B2B Digital Marketing & Demand Generation: My boss has asked me to produce $1 billion in revenue. Now what? (episode #109)

When I started in B2B, my mentor told me, “We call this business to business, but make no mistake, people buy products, not businesses. It’s people who make decisions for these businesses.”

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. If you’re only focused on businesses as accounts, you’re overlooking opportunities.

For example, as our latest guest shared in his podcast guest application, “Track when your customer champions change jobs.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I spoke with Matthew Bowman, VP of Strategy, GTM, and Growth Marketing, ACT [https://www.acttoday.com/]. 

ACT is a 100% employee-owned company with 12,000 employees and 23 offices around the world.

In Bowman’s previous role, he oversaw a team of 32 direct and indirect reports and a budget of $3 million. He is currently in a startup role where he is scaling up the marketing teams.

While seemingly simple, Bowman says these lessons served as part of the foundation for his creating an international department that generated $1.6 billion in revenue over 11 years’ time:

• Message trumps channel
• Track when your customer champions change jobs
• Interview your customers
• Watch for unintended consequences of strategic initiatives
• Prioritize with the RACE (Return, Amplitude, Conviction, Energy) Method of decision making
• Generate buzz with guerrilla marketing
• Foster a positive and productive atmosphere to optimize team performance

Discussed in this episode

Build an artificial intelligence strategy that helps you produce more revenue in an AI Quick Win Intensive [https://intensives.meclabsai.com/] (from MarketingSherpa's parent organization).

Career Adaptability: Marketing can lead to many other things (podcast episode #103) [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/career-adaptability]

Marketing Career: How to become an indispensable asset to your company (even in a bad economy) [https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/marketing-career]

Marketing Strategy: 5 successful (and 1 failed) strategic approaches to everyday marketing challenges [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/marketing-strategy-5-successful-and-1-failed-strategic-approaches]

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Transcript

Matthew Bowman: We're still good friends. from him, I've learned the importance of true leadership. You know, unfortunately, you cannot spend a day without seeing some men. That shows you here's what a leader is, and here's what a manager is. And, you know, the manager's got the staff by the seat in their freedom over the no, really. I read the leaders say follow the way.

That's a great metaphor for things. But in practice and. When you're looking for the 16th largest company on the planet, it comes with certain elements of it.

Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing. From marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz. Real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the senior Director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Burstein, to tell you about today's guest.

Daniel Burstein: When I started in B2B, my mentor told me, we call this business to business. But make no mistake, people buy products. Businesses don't buy products. It's people who make decisions for those businesses. Here's where the rubber meets the road with that insight. If you're only focused on businesses as accounts, you're overlooking opportunities. For example, as our latest guest shared in his podcast guest application track, When your Customer Champions Change Jobs.

That's right, the people. Here to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories, is Matthew Bowman, VP of strategy. Go to Market and Growth Marketing at Act. Thanks for joining me, Matthew.

Matthew Bowman: Thank you for having me.

Daniel Burstein: Let's take a quick look at your background so people know I'm talking to you. just cherry picking your LinkedIn. You've been head of digital content and direct marketing at Allegiance Incorporated, which is now part of Moritz. You've been global VP of Digital Marketing, Worldwide Center of Excellence at Teleperformance. And for the past year you've been at Act.

Act is a 100% employee owned company with 12,000 employees and 23 offices around the world. And Matthew, in his career, he's managed up to 32 direct and indirect reports and $3 million budget. And right now he's in a startup role where he's growing a team. So, Matthew, give us a sense. What is your day like now as VP of strategy?

Go to market and growth marketing.

Matthew Bowman: so it's it's interesting to me when I compare how I spent my days previously, to a large multinational compared to what I do it now in a startup environment. They're vastly different, even though the goals are roughly the same. Where I'm at now, I think of one big exception. My day is what you probably expect in a startup environment.

I spend a lot of my days focused on in the weeds working on foundational kinds of activities. So examples are I frequently meet with our CEO for messenger for them. just got through wrapping up, mapping out the customer buyer journey, developing content from both sales enablement and growth marketing purposes. a lot of marketing ops types, projects such as, establishing benchmarks, setting up the reporting system, developing procedures and protocols so we can effectively scale.

and even able from time to time on the RFP process or event, which is this? Now, the one big difference. Yes. From every other time that I've done this is, we now have a AI powered sales and marketing platforms that single handedly has really changed how I spend my days. And I'm talking about, what's commonly referred to as marketing intent.

they're a big data tool, and they give you an awful lot of information. and it's very easy to turn on a fire hose that diminishes the effectiveness of that. But a lot of my time is spent going over the reports and the data that, it gives because it's a whole different way that allows me to achieve our goals.

So, for example, if you were to observe this, the technology that we've licensed, it shows me how many of our prospective customers are currently in the market and looking at our competition. This creates a stack ranking report of sorts, which I monitor daily. We use this as a new, more comprehensive way to measure the effectiveness of the various marketing activities and channels that we use.

And parenthetically, when we launched this in January, because the companies did not have an awful lot of market presence yet, we found that there were only about 30 companies researching us during the week. Well, jump forward seven months. we went from, the bottom quartile of the stack ranking to the number three position in the first quartile.

And last week, we had over 450 companies research. So that's example one. Another thing that this tool does is it it tells me which of our target accounts are sparking and fire intent. And I spend at least one full day every week reviewing those accounts with our sales team, developing customized plans of attack and so forth.

Daniel Burstein: What we've got going on right now, let's take a look at some lessons from throughout your career, some lessons from the things you made. So when, your prep pitched me this story, here's a line to use I like this. My boss has asked me to produce $1 billion in revenue. Now what? So I'd imagine with that. I mean, that wasn't like just he took out for coffee and just said that, like, I imagine it's a maybe over, some time, but give us a sense.

What were you challenged with before we actually look at what you did?

Matthew Bowman: graciously. That did not come at the beginning of my tenure at the company. It came after we had set up an awful lot of programs and such. And, in the board meeting, a lot of these business leaders said, we want to generate $1 billion. And a lot of eyes looked at us. Okay, guys, how are we going to do this?

