a model you can scale, because that's all they care about, scaling from where you are now to a multiple of the valuation they invested in. They want to know from me, the CMO, what that ratio is, so they can authorize a budget that leans into that ratio. Whereas in enterprise marketing it's not really about LTV to CAC, because unless you've done it so long that you have such good metrics you can really nail down what that LTV is, it's such a moving target, I don't know that that's really the way to measure return on marketing investment in a type of company where you could have one deal this month that makes your entire year, it's a little scrappier than that, you've got to look at other things. I touched on a couple things there, but the bottom line is: if you're going to survive, if you're going to have a good tenure and be successful in those roles, you really have to make sure you're on the same page with your CEO and your board about what good looks like. If they're convinced that good only means a greater than 1.5 LTV to CAC that you can demonstrate and lean into, and you have a marketing machine that runs on autopilot, then that's what you have to deliver, that's what you sold them. If it's more like, we don't care how you do it, you've got to grow revenue, you've got to sign bigger deals, you've got to help sales be more successful, that's a different set of marching orders, but it all really does boil down to trust. It's this guy who was having coffee with me, he has a relationship of trust with the CEO that he's had across a couple of companies he's worked for, and there's no metric that's going to change that relationship trust. They know when each other is doing a good job, and that's an underrated and unmeasurable quantity.

Paul Knegten

Every time I've been successful it's been because we were able to sell a vision of where the company was going to be, rather than just what the company does now. In enterprise sales conversations, that is often the difference: we're going to work with you guys because I think you're onto something, not because I think your product is any good right now, I think it sucks right now, but you guys have technology I know can go somewhere and I want to have a hand in shaping, and that's the classic early adopter, right, but that can be everything.

Paul Knegten

I have a belief, and I think it's widely held among my peers as marketers, but not nearly as widely held among CEOs or founders as it should be, which, nobody wants to hear what I have to say, maybe on your podcast because it's a bit of a meta conversation about it all, but when it comes down to it: founders are exciting, founders are fun, founders are provocative, founders are building something, we're not building something, we're helping other people understand what we're building. But let's be honest, we don't exist without the work the founder is doing, without the passion, and there is very rarely anybody more passionate about what they're building than the founder, because they have to be, otherwise they'd never do what they're doing, they'd be insane. I'm a firm believer in getting them out there. If you have two co-founders and one of them has a personality and one doesn't, okay, that's an easy conversation. I very often find it to be the case that neither of them wants to do anything about it, they're really like, well, you're the marketing person, you should go do that.

It's like, they don't want to hear from the minister of propaganda, to my friends. They want to, I don't know if they even want to hear from you as the founder, but it is our burden and our job to get them to want to meet with you, and at least you ought to do the bare minimum of being willing to do that. I don't think that hiring a PR firm makes any sense for most early-stage companies, because number one, it's expensive, and you probably don't have a whole lot to say, you don't have a lot of success to point to yet, raising a fundraising round, contacting TechCrunch yourself, leading to that. Secondly, the founder should be building relationships with reporters, they want to hear from you, [as] a subject matter expert on something, otherwise why are you here.

That doesn't mean they're going to write a story about you, but anything you can do to be on their distribution list of people they ask about what's going on, that's part of your job, buddy, you need to be good at that, and as a marketing person we need to help you be good at that. When you break down the four Ps, that's a good way to look at it. I like to look at the world as a dichotomy: there are story problems, and there are problem problems. Marketing can help solve story problems, it can advise on problem problems, but those are things like: our product sucks, our market isn't interested in the thing we're selling, it could mean we're running out of money, it could mean we can't hire the right customer support people so we're screwing people over. Those aren't story problems, those are real problems that you need to solve without a marketing lens on them necessarily. But story problems are things like: if we talked better about how we do things, if we focused our message, if we were in the right places, if we were more places than we are now, if we're loud and out there a lot, and I know a lot of Israeli startups are like this, if that's a big part of the success of Israeli companies I've worked with, their ability to just take over the conversation, those are all story problems that could be solved with marketing.

