Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs

Look, I wish I had some master plan. I didn’t. I’m somebody who’s just a really, really curious and obsessive person I love to learn. In the early 2000s, I saw the internet happening and I was doing marketing at a bunch of different marketing agencies. And I like, wow, this Internet is going to change how people do marketing. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I realized one really important thing, that when something’s new, everybody has the same baseline of knowledge. It’s not like somebody’s been doing it for thirty years and has some advantage.

I was like, great. So all I have to do is learn faster than everybody else, and I can be successful. So it’s all I did is I read, I networked, I went to events. I had a blog called Social Media B2B, which was all about just how social and the web were gonna impact B2B boring traditional companies. Nobody was talking about that then because they were all talking about the consumer stuff. And all of that work, wake up at 5AM and grind out some blog posts and then go to work and then kinda do that every day, led me to meet Brian Darmesh at HubSpot.

And they were like, hey. Why don’t you come help us? And and I’ve met them and I was like, oh, they believe the same thing I believe in the world. For people listening, that’s a very rare moment. When you meet people who believe the very same thing you believe and the majority of humanity does not yet believe that thing. You gotta remember, this is late two thousands when online marketing was still really early. So I met Brian and Darmesh, and then the rest was kind of history from there.

I’d say about 2013 to 2014. Basically, what happened, Harry, is that Facebook ads especially got real and Google, Facebook, all of those ad products got way mature. And then we got good enough at organic search, for example, that, oh, you could build a real business. Kieran and I were doing it at HubSpot. People were looking up and being like, oh, how do these guys have millions of people interested in this boring quote unquote b to b software company? And I think between that, the inbound marketing book, everything of that movement, it took a while, but that’s when it really started, I think, happening for real.

me, I don’t need a schedule, dude.

how you think about that. You’re speaking my language is a hard problem because founders wanna do everything. They also wanna track everything. So first challenge here is tracking is getting harder every day. Data privacy is making tracking attribution ROI much harder every day. And I think if you’re a founder out there, you’re gonna do some type of advertising that works well for you. Might be Google, might be Facebook, might be YouTube, but you’re gonna have some primary advertising channel, and you’re gonna need one to two primary organic channels.

And it depends on your scale and your competition. If I was doing a two by two to answer your question, I would say, do I need a few people every month? Or do I need hundreds of thousands of people every month? And do I have no competition? Or do I have a lot of competition? Depending on which quadrant you fall in, I think depends what channel you would actually pick. So if you are going, I have a lot of competition, I need a lot of people, then you’re probably doing YouTube.

Classic Google search is the first place everybody goes. So if you have less competition, then go to Google search. Text is easier, and the conversion rates are little higher. If you’re just entering a very entrenched space where there’s people who’ve been doing really good content inbound marketing for a while, then you need to be different. You’ve got to go someplace like YouTube, for example, to get real scale. And if you don’t need that many people, that’s where you go into different types of influence campaigns, LinkedIn, different things if you’re kind of in a niche B2B business.

But if you’re talking about real scale, which I imagine a lot of folks listening are, it’s about which Google property you’re gonna start with, I think, for me.

That’s a great question. When I think about enduring on a new channel, I think about my moral imperatives. Like, do I have another choice? Sometimes you don’t have another choice. Sometimes you’re like, cool. If I can’t make Google search work, then this business just not gonna work. I’m not going to be able to acquire customers at a low enough cost to make this business work. So if that’s the case, then you gotta grind it out. If that’s not the case, I look at it as like, are you able to make real predictable growth progress?

Are you able to increase your subscribers and your distribution on that channel? Even if it’s small, but are the growth rates meaningful? Can you grow that thing four, five, 6%, seven, eight, 10% month over month? Even if the numbers are small, it’s like, oh, I’m figuring this out. And can you point to clear things that you have learned that are driving that growth? If you have, then grind it out. If you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and your flat performance and you’re just kinda like throwing stuff at the wall, then it doesn’t matter what you’re doing.

