This episode features an interview with Kevin Sellers, CMO at Ping Identity. Ping Identity helps you protect your users and every digital interaction they have while making experiences frictionless. Kevin is a modern marketer with extensive digital expertise to drive growth and relevance for world-class brands. On this episode, Kevin shares his insights into prioritizing the digital customer experience, maintaining a singular focus to maximize your productivity, and the power of the accurate brand ambassador.
This episode features an interview with Kevin Sellers, CMO at Ping Identity. Ping Identity helps you protect your users and every digital interaction they have while making experiences frictionless. Kevin is a modern marketer with extensive digital expertise to drive growth and relevance for world-class brands.
On this episode, Kevin shares his insights into prioritizing the digital customer experience, maintaining a singular focus to maximize your productivity, and the power of the accurate brand ambassador.
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“We’ve invested heavily and will continue to do so to ensure that our digital journey is exceptional.” - Kevin Sellers, CMO, Ping Identity
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Episode Timestamps:
*(03:14) - Kevin’s role at Ironclad
*(04:24) - Segment: Trust Tree
*(10:59) - The power of leveraging data
*(13:51) - Segment: The Playbook
*(14:21) - Prioritizing the digital customer experience
*(18:34) - Choosing the accurate brand ambassador
*(25:21) - Segment: The Dust Up
*(28:58) - Segment: Quick Hits
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Sponsor:
Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.
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Links:
[00:01:35] Ian: Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today I'm joined by a special guest Kevin, how are you?
[00:01:41] Kevin: I'm doing well. How are you?
[00:01:44] Ian: Excited to have you on the show, excited to chat about Ping Identity and all the cool stuff that y'all are doing. So let's get into it. What was your first job in demand?
[00:01:52] Kevin: Good questions, so I have a little bit of a different philosophy because I actually think all marketing services. Demand, right? We kind of parse marketing out, oh, we have a brand person, or we have somebody that does communications or something. But really all of those disciplines, in the end, are about building your business, about acquiring customers and ultimately, therefore about generating demand.
[00:02:12] Kevin: Now, I know your question is specifically around what was your first job really driving demand specifically, and it was probably my previous company. Prior to that, I was at. Doing a lot of different roles in brand and in regional marketing and product marketing and comms and so forth, but none of them had a direct demand title.
[00:02:32] Kevin: But in my previous role at a company called ABnet where I CMO, we, we definitely had a demand general, and then obviously here at Ping Identity, we spent a lot of time on that function. But I do wanna make that pitch. All marketing is about customer acquisition and improving the business. So I think everything we do really ultimately, Is about improving the business outlook and and generating demand for companies.
[00:02:54] Ian: I love it. It's like the thesis for our show there
[00:02:56] Kevin: And we didn't even practice that. I wasn't even cued, so there you go.
[00:03:00] Ian: That's right. That's why we interview CMOs on demand gen visionaries, cuz we're all demand people. Can you tell us a little bit about what it means to be CMO of Ping identity?
[00:03:07] Kevin: It's very, very stimulating and challenging because there's no prescriptive perfect way to be a chief marketing officer.
[00:03:14] Kevin: And for ping identity specifically, we. Very important market of identity and access management. It's growing a lot of money coming into the space as the world's moved digital First, everyone needs to have secure identity to transact, to protect their, to have access to the right tools and applications, whether it's at work or whether it's through your normal day to day life, doing things digitally.
[00:03:34] Kevin: So it's an important and in growing part of what we kind of view as a mission critical or level zero T infrastructure investment. And so that is interesting. In the center of this shift to everything digital, and yet there's a lot of big competitors and money's coming into this space from the likes of Microsoft all the way down to startups and every flavor in between.
[00:03:54] Kevin: So competition is fierce. There's too many players in the industry at this point, so there's a lot of consolidation that's both happening and will yet happen, and so we're kind of stuck in the middle of that. It's an opportunity to, Hey, how do you help drive growth? But also how do you help recognize what's going on in the market broadly to be sure you're positioning the company for its best path for success.
[00:04:15] Kevin: So there's no shortage of both tactical and strategic ways to spend your time and energy, which is ultimately why I think we do these jobs. Let's get to our first segment, The Trust Tree.
[00:04:36] Ian: This is where you go and feel honest and trusted and share those deepest, darkest demand gen secrets. Kevin, what is your company Ping Identity? Do and who are your customers?
[00:04:45] Kevin: Ping ID is about securing the digital identities of all individual, whether they're employees at a company or consumers engaging with and transacting with businesses digitally.