23:00 As it pertains to what the founder's responsibilities are, I've talked about one, which is they ought to be the mouthpiece, and if you close your eyes and think about really successful companies, it is the founder you remember, being out there doing interviews for better or worse, they have to be there in good times and bad. But it is never like, close your eyes and try to think of a B2B SaaS CMO you remember, it's hard, and that's fine, I'm more of a behind-the-scenes person personally. Number two, going back to trust, how you build that has to do with responsibilities on things like: there's a big conference and we're leaning really heavily into an activation, we're going to try to get a lot of buzz, meet a lot of people, it's going to be exciting, that excitement is immeasurable, it doesn't show up on a report. I've tried many times to do decks where you come back and show people, and it always feels really weird and stilted, like, okay, so we spent how much money on this. But I've had plenty of experiences where the CEO was with me during those things and they get it.

I was talking to a really good friend of mine, Alon Mayon [spelling not verified], who taught me a lot about this, he was running marketing for a very developer-focused company with a CTO who was a developer, and it's not often obvious to people who work with technology day in and day out, who deal in the world of largely math problems and logic problems, to be able to quantify the impact of that kind of feeling. But when you take them there and show them, and they experience it, it's a far different level of trust you can build with that person, because they get it, it pierces that bubble of math into, okay, we're human beings who make decisions like human beings do, it takes us back to our primal selves. I think it's the founder's responsibility to show up at those things, that's not a sales and marketing thing, that's a company thing, that's a who-we-are-and-what-we-believe thing, if we're excited about this and we show that outwardly, others are going to get excited about it too. Moreover, if the whole company sees the founder pitching in a conference booth to five people in a huge conference hall, nobody cares about us but they're out there doing that, that says a lot more internally than it even does externally.

I think that's a huge responsibility I sometimes see founders try to get out of, just showing up and being there for the marketing team. Now there's a third one, my marketing colleagues won't like me saying this but it's true, part of the marketing team too: I know there's this problem, everyone's a marketer, so when things are challenging, even when they aren't, they're going to come in with the most annoying ideas you've ever heard, and you're going to have to find a way to try them. It is your responsibility to listen to what they have to say and give it a shot, because I've learned this the hard way, you do not want to be the person who says no to everything, even if you know these things aren't going to work. If it's a tough time, and we had plenty of tough times in my startup, you've got to say yes to some things and find a way to spin them, and by the way they may be good ideas that with your insight as a CMO, or whatever, head of marketing, you'll be able to turn into better ideas, or they may just be stupid ideas, and you have to find a way to do it so it doesn't damage anything and you can learn something from it. Helping them understand their ideas are welcome and they're part of a team, that we're going to listen to them, I think does help build that trust as well. Did I miss any responsibilities of founders that you'd add or take away?

Paul Knegten

I'll go back to my startup, I think it's the best example: we had something that was working really well, an ongoing campaign that was crushing it, we were acquiring customers, and I'll be honest about how we were doing it, we were emailing every real estate agent whose email we could get hold of, and the good news is they're all on the internet. This was a wonderful setup for a scrappy startup that wants to do some growth hacking. One of the big lessons there is things like that work until they don't. Google is a very smart company, they know people don't want to get email all the time from companies they didn't ask for it from, so with algorithmic changes and things like that, you've got to know when something stops working. The good times, and that's the thing about growth hacking, it's really cool when you figure out some sort of loophole, some sort of hack, some way to win without spending any money, those are rare epiphanies, be careful of getting too comfortable with them.

