This episode features an interview with Esther Flammer, CMO at Wrike. Wrike brings all work into a single place to remove complexity, increase productivity, and free people up to focus on their most purposeful work. Esther is a senior executive with 20 years of marketing experience in high-growth B2B tech and non-profit sectors. On this episode Esther shares her insights on how to better manage your budget this year, ways to be smarter with your resources, and how to boost your marketing efficiency.
This episode features an interview with Esther Flammer, CMO at Wrike. Wrike brings all work into a single place to remove complexity, increase productivity, and free people up to focus on their most purposeful work. Esther is a senior executive with 20 years of marketing experience in high-growth B2B tech and non-profit sectors.
On this episode Esther shares her insights on how to better manage your budget this year, ways to be smarter with your resources, and how to boost your marketing efficiency.
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“If you're not able to showcase the ROI or build a good business case on why every dollar that you're spending is producing ROI or is helping move the business forward, it's going to be cut.” - Esther Flammer, CMO, Wrike
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:49) - Esther’s role at Wrike
*(03:51) - Reduce spending, reduce resources and deliver more
*(07:42) - Showcasing the ROI on every dollar that you're spending
*(12:45) - Leveraging data to make better marketing decisions
*(14:47) - The role of experimentation in marketing
*(20:57) - Being smarter about your resources
*(30:16) - Ways to understand what's working and what's not
*(35:24) - Segment: Quick Hits
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0:00:06.0 Ian Faison: Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. And today we are joined by a very special guest, a return guest. Esther, how are you?
0:00:13.3 Esther Flammer: I'm doing fantastic. How about you, Ian?
0:00:16.4 Ian Faison: I'm doing great. Excited to have you back on the show. New job. We've got all sorts of things going on. We got new world that we're living in, lots of fun stuff. Let's get into it. First off, how's the new gig? Tell us about what you're up to now.
0:00:31.8 Esther Flammer: Absolutely. Yes. I've been at Wrike for, I guess, a year and a half now. It's been a wild ride going into a new company. We've had some acquisition happening. We've had growth. We've had lots of things going on. But overall, it's going really well. I'm driving business strategy and leading a global marketing organization across corporate marketing, product marketing and go to market strategy, digital, demand, operations, and BDRs and SDRs across the globe. And we are basically actively trying to help people do the best work of their lives.
0:01:09.7 Ian Faison: It seems like we're trying to do the best work of our lives at this point and trying to drive as much value for the business as we can. Today we're going to, it's going to be a little bit of a different episode. Since we've already done one of these with Esther, you can go back and listen to that episode and hear some of her tips and tricks and uncuttable budget items and all that stuff. And the previous one, we'll link it up with the show notes. And for today, we're going to talk about this mandate that we all have right now, which is do more with less. This is the same thing that we hear over and over again. Every CMO we talk to, every marketer we talk to, they have to do more with less. And Esther, obviously this is something that you're hearing a lot from yourself and your peers because you brought it up to us before this. How are you dealing with this mandate of do more with less?
0:01:52.5 Esther Flammer: Yeah, it's an interesting time. I feel like that's what we've been saying for the last four years. Marketing has had to innovate and get ahead of everything, all of the issues with global pandemics and remote work and then hybrid work, great resignation, as well as all of the things that are happening with the cookieless world, having to get in front of buyers who are buying differently, saturated markets and all while having to reduce spends and resources and deliver more brands, deliver more leads, deliver more pipeline and revenue.