You’re not going to be successful. What you have to understand is you have to think like a creator. You have to have a creator either be one yourself or have one on your team who understands that it’s a mix of the best ideas and the best content, but packaged perfectly for that platform.

Here’s what you have to know. I’m a first principles driven person. I’m just logical to a fault for better or for worse. Every company in the world is either distribution constrained or product constrained. They don’t have a product that’s good enough to sell to their customers or the price that they wanna sell it for, or they do, and they can’t get that product out in front of customers for a low enough cost. Normally, happens when you’re early on in a business, those two things are kinda like s curves, and the product s curve is always the first.

Right? You’re trying to find product market fit. You kinda get middle of the way up that curve, and you kinda found it, and that’s awesome. And then you start that second s curve, which is the distribution one. And most companies fail not because of the product curve, but because of the distribution curve. You cannot wanna do content, what have you. You have to solve distribution. So what I would say to them is cool. You don’t wanna be a creator. You don’t care about personal brand. Great.

How are we gonna get scalable distribution at a low cost? The content’s one way, but if you tell me you have an awesome viral loop, cool, then I don’t give a shit if you care about content. You can make it work. If you have some repeatable template growth strategy that allows you to grow through basically search template product action, great. Then you don’t have to go and have this personal brand. But if you don’t have an answer to that distribution strategy, then you have to care about content and personal brand because that by default is your distribution strategy.

And you are going to be distribution constrained more than you are gonna be product constrained unless you are just completely inept at building the thing you’re building.

If you are good at what you do in distributing things on the Internet, every channel of any scale that I know of, you have years and years of runway. My first job at HubSpot is I wrote the HubSpot blog. I think we did, like, three posts a day for a year or whatever. We did that to get organic search traffic. We’re still doing that. We are fourteen years, fifteen years into that blog grind, and it’s still working. We’re still growing that traffic. Yeah. We’ve expanded topics.

Yes. We’re optimizing the old stuff, all of that. But think about that. I’ve made that work for over a decade and a half. If you’re thinking you’re gonna run out of runway in twelve months, you’re just kind of an idiot. You’re not thinking about the real potential of what you have. Humanity’s natural proclivity is to go do a new thing because they’re bored of the old thing. The most successful people say, wait, wait, wait, I have this thing that’s working really well. How do I make it better and better every day?

And how do I be a top 1% person in the world at this thing? Like, you look, you’re a really smart savvy investor. Right? You’ve seen all kinds of companies at all kinds of stages. I think you’re gonna agree that the following is true. A startup that gets traction and really kicks off, they’ve got one predictable growth channel. It’s often ads. A startup that really scales and, like, flirts with that $50,100,000,000 dollar run rate, they have two predictable growth channels. Normally, it’s ads plus one other thing.

It’ll be YouTube, whether it be Google search, whether it be some type of free product, virality, whatever. The company that scales goes public, really has a future to be a big scale company, really only has three scale distribution channels. They don’t have 10. They got three. So if you’re a founder and you’re in that first bucket, job just get to one and have that one keep working for you. And then as you scale, know you’re gonna need to add one more. Not five more, one more.

People think that they need to do way more than they actually need to.

I mean, you’re in London, which is my favorite city, not just in the world, but my favorite city to have a Martinian. You should come. We

I’m a fan, Harry, of a more focused approach. I think of marketing as a venture capitalist, whether you’re big established venture capitalists like Sequoia, an angel investor, anywhere in between. Your job is to make really smart decisions and win on a bunch of asymmetric returns. So it’s actually like, how many channels do I think I actually have the chance for an asymmetric return on? It’s actually not that many. And most of the time when people spread themselves thin across five, six different things, it’s because they don’t realize that.

Once you’re very clear on the asymmetry of the return, you can say, ah, there’s actually only like two things that are gonna give me the return I want. And I should just go as aggressive as possible of those two things. And I have to make one of them work. If I make both of them work, then I’m a legend. And then we have scaled this thing beyond what anybody thought’s possible. If I make one of them work, we’re gonna survive, we’re gonna be great, we’re gonna be successful.

