Unlocking CMO Success and Strategies with Drew Neisser

Drew Neisser [00:00:00]:
What the world needs now, what your customers Lee, is actually content that they wanna consume because it helps them on a personal or professional Lee. And everything else is just spam.

Announcer [00:00:12]:
Influential and thought provoking minds in marketing, sales, and business, A Business of Marketing podcast.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:22]:
Welcome again to the Business of Marketing. I’m A Lee Judge. For marketers within companies, one of the most common people we have to work with or please is the CMO. If we are the CMO, we have pressure to perform under sometimes unreasonable conditions and A for confident footing in the C suite. To help us peer into the world of the CMO, today we’re talking to someone who has interviewed hundreds of CMOs A in highly acclaimed books he’s written and a strong community of CMOs to that continues to grow. So with us today is Drew Neisser. Hey, Drew.

Drew Neisser [00:00:58]:
Hey, Lee. How are you?

A. Lee Judge [00:01:00]:
Good. Good to be with you today. Good. Looking forward to the conversation because, you know, as marketers, we either CMOs or reporting CMOs A it’s, you know, we don’t always understand the pain of each other’s roles in businesses. And so I wanna dig into some of that today.

Drew Neisser [00:01:15]:
Awesome. Let’s do it.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:17]:
Alright. So you have this community called CMO Huddles. And through CMO Huddles, you have the opportunity to engage with A marketing leaders in a peer driven environment, I guess you’d say. So what are some of the surprising insights you’ve recently gained from these discussions?

Drew Neisser [00:01:33]:
Well, one of the the place I would start with is is the word empathy. I empathize with the challenges that CMOs are facing more than I it it’s like every time I think this job is hard, I A, no. No. No. A I thought it was, I need to go up one more. It’s like we we got to 10. Nope. Uh-uh.

Drew Neisser [00:01:52]:
It’s 11. It’s a really, really hard job. And and, fundamentally, the reason it is so hard is that, one, it’s bespoke and is different in every company. Two, most of the time, CMOs report to people who have no experience in marketing.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:11]:
Mhmm.

Drew Neisser [00:02:12]:
And the result is it’s like a CFO, you know, reports to a CEO. That CEO understands finance because it wouldn’t be the CFO if they didn’t. A, I mean, they they have some sense of it. You know, you’ve gotta get more money in than you spend. Yeah. Right. A with marketing, because, you know, A would blame the CMO and and the marketer, but marketing touches a lot of ground, and marketing has the potential to be absolutely the highest leverage, opportunity for CEOs, and the CEOs just don’t understand what that looks like.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:48]:
You know, it’s interesting. Someone recently asked me why I didn’t write the book that I just wrote recently while I was still in corporate. And I clearly stated stated that there’s some things that I would have wanted to write that would have gotten somebody under somebody’s skin. Like, you know, the the phrase a hit dog A holler. You know, I was throwing some rocks, and I’m sure that would have hit somebody and, like, hey. Is that about me? So, you know, because I was A unraveling these things that CMOs have to deal with. And as you said earlier, one of my biggest pains was the CMO didn’t get the respect from the c suite or even working under the CMO. People don’t understand all the intricacies of marketing.

A. Lee Judge [00:03:28]:
And when you try to sell it up the ladder, they don’t get it. And let me let me ask you about that part, the internal part. Yes. We’ve we’ve both written extensively about marketing and sales A. And we know that internally, marketing leaders have to work to move their visions forward. So what are some strategies you’ve experienced to help CMOs effectively market their vision inside the company?

Drew Neisser [00:03:50]:
So, first of all, what I would take out is the word their vision. I mean, I think that it’s a shared vision, and the minute the CMO feels like they are the ones, it’s their idea, they’re in trouble. Put on your impact player hat where your job your where you your perspective is, I’m gonna help the company move from here to here. I’m gonna try to distribute the credit as much as I can and distribute the ideas for it, the attribution of the ideas, as much as I can. In other words, the more the salesperson, the CFO, and the CEO believe they are part and parcel of the strategy, the more effective the CMO will be. It’s it’s like the days where the CMO can go off, come back in a month, and say, here’s the idea, guys. That’s that is absolutely a sure way of failure. And it’s particularly true with the salespeople.

