Steve sits down with Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift, which makes use of investigative interviews to help marketing teams find more customers. Their process gives clarity and consensus on why customers are choosing your brand; allowing you to develop fresh messaging, campaign and copy ideas; and overall offer better insights on how to spend marketing dollars.

Ryan also serves as a Senior Marketing Specialist for the software company Rewind on a contractual basis, helping them with messaging, content, PR, and branding as they build out their core team. Finally, Ryan is the Principal at RPG Marketing, a boutique firm focused on content and product marketing.

Listen in as Ryan explains the fascinating and often frustrating gap between the pro-research and anti-research camps and how to speak the customer’s language in order to close that gap. He breaks down the principles of effective qualitative customer research in helping to sketch out a roadmap of your ideal customer’s buyer journey.

Ryan also speaks on the unique opportunities that today’s B2B landscape brings when it comes to letting one’s marketing creativity shine. He encourages marketers to embrace their curiosity and follow their instincts, while at the same time taking care to validate and iterate their ideas to cut through the noise.

Key Takeaways:

● Qualitative customer research is all about understanding the depths of how and why buyers buy.

● Research is the foundation of marketing. It helps inform the choices you have to make. When it comes to building a strong customer base, get crystal clear on their path to purchase. That will help you create focus and tension around what they want, while following a roadmap that guides them toward a decision to buy that feels natural.

● There are so many more opportunities to be creative in today’s B2B space. Embrace your curiosity and don’t take answers at face-value. Get seduced by your own ideas, but always take care to research and verify. A bias to action is good; but, is that action worth your time?

Connect with Ryan Paul Gibson on LinkedIn.

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‍Steve Goldhaber:  Hello everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26 for another episode of interesting B2B marketers. I'm joined today by Ryan Paul Gibson. Welcome to the podcast. 

Ryan Paul Gibson: Thanks for having me. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right. I'm looking forward to jumping right into your stories. You've been in the B2B space for a long time, right? Like 20 some years.

Ryan Paul Gibson: Yeah, 20 years. I had a brief detour as a TV and radio reporter for both three years. When I got to the end of my first sort of Senior position. I was like, “Is this what I want? Do I wanna do this?” And it was really, I just burned out that industry. I've worked in hospitality and I've been in it since I was a teenager working for my parents. So I was 30 at the time. I think I just need a break. So I pivoted into broadcasting, which was amazing. And it wasn't my calling, but I learned a ton. I learned a lot that I applied today. So minus a little break, 20 years. 

Steve Goldhaber: Nice. All right. So like we always do, we're jumping right into the stories and the first one you're gonna share with us has to do with an environment where an acquisition has just taken place. Is it seamless? Is it not seamless? I will turn it over to you to tell the story.

Ryan Paul Gibson: Well, they're supposed to be in theory, right? 

Steve Goldhaber: In the boardroom, yes. They're always seamless on board.. 

Ryan Paul Gibson: In a boardroom where everything makes sense. And there's no outside market forces that impact anything. I mean, they're a great path to growth, right? If you can find those opportunities, I've been working with a company that has found one. But the theory is that if it fits into the product portfolio, this is a software company or even if it's a service line, because it happens and sometimes we require service companies, it should fit nicely. We have a sales and marketing engine and everything should take off and we should see some revenue come in at the forecast. Put in our annual or quarterly plans, and that did not happen here. So I got tapped alongside one of their product marketers to understand why. And it actually would've been the first time that this company had conducted what I call qualitative customer research, which is really understanding the depths of how and why buyers buy to keep it very simple. So that was sort of the impetus for that. And it was a very fun project and we learned. 

Steve Goldhaber: I'm amazed that sometimes marketers are in this like research or no research camp. Like you talk about doing research and it comes up as such a exotic creature. Like what? Like we would pay to get people's opinions to shape our roadmap. I feel like I started in the old school advertising world where to get to TV or print, you had to test, you would never foolishly spend media, so you would go to focus. And today, I think there's so much pressure on marketers to just launch and “ Hey, it's okay if you launch and it doesn't work, so let's course correct.” But do you get that? And you've got a really strong background in research. Do you encounter that where it's just kinda like some people, you really have to get them over? Over that hump of research is a strange, exotic thing. 