It’s a good question. So in the early days of HubSpot, we had a free tool called WebsiteGrader. You put your website in, it returned a report. People were sharing it on social, like, really grew big part of how we generated leads, emails for automation, all of that kind of stuff. Still do. But man, it had a peak and then really troughed down. And I think we actually made a bigger mistake than the one you’re asking, which was we spent a bunch of time trying to redo it, do the product, redo website grader to reaccelerate that growth.

And we didn’t realize that actually it had a point in time, and then it has a new steady state after that initial, like, point in time where websites really got mitigated through the diversification of the web, the rise of different social channels, people consuming across different media types. Websites are still important, but they weren’t, like, the thing like they were in the late two thousands, early two thousand teens. So I think the mistake that we made there is thinking, oh, you can salvage that and get back to that peak.

We spent a while, like, couple years trying to do that, and I think we would have been much, much better off. For example, if I had a time machine, I would have said, no. No. No. Our job is to, like, get the best steady run rate, and we should go and conquer a new channel with that same time, energy, and capital.

I love this. Let’s go.

I hate product marketing in in so many ways. I have a love hate relationship with product marketing.

I’ll give you my rant on product marketing. Harry just gave us his rant. I’m gonna give you mine. Well, most founders are inherently logical humans, and they’re often very product driven humans. You know what they do? They go hire product marketing as one of the first functions they wanna hire. You’re like, oh, this sounds great. You’re gonna help me tell a story around the product. That’s never what happens. What happens is those people become operators and project story pushers around. Oh, I’m gonna run to this product leader, to this business leader, and it becomes internal gymnastics versus external storytelling.

They pull these product marketers so close to them that their product marketers are too close to the founder and not close enough to the customer. And when the product marketers do get closer to the customer, the companies often don’t make the hard choice of saying, this is what my customer wants, but it’s not what we’re gonna give them because they need something they do not yet know that they want. I need to package a different story for them. I think the best companies that have the best story don’t start with product marketing, they start with the problem that their customer has.

So if we take the HubSpot story, for example, we didn’t start with, hey, you need software to do better marketing. We said, hey, technologies change the way people shop and buy. Because technologies come along, you look, they’re fast forwarding through your commercials. They’re throwing out the yellow pages because they got Google. They don’t need your direct mail. They got ads on the internet, all of these things. What are you doing? Don’t you need to do marketing in a fundamentally better way? Yeah. Actually, I do. What do I do?

Oh, it’s called inbound marketing. It’s amazing. You’re gonna create content. You’re gonna deliver that content through free organic channels. You’re gonna grow over time. You’re gonna own those assets versus renting them from somebody else. It’s gonna be amazing. And then by that time, people are like, oh, well, cool. How do I do that? Oh, well, we have some software for you called HubSpot. You should check it out. We can help you do all those things way better, provide amazing automation for you. But that product story is that part of the act.

If people are coming to you and saying, I need this particular product, I need this category, then you’re in a market share game with all of your competitors. If you are defining that category, defining the human changes within that category, then you’re growing that category and you’re then not against your competitors. You are against your ability to grow that category and drive awareness for it.

It’s not necessarily more expensive, but it takes longer. You know, there’s two types of business. You’re creating categories, you’re a transformed business, or you’re a better mousetrap business. And most better mousetrap businesses are 10x better, 10x cheaper, 10x faster, whatever. And transformation is like, we’re gonna ask you to do something completely new. We’re gonna ask you to leave the old way of thinking behind and think this new way. And it takes longer because you start earlier on that adoption bell curve. You start with those early adopters and then go up.

When you’re a better mousetrap, you start in the middle of the bell curve. You’re like, oh, I know about this category. It’s awesome. Let me tell you how my thing is better. The problem is when you start at the beginning of the bell curve, you can be really different. When you start in the middle, you’re kinda just like everybody else. If you’re running a better mousetrap business, you have to be obsessed with differentiation and emotion. I think that’s where brand marketing is way more important than product marketing.

