103: Kasey Jones - Marketing and Sales

good afternoon everybody this is john barrows make it happen mondays hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend i did it was father's day so all i did was spend time with my daughter and my wife which is exactly what i want to be doing on father's day so i had a great weekend hopefully all did too and i am super excited to have a guest here casey jones how you doing casey i'm good how are you doing john i'm doing fantastic and this is i think this is the first time we've gotten on since the we need to talk webinar right it is so for those of you who didn't see that google it type we need to talk jay barrows casey jones we did a fantastic webinar on uh the challenges these days of the bro culture and sales which i still think needs to have a voice continuing to go on that um but anyways today we're going to be talking about casey comes from a very interesting background from a marketing standpoint and i come from a sales standpoint but we both have you know sales dna on casey's side marketing dna on my side i mean that was my degree so casey want to give everybody a little bit of background of where you're coming from and what you're up to these days so we can put some context to our conversation absolutely so i am founder and ceo of a small demand generation marketing agency called a better jones and we help startups grow faster essentially and uh yeah i am a marketer but i usually say that my heart is on the sales team so i started in sales absolutely loved it but i was someone who would kill it for my first six months and then i would kind of get bored and my pipeline would start to just tank and i realized that um marketing was kind of where my brain needed to be but because i started on the sales side and how i made that transition is i ran an inbound sales development team and that's when i started partnering with marketing more and then i started i i switched over to marketing basically my job was to help all of the um reps with territories that didn't get inbound leads which was most of them at the company i was at at the time help them get inbound leads and so we ran all kinds of really scrappy campaigns um live events these kinds of things and i just loved it and since then i've had pretty much every job in in marketing um but because of that like i said my heart is still on the sales team and so my focus always is not the stuff that maybe looks the prettiest it's the stuff that fills pipeline so what helps make sales people's jobs easier and um and so as a result i love working really really closely with sales teams um and just helping them kill it day after day i love it so maybe you can because there's a few topics we're going to get into because you were talking through that i'd love to get your perspective on this like a lot of times i see companies when they start right and i'm going to pick on kind of the engineering uh type company because both of us are in sales and tech and that type of stuff so i'm going to pick on the engineering founder i wrote a post a little while ago called the founder's dilemma which is you have an engineer somebody who comes up with a kick-ass product right and they get to market and they go and have really good conversations with their friends family and fools so their circle of people that they know yes and so because they have a good first of all they're super passionate about what they developed right so when and i always say that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm so no matter who you are like if you are proud of something if you are enthusiastic about something you can get people to buy into what you are enthusiastic about and usually engineers are very enthusiastic about the product so they're enthusiastic they transfer that enthusiasm to a comfortable audience and then they think okay well this sales is easy shit let me just hire a bunch of sales reps and let's go sell this stuff and what happens is without a process they tend to hire sales reps give them a territory they fail miserably and then it's like this frustration it's like you know what screw this i'm going to do this through marketing yep they develop this marketing engine and they try to drive the inbound leads and then that always hits this kind of plateau where it's like okay that gets you to a certain point but then they have to reinvest in sales to really take the next level so if you're a company scaling right now and i know this isn't an either or and i know this is dependent on the product you sell but how do you how do you how do you chicken and egg which one comes first like marketing from a lead gen standpoint or sales or how do you look at how do you even look at that for some of the companies that you're working with right now so i think it it depends widely on your target market and how complex the sales process is going to be so if you're selling something that is a widget we're talking like you know 30 50 even 100 bucks a month you marketing is is typically where you should start um you obviously want to have lots of conversations with prospects and you want to have lots of conversations with your target audience to understand how you market to them but you can really start with marketing and kind of getting that going and then um start to invest in sales if you have a more complex sales process you know and i i'm shooting myself in the foot here i think a lot of the time that you really should start with sales um but the the key is is don't just go hire some random person and um and you know off to the races you've got to really really invest in process and you've got to really deeply understand kind of what you what this customer journey