[00:04:57] Kevin: Everyone needs to have secure identity and secure data in order to work and live and operate in a very digital first world. So we focus on balance. Good experiences online that are also highly secure and built around securing the identity of the individual, and that really enables a blossoming of the digital economy that we now firmly live in.
[00:05:19] Kevin: But our customers are enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Now, we don't typically go after or spend a lot of time on small business, but we're sort of commercial marketing up and. A specialty in large enterprise. Specifically, we service, you know, 12 out of the largest 14 banks in the United States and six out of the seven largest healthcare firms.
[00:05:38] Kevin: And you, you can go on, on the list, but we're very good at supporting and managing large enterprise. That's kind of our sweet spot.
[00:05:44] Ian: Yeah. And tell me like who are the personas? What does your buying committee look like?
[00:05:48] Kevin: Yeah, the buying committee is very interesting cuz for our business we're actually shifting.
[00:05:53] Kevin: We kind of have two major parts of our business. One is servicing the enterprise itself, where they provide security for their employees to be able to access the networks and the applications and tools they need in their jobs. So the personas for that market are pretty straightforward. It's the IT practitioners, it's the ciso, in some cases, the cio, but a fairly narrow buying group that has authority across most of the companies we engage.
[00:06:19] Kevin: And so that motion of how you engage that audience and how you can drive demand generation is fairly, I would say, straightforward. The problem is we're not growing in that business because the likes of Microsoft and some others, That are, uh, you know, Microsoft's playing a lot of the same game that they played years ago in the PC industry where they're consolidating functionality and their Azure Enterprise platform.
[00:06:40] Kevin: And so what we're finding is, and we're shifting into the customer use case, which is consumers engaging digitally with businesses to transact right. And they want to be able to be secure both in their identity as well as their data, but they also want low friction ease, ease of use digitally. So we're spending a lot more energy there, but the personas we have to target and the buyers.
[00:07:02] Kevin: It has completely changed the way we go to market because there's not a lot of consistency company to company. In some companies it might be a CMO or it might be a line of business leader, it might be a chief digital officer. It might even be the ceo, because now you're talking customers, you're talking about providing experience for customers.
[00:07:20] Kevin: That creates loyalty, that gives you expansion opportunities, and. So there's a lot of sensitivity to C-Suite when anything touches a customer directly. So what we've seen is our buying committee has grown. It's larger than it is on the employee side of our business, and it's more diverse and it's less consistent.
[00:07:37] Kevin: So we've got some challenges around how do you target and go after the right personas, given that there's more of them and it's not the same company to company. That's our big challenge.
[00:07:48] Ian: Yeah, and I think that that's what's so interesting about selling SaaS at this point in time, right? Is well, the CIO.
[00:07:52] Ian: If it's tech gonna look at it or the CTO or however they structure their organization, and then you have like shadow IT and all sorts of other things that go on. But at the end of the day now, because it is so closely related to the customer experience, you either have the. CIO who thinks about their customer experience, especially if they're a tech platform, usually.
[00:08:11] Ian: And if you don't, then you need to be selling quote unquote around it. And the thing that's so funny is back in the day when you sold around it, you got in trouble. Whereas now it's like, please see all this stuff anyways. Of course we're gonna need to see this thing too.
[00:08:26] Kevin: Well, and even in some cases, developers have become a much more potent, important voice within companies because they're developing internally.
[00:08:35] Kevin: Some of the experiences and even some of the capabilities upon which the applications or the actual website itself might entail. And so that's another very diverse audience that we've typically not targeted in the past on the employee side, that have an increasingly powerful voice in these decision makers.
[00:08:51] Kevin: But again, the biggest challenge for a company like ours is the diversity. Now that we. In the buyer committee, that is not existent in the previous sort of instantiation of what we did. So that's caused us it, it hits your efficiency, right? And you gotta guess, right? And hopefully it's not a guess.
[00:09:07] Kevin: Hopefully it's a data driven decision, but you can't spread your dollars across everything cuz then pretty much know how that'll end and how
[00:09:13] Ian: do you structure your organization to go after your key accounts.
[00:09:16] Kevin: We're actually moving to a model where we. In our Europe and APAC regions, we're very, very, very aligned with our sales teams and how that's structured, and we're finding that to be a really important way of going to market.