Ryan Paul Gibson: Yeah I get that. I think you define it nicely, which is the reason for research or no research camp. I think the reasons for that. There's a spectrum of, when I started in B2B, like I had to do it on my own. I had actually worked in a B2B to C play where I had to do all the customer research, but it was vital to our survival. And then when I went to B2B and I started working with companies, one of the things I'd first asked them, especially a lot of the technical lead founders, you know, So when you talk to the customers about “What's going on, what do they say?” And they looked at me like I'd asked them something in a different language, and I was always struck by that immediately. I still think of that moment today and as I've gone along my career, some companies do it and do it well. Some companies do it and don't do it. Some companies don't do it all. And for me, I always say, Steve, I think maybe it's some of it I think is maybe just how B2B has come up in the digital age, where you have a whole generation of marketers that have just had CRMs and seo and it's almost been handed to them on a silver platter and it's very new for them to try to understand the psychology and the rationales of buyers. I don’t know  if that's true or not but I think that's part of it. But I always look at marketing as trying to understand the market, and if I don't understand how and why a segment of a market is making decisions about a certain set of solutions or problems they have, it's gonna be really hard for me to influence their decision making process. And for me, a lot of that stems from the research. Where we spend our money in a go to market, right strategy. So, I dunno if that touches on or what you had in mind, but that's how I see things. 

Steve Goldhaber: It's interesting. You know I've done less research the more I've aged in my marketing career. And when I was doing more research, what was also interesting I noticed is that, of the group that were pro research, there were two subsets. I'm creating all these fake personas, which is fun, who knows if these personas exist, but I felt like it was people who did research as an insurance policy. So they had come up with an idea or a campaign. They wanted it validated so that if they rolled it out and it failed, they said, well, the research validated the idea so,  “I don't know what happened.” Then there were the people who were pro research learning mode. So it was like, I want them to tell me that our advertising campaign or our marketing program sucks because I want to be able to deconstruct it. And I felt like the larger the companies where I worked for really big clients, they were mostly in that research as an insurance policy camp. They didn't want to make a bad decision. I've seen that with the people who were more curious with research to really learn. They tended to be at the mid-market, smaller companies because they were like, “This is amazing.” “This totally takes us in a new direction. It's fascinating.” I don't know if that's just my unique perspective. I used to do a lot of, you know, “Hey, we're gonna spend five, 10 million on media.” So there was a lot of risk with that. And they didn't wanna put themselves in a position with a CEO who was like, “Hey, you've just spent 10 million, and I don't think it worked.” So, yeah, I don't know. I'm going on a tangent now. I'm reliving my research scars .

Ryan Paul Gibson:  I mean, I use the word de-risking myself. I think that's part of. But if it's de-risking because you wanna wash your hands of it, that's not how I see it. I see it as there's only so much money to go around. And if for people who have never sat in at a leadership table, the money is debated about where it goes across the company, not just into marketing, right? Like you have to make a case for why you should get more over, say, the development team who's trying to attract engineers, who get paid higher than God's. It's just like, you know, and for a good reason. They're figuring really important stuff out. But you have to make a case for, okay, I want to invest the capital of this company into these activities for these reasons. And these are the ways I've de-risked the decision of wasting our money doesn't mean I'm absolutely right. But that's true for anything in the business cuz it's a bet. It's a strategic bet in a market. You don't know if your product's gonna be fully adopted or your new feature or whatever, right? You do your best to make an educated guess. Where I lean more into the second camp you talk about, which is the learner camp. That's just my nature. I think that the more you understand about your buyer, the more you can use that as a competitive advantage for you in the market. Cause I guarantee you a lot of your competitors are not doing that. So if you can find out really unique things about how they're making decisions. Right. And if I may go back to the story that we talked about, one key thing we learned was the extent at which prospects were trying to build their own tools, because there were developers,or similar to the product we were selling, but we didn't know at which volume they were trying to do that. It was happening every single time, almost with every single person we talked to. We didn't realize that. And then when we looked at our marketing, we said “That's nowhere in our journey.” Like that pivotal point of where they learn that they can't execute on this thing that we can do better. We are nowhere to be seen. So if you learn these things, you can use them to your advantage. And then so when we counted for that doesn't happen, installs doubled within the first few weeks of the software product that we were working on. And it wasn't a fluke. The product marketing manager was very skeptical at first. Like, I don't know, let's wait a little bit longer to see if this is just like a bump in there. Yep. But year over year, not an anomaly, but it. We had just figured out one critical piece that we had missed. 