Yes, you can describe the value proposition of your product. But what is the reason that somebody should believe in your brand, have emotion about this thing that they already know that there’s already a bunch of good things out in the world to do and solve? Like, why should they take the time to switch or consider your new thing? Can I ask, brand marketing

When I think about brand, Harry, I think it is the emotional benefit of not just your product, your service, but your company. Why do you exist in the world? And what do you make people feel? From the very beginning at HubSpot, our goal was we want people to feel like we are there to help them, teach them, guide them through this transformation. That just became the principle. So in the early days, I talked to startups all the time. They’re like, look, I don’t have a bunch of money for this expensive brand marketing.

I’m like, cool. Yeah, we didn’t either. Tell you what we did. We had a good story that resonated with people. We wrote a book. We spoke at conferences. We wrote a blog. All that stuff was actually pretty cheap. The hard part, the expensive part was getting the story and agreeing that that story was the right story to tell and having it really tight and everything. So that whole message is kind of cascaded through and that becomes a movement that becomes an emotion. And people wanna come to our event.

Most conferences are marketed as like, oh, it’s gonna be great networking. You’re gonna get to learn from your peers. Most big conferences, like, that’s what it is. People come to our event, like we’re having our event inbound in September this year, and we’ll have, I don’t even know how many peep thousands of people there because they know that all we want is to help and educate them. That’s it. They know that if they sit down in a room that they are going to get a completely valuable and different perspective on whatever topic they’re sitting down in.

And I’ve read all the NPS reports, Harry. I have read all the surveys. The top rated thing, the top reason people come is the quality of content, the quality of education. Same reason people listen to your show all the time, because that’s what they want. Because that is the scarce thing in this world today. Everybody’s trying to just cold sell and cold email people to all hell. It’s very rare to get that value today.

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What you are getting at is what the majority of startups fail. All of these things are very different disciplines, and it is a rare human being who can figure out how to prioritize and get them all right.

Let me give the founders out there listening, I think a framework that will help them kind of codify this a little bit. You wanna think about your marketing stories and a timeline. So the brand marketing work that you do is the longest part of your timeline. That’s gonna be twelve to eighteen months ahead of the reality of your business and your It’s the emotional benefit. It’s pointing everybody to where you’re going. Then the product marketing that you’re doing, that’s kinda like ninety days, four months ahead of where you are right now.

You’re previewing, you’re given some roadmap, but like it’s largely in the here and now. Your demand generation is exactly in the here and now. It is what is happening right now. It’s what you have to offer people, and it’s what customers want in the market today. And if you think about stacking those three things along that timeline, it gets a lot clearer because you basically start at the demand generation stuff and say, oh, what’s my story here today? Am I do I got it working? And is it people buying it?

Great. Extend a little bit to product marketing. They say, great. Now I can accelerate that demand generation, that product marketing. If I tell a remarkable brand story that shows people that my company and this business is going in a real long term direction that is better and different than the other alternatives in this market. I

All those people have the same problems. All of those people have the same problems. The best, best stories are when you can find the universal truths across your customer base that people are afraid to say out loud, but they believe and tell them to them. That’s what we do with inbound marketing. It’s like people knew that they were sending out 10,000 direct mail cards at work and then going home and throwing everything in their mailbox away. They knew that, but they didn’t wanna admit that to themselves.

They needed somebody to tell them and not just tell them in a shameful way, but tell them in a, hey, it’s okay. There’s a better way. That is the universal truth here that I think every business has to get to is we have this big diverse group of customers. Yeah. We do. But they’re all trying to grow. They’re all trying to solve a crisis of disconnection with their own customers. They feel like they’re a mile away from their own customers, whether that be attracting them in, keeping and retaining them.

I don’t care if you’re an architect, a manufacturing company, a software company. I can talk to you in that way and give you real practical ways to do that on top of that emotional benefit of doing that, then that doesn’t matter. You can have a big clear horizontal business with that.

Look, it’s a tough thing. I would say there’s also a converse to what you just talked to, Harry. It’s like you manage uptake that budget, and then your CEO and your board are often trying to push down and spread you in a bunch of directions. They’re trying to cause you to be less focused. So there’s this double edge problem that, like, both are bad for the marketing leader. What you have to do I wanna help people out there solve both of those. On the CEO, the board pushing at it and try to, like, extend your priorities, what you have to do is be very proactive versus reactive.