Drew Neisser [00:04:47]:
You know, if you get down to the program where you decide we’re gonna do an ABM program, first of all, it’s misnamed because it’s, you know, account based marketing. It’s account based revenue growth. Right? That’s the goal. And if you focus it as a marketing program, it’ll fail because sales has to buy into everything, how we define the target, how we define the definitions of what’s a what’s a lead, what’s an opportunity, what’s a you know, and what are our commitments to each A. So A, we’re gonna put the word, you know, A, I did this. We did this, and we’re gonna really emphasize the we perspective. So when things are working, marketing and sales are presenting the same deck to leadership. When things aren’t working, marketing is presenting, hey.

Drew Neisser [00:05:40]:
Look at all the great stuff that we’re doing. Sales is saying, yeah. Well, if it was so great, why aren’t our sales better? Right? It’s just you can’t say marketing is great as sales sucks. It’s a problem. You can’t. Then we can get to a different issue which is related to this. There is an impression in the world, particularly Lee in in b to b, which is what Content all my time on, that you could put in a dollar, like a gumball machine or a vending machine, and out pops revenue. Yeah.

Drew Neisser [00:06:14]:
And and and there’s an expectation. Only spend money on things that will drive revenue. So here’s a great example, and I love talking about this because the time frame isn’t what people want. Analyst relations. Everybody knows that if you’re in the Forrester wave or the, Gardner wave and you’re up in the that’s gonna make it easier for you to close. And in fact, if you’re not there, it’s gonna make it harder for you to close. Everybody knows that. Sales knows that.

Drew Neisser [00:06:43]:
Marketing knows that. Even the CFOs get that. But when you say to a CFO or a CEO, it’s gonna take us eighteen months to build those relationships, to build the trust where it’s a two way street where the analyst is sharing what they hear from our customers, where we’re sharing what we learn from our customers. And it’s a educational program where it’s symbiotic A everybody’s working together to help the analyst do their jobs better. That takes time.

A. Lee Judge [00:07:12]:
And money.

Drew Neisser [00:07:13]:
And money. And it but it the payout’s real. Yeah. But it’s eighteen months. Yeah. And Yeah. You know, oftentimes, CMOs don’t even get eighteen months because you’ve got

A. Lee Judge [00:07:25]:
Two years, A, two years? Two and a half years?

Drew Neisser [00:07:27]:
No. It depends. I mean, again, if you broaden it out and you look at Fortune 1,000 companies as well, it’s four years, four point three years. That was a recent A that I saw. I mean, there are other studies that suggest it’s shorter than that, but part of that is is unfair because A lot of great CMOs do their three years, and then they go to a big bigger brand. So they they, you know, as as they they so and I know many of those in our A. They’ve done their three years. They’ve they’ve had a lot of impact, and they’re ready to move on.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:03]:
So regarding that statistic, it it’s bounced around a Lee, and the number bounces from bouncing two to four, whatever. I guess what’s missing in that this is what I’m getting from what you’re saying is voluntary versus involuntary.

Drew Neisser [00:08:15]:
Yeah. Exactly.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:17]:
Right? Because if they’re that good at what they do, they may voluntarily leave in two years, and it’s not about being fired.

Drew Neisser [00:08:23]:
No. And, I mean, the the I do like to see CMO stay in place for three years A given the chance because it it is that it will take them eighteen months before that pipeline closes as a result of things that they did eighteen months earlier.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:42]:
Mhmm. Yeah.

Drew Neisser [00:08:43]:
And and that’s the fundamental problem that marketers face is there’s a lag time between what they do and its impact on revenue. And nobody wants to admit to that, but it’s just a reality in b to b. Sales time you know, twelve months for a lot of companies is a good that’s a good deal cycle.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:05]:
Well, what happens when that CMO takes those same pressures or those same unrealistic time frames and pushes those down to his team? I mean, that I’ve seen it as a vendor. I had a CMO one time tell me they wanna do a project with my company, and they wanted ROI in three months.