[00:09:31] Kevin: We're actually moving to a model that's very, very ABM centric, and there's a lot of reasons why for us at this point, it's the right decision. I don't stand up here and say ABM is the. End all and be all, and that everyone should adopt it. But for where we are and all the things happening around us, we're actually gonna move to a pretty field centric, ABM centric regional sub-regional centric model where we're gonna be.
[00:09:55] Kevin: Really focusing a little bit less of our time and energy on the top of funnel, which we've done, I think, a really good job over the last couple years and really focusing on conversion and how can we help drive a better and higher conversion rate. So spending a little more of our dollar and emphasis on.
[00:10:12] Kevin: In pipe opportunities and helping to lubricate and move through that pipeline at a more efficient pace. Things that we previously really hadn't done in the past. We're gonna kind of balance our investments across the funnel more than we have in the path. And again, a lot of the reasons we did what we did and what we're doing, going to.
[00:10:28] Kevin: Board are based on our own trajectory and the market we're in and the dynamics of our competition and all that. And so it wasn't that we necessarily did it blindly, but we're definitely pivoting this year to be much more field centric and ABM centric across all regions.
[00:10:43] Ian: You mentioned sort of your unique circumstances, but I think that there's definitely, from the conversations we've had and extra focus on demand for 2023 for sure.
[00:10:51] Ian: Yep. So curious, like how does your demand gen strategy shift or change in that environment?
[00:10:57] Kevin: I think for us it's, it's really leveraging the data probably even more aggressively than we did in the past. We have enough data now to know where's the magic, what really works, what really drives interest and what really moves things forward in ways that other things can't.
[00:11:11] Kevin: So we're gonna be kind of heat seeking missiles this year around focusing our investments towards. The things that we know generate real impact. So in many ways it'll be a little more tactical. So we've approached the market in the past where we've had an umbrella campaign. What was really, people call it awareness.
[00:11:26] Kevin: Yes, I think it's awareness, but it wasn't just, you know, ping, talking about ping. We did it around specific use cases, but it nonetheless, Offered us as a kind of an awareness building umbrella campaign upon under which we would run some other tactical plays to really hit key personas and connect all of that tissue.
[00:11:43] Kevin: We're gonna be doing a lot less of that umbrella and being a lot more focused on the things that help drive and capture in-market demand. One of the things I've learned over the years too, is if you think. The market you serve, you may have a hundred percent of your market that you're going after and at any point in time, again, in B2B where we operate, it's probably five to 10% of that given market.
[00:12:04] Kevin: Might be in the market at that moment, looking for a solution, actively seeking to engage a vendor in solving a problem. The rest of it is something that will come later on, right? And so true demand generation tends to go after that other 90 plus percent, whereas demand capture is a very tactical, again, given some decisions we had to make around our trajectory.
[00:12:25] Kevin: For 23, we're gonna be a little more focused on the tactical demand capture aspect than I would normally. And I think it'll hit our efficiency a bit, but ultimately it'll drive some short term results. Again, I'm not that I recommend it as the right approach, but it's the right one for us at the moment.
[00:12:41] Kevin: We're gonna be very focused on capturing in market demand, and so that'll change a lot of our tactics and our, our messaging. We were talking to
[00:12:47] Ian: Jason from Metadata a handful of episodes ago about this idea of like him using. Like Google ads as a wedge for building content where it's like, Hey, we can't rank for all this stuff yet, so we gotta pay for all the terms as we build out our content.
[00:13:02] Ian: And then eventually spend goes down, and then the content continues to perform. I almost look at this as kind of like a reverse wedge, right? It's like, Hey, you were doing all of those quote unquote brand gen activities, and now you're just focusing on closing the deals. And hopefully, like you said, that 100% of people know who you are, know your value prop, know all that stuff, and then, Focusing in on those 5% moments that when they're in those 5% moments that, that you can go win it.
[00:13:27] Ian: That makes sense to me. And I totally understand
[00:13:29] Kevin: in like a little bit of a harvesting process, I think. Right. And it's more of a temporary focus and approach. I think I'd mentioned before we're a company that's not just been taken private after being public. And you know, there's a lot of things happening in our space and so this is just again, really helping to drive as much near term growth as we can, as kind of
[00:13:46] Kevin: Our process for this year.
[00:13:46] Ian: I love it. It's so helpful for our listeners who are in the same sort of scenario, so let's get into the playbook.
[00:13:59] Ian This is where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that help you win.
[00:14:05] Ian: What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncut budget items? And I'll add to this that clearly, you're cutting a lot of budget items, but you also had some really successful campaigns in the past. So feel free, uncut, budget items, what are they?