I think I could have done a much better job in that situation of using that stream of signups, converted users, it was a great channel, and being like, blank check, that helps us build more durable channels. I think I could have done a better job of building that insulation around it. It felt like, this is how we're doing it, everything we do should be about how do we maximize and throttle this channel as hard as we can forward. Now, I don't know, this is rewriting history, who knows, maybe that wouldn't have added much, but I think using success to buy yourself time is a lesson I impart on other CMOs: when you find something that works, awesome, now you've got something you can always tell your CEO is working, while you experiment with a bunch of other stuff to build more channels, great, you found one, move on to the next.

Now, situation dependent, sometimes these channels you find that work really do require all hands on deck to make them work, but if you find something relatively cheap and easy, the way we did there, just hey, MailChimp, email them all, use that as a way to buy yourself the ability to try more risky things. It's hard to try risky things when you've got nothing, when there are no points on the board, you haven't proven yourself yet, you just sound like somebody who's not focused. But when you have some moderate success, I think that's a good time to start experimenting, to start asking the founders again, what do you think, we've got this thing that's working, but I think we should run a workshop with your founder and the executive team, about what are things you're seeing other companies doing that we're not doing. That's when you've built the credibility and you have the latitude to take the chip off your shoulder and be open to trying anything.

I think that's a valuable thing to do, and by the way, its own lesson, what I just said about workshops, total aside, but because everyone's a marketer, learn how to run workshops, that will enable you to collect people's ideas and feedback and organize them in a way that makes very clear which ones are likely to hit the goal versus ease of execution, whatever two-by-two decision scheme you impose on it, and it makes everyone feel heard, and these things don't just keep coming up. But anyway, that's an aside, I don't know if it was a campaign that was unsuccessful, because I don't think, since then, there have been times where it's like, okay, let's try this, and it's more tactical, like we have a bunch of people who bought X from us, let's see if we can sell them Y, and sometimes that'll work and sometimes it won't, and it's more dependent on what X and Y are than on whether the campaign was successful, it can depend on how old these customers of ours are and when the last time they've heard from us was, if it's been a year and a half they may not remember who we are, and that's going right into spam.

There's tactical reasons why things don't work. So the first lesson is: get good at finding something that works, put it on autopilot as much as you can, to focus on other things you can try that are more risky. The second thing is: be really relentless in figuring out, okay, that worked, but what will [stop working]. I think you'll get more latitude with your CEO if you're very honest and transparent and quick about "this isn't doing what I wanted it to." Don't try to make graphs that go up and to the right just to make graphs go up and to the right, they'll see through that after the first couple of times, because it's possible, if you're just measuring lead gen, you can always get graphs that go up and to the right, whether that translates to customers and business is a completely different question. Get good at saying, okay, it's two weeks in, I don't know if this is working, so here's the three things we're going to do to change it. It's not as good as saying, this is working and we're generating revenue, but I think they really need to see that responsiveness and intellectual honesty, that you're on top of it, that's better, that's better.

Paul Knegten

My perspective is, there's probably no reason why you need a C-level marketing person at seed stage, A-round stage even, unless they're one of the founders and they need a C-level title because they're one of the founders, like I was in that situation in my startup. I think it's less that you need a [different kind of] CMO for seed and a [different] CMO for Series A, it's that you're less likely to find somebody. I could go work for a seed-stage company, I'd probably be way too expensive as a full-time CMO, now I advise companies these days, so they get the benefit of me for a lot less money and a lot of the same upside. But if I was advising that seed-stage founder, what I would say is find someone super scrappy, and sometimes they're young, sometimes they're not, don't pick on that, that's not a good way to do it, there are plenty of older folks who are super scrappy and just don't necessarily want to be C-level. I would find somebody who is more of a generalist.

There's a term in Hebrew, [unclear @ 34:25], maybe they're not even a marketer by training, maybe they're just good at hyping and promoting things, maybe they're in business school, and they have to prove themselves, it's a very underrated quality, somebody who really wants to prove themselves and get to the next level. When you find a CMO, especially if they've had a couple of exits or were later in their career, they don't have a whole lot to prove to you, for better or worse, they don't need this as much as perhaps you need them, and that's not the greatest situation for a startup to be in. You want a group of people for whom this is where they want to make their career. That's how I felt when I was at Dapper, that was my first real marketing job, and I was going to do anything to stand out, there was going to be no question about whether I was good at this. I think as people go through their careers they have less of a need to do that. So I would advise, if I saw a seed-stage company saying we need a good CMO, I'd be like, no.