Steve Goldhaber:  You know, one thing I've taken away too, from when I've done research, is to use the language of the customer in simple things. We're sometimes so enamored with, “Oh, we're marketers. We know how to tell this story better than anyone else.” But when you start to hear repetitive language over and over again, use that language and just make it something that they identify with. I remember another marketer was sharing a story about them being a copywriter and they were telling me about their kind of methodology for understanding the pain of the customer. And they would go to product review sites and they would just listen and they would just empathize and they would use that same vocabulary. The marketing was just that much more effective. Not because like it was the copywriter who was a great copywriter, it was because they just related to the audience so much. So it's another way I've seen research work really well.

Ryan Paul Gibson:  Absolutely. They call that review mining right today. It's one of the best ways to start learning really quickly because customer research, depending on what you do, and there's surveys, there's one on one interviews, there's focus groups. Those can take time, right? And to distill, you know, the data reviews are there, whether it's your own or a third party like G2, right? Or whoever. All that is there for you to use and, and learn quickly about what people are saying about your product and, and earnest what they're saying.

Steve Goldhaber:  All right. Anything else about our first story before we jump into the second one?

Ryan Paul Gibson: Yeah, one more thing, like, was very interesting. As a marketer, I always like to understand how I influence everything from the moment where they think about a problem to when I'm on their consideration set to when they actually choose me as the vendor, right? So there's a lot to do there. There's a lot to sort of create awareness and attention and then create credibility, earn trust, be around when the timing is right for them to solve that problem because businesses aren't always immediately looking to solve a problem, right? They prioritize. So sometimes it's really good to understand, well, how can I be top of mind when they are ready and the business conditions are right. But one of the things we realized was they had in their annual operating plan, they wanted to go upmarket, which is what a lot of mid-size companies do. It's the dream. And for great reason. I understand why. What was very interesting though, is when we did the analysis of talking to the customers who fit that segment. And then we went back and looked at our marketing and we mapped the two of how they buy versus what we were doing. We had zero, we had nothing that spoke to this larger, higher lucrative segment, but in the ways that they consider products, right? Everything they did to consider a product, find it out, evaluate whether it was credible, we didn't have anything that spoke to a lot of different things, right? So that's why research to me is the foundation of marketing and always has been because then you start to figure out like, “Where do we actually throw in a dart and where choices are better than others? What are the tradeoffs we have to make?”  So yeah, that's I think, was a key learning for that company after we did that research.

Steve Goldhaber:  The swim upstream to bigger fish is always so fun because it always makes sense on paper, but it's what comes with it. It's the longer decision cycles. Well now this is gonna take eight meetings as opposed to three. Yeah. It's a hard pivot. All right. Going on to story number two. This one is all about within the construction technology space. You were put in an environment where there's a lot of sales going on, but no marketing. So tell us about that journey of kind of you getting in and, and what did you do to build that up?