[00:14:16] Kevin: Yeah, so I think for us, I would call these the three uncut.
[00:14:21] Kevin: We're gonna be laser focused on. Go to market motion, which is around our customer use case, right? In the past we've had multiple of those, so we're, we're essentially folding a lot of that effort away and being incredibly targeted and focused. So uncut number one is that focus around the singular go to market motion that we're gonna put in market.
[00:14:42] Kevin: Rather than having multiple go to market kind of motions, we're gonna be essentially singular focused, which. Give us the ability to invest at the level we need to, but also keeps us simplified and focused on a single me or single platform. I would call that un uncut, but it's really a strategy that's uncut, but the other two are really important.
[00:15:00] Kevin: The second one is what I call our digital land, recognizing that businesses like ours three quarters or more, depending on what you read of the customer journey, is now done fully, digitally, and on the customer. Timeline. We have yet to have, I think, what I would call an exceptional digital land, or the ability to provide complete self-service from initial connection to actually fulfilling an order.
[00:15:24] Kevin: And so we've been investing in that. In 2023 is the year that we bring that to life fully so that we can serve. That digital centered customer will still have reps. We still have hand touch, we still have things that, you know, for large enterprise never go away, but we've invested heavily and will continue to do so to ensure that our digital journey is exceptional.
[00:15:44] Kevin: So that's uncut number two. And then the next one would be our channel partners. So we've got a number of programs underway to help us scale our business through and with our channel partners. So those would be the three things there that I say. Our must haves for 2023. Awesome.
[00:15:58] Ian: I love it. Any tactical things that you're excited about doing or trying for next
[00:16:03] Kevin: year?
[00:16:04] Kevin: It's funny because we did some, I think, pretty innovative things in 21 and 22. We kind of took a different approach in the market that we're in because a lot of companies in cybersecurity, kind of the core messages, for lack of a better way to do this, I'll just say it. We're the trusted platform. You should trust us.
[00:16:20] Kevin: Like trust us, trust us. We're great. Tends to be a little me centered and it's a little bit generic in its messaging. So Cybersecurity's never been known for, I think great or breakthrough marketing. That's just kind of the nature of the beast. It's sensitive, it's security, it's all those things. And people tend to take a little bit of a safe approach.
[00:16:38] Kevin: Of course we don't spend as much as a Microsoft or some of the other competitors we deal with, so we went after and tried a different approach. We leveraged a pretty smart influencer that really helped create some breakthrough in our own storytelling. That was Terry Cruz. Terry has been an amazing ambassador for us and has opened a lot of doors and had people, it engaged people in ways that just a traditional message I think would've just gone over their head.
[00:17:03] Kevin: We took some very differentiated approaches to kind of break through and create some emotion and some character and some context to, to what it is we do and why it's important in a very engaging and storytelling fashion. I think for. As we look ahead, recognizing and continuing to invest in the digital side of things, it's still a place where search matters both organic and paid.
[00:17:25] Kevin: It's both are incredibly essential and we've got work to do to shore that up. So we're gonna be a little more, probably less sexy next year and a little more. Hyper targeted and hyper focused on fewer things, but exquisite execution and more personalization. So it's hyper targeted, more personalized, very digital.
[00:17:45] Kevin: So it feels like a kind of a basic cookbook for a lot of companies, but for us it's about simplification and being very, very focused on those few areas that I just described. Yeah, so
[00:17:55] Ian: for the Terry Cruz campaign, obviously he's super famous. Everyone, when they see his face, they know. So like why him? I, I guess I said why it's obvious, but, but
[00:18:05] Kevin: why him?
[00:18:05] Kevin: Well, it's really a great question if you think about it, because influencer marketing is a thing. We all know it's a thing. It's almost like sponsorships. To me. Influencer marketing and sponsorships can be very hit or very, how do you get something that's a hit versus a miss? A lot of it is finding someone who authentically can represent what it is you stand for and the message you're trying to get across for the market.
[00:18:27] Kevin: So it's one thing to just hire a pretty face that's famous and has a lot of followers. I think that's where you get a lot of the myths when it comes to influencer marketing. But when you bring somebody in, whether it's an expert in the area, Terry's not necessarily an expert in security, but his strength character.
[00:18:43] Kevin: Embodies this notion of the strength and the robustness of our platform in terms of providing security for every identity, right? His unbridled optimism and energy are something that we highly, highly valued, right? That played right into the message we wanted to provide. So ultimately, we were trying to leverage an influencer that could help us tell the.