Drew Neisser [00:09:24]:
Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:25]:
And I said in three months, I can get you a great strategy and some examples, but not ROI. And that’s we we actually turned down half of the the scope because we knew it was unrealistic and gave them a strategy in three months and examples. And it makes me wonder, you know, was that CMO wanting more perhaps and just had restraints from above that he couldn’t do more, or if maybe they just didn’t realize that that was unrealistic?

Drew Neisser [00:09:53]:
Well, here’s what I can tell you because it it’s funny that I wrote a a rant about this, just recently. And if you thought time frames were bad when that question was asked to you, imagine now in the chat g p t world in the in the it’s you know, CMOs are I sat next to a CEO who was saying, you know, I saw this presentation at Human Exit. A will create a brand in five minutes. So I just told my creative director that they have to work five times faster.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:23]:
Well, creating is not results.

Drew Neisser [00:10:26]:
Oh, yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:26]:
It’s just a start.

Drew Neisser [00:10:28]:
You know, I I’m just quoting what I heard. No. I I tell you what

A. Lee Judge [00:10:32]:
it’s A point though. Because, yes, AI does allow us to create five, ten x faster. It allows us to analyze faster, but that doesn’t speed up the customer to to a result any faster.

Drew Neisser [00:10:44]:
No. It doesn’t. But and by the way, this is not, at all against you know I I gave an example of if if you are dealing in multiple countries and you’ve got a campaign that you’re running and you need a 20 different languages A you have 10 different digital ad versions of that same thing, you know, that’s what these tools were invented for is long A tasks that, you know, where where you can really do it. But if you don’t have a big idea at the base of that, you’re just wasting you’re just doing bad fast.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:16]:
Yeah.

Drew Neisser [00:11:16]:
Right? So you still need to do good, and often that takes time. But to me, what I’d like to see happen is going back to your first question, which is A time needs to be spent A on the strategy with the Lee team establishing the vision for the go to market, which means we’re going to understand what makes us different, what is going to turn us into a power brand, what part of the brain are we gonna own. I define marketing as an epic battle for mind space. And in b to b, there aren’t a lot of brands that do have mind space, but the ones that do have been remarkably Lee. Regardless of the economic cycle, they’ve been remarkably content, relentless against the same target with the same basic idea A, you know, express their competitive advantage in a very clear and differentiated way. That’s not new. That’s not a new idea. The only thing I’m talking about here is building it as a group and committing to it.

A. Lee Judge [00:12:27]:
And that takes a dedicated effort. I mean, we both written books on the idea of sales and marketing working as one team. And I’m sure I know I always always use A sports analogy. You don’t say A offense won by themselves or defense won by themselves. They may have different skill sets, but they’re still part of the same team. And so even though it’s hard to write anything exactly new about this concept, we still find businesses who operate in these silos, and we’re still fighting the good fight, I suppose.

Drew Neisser [00:12:59]:
Yeah. So I funny. There’s a couple of things I could throw in here that would build things for folks to be thinking about.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:06]:
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Drew Neisser [00:13:42]:
Take a look at your last five wins A map the entire customer journey. It’s a lot harder than you think. It really is. It’s gonna take a lot of time to actually do that. But most likely, you’ll find anywhere from 20 to 100 touches for a twelve month over a twelve month cycle. And I defy you to find a sales cycle where marketing didn’t play a role. Like, Everybody goes to the website. That’s a marketing touch.

Drew Neisser [00:14:09]:
Right? So there’s no such thing today as a sale that didn’t happen with some contact from marketing. I don’t care whether sales you know, it’s the salesperson’s brother.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:22]:
Right? I A because I wrote that in my book A as I wrote it, I paused. I was like, sales is not A like this. No. Because A wrote basically that there’s not, there’s hardly ever a deal that closes A. It’s it’s team, but those team members don’t always realize that.

Drew Neisser [00:14:41]:
No. They don’t. And they don’t want to A part of the problem is the way they’re incentivized. Right? Salespeople are incentivized for closing deals, period. End of story. Land and close. Land and close. Land and close.

Drew Neisser [00:14:51]:
And so if marketing helps, great. If marketing doesn’t get out of their way and don’t take the budget. But, you know, it’s just so funny because there are certain things that that salespeople understand inherently. They know that if awareness is higher, like if people have heard of me, it’ll be an easier sell.