If play offense instead of defense, and you have to say, hey, I’m looking at the state of our business. Here are the three to four key strategies and things we must nail for the next six to twelve months. And you take it and you shop it around, you go to the board meeting, you get everybody bought in. And then anytime somebody asks you to do that, you say something new, you’re like, oh, well, that’s not part of the things we agreed on. We’ll add that in, and we’ll revisit it in six months when we talk about it again.

And yes, they’re gonna push, and yes, you might have to do some of it, but man, it will deflect a lot and will make your life a lot easier. But then you brought up the point of, like, how do you manage up? How do you get the the resources to be successful? Well, first, you anchor it all in what are the business goals? What is the constraint for growth of that business? Because a board and a CEO is always thinking about, like, what is the thing that we fix would drive growth and success for this business?

And you as a marketer have to tell them, this is how marketing can solve that problem. So that might be deal creation. That might be your competitive win rates. That could be a whole host of different business metrics. It could be customer retention, whatever that may be. And then you package a strategy that solves just like that. You say, hey, I can help us create more deals. This is what it’s gonna take. It’s gonna take content marketing strategy. It’s gonna take a prospecting strategy. This is what it’s gonna take.

This is the amount of humans and money it’s gonna cost to do it. Do you wanna solve this problem with me or not? At that point, it’s very clear. Either they’re gonna give you the money to solve that problem, or they don’t care about that problem the way you thought. So if you’re not solving it, they shouldn’t be upset or think you’re you’re not doing your job for not solving it because you brought it to their attention. And be happy with the silence. I find that

Look, you’re talking about a problem of attribution, which is has always been a problem as long as marketing exists, will always be a problem as long as marketing exists. And it kinda ebbs and flows. And like, honestly, it’s gonna get kinda worse in the short term because data from Google and Facebook and other channels is getting worse, not better. For example, email data getting worse, not better. What you have to do is measuring something is more of an internal alignment exercise than it is an analytic exercise.

You have to understand on the puts and takes between marketing sales, CFO, CEO, what do we agree on? So for example, Harry, there’s overlap across marketing and sales and across marketing channels. So how are you gonna account for overlap in your attribution is like a big thing that you have to figure out. And there’s endless ways that you could rationalize to do it right. So it matters less what you decide and matters more that the business agrees that, oh, this way we’re doing it is good and fair to everyone and is an accurate representation of what we think is going to grow and scale this company.

So when I think about it, I think every marketer in the future should be directly accountable to revenue, both inbound and outbound, whatever that may be. And in SaaS, especially, it’s pretty straightforward. You have a close rate, you have an average sale price of the product you sell. If you sell a $100 product and you have a 10% close rate on, call it a qualified lead, then great. Every qualified lead’s worth $10 because you need 10 of them to get to the 100. Yes, it’s an oversimplification, but you can get to what is a simple enough example can show contribution in a way that’s not perfect, but it’s gonna really work and drive alignment and growth for the business because that’s ultimately what matters.

Not marketing getting credit, but it’s like, are we doing these activities and are we getting the growth that we want on the other side?

Saying sales and marketing are going to become more different than they are similar and that consumers are going to notice the starkness of that handoff more?

Well, look, marketing is eating sales, but I would actually say that stories, differentiation, personalization are eating like go to market. If you’re a great marketer and you’ve got content that resonates and you’re using that to pull people in, drive automation, like really help them understand what you’re all about, for example, well, don’t you think a sales rep’s gonna send a personalized video in their email about that same thing? The best companies are gonna figure out how to just have that content experience transition really seamlessly from one to many to one to one.

That’s all we’re talking about. All we’re talking about is one to many to one to one. That to me is the difference between marketing and sales. When you do something one to many, it’s marketing, we do something one to one at sales. I fundamentally believe that’s what’s gonna happen is the best teams are going to be aligned on that story and that customer journey from that like very high level brand awareness or first search result to the deck that a sales rep showed, the demo sales rep show.