Maybe, if what you're lacking is strategic advice, go get some advisers who'll help you, at seed stage you probably don't have to pay them anything, maybe you'll give them a little equity, and learn how to use them, whether it's a weekly meeting or something, but you can get the strategic advice from them and introduce them to your scrappy marketing person, please, because otherwise you're going to play the telephone game, you're going to tell your marketing person what the adviser said, and that marketing person isn't going to know who this person is, probably won't like it, they'll resent that person, as opposed to, hey, I got the CMO of whatever to be on our advisory board, and he wants to meet with you once a week and mentor you, how awesome is that, that's huge, because first of all, if the relationship doesn't work because your marketing person isn't good, great, news, now you have validation to get rid of that person. If it does work, and now you've got this mentor-mentee relationship, they've taken off your shoulders a big part of what a CEO needs to do, which is mentor people, because if you don't know marketing, you're not going to know what it takes to bring that person up to the next level.

So I'd say find someone super scrappy, find a group of advisers who'll help you, and be relentless with them, when they say they're willing to help, don't be nervous, they probably do mean it, and then introduce them to your marketing lead and try to get some cadence going with them, so they can lift that person up, hey, did you think about this, hey, what kind of campaigns are you running for this, that'll give them a lot more confidence to try things. Later on, at different stages, there is a certain stage a company ought to get a CMO, I have a newsletter I'm sure we can put in the show notes, but if you're in a situation where the decisions the company is making would really benefit from having a marketing lens in the room, you really need to have a CMO.

You can't just have a VP marketing, because then they're not in that conversation, they don't have a seat at the table, the seat at the table is not for that person, so the company can often make stupid choices a marketing person would have seen coming a mile away, like, hey, maybe we shouldn't do this thing our customers don't like, or, hey, this thing we keep doing that the press keeps writing about us doing sucks, why do we keep doing that. Half of our job, and I joke about this sometimes, is to sit in executive team meetings and say, wait, why. You can't do that when you only have a VP marketing or a director of marketing. When the company becomes more formal and decisions happen in an executive team setting, you need somebody at that level who can build credibility with the other executives so they don't go around them, the marketing person will impose some structure on how we're going to talk about this business, and if they have clout and some ability to influence the rest of the people, they'll go along with it because they've bought into it, they've been brought along. But if that person isn't senior, those more senior people are going to go do what they want to do, they'll listen to whoever, "I'm friends with the CMO at another company, they asked us why we're not doing this," you run into problems like that, and it's a never-ending cycle of, well, they're not listening, well, you're not helping. I think the point, if you're curious about when it's time to graduate from, I've got this really scrappy tactician who is great at getting things done, they're driving a lot of value, they're an MVP, and maybe it's them you want to promote, to, I need someone strategic who can help us shape the story of this company and the growth of this company and help us make better decisions about what to do as a company, that's when you put a C in front of that name, if they're going to be in a room with a bunch of Cs in front of their names.

Paul Knegten

It differs by role. For instance, there's an unsung hero of many marketing teams, the head of marketing operations, sometimes called strategy and operations, or VP of operations. When you get to a certain scale, marketing is a lot of independent projects going on at the same time, especially when you're global, you literally have country managers relying on a marketing person or people in that country to do highly specialized work, and if you think about that on a spreadsheet, and every day stuff's happening, press, releases, events, planning the year in advance, it is so much logistics, and when it's not done right you have lots of failures across the board, your CEO shows up at an event and the booth looks bad, that'll get back to you, there's something broken in the chain, or it's just the never-ending, we need more resources, we need more heads, we need to hire more people here, we need 50 product marketing people, how does that happen, operations management, prioritization, force-ranking what we're doing on a project board or whatever, here are the trains, here's where they're running, here's the efficiency, here's what's happening.