A. Lee Judge [00:15:08]:
They know that.

Drew Neisser [00:15:09]:
Right? They know.

A. Lee Judge [00:15:10]:
They’ll acknowledge it when the when the deal happens.

Drew Neisser [00:15:12]:
So one challenge that I would give to anybody who’s who’s listening to this is look at your close rate right now. And let’s say your close rate is one in five, which used to be terrible. You close 20 of the time. Today, I think there are a lot of companies out there in B2B that would be thrilled with a 20% close rate, which is nuts. And work your way backwards from that and say, how could we as marketers help with the close rate? Well, part of the answer is fewer opportunities fewer, better opportunities, which means better targeting, which means better data management, which means better nurturing, A lot more qualifying. And you start to see a lot of opportunities for marketers to make a difference at this very end of this process. Yes. And when marketers do that A they really go deep, they’re speaking the language of sales.

Drew Neisser [00:16:12]:
They’re saying, I want to help you close more deals. Let’s figure out why the hell this is down at 20% A why when we only are 30% of the deals closing to we’re losing to nobody? Which happens a lot. Often it’s 60% of the deals are don’t close. And you didn’t lose to A competitor which you thought you did. You closed to nothing in action. And by the way, that’s gonna get worse this year. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, uncertainty is the enemy, of CFOs, and CFOs are feeling more uncertain right now than they have in a long time. They’re becoming the CF nose again.

Drew Neisser [00:16:56]:
So

A. Lee Judge [00:16:58]:
Well, I wanna pick up on something you just said a content ago about marketing speaking the language because that’s something that when I speak to marketers, I encourage them to understand how to talk sales. And even when they’re proving their marketing points to try to avoid the word marketing. I mean, back in my career when I was in corporate, one of the main things I would do is if I wanted to make a report that had to go to sales about marketing data, I wouldn’t even call it a marketing report. It might be a sales, you know, influence pipeline report or A. Because the moment you put the word marketing in there, half the ear is turned off. They’re not gonna pay attention to it. And it sounds more like, okay. Marketing is synonymous with cost versus profit, so I’m not interested in that.

A. Lee Judge [00:17:48]:
My job is to make profit and revenue, so so I don’t wanna hear anything about your cost report. So given that actually, you know what? This is A segue. Given the the cost center and the profit center, A your discussions with CMOs, what are some what are some activities that you’ve seen can help CMOs shift this perception, in their companies between being a cost center to being part of the profit center?

Drew Neisser [00:18:13]:
Yeah. It is so hard. That’s a great question, and and I will tell you that it starts with the CFO. If the CFO believes that marketing is actually a lever that they can pull, well, increased investment marketing A higher you know, whether it’s a higher EBITDA or a A line growth, if the CFO believes that, that CMO has really done their job well. There’s nothing look. Sales is never gonna necessarily wanna give marketing credit unless the the only way that that’s gonna happen is if it’s, like, used cars in that A movie where the guy says, oh, can I write it up? And they say yes. So, you know, it’s where it’s one click they bought, then, you know, okay. You you’ll you’ll get some credit.

Drew Neisser [00:19:06]:
So that is is a big deal as the CFO. A then, again, if the CFO and the CMO and the CRO are actually together saying, you know what? Here’s our goals for next quarter. Here’s our goals for next year. Here’s A goal for hopefully, the CMO is insisting two to three years out because some of their work will have longer term impact. If they’re all in agreement that this is where we wanna go and this is how we’re gonna get there and A, you know, then it’s gonna be less combative, I guess, is is my answer. I don’t think the CMO could there’s anything they could say to sales directly. But I will say this, and I wanted to make sure I get to this point because I don’t think many CMOs thinking about this, and this is another way to go. And it starts with your CFO.

Drew Neisser [00:19:57]:
Let’s talk about pricing power. K? K. As a reflection of marketing strength. We all go to the grocery store. There’s a generic oats, and there’s Quaker Oats. Which are you gonna buy? The generic oats or the Quaker Oats? The difference between those, the price and the is the brand value and the pricing power that Quaker Oats has versus generic oats. Right? Mhmm. Most of us will buy the Quaker because we don’t wanna take a chance on the on the other one.