[00:19:04] Kevin: Highly secure, very engaging human and emotion based. And all of that really came through. We looked at dozens of potential influencers and we just, everybody just universally said, man, this guy seems to be the right guy. And then as soon as we started engaging him, he has just been such a perfect fit for us.
[00:19:21] Kevin: It was a glove right on a hand fit so perfectly. So I feel like we got a, a hit out of that one because I hear field people, salespeople all the time saying, you, Got out of a call. They called us because they wanted to talk. They saw the Terry Crew stuff. They thought it was great. They, they, they wanted to include us in the bid.
[00:19:36] Kevin: You know, that's exactly the whole point of it. Marketing to me is about renting a little bit of space in the minds of your target audience, and that's really, really hard to do, right? Yeah. So whatever tools you can do, and Terry's helped us just rent a little bit more space than I think we could have on our own.
[00:19:51] Kevin: So that's the whole point of it. You know,
[00:19:52] Ian: we talk about, Being remarkable on this show, which means you have to actually remark about it to someone else and say like, oh my gosh, I saw that thing. That was pretty cool. Yeah, that was pretty clever. And this is like one of the tangible examples, right? It's like Apple uses celebrities in their marketing.
[00:20:08] Ian: Nike uses celebrities in their marketing and B2B companies, we just generally don't, right? It's just not something that we do. But like, you know, I was thinking about it before this episode. If someone stole my identity, I think Terry Cruz would be one of the first people I'd call to go steal it back. I know that's not how the platform works, but, but I like the, I like the mental image.
[00:20:26] Kevin: He's really embodies it well. And like I said, it's not that influencer marketing necessarily is the end all, be all. It may not be for everybody, and I certainly don't, I mean, everybody's situation's unique, but it can be effective and to make it effective, it's one of those things where the matching and the pairing and the authenticity of it all really plays in, if you get it right.
[00:20:44] Kevin: We've all seen examples where you're like, man, that pitch man or that pitch person for that brand is just so good. Right? It just, it just works. And in other cases you've seen and it's like, that seems kind of odd. That person seems like an odd choice. It's not just about fame, it's about the embodiment of the message that you're trying to get across.
[00:21:01] Kevin: It
[00:21:01] Ian: reminds me of the PC and MAC commercials back in the day with Apple. Yeah. Where in, in five seconds you knew exactly what they were trying to say. Right. Like, PC is old and weird and nerdy, and Mac is like cool and young and hip, right? These type of things that, these are sort of B2C lessons, right? Is how do you tell a story in five seconds or in 30 seconds?
[00:21:25] Ian: B2b. Were so far away from that that we don't even
[00:21:28] Kevin: try. Well, and I found it's very obvious to me that the buyers, we engage the B2B buyers, we. Are increasingly expecting a B2 C experience, which is why you know your website and your digital journey that you provide, the content you create and use to engage that audience, how you inform them and educate them and engage them across a range of experiences.
[00:21:51] Kevin: Increasingly needs to be more thought of like a B to C exercise because that's the experience that they expect. And if you keep it at a very informal and almost lecture like fashion in the way you engage 'em, I think that's a problem. So again, it's not about being sloppy or cute. You wanna be authentic and real, and it needs to provide value because of course they're in a journey.
[00:22:14] Kevin: But if you think. B2B purchases are far more emotional than B2C purchases are other than a house or maybe an expensive car like you. And I decide from an ad that we wanna go try some fast food restaurant cuz the ad look good and we go there and we find out the food's not any good. Have we lost anything?
[00:22:29] Kevin: Oh, and maybe we lost 10 bucks, but that's not a big thing, right? Yeah. B2B buyers, they get their decision wrong, they get fired, they lose their job, they lose their livelihood, and, and so the level of emotion that's a part of that process is far greater than we give credit for. And so engaging people with a little bit of emotion are, are not recognizing the seriousness of the decision that's at stake here.
[00:22:51] Kevin: But still they're human beings. Right? And so you, the way to engage them and just if they can laugh a little bit or they can certainly see the problems and challenges they have come to life in your content. That's, that is a great way to get people to engage and connect on an emotional level. And I think we have to not forget that it's not just about the facts, you know?
[00:23:10] Kevin: It's not just about claiming to. Best solution or spouting off features and capabilities. It really is about creating that connection and that trust, and I think that's where marketers like us that are in b2b, we do have to think more like B2C marketers because we need to be thinking about what kinds of experiences we're actually offering our customers.