0:02:28.4 Esther Flammer: And so a marketer's job is never done. I think the last four years have been challenging for everyone. Absolutely. I would say for marketers, especially, we had to very quickly adapt in a pandemic world with different channels, taking off everything that was in person, switching to digital, having to deal with hybrid workforces, having to deal with burnout and people who were changing jobs and still having to produce and overproduce. And I'm seeing also just pivots in terms of marketing, really having to drive strategy, not just in terms of lead and revenue generation and brand, but also doing more when it comes to sales activation, doing more in terms of goal to market, doing more in terms of market positioning, doing more in terms of product roadmap and development innovation. We really are at the crux of everything that drives a business forward. Now there's an increasing pressure and every single marketer I talk to, every single CMO I talk to is in the same position with just increasing pressure of budget cuts, resource cuts, but at the same time, deliver just as much, if not more. And there's always that trifecta that I always talk about, which is you want more leads, you want better leads and you want to do it at a lower cost.
0:03:46.0 Esther Flammer: A marketer's job is never done, but that's why we're in the business, right? That's why we're in marketing is so that we can solve all these problems.
0:03:53.7 Ian Faison: And more. Solve all these problems and more. I think it's a great point. We saw one of the statistics that like 79% of marketers budgets are either going to stay the same or increase a little bit, which I think is an interesting step because I think that sort of doesn't tell the full picture of do more with less. If the budget increases by a dollar, A, that's an increase and B, if the pipeline number is twice as big and the budget stays the same, you have to do way more with less. And I think that that is the new normal when we created the show on the first point of to hear our CMOs think about demand and you're truly a demand gen visionary. You're someone who grew up in demand, had responsibilities and demand. You're now a CMO. And I'm curious, what is demand specifically role in this do more with less? Because it seems to me that demand would be one of the last things that you cut if you have to cut your marketing budget. How do you think about that?
0:04:44.3 Esther Flammer: I would say that oftentimes, especially if you're looking at overall marketing cuts, which I would say oftentimes marketing is the first to be cut largely because we do have a good amount of spend. And if you're not able to showcase the ROI or build a good business case on why every dollar that you're spending is producing ROI or is helping move the business forward, it's going to be cut. And so I would say overall marketers, and I think that is a surprising stat that 80% of marketers are seeing flat or maybe even slightly growing budgets. I would actually be interested to see if that poll were taken today as people are planning out 2023 with kind of the macro economic conditions that are in place now, if that still holds true. When marketers are faced with budget cuts overall, typically what they will protect is demand gen. And oftentimes it's the first to be cut will be things like brand or anything that doesn't have maybe a direct correlation to revenue or pipeline. Similarly, other types, or if there are certain types of channels that I know every marketer is really starting to look at whether that's channels or just line items within their budget on what would I cut?
0:05:50.4 Esther Flammer: And it's funny because you do have that question oftentimes in your podcast, which is most uncuttable line item in your budget. And I would say typically demand still holds true, but you do look at line item by line item, channel by channel of what's producing, what's not. If you were to cut, it would have the minimum risk to the business into pipeline and revenue goals. And for every business, it's a little bit different, but I'm seeing a lot of cuts, for example, just across the board, but for events, for example, where oftentimes there are lots of residual costs, not just obviously event, sponsorship, but also the T&E and the production and just all of that goes into in-person events and people aren't necessarily seeing direct correlation to ROI. So that's something that would get cut. And again, every marketer I know is literally going through this as we speak.
0:06:39.1 Ian Faison: Yeah. I think that there's marketing budget costs that don't drive revenue. And so you think of your sales kickoff as something. I know a CMO pal of mine had a like absolute astronomically expensive SKO that was planned. And she was like.
0:06:58.7 Ian Faison: "This ain't happening". Like A, why is this all up in my budget? But B is in marketing.
0:07:03.5 Esther Flammer: Yeah. I was like, that's a weird line item. That's typically not in marketing.
0:07:08.7 Ian Faison: Especially if you're looking at a joint revenue budget and it's like, you have to send a bunch of marketing people out there. They all have to pitch. They have to be room and board and all that other stuff. It ends up being a bunch of different things there. But there are certain types of things that like you said, in a big event sponsorship where you get to cut out all the T&E, that there are certain things there that just don't fit. That could be those other types of things. Another thing that we were just talking on the episode before this about how big companies, sometimes that's, or a lot of times it's headcount and smaller companies, it might be more of sponsor dollars or advertising or things like that. I'm just curious when you deal with those types of things, when a CFO comes to you and says, "We need to make a cut about your ad dollars", how do you put your arms around it and say, "No, not this"?