And, because I was overseeing digital marketing, is that okay? But didn't you have the answer yesterday for us? there was a bit of a daunting task because it's a matter of looking at how everything scales, and how efficiently you are going after your strategy. But it it forces you to do some things that I thought were very healthy for us to do.

I had gotten and shame on me. I'd gotten out of the habit of meeting with our customers on a consistent, periodic basis. there's so much you can learn by interviewing your customers. Let me give you some examples. and then I'll move on to some of the other things that we did to do that. And ultimately, we did build something that generated over the time I was there, $1.6 billion in new revenues for the company.

but one of the elementary things that we did that really had a profound impact on our strategy development was visiting with some of our customers. I like to visit with them about not just how it's going on. The typical questions that you would ask, but ask things like, you know, what's keeping you awake at night. And by the way, how did you find us?

What were the criteria you used when you evaluated us? What are the most important things that played into your choosing? Us. and in your role, what, what associations do you belong to? What journals do you, read online or print? It gives me a sense for how do I reach these people, and what new things do I need to write about?

How do we need to tweak our message? Because one of the challenges that I think a lot of companies, if they've developed a really good template, but particularly nowadays, post pandemic, things change at a faster rate than they did pre-pandemic. And you have to be able to change with them. And so you still have your core value proposition as an organization, but you need to help them connect the dots because one of the other changes is that your target audience has redefined the word faster.

And people are very impatient nowadays. There used to be like seven to 10s to get someone's attention on a website. Last time I left it down to about 2 or 3 seconds. So you've got to be really sassy and you've got to help to connect the dots. And you can't do that if you don't really understand your client.

It's just beyond the pro, the marketing profile. But what's keeping these folks awake at night? the other thing that you can learn from this and this kind of ties back to acquaint you earlier, is this idea of finding hidden gems. So when I first joined my previous employer, I asked to be set up with one of our marquee clients.

This is a household name, and, we set up a half an hour interview. I was there with our account manager and the vendor manager, who manages the account from the client side. our vendor manager, bless her point and had spent 25 or 30 minutes going through all this mundane routine stuff about, how many, phone agents we had supply the different programs.

recognizing my window of opportunity was closing very quickly. And based upon the information I had when I asked the client, well, what impact have you had on your business outcomes from working with us? And the response was phenomenal. This is what every marketer wants to hear. She said, I give you the lion's share of credit for helping our company go from literally the very bottom to literally the very top of the J.D. Power Resources customer Satisfaction ranking, all the while helping us achieve the most customer churn in our company's history.

That should have been on a billboard. Our CEO didn't know it. The chief business development officer didn't know, and I asked her, can I call you? She said, yes. It's like, okay, we have a new client reference, a powerful one that we can then use to arrange for, speaking engagements. Case studies, coauthored papers. There's so many different ways to use that kind of information.

So that's kind of my soapbox on really understanding your client and the value that comes from that. Other elements include,

Daniel Burstein: Well, let me let me ask about that. So you talked about, you know, really understanding your client. One of your lessons was Message Trumps channel. So was in interviewing the customers. Is that the right way? You tweak the message, you said the value proposition stays the same, but I assume the message around that can change.

Matthew Bowman: They can change a lot and there's a lot of nuances with that change. now message trumps channel that's applicable in so many ways, particularly right now, where an awful lot of marketing budgets are getting cut and you're forced to use antiquated channels, out of date technology. Maybe you have to cancel some of your brand new, contracts with, your social media vendors.

what I've learned through this whole process is if you get the message right, it doesn't matter if it's email or if it's a paid up, you're still going to dramatically increase the results that you're getting. Now, in my case, what we did is this actually happened to be part of the, the call to generate $1 billion as we went through and completely revamped and transformed our outreach program.

We changed the tonality. now, keep in mind what happened during the pandemic. Everyone started to use email again, and our audience was just flooded with emails. We had so much more noise we had to break through. And so we changed. Instead of using the, the standard sales marketing email template as an example. Ghost, because everybody else was using it, they googled what the latest was and y'all started to use it.

We completely shifted. it was, more conversational on tone. It was written from one senior executive to another, and it had dramatic payoff. So it was still the same old lousy email channel that we had to use because of budget cuts of our own. But we were getting way superior results to that in a the email channel.

That whole problem we put together using that approach, we did some analysis that my team ran the numbers for me to compare. What are the conversion ratios, the Google Ads and LinkedIn? to pair that to what the conversion ratios that we're getting with our own internal demand generation system. And it turned out that at that time it was 443% more effective than Google Ads and 130% more effective than Nixon ads.

In terms of the ROI, how many actual quality leads were getting out of per dollar spent?

Daniel Burstein: Well, let's get an understanding of exactly what was in that message, because when everyone listening hears that effective, they're gonna want to do it as well. From what it sounds like you're saying is like, you know, people were sending generally generic, automated, you know, mass messages. It sounds like you were personalizing them more. So what I would ask is, well, so that's one thing.

There's a change to the message. But also I would assume there's a change to the operation to be able to sound it, send out emails like that. So you can kind of tell us a little more about like what it said, and then how you were able to get the information to say that operationally.

Matthew Bowman: Sure. So the, the messages, we went from pre programing six months worth of communications down to two weeks. Yeah. So the world was changing very fast because I already had an extremely good relationship with our head of sales or the president of sales for the English speaking world. when it was when it came to our English speaking outreach, meet with, almost on a weekly basis, it's like, okay, what's keeping people awake at night for this industry?

Now? You hit on something really important. We did this by vertical. Was a lot of work. At the time, we were chasing 35 verticals and sub verticals. So it wasn't just banking and finance. It was large banks, mid-tier banks, credit unions, fintech, for example. And so we were being very granular at the time. I had the team to be able to pull this off.

but we were being very granular in what we were talking about. And because everything was changing so fast, we were talking about what was stepping up awake at night right there. For example, this is the time when all of a sudden you saw help wanted ads on the front of McDonald's and Chick-Fil-A, say, hey, we'll pay you $15 an hour to come work for us, because this was the time of the Great Resignation, and there were no workers in the United States.