[00:23:30] Kevin: And you mentioned it. Why is Apple so great? Why is Nike so great? Why is Disney so great? They do that. I mean, across the spectrum of what they do and how they communicate, it's really, really good. Why can't we be the same? Yeah,
[00:23:42] Ian: Tyler from Vidyard, when we had him on the show, he said, keep him laughing. Keep him learning.
[00:23:46] Ian: Exactly. And uh, I love that We call
[00:23:48] Kevin: it edutainment. . Yeah. Well, but it's important because in a world that's so full of pressure, I mean, none of us, we we're all looking at the world of 2022 going, man, things are complicated out there. You've got political division, you've got wars, you've got inflation.
[00:24:02] Kevin: There's so much bad news from a cyber security perspective. I also think that if I just started using fear as my marketing, Kind of creating more anxiety and stress in my buyer, and I don't wanna do that, right? What I wanna do is help them see the solution and how the problems can be solved and turned into opportunities.
[00:24:22] Kevin: And if I can get 'em to laugh a little bit, have a little emotion, feel good. Yeah, you're just playing right onto them. Yeah. And what's cool about
[00:24:28] Ian: that campaign too? You said that your website traffic was up nearly a thousand percent. I mean, there's benefits to this stuff that I think is just so cool. I'm curious, how do you view your website?
[00:24:37] Kevin: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of how a prospect first engages you. This is the first kind of real experience they get to have with you. How you view it is it is the single most important piece of communication or the communication. That happens in a B2B world. So any buyer, and we've done the mapping, right? You can see a buyer that has come through it, they've been on our website multiple times, they've downloaded multiple pieces of content or viewed multiple pieces of content, and it's now multiple buyers at one company doing that, right?
[00:25:08] Kevin: So we view it as, look, it needs to be simple and easy to navigate. It needs to be a very, very consistent and simple experience. It needs to have the right level of information. You don't wanna overwhelm them, but you can't just overwhelm them either. So there's that fine middle ground you gotta find. So it's one of those things that we're, you never get it right.
[00:25:28] Kevin: It's never right. It's just, is it better today than it was yesterday? Are we continuously improving? Are we finding the friction points and eliminating those friction points? It's all of that because you can see the buyer journey and we do some research and we find out what's working and what isn't working.
[00:25:44] Kevin: So I think we've made good improvements, but I wouldn't. Done by any means. We still had a lot of work to do to get to where I want to be..
[00:26:06] Ian: All right, let's get to our next segment, the Dust UpThis is where we talk about healthy tension, whether that's with your board, your sales teams, your competitors, or anyone else. Have you had a memorable dust-up in your career?
[00:26:14] Kevin: Oh man. If somebody says they haven't had a memorable dust up, then they're not being honest. Sure. I've had a memorable dust up across probably every one of those constituents.
[00:26:23] Kevin: I mean, I remember my very first board presentation when I started here as a cmo. I went in and presented, I'd been here about. Six or eight months and we had really worked through, and I think we'd done a pretty good job of determining kind of where marketing was, where it needed to change some of the things we wanted to implement, and got great reception from the leadership team and really felt like we were on a great path, walk into a board meeting and it just went south quick because there was a particular board member that just.
[00:26:53] Kevin: Oh, this is the new guy, so let me just see how, how well he can handle the skewing. And so he just went after, oh geez, every data point I had. In fact, at one point, just to give you a sense of how frustrating it was, I mean, I, in my head I was having this conversation, but of course externally I was trying to be very poised and, you know, acknowledge the question to answer the best I could.
[00:27:10] Kevin: He even said at one point I showed some data about the buyer journey and some things that mattered and why we were recommending some changes to try to address. The updated buyer journeys that we were seeing, and he's just like, well, where'd you get that data? And we shared the data. He's like, I don't believe it.
[00:27:23] Kevin: You know? And you're like, oh my God. At that point you're like, I don't even know how to respond to that if you don't believe it. But the point is, that was a tough, tough meeting for me, and I remember walking out of it feeling pretty beat up. But then, you know, I came back again later the next quarter, or maybe it was two quarters later and we had another review and it went great.
[00:27:38] Kevin: It just went awesome and they were super common cause we had even more progress to show the relationship with the boards can be very important, and investing time and finding a champion or two can also be super helpful, which I did. Turns out that this particular individual was not just somebody who picked on marketing.
[00:27:53] Kevin: He liked to do that kind of thing with a lot of people. But anyway, that was a dust up that could have been really seriously negative to the career path that I had here. But it turned out not to be thankfully. And. There's other desktops that was probably the most memorable and the most difficult one for me, at least initially.