0:07:50.3 Esther Flammer: Yeah. And again, I think it goes into making sure that you have the data that backs it up. I feel like in an era of grow at all costs where there was maybe less examination and down to the dollar of everything, where maybe you're spending on things like swag, maybe you're spending on things like large scale events. And now, I think things have really shifted to now it is about efficiency in addition to growth. And so as you're looking at every single line item in the budget or trying to defend budget for specific areas, it really does come down to, "Okay, that's fine". We can see maybe a 30% cut to this channel. However, here's what the actual result or output will be is can we potentially optimize that channel and that's what we're going through, right? Which is if we were to cut by 30%, can we optimize that channel enough to potentially see less of an impact to leads and to revenue? And then how do you balance that where it's not always a one-to-one, it's not 30% hit to that budget item, 30% hit to revenue. Maybe it's a 30% hit to this specific channel and maybe it's only a 12% hit to leads, which then convert into revenue based off of those conversion rates.
0:09:10.3 Esther Flammer: So it really is this whole scientific approach and analysis to really being able to justify every single dollar and every single channel and say, "We can cut here, here's what the impact will be." But if we cut in this specific channel, like you said, like advertising, for example, here's what that impact will be. And are we willing to make that risk? Are we willing to cut that in terms of direct line to revenue or impact to brand or impact to customer experience or whatever it is that is the objective of that spend? It's always a balance where, look, I'm willing to give up on this, but I can't cut this because this will impact our bottom line.
0:09:52.3 Ian Faison: I think it's really tough to do that crisis planning as a CMO to say, here are our tiers and if I need to cut again in Q1, if I need to cut again at the end of Q2 and doing those things because we plan a year, multiple years out, right? We don't have our exact line item budgets planned out four years out, but we try to think in the future, despite the whatever, the 18 month tenure of the CMO, we try to plan beyond that. We plant trees so that others can sit in the shade in marketing, but we try to do that. But when cut off one of the legs of the stool, you're like, yeah, but that fit, that was integrated into what we were doing. It won't stand anymore.
0:10:33.9 Esther Flammer: Absolutely. And that's where marketing is not an exact science, where the board and the executives and everyone, all of your stakeholders want to see that direct correlation where here's a dollar spent and here's a dollar gained, right? Or more, right? Two, three, five dollars gained for a specific channel, but we know that's not how buyers buy and that's not how marketing works. It is multiple touch points, not necessarily trackable touch points of, I saw your billboard and then I purchased. And so that is where, again, you do have to bring the data. It just can't be, this is just how things work. You can bring the data in terms of, we know that if we cut on brand spend for paid search keywords, we actually see an impact to traffic and we actually see an impact to leads regardless. And so being able to produce some of the data and the scenarios around, we know that we've invested in branded keywords and we know that we've seen the same uplift in terms of traffic, which then converts to leads, which then converts to revenue and being able to do some level of just education, right? As well as being able to quantify the impact, but also understanding it's not a perfect science.
0:11:47.3 Esther Flammer: And so doing micro tests, doing experiments of, "Okay, well, if we shut this off, here's what this is going to look like". What's the impact and are there other things that we can do, other optimizations, other channels, testing messaging content, those kinds of things that could potentially be able to get to the place where mitigating that risk.
0:12:05.5 Ian Faison: You always hear CMOs talk about that 10% experimental budget, which might be experiential, but for those experiments that they want to run, obviously this is a place where you could just say, "There's my 10% that I got to cut" and lop that off. I'm curious, how do you think about experimentation and making sure that you reserve some of those funds so that you can do experiments?