is going to look like um the other mistake i see startups make all the time is they think well i've built this this tool that i want to sell to the enterprise so i'm going to find a sales rep that has only worked in enterprise and let me tell you you cannot hire an enterprise sales rep to be your first uh startup salesperson like they don't know how to build the process themselves they are used to having a lot of systems and um support um and that's just not how it works early on so you've got to find somebody that yeah can sell to the enterprise but is experienced in that startup space but what i would also say is you do have to start investing in marketing quickly and and yes i see oftentimes and i think this is true in general of like engineering founders will experience they're very very smart and they experience some early um success and so they they think that certain disciplines are easier than they are and what i see often is i'll see you know an early stage startup they've got 12 15 20 employees they've got a c-level product person a vp level salesperson and a junior marketer and then they're shocked that their results in marketing are really pathetic and it's like you hired a 24 year old who's smart and capable but has never run the thing has never developed the strategy and like is doing the best that they can but they're not receiving the support that they really need the other thing i see and you know is we see sales teams invest a ton in training and coaching for their sales reps and for their management and you never see that in marketing it is so rare to have training come in or to have coaching come in and as a result you hire these marketers that are not given the support that they need to continuously grow and so chicken or the egg it depends but i think the biggest thing is really understanding how you invest in this talent and how you continue to cultivate their skills and coach them to continuously get better so that's a really interesting point i never even really thought of training for marketers is there even training for marketers like somebody like me that comes in and trains a marketing team how to market it's pretty rare no i mean it's pretty rare and look you and i have talked about this like one of the things that i would love to spend time on is okay at sales kickoffs often marketing is now attending those but once the training begins the marketers are sent back to the office and the sales reps get this like really in-depth training and coaching and coaching and it's like you know what sales teams need that as well and i'm starting to see more um on the coaching side so you know some of the work that i do is working with um you know directors of marketing who are kind of at an early stage startup helping them consistently improve and talk through strategies so that they can always get better but honestly right now that's that's the exception i it's very rare and um i think it's i think we're missing a really big opportunity in the marketing space to continuously help people to um improve their skills yeah because i always encourage like any training i do i always encourage the marketing to be in the training so they understand what the reps are actually being exposed to because i mean i've been in sales now for like professionally in sales now for 23 years and i and literally since i got out of school i've been hearing about the sales and marketing divide and i still and i'm still hearing about it today you know and and the problem that i see is that you know first of all sales and marketing are always on different sides of the organization right one's on the fifth floor the other's on the second floor marketing comes up with what they think is good right for whatever reason some of it is some of it isn't and then they throw it over the fence to sales and then sales does or doesn't use it usually doesn't and then they then marketing looks for the feedback and they say well you know how did it work and they're like oh we didn't use it well why not i don't know because it sucks but so there's no feedback loop there of how so it's always feedback loop right and so i you know what i use and i'd be interested in your take on this i think the the missing piece and this is kind of getting to the kind of our our main topic here which is what can sales learn from marketing and what can marketing learn sales right i use kind of the old school glengarry glen ross aida to make the connection right so attention interest desire action and i always say you know you get five to 15 seconds to get someone's attention then you got two minutes to earn their interest and that's where you create desired action with your you know meeting or whatever it is and i say marketing usually does a really good job on the attention but at the broad level right from a brand awareness standpoint they do really good there and then from an interest standpoint like once i get the client to say sure john let's talk that's where marketing comes up with some good stuff right like the the elevator pitch the use cases the case studies the stories that type of stuff but where i think marketing misses hard and where i think sales literally is where we need the most help is the a phase is the attention is literally when i pick up the phone and somebody says hello i mean literally what are the words that come out of my mouth yeah and not the typical elevator pitch it's not the we're the leading provider of bullshit it is it is that moment right and i think that's the miss and so that's what i train on is that i call them attention grabbers to make a connection there but where do you see what what can let's talk about that where can marketing what do