It felt like, and a lot of our clients were feeling the pain. So we hit upon it. I said, you know what? We can help you do that and help you save some money. Yes. There's a little bit of offshoring because this company was a business process outsourcer, but it was applying our solution to a very real, current painful problem that was killing them.

And so we would hit that and we got to the point where, you know, it started off turning, taking a week to turn around these campaigns. We got so efficient at it, we were sending out communications within 24 hours after my talking to the president of English speaking cells. It was just turning around very quick. we also made some changes because I started to do the right.

No, no, that's not something you can necessarily replicate. But because of my background, I've been a senior low executive ever since I graduated from MBA school a long time ago. I just know how to talk from one senior executive to the other. And that was part of the tonality that we changed. can you replicate that?

Yes, you can replicate it from the standpoint that understand what your verticals and sub verticals are. Understand what their pain points are. Understand their vernacular. How do they talk? What terms do they use? Don't throw your industry jargon at them. Talk in terms that they can understand and connect the dots for them. Don't assume that because you present, hey, we have all these awards and we're the best at what we do.

Everyone says that you've got to tie it down to the grassroots level. This is how we can help specifically. and then in terms of being able to send that out, we happen to have a tool. at the time, we were using, Marketo, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners already use, or one of their competitors that allowed us to do that.

And so we were very quick, being able to send these communications out to our database and then track the results and see how it went. You know, what was interesting with that was when we made that shift, I actually have a page of screenshots where people actually thanked us. You don't get that very often as a marketer or the recipient of some communication that they didn't want to see because they're so busy, right?

This is great. Thank you very much.

Daniel Burstein: So that's a great example of reaching out to people in your database so that you can reach out to. Currently, one of the things you were talking about earlier sounded to me like account based marketing. Vaguely. And as I mentioned in the opening, sometimes of the count based marketing, we're a little too focused on the account, the business itself versus the people in it.

So I like this next lesson. You said track when your customer champions change jobs. So how did you do this and what did you learn?

Matthew Bowman: Okay, so, I've learned this because I made a habit of attending sales meetings. I learned so much from just listening. I always had a report I had to give on a weekly basis of how things are going with the support, with the sales enablement, etc., etc., etc. but a lot of it was just listening for ideas because they're the ones in front of customers every day.

And so I would listen for, hey, there's a challenge you're having was a problem we can solve over here that we can help them with or whatever. And in this particular case, this, I heard of a client who they had just changed jobs. And within a couple of weeks of starting a new job, they contacted us and said, hey, we want you to submit a bid.

Well, light bulb went off and we had my team do a deep dive on our database, and we had extensive data at that point, and I was comfortable with the quality of the data. And what we discovered is that in that industry.

Role, the exact stats. The executives that we were dealing with, they had a ten year of about three and a half years, and they have changed jobs. And 60 is our 61 or 62% of the time they would change jobs. Similar industry. Also on account that we were targeted. So I recognized that, hey, if there's something here, we can potentially proactively create serial clients.

And then the other element of this was when you from a business perspective, once you look at how much time, money and effort goes into developing a relationship with a business leader, the point that they select you, at least in the BW world where I compete, you know you're looking anywhere from 12 to 18 months and thousands upon tens of thousands of dollars in some cases, you know, taking them to events, getting a box booth for their special events or trying to quarter them all the things that you do over time.

that's a huge investment. And once you get them as a client, it's criminal just to let that go. Now, here's how it falls apart. Your salespeople typically are going to be very good. So they'll to the veteran salespeople, they're going to monitor that and see when the person changes jobs. LinkedIn does that for you already. But the the problem is if they go to account owned by another sales rep, odds are that sales rep is very busy trying to meet their own number.

They don't take the time to say, hey, this person just joined your account. Let me introduce you. That doesn't happen. you know, not criticism of anybody, but it's just because they're. Everyone's so busy. And so we started to monitor that, and we systematized it so that we knew exactly when people in our database of 100,000 plus were changing jobs.

And then we would immediately and automatically send out a follow up. We alert the new salesperson, say, okay, this is the person that just changed jobs that you just inherited. Here's all the opportunities that they were tagged you. here's all the conferences and events and webinars that they've been to. Here's the former account manager or salesperson we had the relationship we connected to here.

Would you introduce your prospect to this other sales rep? And the effects were phenomenal because not only was it scalable almost to the point where we actually reduced our sales cycle because, you know, much of the burden of the time involved is developing a relationship of trust. Well, if that's already there, you just shorten your cell cycle significantly.

It also reduce the amount of cost. our cost of goods sold from a sales perspective, that dramatically reduced that. But like 57% of our members. Right.

Daniel Burstein: Well, let's talk about some of those numbers. And I wonder if you could help us understand how do we track a tactic like this to understand its effectiveness? Because, for example, I interviewed Melinda march, the CMO of Prosper Marketplace, on how I made it a marketing, and one of her lessons was know the numbers and how your work impacts them.

And I worry sometimes marketers here that we're so focused on performance marketing, and if something doesn't show an instant result in an instant ROI, we're kind of scared because we can't track it and show it so easily. Well, you talked about some really good points like, hey, we've put a lot of money into these relationships with these potential customers, right?

That was a while ago. To a different account. Now we're reaching out to them. And you said good things. I could shorten the sales cycle, but I'd also imagine sometimes, you know, people when they first hit a new job, they might not be, you know, purchasing ten right away. They might first be getting the lay of the land.

So it's not necessarily an instant return. So I wonder how do you track something like this for effectiveness? Because I think as marketers sometimes we're just so like eyes down now and just performance marketing only.

Matthew Bowman: Like, anything is doing more than one way to do it. Here's how we did it. we set up some customized reports and sales. Navigator of major, and we had a specific job change report. you got it to the point where it would run. We would just export that. And we had the list of this week's list of executive who would change jobs.