0:12:28.7 Esther Flammer: I guess I haven't really allocated certain budget for experimentation because I am of the opinion that we're constantly optimizing and you always have to optimize and experiment within each of your channels. Absolutely. There's budget set aside for maybe net new channels that you want to experiment. And maybe that's what you're specifically talking through. I still allocate some level, even if it's a very small amount, it's not something I'm willing to cut and largely because you always have to be experimenting, right? And you always have to be looking for what are new ways to get in front of your buyers. What are new channels that we haven't tested yet that if we just put a little bit of time and effort into, we can see and prove if that's something that is worthwhile for our business because things are constantly changing, right? There's always new channels popping up. There's always new messages, new ways, a new buying mentality and methodology. And so to me, it's not something you can just cut and it's not a practice that I would ever stop, especially as a marketer where you're constantly changing and you're constantly having to innovate.
0:13:36.9 Ian Faison: Yeah, I think that's the tough part is because when you talk to the finance folks and they say, well, show me the ROI of that thing. And you're like, the whole point of this is to determine what the ROI could be. This is something where it's like, it could be 10, it could be two, it could be negative, it could be flushing money down the drain. And when you're working in a resource constrained environment, it's even more important to do things like that because it could return tons of efficiency back to the business. Then the breaks when you're in a competitive environment, you were talking about earlier how being in a really competitive environment, we've all seen the explosion of technology and options and the stuff that everyone has. If you're kind of just doing what everyone else is doing, we all have the same access to LinkedIn AdWords and to Google ads and to all these things and to all these paid channels we have access to sponsoring the same events. We have the access to spending money in very similar ways. I'm curious, how do you think about differentiating your marketing, getting your team to think more creatively about how you go to market and ways to find new avenues?
0:14:38.5 Esther Flammer: Yeah, absolutely. And that is the name of the game when you are in a very saturated market or a highly competitive market. For us, a lot of it is about messaging and just unique differentiation that what is it that we can do as a company, as a solution, as a product that no one else can do? What is our sweet spot? Where do we shine and how do we create that messaging that really can connect those dots very clearly? And so to me, it really does very much boil down to messaging in a lot of ways, right? Because the pain points are often similar, right? When you're targeting various personas or audiences and so really hitting home. And that's something that we've talked through a lot, which is oftentimes differentiation is really built into kind of the bottom of the funnel in terms of sales enablement. And once you get into a deal, you really give a lot of that ammunition, the battle cards to your salespeople so that they can go and win the deal. But we talk a lot about, actually that differentiation has to be pulled up to the top of the funnel because you have to be able to very clearly differentiate early on.
0:15:45.0 Esther Flammer: But beyond that, absolutely. There's a lot of various creativity and innovation and new channels of how do you get in front of audiences that your competitors aren't getting in front of. And that goes back to that testing methodology, which is constantly be looking and doing analysis on what is it that they're doing constantly be doing research and analysis of your audiences and figuring out like, what are some of those areas where you can get maybe more grassroots, organic, maybe you can get more credibility through influencing like there's so many different channels and opportunities to get in front of your buyer. And then what do we know specifically about our buyers? And then how do we get in and either create an outlet to get to them or invest in certain channels to be able to get in front of them before your competitors do.
0:16:32.3 Ian Faison: Yeah, we were talking with the CMOs offline, talking to a CMO the other day, and they were saying how one of the areas for opportunity that they saw was one specific vertical that they do really well in that a bunch of revenue comes from. And they were like, "We're just going to go own this vertical", right? We're going to stop spreading so much money across these five verticals. And we're going to go way deeper on this one, because we know that we can just win here. And like, those are the sort of creative things like that is, let's say it's like wildly outside the box. That's pretty outside the box thinking right to say, "Hey, same amount of money, I'm going to go deep on this."