you think marketing needs to learn from sales and then i can talk a little bit on the other side of what i think we need to learn from you guys okay so i'll just give you the the caveat that i am very focused on startup marketing and so my bias is very much there so where i see the most opportunity for marketing to learn from sales is marketing often okay let's think about when a um a marketing team puts on an event or a webinar traditional model is you pick the date you pick the topic you build your registration page and you like send an email blast and you post it on social and fingers crossed that people register but if you're at a startup your list is kind of small and it's not really going to help you right and you probably don't have that many people following you on twitter or linkedin so my biggest recommendation is learn from sales development and instead of just hoping and praying that people come and find you go find them so when when we do events and when we do webinars we will either work really closely with an sdr team or we'll build it ourselves and we'll pull that list of like okay who do we want to attend this thing and we will send really really customized feeling and personal feeling messages to our target audience inviting them to attend and it's it is genuinely a game changer i don't know why more marketing teams don't do this but all of a sudden you get a lot of people engaging but the other thing that we do that is really different and i recommend that all marketing teams do this because let me tell you this is how you team this is how you give your sales team those attention grabbers when you send those invitations and they click through and they go to that registration page okay when somebody registers for an event or a webinar or to download a piece of content or whatever the case may be we want to keep the form as short as possible so we can get the most people to sign up but what what happens is we lose out on potential information so what we do that's different is we will add at least one or two additional questions so instead of just like name company email it's name company email hey what's the number one challenge you are facing associated with whatever the topic of the event is what is your goal for 2019 if we could help you solve one problem what would it be and let me tell you you will be astounded at how many people will fill out all of those questions we don't make them mandatory but most of the time we get like 75 percent of people will fill out those questions so then when we give that list to the sdrs or to the sales team they can follow up and be like hey joe you mentioned when you registered for this event that we hosted that your biggest challenge right now is x and like i can help you solve that would that be worth a 20 minute phone call and all of a sudden it feels personal you have sent this message to your prospect that you give a damn about what they tell you that you're working as a team to solve their problem and you have this like spot on context for what they care about and yes it helps on the one-to-one level but then it also helps you figure out okay hey like 60 percent of the people that answered this question are saying you know are mentioning this one thing that we didn't think people cared that much about and you can shift your messaging you can shift your whole approach so that it is so much more customized to your audience and to what they care about i love that and you said a word in there that i that i've been grasping onto for a while it's that context piece yes i think you know and you've heard me say this before i stole it from gary vaynerchuk you know you said content is king context is god and i look at that as marketing and sales marketing is content sales is context and i actually use your example and you actually take it to a different level which i love which is what i want and i'd be interested to your feedback on this too i kind of piss a lot of marketers off by saying this because i'll usually say it in class and they'll be like and everybody kind of looks around like yeah but then the marketer sitting in the back of the room going hey thanks asshole i'll say is is look let marketing market let sales sell yeah please do not put my name on marketing emails that go out there okay like so like because the way i look at it is if you get if casey jones gets 10 emails from john barrows when they're obviously not from me right and it's an obvious marketing template inviting to a webinar and those type of things if i then decide to take you out and actually write you a nice thoughtful message or whatever it is i'm already in the spam folder right so let it come from your cmo let it come from your ceo what a vp of sales i don't care but the other thing is i want you to put me on the list so i get the email when it hits my territory because what i'm going to do and this leads into your your point here which is i want to take my say my top 25 so i always have a hot hit list of 25 accounts that i absolutely am trying to get into the logos and that type of stuff whatever so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take that market say there's a webinar coming up yeah and uh and it's next week um and now i and all of a sudden that email hits my inbox right because i know i just saw my territory now i'm going to take that email i'm going to forward it one-to-one forward it to one of my top 25 and say hey casey i'm not sure if you just got the email from our marketing department but we have this kick-ass webinar coming up here soon and the reason i think you should go to it based on what i know about you is xyz absolutely so that's step one now check this out step two