And I want that line to be blurrier. The more stark the contrast is between marketing and sales, the less effective it’s going to be in the future because the customer is gonna be like, oh, wait, I was sold on this thing with all this this marketing messages. But now I’m getting this very different vibe and experience and message over here. Is this really what I thought I was getting?

I will tell you what the most significant is. It’s one of the things I talk with founders or companies I invest in constantly. Mistakes always people related. People are much harder than strategy. Strategy is often much clear. The people side of it, do you have the right people with the right skills for the right stage of your company is actually the hard thing.

The biggest mistakes I have made not hiring the right person or not knowing that I needed a person with a new level of skill set at that stage and scale of the company or holding on to somebody who was really good for that last stage of growth, but isn’t good for this next stage of growth too long and being too close to that. I heard that was a weakness of yours.

Let me tell you why I think that’s hard. Are you a sports fan, Harry? I think you are. Right? Yeah. So for example, in the NFL and the NBA in in The US, there are some teams that have a person who is both the coach and the general manager. And there are some teams that have a person whose job is to be general manager. The other person’s job is to be the coach. It’s very hard to be both. And that’s what you’re asking a CMO to do, to be the coach and the general manager.

And when you’re the coach, you’re so close to the people, and you’re in the trenches with the people that you have trust, you have loyalty, you have all those things. When you’re a general manager, you’re saying, I’m trying to win. Do I have what I need to win? And that is a very, very hard thing. That’s a very hard thing for a CMO. It’s very hard thing for a founder. So I have found that there are times where you have to purposely put on the general manager fictitious hat.

You gotta say, okay, I have to take this week and think about it like I am just a general manager, change my schedule, and just be very, very objective. You really have to put in processes in place where you’re like, okay, I’m taking back and I’m taking a different look and evaluation at this team to make sure I have what is necessary to win. I totally agree with you, but it’s hard to do. Freaking so hard. It’s one of the things that Harry takes practice and repetition.

You just can’t like hear me or you or anybody else in this world talk about it and be like, oh, cool. I got it.

You have to look at everything from the principle and problem layer. You actually have to take the people in totality out, and you have to say, I am trying to grow. What are my constraints for growth? Based on those constraints for growth, what is it that I need to do? And what is the success in doing those things look like? Literally, write it out. Like, this is what I need to do. This is the type of skills and activities that will happen to be successful.

Once you have all that finished, then you can go and like overlay it on top of the people and be like, oh, well, what we need to do is actually this person has the skills to do what we need to do, so that’s fantastic. And we can go and march on to do it. Or actually this person doesn’t, but I think I could coach them because it’s just a small gap. Or, oh, actually, there’s a big gap. And what I need to do is bring in somebody with a different set of skills to help us get to that next stage of the problem.

Yeah. And I will broaden this up to just founders overall. And I get this question all the time. Do I am I good with, like, a junior director of marketing for a while? Do I need a VP? Like, what what do I need a CMO? What is it that I need? And what you have to say is balance teams win. Teams with a balance of perspective and skills win at the end of the day. If you’re a CEO, for example, on the startup side who’s passionate about marketing, been doing a lot of the company’s marketing in the early days, you know what’s up.

You can probably get by with a stretch candidate because you know a lot of it. If you are a super product driven CEO and you are crushing on the product, you don’t know shit about marketing, then stretching is not gonna be a good thing. So just on the media company side, Harry, if you are awesome at operations, and you are process driven, you know how to scale stuff, then you can go and stretch somebody. If you are not those things and you wanna bring in somebody to be those things, then you need to have somebody with those skills more established.

Well, no, it does. It does. I completely disagree with you. Because if you are awesome at them, you know how to help people. True. You know how to get people unstuck. You know how to push them and point them in the right direction. If you’re not good at it, then you just don’t have the clearest fucking idea what to do. You don’t know where to point somebody, and so they’re just gonna run around in a circle. I totally agree with you. How do you know when to let someone go?