That's a critical role, and the person you need for it doesn't need to know anything about, I'll be honest, they need to know how to run things, kind of a chief of staff role, that makes it sound like, oh, you're a chief of staff to the president, no, they're an operations person, they're there to help things run. For some reason people understand why those roles are necessary in product, or for finance or something, but I don't think they understand the complexity of running all those programs at the same time, and having somebody senior who reports to the CMO in charge of that. Any scaled company I've been at has had a VP level at that role. So that's one, let's put that aside. What do I look for in hiring marketing people more generally?

I'm more of a right-brain kind of thinker, so that biases my thinking, I don't look for a copy of me, but why am I good at what I do, I've been a musician my whole life, I've played drums since I was 10 years old, I cook all the time, I broadcast from a studio control room I play in all the time, it's no accident, this is the creativity, the taste thing, being able to understand how people are going to feel about something if you do it or don't do it, how a constituency is going to receive a message, those aren't really teachable, you have it or you don't. Some people are very good at, okay, I can predict five chess moves away how this is going to play out, and those are the people you want on your team, because those are the people who are going to understand how we should be talking about ourselves and what message is right, they're going to be able to listen to customers in a way and have empathy for customers in a way that somebody without that just isn't going to be able to.

I think curiosity, really trying to understand why aren't they buying, what are they buying, why don't they like us, what don't they like about us, what do they think about us, if they're not asking those questions and they're saying what kind of marketing programs should we do, you're going to be spending a lot of time just telling them what to do. That kind of tendency, or curiosity about really understanding the vibes around things, it's hard to describe, but you kind of know it when you see it. Most marketing folks I know, maybe it's changed more recently, don't come from a background of doing customer interviews. In enterprise marketing it's hard to do them, to be honest, it's like, hey, we're pitching Samsung, and if you say, hey, I'd like to do some user interviews with Samsung, they'll say get lost, if we could talk to them we would, but we've got this big pitch coming, so the aggressiveness of being able to say I don't understand how they're feeling until I actually get to talk to them, some of them can build that from listening to sales calls too, but you've got to have folks who are curious about what goes into that person's decision to buy us or not buy us, and how can I best understand that, and then how do I tap into that.

I think if you're hiring a product marketer that's essential, you need that. A lot of people think the product marketer has to be the really technical one, they need to know how to go toe-to-toe with the product managers, the designers, the engineers, they're your last line of defense against shipping things to people that they didn't want but that your CEO thought would be neat, so they really have to understand what the voice of the customer says. If you're hiring event people, I think it was Marc Benioff who said the event is the message, that's a Marshall McLuhan thing, the medium is the message, how you build that, what the event is for. For instance, when I was at Dapper, we had an event series called Fixing Advertising, it wasn't called Dapper, nobody gave [a thought] about who Dapper was, we were this little Web 2.0 startup that made dynamic ads, maybe based in Israel, nobody had heard of us, but people were really frustrated with how display ads didn't work, we were measuring CTR and it was lousy, so we launched this thing called Fixing Advertising, where we could bring in people working at agencies and brands who were "the fixers," and shine a spotlight on them and make it about them and all the great things they were doing.