is say because the the show up rate is going to be whatever 20 30 something like that if you're in you're in good position um so now afterwards i'm gonna send out an email instead of just the generic hey sorry you missed the webinar with the link in it again only for my top 25 and and your context piece of this is perfect because i can check off the box of what you were interested i can take those 25 and then say hey casey i saw you signed up for the webinar but i noticed you missed it you had said earlier that one of your top priorities was boom if you actually start listening to this webinar around minute 15 and go from minute 15 to 26 like that's where they talk about that thing and i thought you might get some value out of that yes and i think that is critical and so this is where i see the the most opportunity that sales and marketing like that relationship is missing out on is marketing is creating sort of a platform for sales to have that context and sales isn't taking advantage of it and that's not to say that that's sales fault it's often that like they're just they're not working in concert one team is doing one thing sales is doing another and like it just doesn't work but when you work together and you have this much more sort of cohesive strategy everybody's results dramatically improve and how you set that up i think is the most critical part and i think you know you were you were talking earlier about this kind of feedback loop and i think there is this this real opportunity to build a more sort of mutually beneficial relationship for sales and marketing but really the me the the benefit also comes to the prospect because instead of feeling like you're getting bombarded by stuff that isn't really cohesive it'll feel like a whole team is focused on delivering value to you together and and one of the things that i've done in the past that has been the most successful there and this is when i was running the inbound sales development team you know we would we were working selling a technical product and my sdrs were really struggling to have enough stories to tell on the phone and so what we started doing is once a month we would pick a customer and we would basically tell the customer story we would get the mark we would get someone from marketing who would come and be like hey the lead came in from this source um they attended this webinar they went to this event they downloaded this piece of content the sdr would be like i followed up and i did this the ae would say you know and then it came to me and here's how i closed it and here's the challenges that we had to kind of the hurdles we had to get over in order to make this happen and then we'd have someone from customer success or account management be like okay and now here's what here's how the implementation went and here's where there's opportunity for the future and we would do this once a month every single time sales would be like whoa wait they read that thing and they did this and they went to that and marketing would be like whoa they asked that question and the whole everybody would start to respect what the other person was doing but we would all learn so marketers would be like whoa you're always getting this one question or there's always this one hurdle that you have to get over with customers is there a way that we could produce content that would help you that would prime the prospect so that that would be an easier hurdle or like all of these opportunities for ways to work together started to kind of bubble up to the surface in this really organic way rather than this top down here now you do this and and you know you need to do that which just doesn't work when it comes to you know the head of marketing telling an sdr what they're supposed to be doing it doesn't work i love that i i mean i i think there's like tactically and tell me what you think of this so i i love the so case studies i gotta be honest i think if there's any investment i would make in in marketing would be case studies to tell that story right not necessarily the story of like i love the idea of of lifting up their covers a little bit and showing exactly end-to-end how we got that client and how sales and marketing work together best right but the other way is is having marketing and this is also something i see a gap of which is from a sales rep standpoint is the whole business acumen i i just don't think that that sales reps specifically i mean we get we're the we're the most uneducated group in our profession period right because there's no majors i mean there's few now but we're the default profession um and so and we get limited training even though it's more than marketing at this point um but then what happens is i i always say that if there's two things i could have gone back to until my 22 year old self one which i'm going to say is what we could learn from marketing which is split testing you've heard me talk about that before yeah the other is is to really um be more proactive with my business acumen right to to not because my business acumen used to be a byproduct of my activities you know i used to just kind of go go go go go and then like i would ask a stupid question to a ceo and the ceo would say that's a stupid question never ask it again right so that's how i learned but i think if i were to go back i'd be more proactive about it and so this little exercise right here crosses off a bunch of things which is you take a case study right and you have marketing come in and do a little lunch and learn on the case study and at the bottom look at what was the result what was the results of that client that becomes our message right yes my call today is we show this company