Drew Neisser [00:20:26]:
So pricing power is really interesting as a way of talking about brand without using the word because it’s based on A. It’s based on the whole go to market customer service, the whole experience that a consumer has with your product or service. Right? So if you said to a CFO, you know what? We’re closing our fourth quarter deals are all discounted 30%. That’s an indication we don’t have pricing power.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:55]:
Mhmm.

Drew Neisser [00:20:55]:
We took a price increase last year, and we had to discount it back to all our current customers. You don’t have pricing power. So then you can start to say, well, why don’t we have pricing power? And what would we have to do to get it? And how would that improve our margins if we didn’t have to discount, if we could hold our price increase? Suddenly, the CMO is just another business executive solving the biggest problems the company has. And that’s where, you know, great CMOs are business executives that are responsible for marketing, not marketers who have been, you know, who’ve been thrown on the the leadership committee.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:35]:
A what you said there is, again, a way to speak marketing up the ladder without saying the word marketing. Right? That’s how you have the conversation, without actually turning those ears off and saying it’s a marketing conversation. Now it’s a business conversation. It’s a revenue conversation.

Drew Neisser [00:21:54]:
It’s I feel the same way. Yeah. We’re gonna find some euphemisms that will allow us to talk about the power of marketing without ever having to use the word. One is pricing power. Two is reputation.

A. Lee Judge [00:22:05]:
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Drew Neisser [00:22:58]:
One is pricing power. Two is reputation. And reputation is such an interesting word because we all get it. Like, Lee, you know, you have a reputation in your A, and you could pick any community you want. And there’s I know Lee. He’s a great podcaster. I know Lee. He’s a great marketer.

Drew Neisser [00:23:13]:
He’s a good you know? Reputation is something we all feel very per is very personal. Mhmm. But that CEO goes to a group of his you know, he’s in a book club, and it’s like, what company do you work at again? I haven’t heard of it. It’s like, uh-oh. That’s A that’s when they feel reputation They

A. Lee Judge [00:23:31]:
feel it.

Drew Neisser [00:23:32]:
At the core. And they inherently know that a good reputation opens doors and a bad one closes doors. So now if the CMO follows that up and say, wouldn’t it be great if we could track our the reputation and the impact that that’s having on our pipeline? And it turns out that you can track couple of things. You can you can track reputation really cheaply Mhmm. And you could show correlation. If your reputation goes down for whatever reason because you cut the PR budget, guess what? Six months A now, you’ll see a drop in your reputation score, and then you’ll see a drop in your pipeline. It’s gonna happen.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:17]:
It’s all connected. And you A earlier about, you know, the CMO getting the CFO to pull that Lee, perhaps, you know, let loose some some funds or some resources A talk about reputation, which is something that marketing has to create. So let’s bring those two things together because as an agency, I’m often contacted by marketing leadership because they’ve been pressured to create more content perhaps for their reputation with fewer resources. I mean, this is a common stressor we know that most marketers have. So what are some innovative approaches that CMOs could take to balance that creativity with also cost efficiency?

Drew Neisser [00:24:57]:
Yeah. Well, that’s probably one you could answer, pretty well too. I mean, I I think, again, if you can get back to A is our differentiated story that we’re trying to implant in the individual’s mind? What are the connections that we were building that gives them some kind of emotional hook and and and a relevant hook? There’s a reason why you see penguins in the background A, of you know, that they’re part of our community. I wear the silly penguin hat all the time. It’s part of our brand. It’s deeply embedded in our brand. And because we have A, because a group of penguins is, is called a huddle, it’s an element of fun. It’s an element of visual differentiation.

Drew Neisser [00:25:45]:
It’s something that we can use in in various ways to create a bond with our customers and and stay there. Now if I have that core brand idea and differentiated notion, then getting to the more content with fewer resources is possible. Mhmm. And all these tools can be really, really helpful, the the generative AI tools. But if you don’t have that, what you’re gonna end up with is a lot of stuff. And more content is not better content. What the world needs now, what your customers need, is actually content that they wanna consume because it helps them on a personal or professional Lee. And everything else is just spam.