 Ryan Paul Gibson: Yeah. This was a company where I ran marketing and I was their first senior hire. Construction's a very interesting vertical. It's one of those verticals, this is what the term I use, I'm not sure if other people use this term, but like legacy industries it is. So I think of finance, healthcare, and construction industries that have been around for hundreds of years. They often are very slow to change. They have very sort of traditional ways of doing things. And we were selling a piece of this company that still sells a piece of technology that's very new and was very ahead of its time for this industry. They had a sales team. They were doing okay. They had a director of sales that was phenomenal. Brought in 50% of the revenue, but that's not scalable, right? Like one person can't have every single meeting with every prospect and close every deal. It's just not feasible. So I was brought in to help build out a marketing team. They had a few already that reported to the CEO, but they wanted a marketer. And I live in the mindset of being aligned with sales. It's joined at the hip. I talk to the team every day. “How's it going? What are you hearing? What are your challenges?” Cause that's so vital because I come before they do, right? The work I put out is the first thing people see. And then if I do my job well, and sales is able to set things. And sort of knock 'em down, right as that's, it's so vital to have that pairing. But when I looked at the landscape around what we had to support them, we had nothing, no case studies, no buyer personas. I don't really use that term anymore. I usually use a term like average buying story or path to purchase. It's all the same thing though. It's like why are they buying, why would they be choosing us? What are the market forces and market conditions and the business problems and challenges that exist that they would turn to us? We had none of that intelligence. Right? “Where are they buying? How do we get in front of them? What are things they care about?”  So we had to start from scratch. Right? And for me, again, if we've been following the narrative, what to talk about, like to me it starts with the customer challenge I had as I kept asking for names. I didn't really get many. 

Steve Goldhaber: They didn't wanna share 'em or they didn't know? Or both? 

 Ryan Paul Gibson:  A bit of both. Other marketers might know, have shared this experience. There's often a lot of politics around who gets to talk to the customer and organizations, and I'm used to navigating that now. But not everyone probably is. Sometimes customer success wants to be the people that speak to customers. Sometimes sales say, “It's my account. I wanna have that touch point.” I understand, right. So I just care about at the end of the day why are people choosing and choosing us? I wasn't getting the names I wanted so I just started going through Salesforce myself, and I picked up the phone and it was very brash. But I'll tell you, Steve, like I have a budget that I need to spend. I need to hit certain dates in the calendar to achieve certain things and I wanna understand where I'm gonna put my money. So I started talking to customers myself, and it was very interesting. I was able to learn in a short period of time and then apply that to the marketing that we had. What's very interesting now is when I go back and look at this company's website and some market activities, stuff that I initiated then they're still doing today. So that's nice. It's a nice little touch, right? Because there was all this stuff, if we talk about buying journeys, we were focused, the sales team was focused on one specific persona, but in B2B there's often many people involved. There could be two or three people involved in a deal and evaluating a piece of software or some type of solution or some type of service. There was one key person that was involved in the deals the whole time. I know, because I went to Salesforce and I saw who they were and what their titles were but they never came up in conversations with the sales team when I went to go talk to them on the floor every day. Like, “Who is this person? Why is there credit? Why are they there half the time, their credit card, you showing up, I wanna go talk to this person.” I understand what they're thinking now is a key thing. That was a big piece that we figured out by talking to them. Yeah. We started putting in our marketing. 

Steve Goldhaber: How long did it take you to kinda take them from nothing into a place where you felt like, all right, we've got some of the basics in place.

Ryan Paul Gibson: It was tough. They were still in their early stages. They were transitioning into a new product out of some older products. We're not really landing in the market. Their whole thing, their piece technology was a sensor that went to concrete and attached to a phone, and you could see how concrete was curating real time. It was very like new technology for the industry at the time. But they'd started in a very scientific realm. So they were having to transition outta that and the CEO was leading marketing and they did well, but they were an engineer. I say that because it takes time sometimes to make the business case about why you want to invest in certain things, right? Because it's just not comfortable territory for people who don't have a marketing background, they get sales. I have a salesperson, maybe I can close a deal. Marketing's a bit more of a leap of face sometimes, and it's not always easy to connect the dots. But again, that's why I like to lean into understanding the path of purchase because if I can say, this sample size or this set of buyers, they do these things before they look at our product. So if I can focus on building awareness and tension around these things, and have our marketing sort of talk to these things, and the odds of them leaning into us when the time presents itself. That is much greater for our chances of success. So it’s probably been four to five months when I really started. I felt like we were starting to turn the corner around things, right? No longer than I thought but in a company that had never done marketing really in sort of a new way. It's actually not too bad.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it's a tough environment. I mean,there's the demand side of marketing, which is usually a pretty straightforward story cuz like you're essentially selling in a marketing channel. The other stuff, it can be challenging and sometimes you can get through it because you've got your head of sales saying, no, this is good stuff we need it. Other times the CEO might say, This is inherently a good long term decision. I need to build the brand, not just sell every quarter. Other people going back to the research world, validate it. When I did larger campaigns and put it in a couple markets, you could actually follow up and say, all right, “Well what do people think now?” So what's the pre and the post? And sometimes that was a great tool to validate people who have seen our marketing like this as opposed to those who didn't see it. I've always loved just the basic banner test control versus test, and you just serve one group. We used to serve like Red Cross banners, just like we would just use their banner to drive awareness of the Red Cross and that would be our group to test against. And it's just so powerful to say, “Look, we serve these audiences different messages and here's what they thought.”  