0:17:07.7 Esther Flammer: Yeah, you absolutely have to do that. And especially when you're in a high growth type of company. And this is what I've seen with a lot of my companies in the past is high growth, lots of opportunity, and you can literally be everything to everyone. But you don't want to be because that creates too much, just like you're spread too thin, you can't do anything well. And it's really hard to dominate a certain market. So absolutely going after very specific buying centers or verticals, right, figuring out what is that segment of your target market? Because oftentimes, you're talking about your TAM, you're talking about your total dress for market, and it is, it's huge, but there are very specific nuances of how do you cut down a cohort of absolutely, this is your sweet spot. Here's where you should dominate. And potentially, it's where your market, your competitors haven't gone, right? It's untapped market potential, and you do have differentiation, you have product market fit, right.
0:18:02.2 Esther Flammer: You can create messaging that clearly delineates that and go after them before anyone else does. And that's absolutely what Wright did as part of one of our buyer personas in marketing. And we actually went after marketing pretty hard years ago before a lot of our competitors do and it's still a huge buying persona for us.
0:18:19.5 Ian Faison: Any other stuff on do more with less or any of the strategic pieces of that or any other sort of tactical pieces within do more with less that you'd recommend that that a CMO or marketing leader does for the end of the year and early next year?
0:18:31.0 Esther Flammer: Yeah, absolutely. We've talked a lot about the budget issues, right. And just that the ROI component, which is you always have to get to that level of obviously business justification for every dollar. But also, right, as you're thinking about do more with less, that has to do with resources as well as ways to really streamline the work that's being done. A lot of what I talk about with marketers is the fact that we're getting resource constrained, in a sense, right? And with kind of the do more with less in a lot of ways, actually, again, the name of the game with marketing is like, you really never have enough resources to do everything you want to do, which means you have to be smarter about the resources that you have. But also, at the same time, there's just a lot of repeatable workflows that happen within marketing in terms of how do you get a campaign out the door? How do you then tie it to the ROI? How do you actually be able to get to a place where you can actually understand what's working, what's not, what resources you have, where are they working, all of the optimizations within an organization.
0:19:31.5 Esther Flammer: And so we talk a lot about that as well, because if you don't have an efficient marketing engine, not just from a campaign standpoint, but also a work management standpoint, as you're getting campaigns out the door, you're just, you feel more of that pressure, more of that stress and more of the just the complexity to try and go fast, but with less resources. So we talk about that a lot as just a big, just theme and a big compounding pressure that marketers feel of just the stress of having to manage all of these different cross functional teams within your marketing organization, getting alignment, which is always huge, not just within marketing. So that there's, do we have the same level of focus? Do we have the same priorities between your creative team or your content team or your product marketing team? There's lots of asks coming, not only from marketing, but from sales and products, right?
0:20:24.8 Esther Flammer: There's always more to do. And so how can you become more efficient within your organization? And again, as I said, efficiency is the big thing of the day, right? Where every marketer, every marketing organization is having to showcase efficiencies.
0:20:40.4 Esther Flammer: And that's just another piece of it is how do you get your team to be productive and to be efficient and to be able to move faster and produce better work?
0:20:49.0 Ian Faison: One of our other podcasts, Rise of Rev Ops, we talk to revenue operations leaders. And one of the things that's super interesting about their role in this process, which is part marketing, part bean counter, part sales, part technologists, which is a really interesting thing in this resource constrained environment, which is figuring out the ground truth of what is actually happening and what has been happening and be able to say, "Hey, yeah, this channel is a little bit better". Curious, how do you think about investing in those, whether it's marketing operations or revenue ops or things like that?
0:21:22.6 Esther Flammer: Operations in my mind is absolutely critical and central to especially a demand gen marketers' ability to be able to move forward. The way that I think through just a general marketing organization is there's corporate marketing, and this is how I have my team structured and how I've structured my teams in the past, is you have corporate marketing that really is focused on that general messaging and positioning of who you are as a company out in the market, out in the industry. And that really has the finger on the pulse of how do we position ourselves as an organization, as a company out there, as a brand that then feeds into your product marketing or go to market organization, which really does take that approach of very specific audience segments, verticals, buying centers, and really understands from a market analysis standpoint, where do we win?