The event was the message in that particular case, but that could only come from understanding these people are frustrated about the industry they serve, they don't like going to work every day and making crappy banner ads, so let's call that out, let's make that a thing. When you're hiring marketing people, look for, there's no such thing as an undergraduate marketing degree generally, maybe there is at certain universities, I don't know, I think someone with an English degree, someone with an art degree, someone with a sociology or psychology degree, look for somebody who's really good at understanding people and has a lot of empathy, and I don't know quite how you measure that, you know it when you see it, and when you talk to people you certainly know when you don't see it, there are friends of ours we love dearly who have no idea how people are going to feel about something until they do it, but we also have friends who know how to calculate that and know how to look five steps ahead, how's that person going to feel, those are your marketers, whatever kind of role. There's data analytics people you have to hire, they've got to be good at math, but they're all better when they know which questions to ask, what to measure. The biggest mistake you can make is hiring someone who isn't a marketer, who doesn't get marketing, to be your data analytics person, because they're not going to know where to look for the trends they should be surfacing to you, the interesting data stories you could tell externally, or they just help you understand whether what you're doing is working in some way. I don't know, I would do that, or there are personality tests, I don't know if I believe in them, but you kind of know them when you see them.

Paul Knegten

If I could add one more thing to it, I think it's the most important thing out of that, and I appreciate you bringing that up, one of the best things you can do as a marketing person is the thing that might get you fired, which is being relentless about saying no. I said earlier you don't want to say no to everything because that'll get you fired, that's true, but I think the biggest mistake I see companies make, 9 out of 10 times when companies fail it's because they confuse what they want their customers to want with what their customers actually want. I think Steve Jobs screwed up a lot of people's brains into thinking customers don't know what they want and you shouldn't listen to them. Every time I hear a founder tell me, if they'd listened to customers, Henry Ford would have built a faster horse, I want to go crazy, because nobody ever said that.

You need to build what your customers tell you to build, or what your customers ask for, what we're saying here is you need to build what your customers want or need, and it's your job as a company to figure out what that is. One way to figure it out is to ask them, and you'll get an answer, and if you don't have a good marketing ear, whether that's a marketing person or you as the CEO if it's early enough, you're still figuring out what to build, if you can listen to that and unpack it, if they say "I'd just like a faster horse," that's not the end of the journey, the question is why, let's think, why are they asking for a faster horse, "because it'll get me to where I'm going faster, I'll be there on time." What if it wasn't a horse, I don't care what it is, a mule, whatever, a rocket ship, just get me there. Now we've figured something out, they want to get where they're going faster, how do we get them there faster.

Henry Ford wasn't an idiot, he wasn't deciding between a faster horse, the analogy breaks down there, but it's really important to be able to say, guys, I know you really want to move into this adjacent space, you really, really want to sell this new product, the reason you're not selling it isn't a story problem, it's a problem problem, it's because they don't want to buy it, and this is why they don't want to buy it, and this is why no matter how hard we market it to them, they're not going to buy it, and we are wasting our time and our resources trying to make this happen. Boards try to do that to companies constantly, you cannot listen to them, they will send you every competitor's press release about some new thing they're doing in some adjacent space that just tripled their [valuation], and they're going to bake that into their next round's valuation, and you need to be able to not care about any of that, and that is really, really hard, because VCs aren't going to shut up about it, and next time you have a board meeting, what are you doing about this, how come I see this company doing it, it sucks, but that's sometimes your job, your marketing lens has to go on and say, okay, look, [a competitor] tried to do it here, here's why they're more suited to do it, or here's why they're likely to fail, but here's what our customers are saying, here's what they actually want, why don't we go build that.

The answer is often, well, but that's just not going to make us as much money, sorry, but that's gravity, that's physics, that's where we are, and rarely do I see a company very successfully create out of nothing a need in a customer to solve a problem they didn't know they had. That happens, certainly, but it's the exception, not the rule, and it creates so many founder headaches, of pouring their soul into this amazing product that does amazing things they're hoping people will see the magic in, as opposed to being really good at understanding what their pain is and being the best one to solve it, and understanding that even if you're the best one to solve it, even if you have the best product, if they don't like you they're not going to buy it. I don't know, I think one of the key things is being that person in the room who can say, guys, you can hate me for it, but this new widget we're hoping people buy because it has a higher valuation for our company if we're successful at it, we're wasting our time.