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, cool. I like the story. I like the world of construction, and I spent a little bit of time in that industry in a former life so that the construction world is fascinating. Especially now,  it's like the models post pandemic. Like, “Are people buying and building big buildings or do they not want that? Are they creating hubs?” It's a fascinating space. 

Ryan Paul Gibson: It was interesting because it really forced us to learn when you get back to who was in a deal and who cared, it forced you to understand what made sense to talk about because there were two critical people in a deal there. One was the user of the technology who was maybe someone on site with part of use putting concrete in place and running a team. Their challenges though, were much different than someone back at the office because on the site they wanted, they were just hoping people showed up. Right. The weather cooperates. Some of them had never even used a smartphone in their life, but the technology we were selling was dependent upon Bluetooth tech B. Some of them had never even seen an iPhone, so part of our marketing was onboarding them on how to use an iPhone. But when you spoke to the other person involved in the deal, they were usually back at the office overseeing five construction projects going on at one time. And what they cared about was saving time in the process of construction. Because for many new buildings, I can see your own one now. It's probably made of concrete, half of the project time, 50% of the project time is concrete. So even if you can say three to four weeks, I might be able to get my financing cleared sooner or I might get a bonus from my client because I delivered the asset faster. There's all these, that's what they cared about.The other person just cared about, “Man, it's raining today. That sucks. Right?” They worked together every day, but what they wanted the technology for was vast. Therefore, as a marketer, you have to go understand, well how can I navigate all that? And if you're gonna sit behind a laptop and just try and figure it out, it's not gonna work. You need to understand what these people care about and how they make decisions. Sorry, I just wanted to add that because

Steve Goldhaber: It's a good point. I really liked what you said about the user adoption of the actual tool. It reminded me of a case study someone shared with me once, this was like a muffler mechanical franchise and they were trying to get the guys in the shop who were doing the actual work to move from the traditional clipboard; diagnose the problem, write down what it is, do all the estimates, and they wanted to move that all digitally. And their way to drive that adaption was actually created an iPad friendly app that was designed in the exact same orientation as the clipboard. So they would show the people like, “No, hold it on the right side just like you're always used to.” And it was fascinating, like those little tiny things can drive adaption. And they were like, look, if we can get two pages of content in that app and like they'll do it. That's just fascinating stuff like that is true customer insights that make their way into product design, user experience. Even though the UX person on that product is like that, “This is ridiculous. I could do so many amazing things using all these different navigations,” but it doesn't matter. The user doesn't care about you showing off. It's about you relating to that user and making it simple for them.

Ryan Paul Gibson: A hundred percent all the time.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, let's jump into getting to know more about you. When did you first kind of go, “Aha. I think B2B marketing is fun.” maybe you're not there yet. I don't know. Oh, but when did it first hit you? 