A. Lee Judge [00:26:35]:
Mhmm. So within your huddles, are you hearing when when you have these conversations about AI because you can’t really have a conversation today without it at some point in business. So within your CMO huddles, are you hearing conversations beyond A, like, beyond content A, or are they using it yet to you know, for analysis and planning and strategy? What are you hearing?

Drew Neisser [00:27:01]:
Yeah. So, no doubt 2024 was about, just creative output. Right? It was it was A, getting to written content faster. It was about getting to, you know, visuals faster. It’s about podcast production faster and efficient. Right? And and I think that that was the low hanging fruit A, if you will, of of getting getting, your creative work done. The next step that we’re starting to see happen is in workflows and work where we’re really doing some really interesting things with all the recorded meeting notes that you have, having that sort of parsed out and assigned and put on to do lists and follow ups and all of that stuff that can Lee, automated. And then I think there many companies are trying to figure out how do we integrate this into our whole business operation.

Drew Neisser [00:28:04]:
So there’s this sort of three levels. I don’t nobody’s really come up with an interesting maturity model that I A, but I think those three buckets and it’s funny. I I was at A, this big A, Humanex, the other day, and the the, head of product for Amazon AWS talked about it in those three buckets and how they’d applied it A how even though the workflow bit had saved them thousands of hours of development time.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:36]:
I think that was probably or is probably a quick on ramp to AI because shout out to my marketing operations people. That was my last official title was I was in marketing operations and sales A. And automation was already a part of their lives. They were already piecing things together, making it work faster, more efficiently, gathering data. That was part of the job. And so for them, getting AI is A just getting a jolt of energy as a mind put into the engine they already had. And so I think there’s probably not enough credit. In fact, they could be working A in silence in the dark because that’s where I think the biggest superpower is.

A. Lee Judge [00:29:16]:
Even from someone who has a creative agency, my background in operations tells me that the biggest value is an automation plus AI.

Drew Neisser [00:29:25]:
Yeah. I mean, if we can get rid of the tedious tasks, these long A hard tasks, and have generative AI do it, it’s it’s amazing. I I will say that there’s there’s two big problems that it’s also created that, you know, if you think about search, and how SEO used to work, suddenly, you know, Google’s share of search is down to 90. That seems like, wait. That’s really high. No. That’s below where they were. And, you know, ChatGPT is 50% of all LLM searches, and it’s creating a no click world.

Drew Neisser [00:30:05]:
There’s no click A. And that’s creating all sorts of interesting, SEO challenges and site traffic challenges. That’s part one of the challenge. Part two of the challenge is this ridiculous expectation of speed for everything. And I think that get back to the bigger question that you had at the very beginning, which is CMOs putting pressures on their team. The pressure on CMO is, to get stuff done faster is gonna roll down.

A. Lee Judge [00:30:34]:
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I I I Lee myself of being in that ranking when I was in A. But now as a vendor, we one of the first indicators we see when we’re we’re looking through a potential customer or client, we’re trying to suss out what are their pressures they’re under and what unrealistic expectations do they have. You know? Because not every good customer every customer is a good customer because when we see them with these unrealistic expectations, we go, you know what? They they have some budget to spend, but they’re gonna churn in three months because they’re under pressure for unrealistic

Drew Neisser [00:31:09]:
ROI. I you know, it’s it’s funny. I think there’s some sort of sales jiu jitsu that you could do in that when that comes up. It used to be you would ask this A. Do you want it fast? Do you want it good, or do you want it cheap? Pick two. Right? That was the old adage. I don’t think you can get away with that. I think we do live in a world where

A. Lee Judge [00:31:30]:
fast and good now.

Drew Neisser [00:31:32]:
Fast, good, and, you know

A. Lee Judge [00:31:34]:
Maybe even cheap for for the time being.

Drew Neisser [00:31:36]:
Right. And maybe even cheap or certainly not more expensive.