in your industry how to drive these type of results and you finish them there's your attention grabber yes because that that's that that that um case study fits a very specific persona now you can educate me from a marketing standpoint you can educate me as a sales rep on what do these people care about like what are their what are their challenges what are some questions you could ask that specific persona that's going to show that you know what the fuck you're talking about a little bit right and then by the way how do you tell that story in a very condensed way so if you get them on the phone so now that little lunch and learn everybody runs a list in their territory that fits that profile and everybody calls up and then we do a call blitz right after at one o'clock where it's like hey the reason for my call today is rinse repeat rinse repeat and then marketing sits in on that call blitz and listens to how that message is being delivered so there's your feedback loop right and then we come back in afterwards and we do an hour and say all right how'd that work out what tweaks do we need if you just do that once a month for crying out loud once a week ideally but once a month the shit that you could learn i mean is that in line with what you are without a doubt in my view it's we need to find more ways for these teams to be in the trenches together um way too often it's everything is separate and you learn you know you're given reports and things like that but it's not the same and let me tell you like you know marketing will always gets really upset because they'll write a case study and then they find out that sales isn't using it at all it's like i'm sorry but people don't really absorb information in that way and sales is always working so hard and they're moving so quickly that they don't take the time to like read and really digest new content in that way and so there has to be this much more personal engagement of how we educate our teams but then i love this idea then how do you kind of put it to work and really learn learn from it because that's the other thing that i i feel like marketers need to do more of is they produce stuff and they spit it over to sales but they don't really find out how it's being used or if it's being used or where there's opportunity for improvement and and i i'm a big believer that like your marketing messaging and your strategy should be this like organic thing that is constantly evolving it's not a one and done like i talked to founders and i talked to marketing teams and and frankly sales teams also where it's like actually no sales is way better about evolving their strategy but marketers it's like you know once every six months they'll do this like hey we're going to do sort of a messaging refresh or once a year or worse once it's enterprise it's like once every two years i was like like this needs to be this constant evolution and sales is your is your greatest asset in this because they are out there every single day testing and getting feedback and so you know i i am a big proselytizer about how marketers need to be talking to their sdrs like a million times more than they are because sdrs are they're they are the front lines and they are working their butts off to test things and they're getting immediate feedback and that is so valuable to marketing teams and marketers just don't don't gather that information often enough so with that do you think sales should go under marketing or sales i'm sorry yeah do you think sdrs specifically the ones who are either taking the inbounds or making the outbounds do you think they should go under marketing or sales so i don't know this is the age-old question and i you ask me on a different day and i'll have a different opinion i think when it comes down to it i think sdrs should be under sales however i think that they should work really really closely with marketing and in general like i just think because here's the thing i don't think that marketers can ever manage um those kinds of commissions in the way that sdrs kind of need right like they always want to get out of that but but sdrs need to be much more closely aligned and much more um closely integrated and so i that is one reason why i do advocate for especially if you sell a complex product you should be you should have an inbound team and an outbound team and that inbound team should be super closely integrated with marketing so the question i have and it's probably going to piss some people off too is um should sdrs be commission based yeah i think that they should um and i think that um part of it is that you want you want that hustle right um you want that consistent follow-up you want to have that kind of that sort of scrappy mindset in terms of of um kind of getting the job done um but i think that you've also got to have um you have to be careful of how you compensate people so the reason why i'm a big advocate that inbound and outbound should be um differentiated is outbound if you're getting a bunch of inbound outbound is harder however outbound is usually compensated more because of that and so what we found and the reason why the company that i was at we switched we we separated inbound and outbound is because inbound leads which were by far the most qualified and had the highest opportunity were getting ignored because sdrs made more money from outbound so they just weren't paying as close attention so and i would also say it's a very different skill set sure the sdr that's going to kill it and outbound is probably not good at inbound no joke and i apologize for the guys that are listening when i created that team they offered me to take the the top sdrs and i said no no no i want