Ryan Paul Gibson: That was like a horrible response to your question that made it. I mean, there's always fun stuff about it and what I will say is funny. Everyone talks about B2C as if it's the best. Well, there's challenges to that too, right?  Like nothing's perfect. I don't know. It has actually been in the last five, six years I've had the most fun because I think there's just so much more opportunity now to do things that I wouldn't not have thought of. Years ago, I've always been someone that really tries to sort of, I don't wanna say push the envelope, that's not the right word, but just tried to be different in my B2B marketing. Like I worked for an incubator for a few years, I was their senior marketing strategist and I'd worked on their international campaigns because we were an incubator /economic development agency up in Canada and we had no talent attraction campaign. Most of them were really boring. It was just like, “Come live in our city. Like who cares?” What I showed was, I was like, “It'd be fun.” There's this really cool festival we have called House of Paint, which is all slam poetry, break dancing, and hip hop. Let's make that the attraction video. I emailed them like, “Can we borrow your B-roll and make the attraction video for the city model?” And they're like, “Yeah, you can.” That was it. So I was like, “Come work as a coder in Ottawa by like, “Hey, break dancers, come dance, but learn code on the side,” whatever it was. Right? Like, so I say that was like seven years ago and the collared shirts were sort of stiff around that but I remember when I showed the video, at the time, so for your context, like I'm from Ottawa, Canada, that's the headquarters for Shopify. Most people know Shopify, the e-commerce platform. They're much smaller and their CEO at Toby, he was on the board of directors for this incubator/economic agency. So I'm showing the campaign to all the directors, the board, and all the B2B. People have liked doing it for 30 years and were looking at it like crazy hop. He was like plotting and he's like, “Yeah!”what was his problem? Well, he wanted a bunch of engineers to come to the city because he couldn't find any, right? But he also understood that B2B was changing. And it has changed I think in the last few years. If you look at really cool companies like Gong, who I love, their marketing, sales intelligence, like they just knock it outta the park. It is a Super Bowl ad like a year ago, I think maybe two years ago. When you listen to their CMO Udy likes to sort of talk through the logic of it. It was like, “Oh my God, that was great. So smart.” So it's fun now I think Steve, because it's almost there. You're not confined to I think anymore people think it should be. There's so many ways that marketers can be creative and use ingenuity to really do interesting things. I think it's more fun the last five years. So that was a super long answer to your question. 

Steve Goldhaber: You were just buying time to think about, is this fun? Should I do it? I would say the first couple years for me in B2B were tougher in just understanding the buying dynamics, because I grew up B2C. You were just always laser focused on talking to a person or maybe two people if it was like, “Hey, if we're selling a car,” it's a husband wife conversation. B2B is just so much more complex and tricky and political.  It's kind of like what is said in the meeting isn't necessarily what's happening, where on the consumer side, they're just gonna tell you. “I don't like it. It's too expensive. I don't understand you”. But there's just so much more that happens in the B2B space where it's like, here's our buyer, but they're not disclosing that like their boss has another agenda or provider, but he's not gonna tell us and maybe like the analogy or I should say it's more chess than checkers in the B2B world. There's always something going on that you interpret is not as blatant. 

Ryan Paul Gibson: Yeah, I agree with that. I still think though, if you do your job well, you'll understand how to navigate some of that, but you're right that's always there. But that's never really bothered me too much. I think for me, that's almost part of the fun, like trying to crack the code. 

Steve Goldhaber: Especially I guess as you put more of a sales hat on as a marketer, that's what I've learned about too. It's like you have. I think when I started it was more about, “Well, I'm gonna show you the capabilities of what I'm selling you. I'm gonna talk about it, I'm gonna show you case studies.” And these days I really tried to take that like “I'll give you all the marketing stuff before the meeting, just so if you wanna read it, you can read it. But the meeting now just becomes a conversation. And if it's a half hour meeting, I'm gonna give you the five minute pitch because you want the five minute pitch.” So it's interesting how I've just devolved my marketing in those types of settings because you realize the conversations and where the buyer is leading their own journey is the way to do it as opposed to just saying, here's our process, here's the structure that you need to adapt to.

Ryan Paul Gibson: Because that's what it is now they are leading their own process. That's what's flipped. Right? When I started, when I was a buyer, I wrote about this on LinkedIn a few times. I had to rely on my account executives or other vendors for information. I had to talk to peers and I didn't have many of them. I only had a few. I had to actually physically leave the office to understand what was happening in the landscape, which is fine. I was reliant on so many things. It has totally changed. Now I can build a consideration set of solutions for vendor services in 10 minutes by dropping one question in slack. “Hey, I'm trying to do this. What do you, what do y'all do?” Perfect. There's 10 options. I'll go see what those are about. Happen in 10 minutes, right? That would 've taken me at least a month before to sort of figure that all out. Like the buyers control everything now, so you have to understand and respect that  but if you know that, then you can use it to your advantage.You just understand how and what they care about. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. What you mentioned is Gong as a platform that you'd like to use. What are some other things that you're like, “I love it. Can't live without it?”