You know when to let someone go when you’re clear on what you’re trying to achieve, set expectations with them about what it takes to get there, and they have not been able to do it for a period of time that you guys agree on. Normally, you would say, you can normally see progress pretty quick in a month or two. You can say, oh, this person’s on the progressive path. They’re gonna get there. You can say, this person is actually just not. This is actually just a fundamentally wrong job for them.

They actually care about this other thing that I don’t need right now, and they should go to another organization and go do that and be great at it.

most challenging aspect for you? It’s super lonely. Think about it. Have a pretty broad sense and go we get to the second part of your question, right, which is the challenging part. I don’t know that there’s another business discipline that requires as much context switching and broad knowledge than marketing. So for example, what I mean by that is like, you need to understand, like, the depths of distribution on Google and Facebook. You gotta understand email score deliverability and GDPR and data privacy regulations. But you don’t need to understand what great design looks like and what a perfect event experience looks like.

And, oh, by the way, how to model and attribute all of that so that you can do what you need to do for your sales team. Oh, and what’s the story we’re gonna package for product for the product team and how are we gonna take that product to market? Once you start stacking all the very different things that are actually fundamentally very different skills, it’s a very broad job, and that’s what makes it lonely. Because at any month, you’re kind of focused on one part of it.

So the vast majority of your team is like off doing other things that you’re not thinking about and doing because you’re trying to fix the one of those many parts that is broken in that moment.

The thing everybody listens to show needs to understand is that humans are incentive based creatures. Incentives and alignment around goals and incentives fix everything. If you have a problem collaborating, it is because you have competing goals or you have competing incentives against those goals. So job one is to be very clear on those goals and make sure the goals are aligned between whether it be marketing and product marketing and sales. We talked about attribution. Once you have your SLA, your attribution, all that set up, it’s actually very clear.

The incentives are aligned, and then you just come up with a check-in and like communication process around that. Most people fail because they don’t set that foundation. And instead, they just go and kinda do budget stuff and kind of over index on the relationship building side, which is really important. But the relationship part can be secondary if you’ve got the right foundation and infrastructure around goals and accountability.

This works for CMO, but I think it works broader than CMO. If you want to be great at something, whether you wanna be a CMO, whether you wanna be CEO, found a successful company, you have to make a series of counterintuitive trade offs that you wouldn’t think you’d otherwise make. Most people that I know who who wanna be a CMO but don’t get there, don’t make trade offs. What I mean by that is like, cool. You know what, Kipp? I really wanna be a CMO. Well, what what’s the next job you’re gonna take?

Well, you know, I’ve been doing marketing automation. It’s going really well for me. So I’m gonna go take a director of marketing automation. They’re gonna pay me 20% more. It’s gonna be awesome. I’m like, great. But what if you just go learn a completely different part of marketing? Go make 20% less in the short term, but wow, you you get a real breadth of experience, and now you’re actually ready to be a CMO. Most people don’t make those changes. If you wanna be a CMO, have to figure out how to get a breadth of knowledge, and you have to figure out how to scale your leadership and get things done through others.

Most really talented marketers are amazing individual contributors. They have a hard time delegating and scaling through others. And the magic of being a marketing leader is figuring out how scale through other people.

The question I think we’re asking is, oh, cool. If I have one spike of excellence, is that enough to get me to be a CMO? In an average organization, maybe. What I’m advocating for is multiple spikes of excellence, which is like, hey, I’ve got a spike of excellence in marketing automation. And then I went and did eighteen months in product marketing and killed it. This is the progress and success we had. And then I did eighteen months in acquisition demand generation marketing. We grew demand a 100% year over year.

Now let me talk to you about how I also built the teams that I made to accomplish those things and how I think about hiring people. That’s the ideal candidate. It’s a hard thing to do in practice, but that is the person that a founder really wants.

The emotional side of marketing, brand building. Kieran is a logical person. Right? If you are listening to this, what you wanna say is what are the things that I am best at in the world, and how can I get good at the opposite side? Because that’s how you get 10x. Kieran is methodical. He is logical. He is analytical. If you can combine that with really emotional skills, then you are like a diamond in the world. There are very few people who can combine those things together.