And the report also shows who associated account manager or salesperson was and we also did some customization. And when it pushed it into our CRM, it also showed us all the opportunities events that I've been tagged. So we automated as much of it as we could and gradually sales Navigator integration for a lot of CRM. So this is something if you have a somewhat tech savvy team, you can figure out and pull that off.

That's the majority of the work right there. Then what we did is once this would come in first to the CRM, we automated these alerts and then we would just populate the work email with, here's all the information you need to know and push that out to. The next step we did is we automated the reports. We came up with an exception report.

we would send these things out as they happened real time with them, on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. This exception reports were being sent out to their sales managers with their own copy because it was very quickly recognized. This is a goldmine that we're sitting on because, you know, we're we're saving money or shortening cycles.

We can very easily create serial customer, especially with our very happy customers. And there's absolutely no reason for a salesperson to not jump all over this within 24 hours of being notified. And you would service exception reports to the managers and said, okay, well, here's the person that as a decision maker used to be here, and now we're here.

And, this was sent to your sales rep on this date. And as of this day, we have not followed up either. The sales managers were obviously motivated to jump all over it because this was a heck of a lot more effective than chasing leads in a trade show.

Daniel Burstein: Yes. Hit it where they are. so that's a great example of just showing some sometimes, you know, we just talk about these ideas and so it's a good idea. Well, now how do I act on that. That's a great example of putting it to process. And I want to ask you another one of those type of questions, because another one of your lessons was to interview your customers, and you pretty much already told us a story, how you happened to be in that meeting.

You got that great testimonial from a customer. But I wonder, how do you systematize that practice? Right. Because, and sometimes I think when when we're talking about interviewing customers, it's not as hard as some companies think. And let me tell you why I interviewed Kristen Zhivago, before. And she is she's a great expert in this. And one of the things she often says is within 5 or 10 interviews, you can start seeing patterns from customers, and you don't have to interview every single customer.

but you still do have to set up a process. You happen to be in that meeting as you talked about. You had those last five minutes, you jumped in, you asked that question. That was great. But then how do you take that and not just have it be a one off? How did you systematize it across your organization?

Matthew Bowman: There's a couple of different circulating thoughts on that idea. One is to do surveys. You know, there's the voice of the customer. Those certainly have their value. And I certainly recommend getting that very valuable. But what those voice of customer surveys lacked is your ability to do what you're doing with me, which is you hear something interesting, and then all of a sudden you're going down another path that you did not intend, and you're asking questions, and all of a sudden you're finding out this customer is well-spoken.

They have an amazing story. I would desperately love to get to them on a webinar or in front of clients or something like that. So there's a human element. And by the way, I always have fun interviewing clients. I really enjoy that aspect of my job. we were just once a quarter. We interviewed one for each of the verticals that we were going after.

And, I agree with your other guest. You do start to recognize patterns in everything after a while, but, you know, frequently and exponentially, the odds are frequently you're going to hear a story this like, how can we have not been talking about this yet? And it's a great story. Another example is with my previous employer. we went up to the contact center, which for that company, that's their product or is a contact center.

And, I learned that what we had done was find a new way to generate sales for this beverage company. And the guys in Starbucks, you know, we're doing it. You just revamped how our client generates money, and they've generated I forget the numbers. It was quite a large percentage growth, in revenue as well. We lower the cost.

It's like, gosh, this is a big story. We're not telling this. so there's those kinds of elements of it as well is the same thing with my current employer. as I interview our clients and subsequent account managers, and I'm hearing so many stories that have not been circulated of amazing efficiencies, turnarounds during recessions and all kinds of amazing results, that they're just dying on the line because no one thought to ask the questions and to publish it.

And then the next piece, which you may or may not ask me about, is once you get that there's a rule of five, there's five things you can do with that information. Put it on your website, put it in a blog, look what's in the paper, what you get their permission. They become a resource for sales, referrals. sign them up at a trade show or a conference to have them speak about their experience.

There's so many ways to, leverage that information.

Daniel Burstein: And I like what you said to comparing it to surveys. So this is something I did earlier in my career. I would interview customers. And one of the differences, like with a survey, surveys are good, they're helpful. But like you're putting a lot of the onus on them, right? They got to go. They got to fill it out.

They got to do these things with companies. I worked out when we would interview customers. It wasn't just getting the information, it was partly making them feel special, like they were a star to get interviewed, to go to a nice dinner, you know, we bring them to a big industry event, we do it there, and then there's a different human dynamic that happens.

And like you said, it's two, three, four levels down. We're doing the follow up questions where you really find the gold. So I love that. I obviously I love interviewing, I'm talking, but I love that lesson for everyone get past just, you know, get past that digital screen all the time and actually talk to human beings. and in the first half of our episode, we talk about some lessons you learned from the things you made, which we did the second half.

We are going to talk about human beings. We're going to talk about lessons you learn from people that you collaborated with. but first I should mention that the How I Made It in Marketing podcast is underwritten by Mic Labs. I the parent organization of marketing. Sure, you can build your artificial intelligence strategy with an AI quick Win intensive from Mic labs.

Learn more at Intensives organic labs I a.com that's intensives that MSE labs ai.com to get direct help building out your artificial intelligence strategy to better serve your customers and improve your marketing results. All right, let's take a look at some lessons you learn from people you work with. you mentioned and if I butcher any names, please correct me.

You mentioned Melina, Victoria montoya, the marketing, operations and performance at Teleperformance and Liana Negra, solely, global senior Salesforce administrator, also at Teleperformance. And the lesson you learned was watch for unintended consequences of strategic initiatives. So what were the unintended consequences and how did you learn to watch for them.

Matthew Bowman: By the way? Good job and pronouncing their names. Thank you. So we had been given the task as we grow as a company, and as my role continued to grow, you know, there was a big company there for 150,000 employees. and we had marketing teams and sales teams in six different regions around the world. Each of those regions had their own CEO and their own way of using data.