Ryan Paul Gibson: Oh, I guess it depends on what I'm doing. Like as a marketer putting my marketing hat on, I've always been partial to things like Hot jar or product people who use things like full story or heap. Just like trying to understand what's happening with people and how they use a product. As a researcher now, I care about things like,  I hear at LinkedIn a lot. Funny enough, because I spend a lot of time there just trying to understand people. Like I read a lot of conversations and nuance between people and what they post. I use a lot of research platforms, so there's a lot of different ones I use or even survey platforms, right? I use a piece of software right now, a lot called User interviews and respondent IO and what those are aggregated populations of different disciplines, skill sets, expertise, interests. So, if I want to go and talk to 12 software buyers that are in this role and have these skills I can pay for access to them. I can go talk to them. And I do that a lot. Where a lot of UX and design people do that, product people do that. But I do it as a marketer.  Because I just wanna understand in addition to my buyers why they buy, I wanna understand this, the market, the segment of the market that I'm talking to as a whole. Might not even know I exist. What do they care about? Are they the same things, am I missing something? Is there a part of the story that I'm not gleaning into? There's all these things. So I use a lot of those things as a qualitative researcher to really inform what I do. And I use tools now for aggregating that data, tagging the data, and driving insights from all those interviews. So yeah, that's very niche to me. That's sort of where my brain is these days.

Steve Goldhaber: Right. We'll do one or two more questions. I feel like if there was a male equivalent of Barbara Walters, I feel like that's what I'm turning into. Looking back over your life, here's my question. You're talking to your young self in your first marketing gig and you kind of tell him, “Listen, I know that you feel really strongly about this. Don't trust yourself. Trust me. Think about it this way.” What kind of advice would you give to the young marketer that you once were? 

Ryan Paul Gibson: Be very curious and don't take answers at face value, especially ones inside the company. It's so easy, in my experience, to really get seduced by your own ideas. And they might be really good, they might be fantastic ideas, but how do you know that? How do you know that what you want to do is something that will actually move the needle? If you aren't sure, you should go find out. That's the advice I'd give because it’s a bias to action, but is that action worth your time?

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's really good. I think I can relate to that advice where you get so caught up in the exciting part of marketing is the ability to come up with an idea and see it produced. Sometimes young marketers don't balance that enough with. “I like it. It brings me joy. What does it do for the customer or the prospect?” And it's kind of a, you gotta have the win-win there. Otherwise you're just a marketer with an agenda trying to do something that you think works. That's hard because you're like, “No, it's a great idea. It's funny.” 

Ryan Paul Gibson: Yeah. But I think what people realize as you get more in, I know, but you Steve, I've found that as I understand the customer, you actually see really cool and interesting ways to do things that other people have not thought of because of the depth of your knowledge, right? That's the part I've really found fun. Now, there's all sorts of things that you think of like, “What if we did this?” And sometimes the looks I get from my colleagues are a little out there, but I'm like, “We should try this. This could be a thing, right?” And I say that because this is what we’ve seen. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right. Awesome. Well, that's gonna wrap up the show. Thank you Ryan Paul Gibson for joining us. I really enjoyed getting to know more about your background. I love that we got into the market research area. Marketers need more of it. We need to take it, it needs to be the new “Apple a day keeps the doctor away” saying,

Ryan Paul Gibson:  Yeah. “Apple away keeps the CEO out of your office.” 

Steve Goldhaber: That's right. And by the way, congrats to Apple's conglomerate who pushed that agenda, like, “So I just have to eat your product and I'm good. All right, let's do it.”

Ryan Paul Gibson: Smart. 

Steve Goldhaber: Some of those really are helping me.

Ryan Paul Gibson: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Steve. It’s been great.

Steve Goldhaber: All right. Take care.