[00:28:09] Ian: Prove the haters wrong. Kevin, that's your advice.
[00:28:11] Kevin: Definitely a hater. Well, and I found out later this was a guy that didn't believe much in Mark. He felt like, if you wanna grow revenue, yeah, you hire, you hire more sales, you don't need marketing. Yeah. You're like, I'm like, well, duh. You know, I mean, and I'm like, go for it.
[00:28:23] Kevin: You know, when you look at a buyer journey, you look at all the touches in that journey and you realize how many things that the marketing team actually. Connects with that buyer. It's like it's your own peril, man. Invest less in marketing is what I said.
[00:28:35] Ian: f Go or it. I was talking to a sales leader the other day and I asked a question about marketing.
[00:28:39] Ian: They were like, yeah, I think that there's a real need for marketing now these days. I was like, wow. Way to plant your flag on that one.
[00:28:46] Kevin: Wait, wait. A got on the limb though?
[00:28:47] Ian: Yep. It's like an arrested development. When they go from a, a sell to a don't buy. Like we made it to don't buy . It's like, congrats marketing.
[00:28:55] Ian: We do deserve to have a job. Okay, let's get to quick hits. These are quick questions of quick answers. Just like 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.
[00:29:15] Ian: Just like these questions, go to qualified.com to learn more qualified is the best. Go to qualified.com to learn more. Kevin, are you ready? Hit me number one. What's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
[00:29:25] Kevin: When I was young, I remember as a kid looking up in my classroom at these placards around the room that had the letter A and the alphabet and below it, the number one.
[00:29:36] Kevin: And then B had the number two all the way down through Z, which was 26. Right? And I remember just staring at that and getting bored. Well, to the point where now when I see letters, I see numbers. And vice versa. So what I do, my family just cracks up cuz I do it all the time. I can look at a word. If I took the word Ian, which is your first name?
[00:29:55] Kevin: Simple three letter word i a n, right? Well I is nine A is one N is 14. Well, I see that in my head immediately. So what I do now is I've taken it to the point where I added up and I can tell you, for example, e N equals 24 because nine plus one plus 14 equals 24. But what I do. If I look at a word, I can tell you that last digit, like in this case, e n equals 24.
[00:30:17] Kevin: I can tell you four. I can tell you in a 10th of a second, I can look at a word and I can say, oh, that word ends in two. So it's a stupid human trick. It's like, I should have been on David Letterman years ago. It's this stupid human trick. But I can literally look at a word and go, oh, that's three, or that's a five, or that's a 12, or that's a two.
[00:30:34] Kevin: You know? And so, uh, it's this weird thing now that I just, because I just see the numbers, I see the letters and I can add 'em up. It takes a little longer to add up the full number, but I can get, cuz I've memorized patterns now, so I can just, I can get to the last digit almost instantly. So a meaningless talent, it will never be on my resume, but it's a talent.
[00:30:53] Ian: There you go. I love it. That is, that is truly a hidden talent.
[00:30:57] Kevin: h. Yeah. Are you used love hidden talent?
[00:31:01] Ian: Yeah. I don't know how you could make money on that. Maybe we could get you to like a carnival, perhaps.
[00:31:05] Kevin: Like freak show game.
[00:31:08] Ian: Yeah. We'll work on something. And what's your favorite podcast book, TV show that you've been checking out recently?
[00:31:13] Kevin: My favorite podcast is Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist. Love that podcast. I've read basically everything Malcolm's written and it's a fascinating podcast cuz he talks about things that are overlooked or underappreciated in history and tells these amazing stories about things that you would never have heard of, but they're pretty amazing outcomes.
[00:31:31] Kevin: So yeah, revisionist History is my favorite podcast. So good.
[00:31:37] Ian: Yeah. Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby that maybe makes you a better marketer?
[00:31:40] Kevin: Cooking. I've taken up cooking, especially from Covid, and I don't know if it makes me a better marketer, but I follow different chefs online and I tried lots of different dishes and I found one that I follow.
[00:31:52] Kevin: His name is a chef Billy Peri. What I like about him is it comes back to marketing in a. He has such a simple way of teaching complex cooking techniques, but he breaks it down in ways that makes it easy and it makes it interesting to do so. I think he's as good a marketer and communicator as he is a chef, which is why I've gravitated to him versus a lot of other online chefs that you can follow, including Gordon Ramsey, who I've.