I’m gonna disagree with you, Harry, because the question was 10x better. It’s very hard to get 10x better at the thing you are best at. If you ask me how to make the most money, I would say exactly what you said. But if you ask me how to get 10 x better at something, Kieran can’t get 10 x better at something he’s been doing for the last twenty years.

that you were shit at? No. I’ll tell you a little bit about me and my approach to this, Harry. I’m a serial obsessive. I love learning things. I believe that anybody can get to, like, 90% proficiency in something in three to six months of learning something. Maybe not necessarily doing something, but learning perspective, applying that knowledge. And I’ve done it across all kinds of things, whether it be marketing, whether it be personal hobbies, whatever that may be. How you do that is you have to approach learning very differently.

Most people go and they buy the most popular books and they follow listen to the most popular podcasts and all of that. That’s a bullshit way to do it. How you actually go and do this is you find who are the people that the majority of the world think are smart at this topic. I’ve got that outlined. Who are the people that those people learn from? And I go straight to them. And there’s normally, like, these background, less popular, less personality people that have all the fucking knowledge in the whole world.

And you go straight to them, and you are unabashed. And you say, hey. I will pay you for an hour of your time. I will pay you for a day of your time. I don’t care. I am trying to be the best in the world at this thing. Can you help me? And you flatter them. You pander them. You do whatever it takes. You go and you learn as much as humanly possible. And you go through this deep immersion process where you get all this information, and then you start pattern matching that information against the thing you’re trying to learn about.

Like, I learned about art the last year. I learned all about contemporary art. I talked to galleries all over the world. It was incredible. And I probably have looked at 10,000 paintings in the last year because I wanted to understand the lessons that they taught me and how to apply them. And so now I can tell you all the things you need to know about contemporary art. I can tell you the core artist, but I can tell you why. And the why is what’s important. Once you understand the why, then you’ve actually you’re not just like mediocre, you’re actually approaching being one of the better people in the world it.

Ah, there we go. A podcast is a great hack to do that.

a cheat sheet. The more open a tactic, meaning less less regulated by one company. So like email hasn’t changed a lot because SMTP is inherently an open protocol. Apple has put some tracking changes in, but like email is evolved, but it’s still email. And it hasn’t actually changed that much. I know some of the email people will disagree, but I’m sorry, folks. It hasn’t changed that much. Whereas if there’s one company, organic search, for example, organic search has changed a ton because Google has changed the search engine results page a ton, more ads, different types of search results, and that really normally, when there’s one company that has financial incentives to evolve a platform, that changes a lot.

When it’s an open protocol, it changes a lot less. What

I think in marketing, everything is circular. I don’t think anything dies. I think it goes dormant for a long time and it comes back around. Look, I think even some traditional advertising channels like out of home and those things like, I’m an investor in a company called OneScreen that’s creating a platform for out of home and attribution for out of home. And like, that’s gonna be awesome. And I thought out of home had died a death a long, long time ago. So I’ve learned my lesson that things don’t die.

They go dormant for a while and they come back around.

clear story. Which is educate first. The inbound marketing story was 10 very simple slides. The way you were doing marketing doesn’t work anymore because technology changed. And because technology changed, people are ignoring you. You need to do something new. That was the story. I could give you the three hour version or I can give you the three minute version of that story or the three second version of that story. And that is what makes something powerful and successful.

Oh gosh. Every way. Problems of scale, international markets are really hard, leading a large scale team of people and helping them succeed in a hybrid work environment when nobody knows what the hell is going on. Some people wanna be in an office. Some people wanna be remote. There’s a lot of things to get get better at over the next few years.

Cash App. Why? I love anybody who’s great at marketing a commodity, and money is the ultimate commodity. They’ve done such a great job of reaching a younger demographic in a platform centric way, whether it be through TikTok, whether it be through in person activations. They’ve taken a product that had no business of being successful candidly and making it very successful through remarkable marketing. Kipp, this has been such a