the bottom two because they spent way more time on the phone they would often talk themselves out of meetings because they were asking so many questions and being so curious and all of this they were phenomenal inbound sdrs they absolutely killed it but the the guys that were killing it and outbound they wouldn't have taken the time that inbound really needed so because my theory here is uh and love to get your thoughts on this i actually think i'm it's funny because i'm coming from the sales side and you're coming from the marketing side and we actually have different views on on where it should because i actually think the inbound sdr role should be under marketing because and i think it should and i'm seeing it 50 50 in a lot of cases but i think it's going to evolve more into marketing because i think the it's going to be a very process driven role in the sense that if you take the tools like sales loft and outreach and all the data integration tools and then if marketing does a good job creating messaging that's relevant to personas and triggers and that type of stuff it's not going to be a very um uh and i don't want to and i and it's probably going to come out the wrong way but i it's not going to be a very creative role in the sense it's going to be a much more analytical role it's let me take okay marketing we got their account-based marketing here now let me put together campaigns to go after this very specific persona but it's going to be plugging and playing and then working within a process and then analyzing the results to then come back to marketing and say yeah this message is working and this one isn't so i actually think the inbound role i two things i think i actually think the inbound role with all the work that marketing does is going to elevate quite a bit because it's now going to be more customer service oriented so instead of paying some junior kid because what's the i mean think about this right you put all this money into marketing and you drive all these qualified inbound leads and then the first part and then if you tie this to um you know challenger sale by the time somebody comes to us they're already 60 to 70 percent of the way there so the first person you're going to get engaged with is some 22 year old kid wet behind the ears who has no fucking idea what they're talking like that's a nightmare that that's going to die right so you have to elevate to a skill set that can ask those questions it can be dangerous yes that's that's why i think customer success that we're going to elevate pay those higher base salaries less commission yeah and here you go whereas the outbounds are going to be now the intro to sales and okay cut your teeth and but it's going to be a lot more process oriented and then few are going to evolve to the AD role do you do you see that i totally i totally agree with you and that was so that was my big thing is like um oftentimes they're like oh inbound it's easier so we can put really junior people no no no when if somebody has come through inbound they have crazy specific questions they have something very specific in mind and they're going to get to the meat of their questions really fast but i would also say inbound it should be done on the phone totally it should not be done through email and that's why like one you need somebody who's a really good listener and who is is very curious because here's the other thing that happens that they don't train you for is that customers that come through inbound they will often use terms that your company uses but in a different way and so you have to be a really great listener you have to be really good at asking questions for you to kind of um tease that out but i would agree with you that the people that are really really good at inbound sales development or inbound lead qualification are more likely to be a great am or customer success person than a deal closer um but i would also say you know marketers don't like being on the phone and i don't know and so finding somebody that so maybe it's i don't know maybe you put it under customer success that sounds crazy but like it's i don't know that it it belongs under marketing because marketers are always going to look for this more sort of like systematized way of solving the problem and it can't be that systematized it's like every single call is going to be really different and needs this really custom approach i like that cool i mean i am fascinated to see where this is going to evolve like in our um in our business lifespan here i think we're going to see some cool shit happen in the next five years with technology and this huge this shift that i think we're in right now without a doubt and i think there's one more uh topic that i want to hit on as it relates to that um as far as what i think is going to be necessary to be successful moving forward for companies in our space like again talked about this enterprise whatever um that that's a mark big marketing you know like okay here's your brand there's commercials and there's billboards and all that stuff but we're kind of small and mid-sized companies i genuinely believe we are in we are moving into a world where companies have to find a person within their company to represent their brand yep and not the company itself so for instance um two glaring examples of this uh chris orlov over at gong and dc over at drift yeah right so we got dc who's the ceo and he's great and all and he goes up on stage and and there's drift a really cool company but i think the reason that drift right now is leading the the marketing at least the perception here is because they got somebody like dg who's always on linkedin trying cool shit driving people and