[00:32:18] Kevin: Followed for a long time, and I think he's great, but this guy is, he's the best teacher of cooking that I've seen. And again, it comes down to marketing. How do you communicate the things that you can do in ways that are compelling, engaging, and create an audience? This guy's done a great job of that. If you weren't in marketing, what do you think you'd be doing?
[00:32:34] Kevin: I'd be teaching. What subject I'd either be teaching at the college level or the high school level. In fact, when I retire from this job, at some point I'll probably go teach high school. I've always wanted to do that. I may or I may teach at the college level, but if I had taken this on as a profession earlier, I probably would've gone on to get a PhD and therefore would've ended up probably teaching at the college level, and subject would've been, it might have been market.
[00:33:01] Kevin:
[00:33:01] Ian: Yeah, go teach marketing to freaking high school students. They need to know this stuff.
[00:33:02] Kevin: I just look, I believe in it, like you may have heard this, but one of my favorite quotes of all time as it relates to business was Peter Drucker many years ago, decades ago. But he said, and this is fascinating if you think about it, right?
[00:33:15] Kevin: He said, in business there are two and only two functions that matter. Marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation, produce results. All the rest are costs. And kind of what he means by that. I know. And I think he means marketing in the capital M Sensee. Not just the discipline of marketing, but really go to market.
[00:33:33] Kevin: So sales and marketing. Yeah, because sales and marketing together, we go to market and we generate revenue, right? Well, you gotta have an innovation, a product of service or something, and then you have to have the ability to communi. And therefore engage your customers. Everything else, do we have to have lawyers?
[00:33:49] Kevin: Of course. Do we need finance people? Yes. Do we need hr? Of course. But those two functions drive a business forward and so it's center to the success of all businesses. So I do think it's a bit of an underappreciated art and craft that I quite enjoy. Yeah.
[00:34:05] Ian: One of the best pieces of advice I ever received, I got outta the Army and someone said was Get as close to product as you can get or get as close to sales as you can get anything else in the.
[00:34:13] Ian: Is expendable and everything is supporting those two things. And like I think, I mean, I think if you look at where marketing is now, currently with self-serve and all this other stuff, marketing is driving revenue like they always have, but it is a hundred percent attributable and there's no. If sands or butts about it anymore, right?
[00:34:33] Ian: It's like, Hey, this is the number, this is what's happening. This is what's being hit. Doesn't matter how good the salesperson is, if you have that sort of stuff. So, absolutely, I think it's a really exciting time to be a marketer. And I, I totally, totally agree.
[00:34:44] Kevin: I totally agree. It's so unique and different and digital has changed the rules of everything, and, but it has made the job such an intellectually stimulating and challenging thing that that's why I get excited.
[00:34:56] Kevin: It's not the same old thing now. I mean, we've had to change and learn and grow new skills. All along the way, and I mean I grew up at a fundamentals of it all are relatively the same, but the execution and the understanding you need and the strategies you have to deploy are very different. So that keeps it fresh, exciting.
[00:35:13] Kevin: And I do agree with you. I think marketing now is as interesting as it's ever been.
[00:35:18] Ian: What advice would you give to a first time CMO trying to figure out their demand strategy?
[00:35:21] Kevin: Don't be afraid to ask for help. There's a lot of help out there. There's a lot of people that have gone through the motions you have.
[00:35:27] Kevin: So one of the things I didn't do when I first became a CMO was reach out to peers as well as I should have, like I do now much more than I did then. So I would say reach out for help. There's great networks available, CMO groups that can, you can work with. So I would say do that first, but then specifically within the company.
[00:35:45] Kevin: Really understand. There's probably two, two things I would say going upward. I would say make sure you're connected well, both to the CEO and to the cfo and the company strategy overall. Make sure that what you do is really tightly connected around building out that strategy and demonstrating that that how you're gonna take that to market in a way where they get a chance to see him.
[00:36:05] Kevin: So the more connected you are to that C level. Integral you will be to the company's direction and future, and then working with it. I'd say the same thing would be working with your product peers as well. Really understanding the uniqueness and the differentiation, the service or product that you have to enable you to create that, because at the end of the day, If you're not differentiated or unique, you're just gonna become noise.
[00:36:30] Ian: Well, for our listeners, you can go to ping identity.com to learn more about your company and they help you protect users at every digital interaction. Well make an experience frictionless, check out ping identity. Kevin, thanks again. We really, uh, appreciate it and we'll talk soon. Thanks again.
[00:36:45] Kevin:. Appreciate it.