Now, they the company had been able to get everybody under the same CIA. But that doesn't mean there was any uniformity in how they reported. And when you're a publicly traded company, you're trying to do roll up reports or try to be your data driven decision makers. You can't have five different ways of identifying an opportunity or a marketing generated lead.

you had to come to some unification. Well, as we went about that, you know, the easy approach would have been, okay, this is how we're going to go do it. We're going to form a little executive committee. And, these are now the definitions for the stages of a marketing and sales cycle. This is how we're going to track opportunities and is forced upon everybody.

When you quickly learn that doesn't work because you get to the point is unintended consequences where you make a decision that you think is good and it's a try that you think is going to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish, but you're creating more work down the road because you did something that you had no idea it was going to do.

and, you know, that could take the form of creating an awful lot of work for somebody in one region. Or it could be, oops, we just messed up another report we already had because we changed this field in our CRM, and now we just brought two reports trying to create this global roll up report. That happened a lot.

And so we went through and we kind of discovered it. And it was both of them combined who do the database better than me at the time. they were like, okay, well, this is the decision we're going to make. Here's a domino effect. And we had to start doing that every time before we ever called a decision on how we were going to ultimately roll up our database and create a uniform set of definitions and, reporting templates and everything.

Daniel Burstein: All right, so this is a challenge as old as time, at least as old as sales and marketing time. Right. How do you get sales to update the CRM? And so I wonder, you know, you talked about interviewing customers to better understand customers, to serve them. Our other employees, yes, they're employees of the company. They are internal customers as well.

And I wonder how your sales experience helped inform this. And while you're thinking of that, I want to mention too, like, you know, we can think internal employees, well, we just tell them to do the thing and then they will do the thing. But they are human beings with their own free will, and it will not happen. And I was reminded of this.

I did a case study about a consulting group. Right. That really had a hard time. They were trying to, you know, a consulting group. Your employees are so key to your value proposition. Now, they had to find a value proposition so that those consultants understood why they should share on social media, ultimately help grow their personal brand. But then, you know, the whole the whole organization grew.

They were able to grow web traffic by getting those key people out there. So I wonder if you can give us a sense of, from your sales experience, one, how you're able to empathize and kind of communicate to that sales force, and then also to, tell us why you aren't in sales anymore.

Matthew Bowman: Okay. To the questions. Okay. So, you're right. Whenever you're doing something like this, you have to take into account human tendency. People are busy, especially salespeople. They're coin operated as they should be, and they're going to be doing those things that make them money. And if it's just an administrative thing, you have a limit of how much you're going to do before they balk and say, I'm, not doing that anymore.

So it was a combination of things. One of them was we automated as much as we possibly could. so when we did come to a consensus on here's our unified global set of definitions and reporting, and all the CEOs and all the heads of sales were on board and they agreed with it. We then programed our CRM so that all of those variables would be accepted.

We were what used to be an open text field was now called our menu. and, you know, certain reminders are just built in so that help with the uniformity of the data entry. But the thing is, when you get a bunch of people who are like, this is all new, I'm not doing this. I got to go to a client call.

Well, how we overcame that element of it was because I had a very good relationship with, the president of sales for the English speaking world, who we're still friends today. The guy is a fantastic guy.

This was part of his initiative. Now, he simply stated, and this is one of those top down things you have to have for support is. And he said this several times, the sales meetings, if it's not in our CRM, it doesn't happen to you. You're not getting paid a commission on it. That got everyone's attention very quickly. That's a bit dramatic.

It was actually his idea to do it, but I saw the effectiveness of it and everyone sat up very quickly.

Daniel Burstein: And okay, before we start talking about sales here, you mentioned that you were the head of sales and marketing at one point and then decided that sales should not be part of your role. Do you want to take advantage of also that human element of that? You want to take us into that?

Matthew Bowman: All right. Yeah.

So let me take a step back just a little bit. I did not start my career in marketing and sales. Believe it or not, I actually started my career in finance and accounting. This was it. My degree out of college. It wasn't till I got my MBA a few years later that I was going through, and I realized as I was thinking about your marketing classes, I found this fascinating.

You know, this is kind of, science. And, art combination that I really like. from there that put me as head of sales and marketing for a couple of, Inc 500 SAS companies. And, when you're involved with sales, you're on the road a lot. You become a road warrior in many industries. And I was, at the time, my twins were about two, two and a half years old, and I had just come home from like a two, two and a half week trip.

We had been gone the entire time. I took a red eye to get home. climbed into bed about 130, 2:00 in the morning. Shortly after I got comfortable, one of my twins got up and started to cry. So I haven't seen my son in two and a half weeks. So I just went down and, kept the light off, went to check on him.

And the sweetest thing happened when I walked into that dark room and he saw me, he stopped crying and he got a little smile on his face as I got near his crib. He held up his hands and touched my face to make sure I was real. There was that very second I decided I was going to do a career path change and focus exclusively on marketing, because I didn't have to travel as much.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. You know, so when we talk about some time for marketing, we get so frustrated with sales. Just fill out the darn CRM and work these leads or good leads and all these things. It is always good to have that empathy. I remember I worked with a company that had, quarters that started a month later, than than is typical.

And because of that, October 31st is a quarter closed. And I always felt bad for the sales reps because they were trying to close that business and they're out with like, their kids trick or treating, but they're still trying to close that deal this quarter, you know, and it's like you got to empathize with them a bit. speaking of priorities.

So there's priorities. And in life there's priorities and work. one thing, you mentioned you learned was to prioritize with the race method of decision making, which is return, amplitude, conviction and energy. You learning this from junior fellows. So how did you learn this lesson?

Matthew Bowman: yeah. Now, the race model for decision making is a really good model, particularly when you don't have all the data and you're not quite there to that quote unquote data driven decision making department. it helps you prioritize which projects that you have. And it's based upon the very well established philosophy that 80% of your results come from 20% of your programs.

That's true of marketing and sales and operations is true. And customer service. so how do you decide which of the 20% of your initiatives do you want to focus on? so let's just break it out. You already said what it is race return, projects have a clear return on investment and impact should be prioritized to much higher as you're evaluating.