people look at dc as hey that's drift same thing with chris orlov like no offense to core chorus and exec vision out there and and no offense to any three of them but tomato tomato on all their platforms but the perception right now in the industry is gong is kicking everybody's ass yeah and because of what chris orlov is doing with all his with his data and he's putting it out there like his blogs are some of the most powerful blogs i've ever seen in my life and so what are your thoughts on the idea of not just an influencer i'm not talking about getting some jamoke like me and paying somebody like me to represent your brand i mean somebody who is like internal within the organization who is who you kind of unfortunately have to let up some of the reins to and take a risk on to represent your brand do you think that is happening do you think it has to happen i think it is happening and i think it has to happen um look the thing that social media has done and frankly it started with b2c and like consumer brands social media we now have a much more personal relationship with the brands that we love okay like you know the the the brands that we follow on instagram are the brands that like we're kind of die hard fans of it's because we feel this like personal connection to them yeah yeah yeah we like their products but it's there's something about how they tell their story that feels personal to us um and this is now starting to translate over to b2b and look we've been hearing this for years like i'm sorry there's no product out there that is like in a realm all of itself like i'm sorry every product i don't care what you sell you've got two or three competitors that basically sell the same thing so this has been the argument with customer success for a long time it's all about customer experience right that's going to be the big differentiator well marketing plays a huge role in that that customer experience begins the first time someone has ever heard of your brand and if they can connect to a person and that person's wisdom and expertise and personality and all of these other things that is what is going to kind of propel your business forward and i am and this is something i'm starting to work on with clients is how do you develop kind of a thought leadership brand and and become known as not just a company but a person um one of the things that is though concerning to me is um you don't we see male examples of that we see almost no female examples and so i have a i have a friend nina church adams she's the svp of marketing over at act on and um we really bonded she's based in portland also we really bonded because um she wanted to get into video and and i was already kind of doing it and so we did a couple of videos together and now she's killing it on linkedin with video but she did a call out this is maybe six or eight months ago where she was like hey who are all the sort of marketing influencers who are doing video content on linkedin that i should follow literally every the only women that were suggested were women that had their own brands there were no women that worked for bigger companies that were well-known kind of thought leaders on their own that's not true with men and i think that there's this like opportunity for women um to really start to develop their brand so that it is aligned with their company's brand it is furthering their company um but that is still also theirs and i do think it's a scary thing for brands sometimes to use your language to free up the reins a bit and and let somebody who is you know just an employee to really kind of carry that um that charisma and carry that um brand reputation along with them but i am with you the companies that are differentiating themselves in the b2b kind of startup and mid market space are the ones where there is a senior level person not necessarily the founder and ceo who is out there you think it should be the ceo or do you think it should be somebody else i frankly i think it should be both and the reason why drift is so impactful is it's two of them that it's not just one where now you you have this drift has this reputation where like no it's not just one person it's a team of people that are all that are all passionate and are all brilliant and are all testing and being creative and like you listen to their podcast it's not just on the marketing side it's in a whole bunch of different departments and that's where i think there's some real opportunity is like how do you elevate and and cultivate the brand reputations of individuals within your company and and knowing that by doing that your your company's brand is going to kind of skyrocket in respect and and awareness yeah i mean it's funny because i won't there's two examples of one individual that i work with that you and i both know and he's great out there on social and his company just would not let him be him because the marketing department was afraid that he was going to basically take over from a brand standpoint and he came to me and asked for advice and i go dude i gotta be honest with you if your marketing department is not letting you do this this is in your dna you have to go do this somewhere else and they're going to lose out because if they're if they don't fundamentally buy into this concept of you building your personal brand and not elevating both and taking the risk on you doing that then you're never going to be happy and they're never going to let you do what you want to do so i'm sorry go so he found another job and there's another company that's letting him do that he's crushing it right um and then there's another one where he a guy came to me and asked me hey john i'm a product marketer