Paul Knegten

Stay at bigger companies longer. I quit two very good companies I probably should have stayed much longer at. First was Yahoo, I stayed for six months, shiny object, going to be VP Marketing at MediaMath, which was a great experience, I don't regret a second of it, I learned a lot of lessons that carried me through to today. From there, but the second time was Comcast, and I think, if I was giving advice, a lot of scrappy young people, you're going to grow, you're going to go up in title and your career path, if you don't stay at the company you're at, way more than if you try to be promoted within, it's much harder to be promoted within a company than it is to get that title somewhere else. I think I'm a good example of that, if you look at my LinkedIn profile, that works to a point.

I think big company experience is different, in the sense that, look, I don't know that I'm learning giant marketing lessons from being there, although there are situations you simply don't get access to unless you're at a big company, but your ceiling is so much higher, your ability to be promoted goes up many, many more levels in large companies, and I think this has nothing to do with marketing, it's just, don't have the chip on your shoulder I think I had, thinking they move so slow, they're so stupid, I mean, yes and no, I don't think they're looking, some part of me thinks, well, you know, they're looking for a scrappy startup type to bring some energy to it, they are, but that does get annoying to them fast, and I think learning how to create success in those types of environments is its own reward and its own lesson, and has really outsized payouts, I went and thought the best way toward wealth was to start my own company, but I have a lot more friends who are wealthy because they were at Amazon for years, that's a more sure way to do it, talk to anybody at Nvidia right now, the person who cleans the toilets is probably worth $10 million at this point.

Big companies are not bad, give them some time. Then I guess the next thing is, that feeling you have when you meet with your CEO, I'll give you two things and then I'll stop talking, the feeling of, do they get it, is this a person who's just going to get it, is this a person who, if I pull off something great, is going to recognize it, or is this a person who's going to be asking for numbers all the time and headcount reductions and things like that, please trust that instinct, it's really important. Ask them a question like, what's a company you think is doing really good marketing, and when they say Nike or something like that, or it's probably not Nike anymore, but when they say a consumer brand, like, Apple's doing great, okay, what's one in our space you think is doing a good job, listen to that answer, really listen to that answer. That's all I've got

Paul Knegten

Interesting, I think you're pretty good at this because you've been a founder and you've also been in marketing, so I think maybe you could ask, how do you give feedback to a marketing person, a CMO, a director of marketing, whatever, how do you question if they're doing a good job, because I think a lot of the time it's kind of a binary thing, is this person good or are they not, and I think, again, when you make the joke about the 18-month tenure that everyone does for a CMO, I often wonder, well, if it was so obvious things weren't workable, what kind of feedback were they getting, were they getting called out, or was it more like, eventually they just got sick of having this person around. You, as a founder, you as a CEO, I'd say at least [figure unclear] responsibility for whether that CMO was successful or not, the other 50% is the CMO's responsibility. But it's true, if you don't give them the resources they need, they'll fail, if you don't give them the feedback they need, they'll fail in your eyes at least.

If you don't think it's working, you need to say you don't think it's working, don't just tell your co-founder that and then wait for a time that's convenient to let your CMO go or something, I think that happens a lot, because they don't really know how to articulate [why], they don't know what's working, I don't really know why they don't do it. And by the way, just asking hard questions and not getting the answers you want, that's not sufficient, you need to say, here's how I see the world, and that's why I asked this question, and what you're telling me is this other thing, here's why I think it's important. If you do not think the answer to this question is important, have that discussion, you may ultimately wind up disagreeing, and that's fine, maybe that person wasn't the right person for that role, but you really should dig into it, as opposed to it being a binary of just, I think this is working, or I think this isn't. Yeah, maybe in the future you should ask marketers or CEOs, how are you going to manage things when they're not working, or when you think they're not working, or when you're worried they're not working, what do you do.

Paul Knegten

Yeah, it's been so much fun, I had a great time, and thank you so much.