We have limited budget, limited resources. What are we going to focus on. So that's one amplitude. It's the broader the scalability of the reach of the project the higher the priority. So if it's real narrow it's going to benefit a little bit, probably drop that priority. But if it's one where it's obvious it's going to scale easily, it's going to have a broad impact.

Again, height, the priority on that project. see conviction initiatives with fewer uncertainties and more predictable outcomes mean less moving parts. The more likely that program is to succeed again, increase the prioritization of that project. And then there's energy. And this is the only one that goes the opposite direction. Projects are require less energy and effort and have a higher chance of success.

So the more energy it takes, do you prioritize it? The less energy it takes to pull it off. Skyrocket that one up. Now, if I may, related to this, there's one more element of this that I think is important to the discussion of something that I've learned that's executed on it. So this tool will help you identify those projects that have a higher likelihood of success.

I've been in my career long enough. I've seen a shift in corporate America. Well, global corporate companies where when I first got out of college, it was not uncommon to go through several day orientation before a bigger company. My first gig was at various lawsuits in Palo Alto, and even though I was just a low level accountant at the time, they still spent an awful lot of time with me and my incoming class.

This is what it means to work at various. This is what you're expected of. You know, it's kind of like we're corporate citizens. Here's what we expect from you. Honesty, integrity, here's the values that we incorporate. And then as you got promoted, they try okay, here's how to be an executive. Here's how to lead the challenges. A lot of the big business schools, you know even Stanford where I went in some cases they don't necessarily teach you how to execute the teach you how to develop strategy.

But everybody comes up with strategy. I'm going to maybe misquoted. I forget who it was. As one of the big consulting firms talked about the percentage of strategies that fail, it was something like 80% is ridiculously large. And that was because people, leaders aren't taught how to execute. That's where the race program comes in handy. But the key thing here, I'm driving this all this is being able to differentiate between those initiatives that you can call this like a pencil lab, where the team has the skills, resources and everything they need to pull off this project.

A that's great. Those are easy to do. That's the other ones where a lot of people don't. A lot of leaders don't recognize my team doesn't have all the skills we may need to hire somebody. We may need to upskill some of our, people to pull this off. And we're looking at how do dramatically change the behavior of our team to pull this off.

Those have to be managed in a very different way with their different expectations. they take longer, the measurements you use are going to be different because you're having to measure other new behaviors being put in place. Once you figure that out, you'll be a much more successful executive of any type.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. And, I mean, one thing you're talking about, too, I think partly just comes from experience. You see, so many things fail. You kind of understand when they fail, and hopefully you get to point to their succeed. And you have one interesting experience that I wanted to mention. You talk about going to Stanford, but even before that, you grew up in Silicon Valley and you were around some pretty accomplished people who were accomplishing I mean, they they created what Silicon Valley is.

They created probably what the tech industry and many other things are in America today. And I wonder if, if any of that, if you realize it or even don't realize that was baked into you at that young age that then helped you go on in your career, anything that you were around? Because for me personally, you know, I didn't really grow up around the marketing industry, but I was a paper boy when I was like nine years old.

I started, and at the time, I never would have made the connection. But I realized that was back in the day when, you know, now it's like there's an auto charge on your credit card for, you know, a paper subscription, right? Easy peasy. Like when I was a kid, I was like, sure I do door to door, knock on every door and ask them for like the dollar ten or whatever it was every week, you know?

And if it went really well, I'd get $1.20 and get a tip or whatever it was, you know? And so, I mean, that taught me how to make an ask, you know, how to board it differently. I didn't even realize I was probably experimenting with different ways to do the ask and those sorts of things. And so sometimes I feel like we have these kind of foundational, learnings that happen before we even get to college or grad school or that first job that we don't realize that we're baked into us.

So with you, I mean, that is just such a phenomenal experience. I, I would have to think, to grow up in Silicon Valley at that time. was there anything you think you learned from, from that, that we could learn from?

Matthew Bowman: Yes, definitely. so Silicon Valley, you know, there's a lot of amazing places on this planet. Silicon Valley was so fascinating for us to grow up when I did, born and raised there. four houses down was Bill Landers, one of the Apollo eight astronauts. Now, Silicon Valley is full of people who quite literally have changed the world or made their mark on history.

Bill Landers was one of those people that meeting people like that. It's a fascinating experience, particularly as an impressionable boy at the time, to hear and learn about this guy and, you know, talk to his kids and, it it opened my eyes to something that we did as a country that was really cool, which is beyond just a mass space program that opened my eyes that subsequently that sometimes art and science do work together to create some really amazing things.

You know, I did it connected to marketing at the time, but it opened my eyes to that. And I started studying science, and I started to go to other paths. It was very interesting, and it did change me, in a number of subsequent changes and course corrections later. I'm in the MBA program and I'm getting my graduate certificate in marketing it.

I'm starting to see, you know, there's an arts, the art, creative side of marketing. And then there's a scientific side that the neuroscience of selling. That's part of this. And watching those two blend together was just fascinating. and I absolutely loved it. And I still do, I still study the neuroscience of selling. I actually took the on their sales training program because it teaches you all of, how people think and how people are wired.

But at the same time, I went and I got certified in Six Sigma is that's kind of a science side of being able to manage large groups and large programs. you know, I did my post-graduate work at Stanford, so, yeah, it very much shaped my future career path. And the things that I find interesting.

Daniel Burstein: I mean, one of the things I think about when it comes to Silicon Valley, to not just those accomplishments, I mean, Apollo as well, is the scrappiness factor. There is a certain scrappiness factor of like, let's figure out how to get this thing done and maybe change the world with it. That's interesting when it comes to your next lesson, you said generate buzz with guerilla marketing.

And I think of guerilla marketing. I think of scrappy. You've talked a lot about some of kind of the bigger kind of corporate initiatives, bigger, more structured initiatives. Guerilla marketing can be a bit shoot from the hip. you said you learned about it from Paul O'Hara and Rory Starks. I wonder how you learned this from Paul and Rory and, how how you used it.