A. Lee Judge [00:31:39]:
I think it’s fast, good enough, and cheap.

Drew Neisser [00:31:42]:
Well and, again, there that’s the question. If you have a big strategy, a really good strategy, good enough might be fine. But what I would focus and turn it back around on with that with that prospective customer is A if we’re able to do what you’re asking either faster or talk A, we are using all the latest tools to help us speed up things. Would you agree that Lee, the outcome that we’re looking for is x, y, z? A the impact of this work? Because, you know, there’s in the old saying was there’s always time to fix it, A that always happens. So a lot of times, I think sometimes service companies walk away from deals, they’re scared. And I think the c at Mo might be trying to scare you when if you could just agree that short term, long term, we’re really trying to do this. And if we did that and work together and partner you and solve these problems, would we be a valuable vendor for in your in your system? It cannot be just, you know, you’re gonna call us and say, hey. I need this in a week.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:53]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Drew Neisser [00:32:54]:
But but but there’s outcomes that they’re looking for.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:57]:
And A the questions we’re gonna ask too. Like, what are your outcomes you’re looking for? Because when they when they give the the the crossroads of time versus expense, there’s also another level in there is value. And then you gotta figure out, you know, what part of the year is this? What are they up against? You know, are they being pressured to make a change? Is it Q4 and sales is on their back? Because let’s let’s dig deeper. I mean, that’s I guess that’s the advantage or the privilege I have of being in corporate so long. I can kinda understand what I’m selling into. Yeah. So I’ve been on the inside so much.

Drew Neisser [00:33:32]:
You know, I I feel your pain. I understand fire drills like that. It sounds like this might be another fire drill. Let’s talk about that and and why this one and and what’s gonna what what difference having it in three months will mean?

A. Lee Judge [00:33:48]:
Love that language.

Drew Neisser [00:33:49]:
I do think we’re in a world where you’re gonna get fewer swings of the bay bat, and so you wanna close more. We’re going back to that. So Yeah. How do you close deals A right now? And and I think that’s trying to help them reshape their problem in a way that you can solve it uniquely.

A. Lee Judge [00:34:07]:
Beautiful. Well, before we go, Drew, I wanna, ask you about your your latest book, Renegade Marketing. And, you know, what’s one bold, unconventional strategy you believe marketers should adopt that maybe you’ve talked about in the book?

Drew Neisser [00:34:21]:
I love that. Thank you for that. Boom. So, in the book, chapters four, five, six, Lee, actually, it’s seven, eight, nine. Flip what you know, most folks start to think about prospects, then customers, then employees. I sort of say, do it the other way. If you wanna build a company, a great company, not one necessarily wanna flip tomorrow, but maybe even then, get your employees on board. If they’re not on board, that’s a real problem.

Drew Neisser [00:34:50]:
You’re not gonna be able to sell your customers. And then get your customers into advocates because if you can get them to do selling to your prospects, it’s gonna be easy. But if your customers are unhappy, full stop. So I just flip the targeting completely around A then make sure you’re actually monitoring the health of all three of those employees, customers, prospects. And I would add now if, partners, as as a as another important part of this, ecosystem A if I was rewriting the book, I’d add another chapter on that.

A. Lee Judge [00:35:23]:
We’ll wrap this up, and I wanna remind our listeners to, check out Drew’s book, Renegade Marketing, 12 steps to building unbeatable b to b brands. So, Drew, is there anything else before we go that you wanna tell us how we can connect with you?

Drew Neisser [00:35:37]:
Yeah. A feel free to follow me on, on LinkedIn. It’s Drew Neisser on LinkedIn A, and renegademarketing.com. The website has all of my podcasts and blog posts and and a a monthly newsletter that, doing pretty well. So thank you. A, Lee, thank you for what you do. I know these podcasts are a lot of work.

A. Lee Judge [00:35:58]:
Hey. I I love doing it. It’s my it’s my creative beliefs to do podcast. So thanks again, Drew, and thanks to the listeners. If you’re listening to the podcast and want to also see Drew and I, video of the podcast and others are available on the podcast section of contentmonster.com. Catch you next time.

Announcer [00:36:20]:
Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing podcast, a show brought to you by contentmonster.com, the producer of b to b digital marketing content. Show notes can be found on contentmonster.com as well as A Lee judge Com.