right now that's my job but he's killing it on the brand side right and he had an opportunity to have somebody else backfill him to and then he elevate and he asked me should i go into a kind of vp of marketing role like literally just the name of the title or i have the opportunity to do chief evangelist role and i he's like like which one should i do and my opinion was um if you want to go the more traditional route and eventually become a cmo you probably should do the vp of marketing role but if you want to start blazing a new trail here which is where i think things are going take on the chief evangelist role because i genuinely believe in the next two to three years you're going to see that be a real thing where somebody is going to come in as the chief evangelist of your business and look it might only be for a couple of years or something like that where that person comes in works with the team gets the brand out there brings their followers with them because the ethos is equal and blows it out and then okay hands it off to somebody else to run with it after that but i know that that's going to happen and that's going to happen fast well and for years um we've had developer evangelist roles right so products that sell to developers or that are really really technically um you know technical products and so you need to have the developer community kind of bought in and loving what you're doing that role has existed for years and i think what we're seeing is like them you know more companies are starting to recognize that you need that not just within one you know section of of your target audience but of the entire kind of community as a whole and so how do you evangelize a product and what the product stands for and what the company stands for because that's the differentiator your products sorry not that differentiated i hate to break it to you guys but but your brand and the stories you tell around your brand and what you stand for and the message you get out there and the value you provide that is where the opportunity really lies and i'll and i'll end it with this you know your the the why your brand matters so much is because and you and i both know some people who have come after your brand and have come after my brand yep my response to them always is bring it yeah because i know my rep because of how i've really tried to focus on quality and giving a shit and doing the right thing that i know how my brand is out there and i know how their brand is out there and i'm like you want to go toe to toe on this bring it the fuck on because i will win if and and i go back to gary you know positivity wins you know what i mean like if you're out there with a solid brand with a good message with strong values and that type of stuff you can defend against any shit bag out there who's trying to come after you and you can serve a bunch of ebbs and flows in your business you know what i mean and let me tell you when times are tough in your business when you know that you have integrity and you know you've stood by your values it makes getting through those hard times a whole lot easier and it like it's it's when you are tempted to compromise those things that you need to really take a step back and a deep hard look because i i guarantee you will regret it and not just because it's going to eat away at your soul but i promise it will also eat away at your bottom line in the long run 100 awesome casey well look um tell everybody um first of all give a sense of the type of companies you work for so if there is anybody out there listening right now at the stage that you help them and then what's the best way to get in touch with you and follow and all that other stuff absolutely so we help um primarily b2b tech companies you just raise your seed round all the way through kind of in between a and b um and we help in a whole bunch of ways but a lot is helping fill pipeline for that sales team and also helping you really get your brand out there so um you can find us at a better jones everything so on twitter on linkedin um and on the web like a better jones it's it you spell it like it sounds um and come find us and come hit us up i'm always open for at the very least a conversation and i love learning about what folks are doing out there so um let us know if there's any way we can help i love it and and casey does a great job and you know i do everything i can to support you know more women in sales more people of color in sales you know across the board to your point of influencers let's get the old white guys like me like at our time you know what i mean don't get me wrong i'm still fighting the good fight from the inside like you know like there's there's a there's a there's a shift that absolutely needs to be made um and i'm not talking about like why you know that type of scenario but there just needs to be more diversity on the top end of marketing on the top end of brand on the top end of a voice yeah we got to get more out there so casey does a fantastic job and i appreciate everything you do in that area well thank you and i we all super super appreciate what a strong ally you are and i am personally very grateful for what a support and mentor you have been to me so thank you thanks casey all right everybody well hopefully you enjoyed this conversation please go check out what casey's doing over at a better jones she's kicking ass over there and do some really and as i said always you know if you do nothing else today if you just go make somebody happy you know you had a good day all right everybody have a great day make it happen and i'll see you next week thank you oh oh you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you