0:22:11.6 Esther Flammer: What's our sweet spot? And then how do we bring our solutions to market? And then that then feeds into your demand gen, your digital organizations, your performance organizations that are distributing against the channels and generating leads and pipeline. And then you actually have marketing operations as that core foundation and infrastructure or revenue operations, because you need to have the systems and the infrastructure for scalability and obviously all of the working components of being able to deliver on those campaigns and to align all of your processes and workflows, but then also the data component, which is what's working, what's not, right?
0:22:48.7 Esther Flammer: And ensure that you have all of your multi-channel attribution in place to be able to pull all the reports that you need to understand down to the granular level of right time, right channel, right message, right person, right place, all of those things to really optimize the whole engine.
0:23:06.1 Ian Faison: Kind of switching gears a little bit here toward your career and after been in the seat for a little while coming into this next year, how have you grown as a CMO? What's some of the stuff that you're like, I've really hit my stride on with some of the stuff that you're working on?
0:23:21.6 Esther Flammer: There's always growth and always growth and opportunities. For me, I think I've absolutely grown in my ability to be able to work as both kind of a strategy driver within the entire organization, but also activating that strategy. And I just talked about the way I structure my team. And a lot of that kind of general foundation does really play into the rest of the organization. And you have to be able to partner and align at every single level with all of the different stakeholders, whether that's product, sales, CS, engineering and development, HR, legal, finance. I mean, literally every part of the organization, you have to be a good partner with, and you have to basically understand like, what is it about marketing?
0:24:11.1 Esther Flammer: And then my counterpart, right, our stakeholders, how do we work together to drive the business forward? And so I think making sure that you're getting out of that, just pure marketing mindset. And I've, because we've talked about, I've grown up in demand gen, really focused on revenue generation, but understanding how does that play out across marketing, first of all, because again, you all need each other to make sure that you're driving revenue.
0:24:35.5 Esther Flammer: And it's not always just about demand gen that's driving revenue. So usually your neck is on the line to produce here's what the revenue looks like, but you absolutely need corporate marketing. You need marketing operations, you need product marketing. They all have to work in conjunction together. And at the same time, you also have to have that across an organization. Everyone knows about sales and marketing alignment. That's absolutely critical. But CS and alignment is absolutely critical as well, especially, because especially now in the era of do more with less, a ton of companies are now focusing on their customer base because the cost of new customer acquisition is getting to be too high. You're pulling back, you're focusing on your customers where they're already, you don't have that cost to acquire and you can focus on expansion. So there's huge components there as well as customer life cycle, customer advocacy, customer adoption that marketing should be a part of. There's product innovation and roadmap where oftentimes I've seen product development and product management owns the roadmap and all of the market research and analysis around how do we innovate. But again, that should be done in conjunction with marketing because we should have our finger on the pulse of what's happening within our audiences and within the market and the industry at large.
0:25:48.0 Esther Flammer: And then how does that actually then work together for product innovation and again, messaging and differentiation. I mean, there's just, there's a lot of components there in terms of really being a good partner and then together driving strategy.
0:26:02.3 Ian Faison: I know that we've already done some uncuttable stuff, but I have to ask you, what are some of your uncuttable budget items going forward for next year?
0:26:13.1 Esther Flammer: Yeah. And I know we talked about this and again, every business is a little different. And so when I answered this question, when I was at Conga, I had talked a lot about ABM because that was a huge driver for big deals and also just the premise of ABM of going really targeted, understanding your sweet spot and then making sure you're getting in front of every single buyer in that sweet spot in a really multi-channel way still holds true.