Matthew Bowman: Okay, so both Rory and Paul are British citizens. There were colleagues of mine previously, great guys. And we just had a blast together. We traveled a lot. We were literally run around the world. We run to China all over Europe and India. we we took tens of hundreds of thousands of miles, in the air, pulling together, those are extraordinarily smart.

And, they understand people really well, and they're both really good at finding loopholes, but ways that connect with people that are kind of outside the box. because I had a graduate certificate in marketing, graduate degree in marketing, basically, that was very much formalized. You know, there's the science side of me. It's going to follow this process, and we're going to go down this path and everything's going to work out wonderfully well.

You know, that's great for about five seconds. And then reality hits and you're finding that. All right. Well, I did anticipate having my budget cut in half of the layoff. A few people, even though I'm still responsible for the same number that I was before. it wasn't anticipating, the chatter was that I used to be completely oversaturated and people are sick of it.

And now I'm getting diminishing returns and all these programs, and we're a publicly traded company, so. So I'd have to come up and meet our numbers. There's just no excuse not to meet your numbers. You want to keep your job right? So, they came up with some really innovative ways of using social media to be able to reach out and engage prospective customers.

they also came up with some really cool ways of getting people to an event. When there's webinar and conference fatigue, and doing organic, grassroots kind of growth, finding ways to help your target audience feel like it was their idea. This is their initiative. they came up with some fascinating ways to do it. And I would tell you this is correct.

I'm going to run with this, and I try to scale it. And, yeah, we're both of them are very scrappy and, very bright and are able to come up with these really cool, ways of reaching target audiences.

Daniel Burstein: Could you give us a specific example of maybe one of those most impressive campaigns? Is that stuck out to you to kind of give our audience ideas for guerrilla marketing? Because I think when it comes to guerrilla marketing, people think of one of two things. It's either simple thing, like you said, just, well, we'll post stuff to social media and then people will act.

But, you know, organic social media is very hard to break through. you know, the major platforms aren't making money from organic social media, right? and they'll go on the flip side and they'll do something totally radical that might even hurt or destroy the brand, like a protest that just isn't isn't a good fit for the brand, like a fake stage protest or something like that.

So I wonder, can you add, if you any thoughts come to mind about one of the specific campaigns that really stuck out to you, and how it broke through the noise?

Matthew Bowman: Yes, I can give this one because frankly, this technique is probably been overused at this point. I feel uncomfortable saying what they're currently doing because I don't want their great ideas to be, you know, used by everybody else. This is not my place to give those away.

Daniel Burstein: Absolutely.

Matthew Bowman: One of them that works, a handful of years ago, there was a very large international company that we wanted to do business with, based in the Netherlands. And, try as we might, we just could not get their attention. We tried everything, and we at the time had the budget to do all kinds of crazy things, and nothing was working.

So, my friend, Paul, the, She decides to do some research about this company, and he finds how they become a little innovative with the digital aspect of the retail business. and so he found an article written about it, and then he repurposed it. He posted it, posted his own comments. Now, he had just reached out, connected on LinkedIn with some decision makers he wanted to meet with.

So he wrote it. It was very much an ego stroke. There was. And you guys are granted this amazing stuff you're doing. You didn't write it for the world. You wrote it for them to read the tag. Those people on LinkedIn now they start to take each other. And, he reached out and was finally able to get a conversation.

That first conversation led to an opportunity and listened about a year, year and a half. They were a client.

Daniel Burstein: Well, one of the nice things about that this is not a mass message like, I know, I mean, man, I get so many LinkedIn outreaches, right? And at least make an effort, at least personalize it. That's the great thing about LinkedIn. It's this beautiful database where, you know, all of a sudden people are choosing to update all this information about themselves and telegraph it to the world, like you remember before LinkedIn, there were these database companies, of course, who still exist, where they would have to manually try to figure this out, call around and try to figure out where do you work.

Now let's update that. Where do you work now? Everyone's sharing that with the world. They're share everything they care about. If you're going to market to them on organic social media, at least understand them and try to target it to them. yes. Let's talk about one more lesson here. This was from Amit Shankar. Does, you say form a positive and productive atmosphere to optimize team performance?

You were talking about working at a public company. You said, hey, we still got to hit those numbers, right? It can be pretty stressful. So how do you make sure, even in that stressful environment, that you've got a positive and productive atmosphere for your team?

Matthew Bowman: Indeed. And that is the one name you butchered? I'm sure that Matthew.

Daniel Burstein: Bowman, that was so easy. I know I had to I had to butcher something.

Matthew Bowman: Yeah. So, Shankar Das, Thank you. Yeah. We're still good friends. from him, I learned the importance of true leadership. You know, on LinkedIn, you can't spend a day without seeing some meme that shows you here's what a leader is, and here's what a manager is. And, you know, the managers got the staff by the seat in there, beating them over the head, over, you know, whatever.

And the leader saying follow the way. It's also great metaphorical things. But so you put it in practice and. When you're working for the 16th largest company on the planet, it comes with certain elements of it. and, this is true, I guess, of most companies, when you're a team leader.

Nowadays, it's very likely that they you get distracted by company politics, by, you know, artificial deadlines, by, a changing environment that makes it very difficult to be productive because people are constantly stressed about, you know, vaguely disguised threats, as, just the things that everyone, I'm sure can relate to that they have witnessed at one point or the other in their career, or they're experiencing it right now.

being part of Olmert's team, she learned or he sheltered us. he wasn't trying to keep information from us. That's different. she protected us. She would negotiate more reasonable timelines when something was a really stupid request, you would just outright say no. You would take that risk as a leader to protect us. Because you recognize I'm not going to set my team up for failure.

And all of this bouncing back and forth with different priorities, artificial fire drills, those kinds of things that are becoming more and more prevalent in today's business environment. Those are all productivity killers. They're all morale killers. and, you know, everyone knows that if you're going to have a highly productive team, they need the environment where they can be, effective, productive, and you're doing things to help their morale.