0:26:41.3 Esther Flammer: I would say the Wrike go to market model is very highly dependent on inbound and inbound trials where we're generating a substantial amount, like tens of thousands of trials a month and trials are fantastic. They're every salesperson's dream because basically you not only have a buyer ready lead, but they are actually in the product utilizing it and seeing what they can do with your solution. And so that's fantastic model. And so some of the drivers of that, those inbound trials are really going to be around, buyer ready types of leads who are searching for project management, right? Or for work management. And so paid search is obviously huge for us as well as listings.
0:27:26.1 Esther Flammer: People who are buyer ready are looking for a solution. So those are probably some of the more uncuttable budget items. But I say that also with a little bit of a grain of salt because they're also quite expensive. And so again, our constant need to optimize those channels and to look at every single message, every single keyword, all of the optimizations that we can potentially do within those inbound digital channels, it's a huge focus for us.
0:27:52.9 Ian Faison: And you touched on this a bunch, but your total addressable market is absolutely massive. So this is where you feel like of course marketing could never get a big enough budget because you're like, "Yeah, we have so many people to go after and so many different people that could use our product and benefit from it", that like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff to be done, which is exciting, but probably a little daunting.
0:28:14.4 Esther Flammer: Yeah. And again, everyone has finite budget, right? It's no longer just deep pockets everywhere you go, right? And it doesn't matter where you're spending. It is absolutely finite budget. And so you have to be smart about where you're utilizing that. So even though paid search is a huge channel for us, it doesn't mean that we can just spend whatever we need from cost of acquisition standpoint to get a buyer ready lead. We have to be really smart about where we're spending, who we're targeting, what kind of leads that we're getting. All leads are created a little bit differently and so we have to make sure that we're really optimized towards those audiences that we care the most about.
0:28:52.4 Ian Faison: Any other thoughts on uncuttable budget items or stuff that you're cutting or anything like that? I know we talked a lot about budget.
0:28:58.0 Esther Flammer: I know we have talked a lot about budget.
0:29:01.4 Ian Faison: It's so top of mind. It's budget season. Everybody's budgeting and we're all nervous about budgets and I don't know. It's just, every time I talk to the finance folks, it is shiver down my neck.
0:29:13.3 Esther Flammer: Yeah. And again, this is why it's so important as a demand gen marketer to just, to make sure that you have, again, that really good infrastructure and understanding of what's working and what's not to be able to justify. And that's basic marketing and basic demand gen is you always need to be able to justify your spend. Now when push comes to shove and you're really having to justify every dollar, it counts even more. It's so much more important. We definitely take this next year with a let's absolutely every month, every week, every month, every quarter improve and get better and showcase the optimizations that we're doing and the efficiencies that we're making and what we're able to produce. And we've been hugely successful actually in cutting our budgets even now, but yet still maintaining volume and actually improving on quality.
0:30:04.7 Esther Flammer: It's actually, I think, a fantastic exercise. I know everyone feels a lot of the pressure of it, but it is getting back to the root of we are marketers. This is what we are supposed to do is not just grow at all costs and spend wherever we want and create lots of fun things, which we should be doing. But at the same time, we really do need to really think about, I only have this much budget or this many resources. Let's be smart about where we're doing it. Let's showcase the value. Let's showcase what we're doing and prove out the ROI and prove out the growth. And then you get more, right? There's appetite to invest. Absolutely. There's still money out there. Absolutely. Right. If you can prove it, there will like, more will come. Right. Like if you build it, people will come type of thing. I think it's the same kind of premise, which is prove out that you can do a great job with less and then you can get more later or you can build at least business cases to say, "Hey, we spent a million here. Here's what we got. We doubled ROI or tripled ROI". There will be people, right? Like it will be much easier for you to continue and grow in scale than if you didn't have that business justification.
0:31:16.9 Ian Faison: You recently presented a pretty fun presentation about how to measure creativity. I'm just curious, creativity is so important. We talked about it a bunch on this episode. How do you measure creativity and drive creativity on your team?