So not only would he shelter us from all that noise and only pull us in when absolutely necessary, when the expert marketer that he was, he would really reposition that well for us. And he didn't repeat it the way he heard it, he would reposition it in a way that it came across positive. And, then he was really good at just doing the one on one to make sure we were okay during stressful times, and we had to work long, late hours.

it's like, how are you doing? Can we do anything? In fact, there was one time, I don't know if I still, I was stressed, you know, we hadn't taken damage in this case because it was in the pandemic. We had to take the vacation in two years, and, we were exhausted from working six days a week.

and we were accomplishing some amazing stuff. We were exhausted, and, you could see it on my face, and it's like that. Oh, I'll talk to you right now. I'm heads down. Just let me do my job. Well, gee, there's these are squishy balls, so I have a little smiley face on them. They're foam, and you can squeeze them to get rid of the stress.

He sent me a whole bag. it made me laugh. It's like, okay, this guy's a great leader. So that's a really important lesson. I think when we're dealing with today's environments, particularly when there's an awful lot of leaders who have not received an awful lot of formal training on effective leadership. And you kind of see firsthand some of these, less than desirable practices of, a hammer instead of a carrot and, learning how to protect your team from that so that they can be other optimal best whenever possible is a valuable lesson.

Daniel Burstein: Well, let's talk about protecting our team. Let's kind of take this full circle back from where we began, where you mentioned, okay, you were tasked over time with generate $1 billion. How did you communicate and manage up about that overall project and the results to kind of keep the heat off your team, so to speak? Because when you talk about, hey, there's all these fire drills, people are asking all this stuff of us.

I mean, a lot of those reasons are because they probably don't have a good understanding of what's going on inside that team. And the tough thing about being in marketing and sales, too, but in marketing, everyone thinks they're a marketer, right? I, I had a colleague, I love it, he used to say, you know, the CEO is never taking a shower in the morning, and he's got some idea for JavaScript.

Not in most organizations. Right. But boy, he'll have an idea for marketing. And, you know, used to feel, you know, kind of, I don't know, maybe a little offended by that, but then I had a chance in my career to work on earnings calls. And, boy, if you're an earnings calls, you see why these senior leaders in public companies, you know, have to kind of bring this heat down because, man, the heat they get.

And it blew my mind earlier in my career. Fast growing company growing at whatever clip it was 17%. But if it wasn't growing at 19%, and the street predicted that because there was, you know, some foreign exchange differences, boy, were they getting heat left and right from these analysts. And I'm thinking, what are you talking about? This company just grew 70%.

That's amazing. Right. But that is the reality of a public company. So I wonder if you've, you know, when we go back to kind of at, hey, generate $1 billion, how did you then over time communicate up, communicate to the right people in the organization who ultimately had to report out to analysts, had to report out publicly to board and all these things, to kind of keep that heat up, you and say, like, hey, we got this.

It's probably not an instant plan. It's a long term plan, but stick with us. This plan is going to work.

Matthew Bowman: It's not an easy answer, nor is it a short overall, abbreviated as much as possible. Part of that started before I was ever given that assignment. In developing a relationship of trust with the President of Sales for the English speaking world, that came through having integrity, particularly on the report. It was having integrity, being data driven. The old adage is if you don't have data, you just have another opinion and you're not welcome at the table.

So having as much data as possible, being a good listener, knowing that, like you just said, president of sales for each speaking world, he was under a great deal of pressure. So it wasn't fair. So he was a realistic. But knowing that I had his back and that would do everything in my power to help him reach this goal, you know, and that this wasn't a one and done that was developed over many years of knowing him or flying all over the world together and having dinners together.

And, you know, we got to know each other. So the very first part of the answer was developing that before this ever happened, Then the second part is it's.

Any time there's going to be setbacks. Right. And so any time there's a setback, this communicating it effectively no surprises. Your, your, your bosses should never be surprised, particularly in a meeting by something that you're going to say. so if it's not good news you've got to communicate that upfront. Don't surprise your boss with that. And of course you've got to have the answer.

okay. Well, using our data, this is where we fell down. This is our approach to fix it. Now, here's some of the ideas that we can serve to, fix it so they know you're not just a one trick pony. You're thinking about this theory like the business executives that you are.

Daniel Burstein: Well, let me jump in and ask, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer? You mentioned a few things there. We've certainly talked about several things. From all the different lessons you've had in your career. If you had to break it down, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Matthew Bowman: I just listed some of them. Let me put it this way. I think the answer to that is evolving, because I do ask me that two years ago, I was giving you a slightly different answer than I would do that. But the business environment has changed. Companies. See our CFO, CEOs, everybody, they're under a lot more cost and financial pressure today than we were few years ago.

that translates to you directly. So from my perspective, to be a successful marketing executive, first you need to learn to think more like that. Communicate better with your CFO, your CEO of your CFO, etc.. and then with that in mind, the traits that I think beyond just knowing your craft is being a data driven decision maker who being good at it, like I mentioned earlier, having integrity.

If they know you have integrity, they're not going to necessarily come on the carpet as much when you present your numbers, have intellectual curiosity. you hear something that's intriguing or a problem that someone talks about. Why don't they answer to it? you know, particularly when you're in a sales meeting or a chief revenue officer and they just mention casually, it's a struggle that they're having, and maybe they'll even footedness in that many words.

But you recognize we're not doing X, or we're not effectively getting V as well as we should. We said, hey, the last time we talk, I sense this, I have a potential solution for that. the ability to prioritize the 8020 rule that I mentioned earlier, be good at that. Of course, the ability to get others to see your vision and to buy into it if you're not good with numbers, get good at numbers.

And then the last piece where we just was the ability to shelter your teams and company, unnecessary company drama and politics. Some of it's going to work its way through. It's inevitable, but your team will recognize appreciate it. There will be more loyal to you. They're more likely to work harder for you. Then you're going to achieve better results.

The more you can keep a focus on your sense and be doing. Generate the best results.

Daniel Burstein: Well, I appreciate all the time you've taken with us today, Matthew. Thank you for sharing all the lessons and stories from your career.

Matthew Bowman: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Daniel Burstein: And thanks to everyone for listening.

Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it and marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing rpa.com and.