0:31:28.2 Esther Flammer: It's a good question because I think it is difficult to measure creativity necessarily, right? And again, in the spirit of ROI and experimentation, as we've been talking through, we should always be doing creative testing, A-B testing, because it is critical to our ability to see conversions and see if channels and campaigns are producing. And so for me, it is, how do we make sure that we do have the infrastructure and the process in place to be able to do really good A-B testing and quick pivots based off of things that we've learned? I think that's an important component with any sort of experiment, right? "Hey, we have a crazy new idea to go put this on the website or to put this campaign out the door". What are we actually going to get out of it, right? And create a baseline and then basically do an experiment and see basically based off of those measures, right? What did we actually improve? Do we improve open rates? Did we improve click-through rates? Did we improve lead generation and then revenue generation? That constant impact of measuring that creativity kind of across every campaign, every program that you're running. I think that's probably some of the main ways that we measure creativity.
0:32:40.7 Esther Flammer: And I think where it's important to continue to make sure that you're leaving that space and pushing your teams to constantly be thinking maybe a little bit differently outside the box, making space for brainstorming and ideating on what are some new things that we could potentially do that gets people, it gets buyers' attention in a new way. That's a challenge just because everything that we're doing is oftentimes just so saturated in terms of buyer consumption. Being open to those new ideas, leaving space for the innovation and the brainstorming and creativity and then putting in the right process in place so that you can actually test to see, "Hey, did that thing that we tried, did it work"?
0:33:23.1 Ian Faison: All right. Let's get to our quick hits. These are quick questions and quick answers. Just like how qualified helps companies generate pipeline faster, tap into your greatest asset, your website to identify your most valuable visitors and instantly start sales conversations quick and easy just like these questions. Go to qualified.com to learn more. It's qualified.com. Quick hits. Esther, are you ready?
0:33:46.6 Esther Flammer: Sure.
0:33:49.8 Ian Faison: Number one, if you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be and what size would it be?
0:33:55.4 Esther Flammer: Tiny elephant, the size of a duck.
0:34:03.0 Ian Faison: First of all, I think it's our most popular answer. I like that you said a size of a duck.
0:34:06.7 Esther Flammer: Is that a popular answer?
0:34:08.2 Ian Faison: Everybody likes to make elephants tiny. That's my answer. I want a tiny elephant. Are you kidding? That would be adorable. If we brought you back one year from now, what's one thing do you think that has changed?
0:34:17.8 Esther Flammer: Hopefully, I hope, right? The do more with less and the budget ROI emphasis, but I'm guessing not. What else? I think there will probably be a lot more conversation around just new innovations around like the cookieless tracking, those kinds of things and those kinds of strategies.
0:34:39.5 Ian Faison: Any book or podcast or TV show that you've been checking out?
0:34:41.7 Esther Flammer: A lot of them. I'm like thinking about each one. The last book I read was Verity and that's just a fun fiction, not like a business book. Podcast, I'm trying to remember the name of it. No, you know what? Saster, I think was the last podcast.
0:34:56.9 Ian Faison: Oh, yeah, sure.
0:34:57.9 Esther Flammer: Yeah.
0:35:00.3 Ian Faison: That I was listening to.
0:35:00.4 Ian Faison: Well, that's it. Esther, this has been awesome. It's so great to chat with you, have you back on the show. So many insights. We'll have to have you back again soon. Always great to chat. For our listeners, go to checkoutrike.com to learn more. Tools for marketers too, productivity. That's the name of the game. We just talked about productivity for like an hour. So be more productive, check it out. Esther, any final thoughts, anything to plug?
0:35:20.3 Esther Flammer: Again, best work of your life. Right? Thanks for having me, Ian. It's always a pleasure. I love talking about marketing strategy and ROI. There's always more to talk about. So thanks, I appreciate the questions and the conversation.
0:35:34.5 Ian Faison: Indeed. All right. Thanks again and we'll talk soon.