In this episode of Interesting B2B Marketers, Steve Goldhaber sits in with Scott Vaughan, Fractional Executive & GTM Advisor to CXOs & Investors at Vaughan Go-to-Market Advisory, discussing the importance of redefining the role of Chief Marketing Officer and how it can have a significant impact on a company's success.
Listen as they discuss sales and marketing alignment issues in the context of a government technology company, as well as how to help a startup scale quickly by focusing on a specific market segment.
They also talk about the importance of working with people who share similar values, creating impactful content that ties back to go-to-market strategy, navigating go-to-market strategy as a senior marketer, and the importance of getting new perspectives and going to truth-tellers.
Finally, they touched on meetings and scenarios where they don't enjoy being in and how culture plays a big role in driving good or bad meetings.
Tune in for more insights on how to better navigate the go-to-market strategy!
Key points from the episode
Connect with Scott Vaughan and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.
With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.
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Steve Goldhaber: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26. This is Steve, your host of Interesting B2B Marketers. I'm excited today because we are joined by Scott Vaughn. Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Vaughan: Thanks for having me.
Steve Goldhaber: All right, my pleasure. So listeners know we always jump right into the cases, but before we do that, give us a quick 60-second intro about who you are.
Scott Vaughan: Well, I'm a marketing geek. Marketer who spent about 10 years of their career in sales, carrying a bag or leading a team of field salespeople regional, national, and global. And I think that experience, being a marketing and salesperson over my career really helped shaped how I think about it, and one of my main focuses at this point in my career is about bringing it all together into a go-to-market strategy and how to activate that across the organization. Primarily, my time has been spent in the technology markets. Broadly speaking, IT cloud, cybersecurity, the traditional, but also more broadly, FinTech, healthcare, tech, et cetera. And I would say that the thing that has helped shape me is I work a lot in the market versus behind a desk. I hope in some of the case studies as we try to figure out stuff that's been one of the things I've learned to do to really learn the markets and study and know the audience, et cetera, et cetera. Some of the things I now believe in that are so critical.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. Awesome. So we're gonna jump into the case. The first one has to do with sales and marketing alignment problems, which of course, it's nothing new. We will always continue to talk about sales and marketing alignment issues, but go ahead and take away the first.
Scott Vaughan: Well, the first case really is around of all things, a government technology company that is a mix of services and software and these very advanced work that they're doing, but by the way, you hear that word and it's very typical. You go into the executive team and they say, oh gosh, if we could just get sales and marketing aligned, we could fix this. And I've heard that. In all my companies I've worked for and now the last 18 months, I have advisory and consulting hands-on and almost every time there's a piece of it, but that's not the core underlying issue in this case. It was really everything that got pushed out to the field and in my experience, and certainly, in this case, going to market needs to be an organizational thing. It needs to be through product and operations and finance. And sales and marketing and in the software world, in customer success where they're touching the customers every day. And a big deal is a renewal, upsell, and cross-sell in an annual recurring revenue and subscription model. And so you diagnose it quickly. If we could just get those darn salespeople to x, if marketing could just create more leads or more demand, we pipeline, we'd be fine. And typically you've gotta break that down and understand what are the mechanics.
I didn't say start from scratch, but really rethink your emotions about how to go to market.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I wonder, I wanna get your thoughts on this, because sales and marketing alignment, it's a rich area to be in because there's endless a need for it and why. What do we think is the root cause of this? Is it a structural issue where typically the marketers report to the CEO? The salespeople report to the CEO. Then there's all this gray area around, well, what's sales enablement? What's brand building? I'd love to get your thoughts on like what's consistently driving that.
Scott Vaughan: Why don't you start with the easy questions?
Steve Goldhaber: Well it's just a one word answer. That's all.
Scott Vaughan: If it was only that simple, I think there are a few things though to delve into there. One is sales and marketing. When everything's going great, they're aligned. And that's because they're aligned around a customer or they've got the tailwind of a market that's exploding. And so it's easier to do that. But the problem is sales and marketing have different functions and roles. Those need to be integrated, not just aligned. But today, especially in the software world we're talking about where so many companies are software with services, even the most mundane companies have the software working in the background to either automate or drive some kind of engagement with the market. So today, that becomes really important that you bring in the other functions. If your product, for example, It's looking at all the features the product has, but it's not aligned with the market or the platform or the services you're offered or they're not packaged, right? That's a product alignment to the market issue, not just sales and marketing. And so if you just keep putting stuff out to sales and marketing: One, they're just not natural. They have to play different roles, and Two, the whole organization has to be able to prepare constantly and be part of that process. And I can break that down specifically. So for example, you have a product, they go build the stuff, develop it, and bring it to market. That's been forever the case, no matter what segment you are in. But in this case, you look at stuff like product-led growth. The product, for example, is designed from the get-go to be self. The product's designed for the customer to be put, providing direct input. And then there's a sales-assisted motion where marketing is bringing people to the conversation to say, try this solution or try a piece of the product and then put them in a motion to build their relationship and build their engagement with a broader set of solutions over time. So very different go-to-market models in motions, but by the way that apply. So much in today's market, the way companies buy, which is the second thing, Steve, the sales and marketing alignment thing is when you go, and especially I'm in business to business, when you go into that world, customers want to be primarily self-served. 80-something percent of the engagement is already done before a sales rep gets truly involved and brought into the process by the customer and by the buying committee, which is getting bigger and bigger and more complex. Because typically the decisions they're making, in many cases, there's more on the line for the customer. So there's customer indecision, there are more people involved, and that means that you have to really think through that process ahead of time. You can't just develop it all and have a couple of sales and marketing inputs and take it to market. It needs to be a continuous, connected, integrated process. And I'm not throwing those words around lightly. It's way more than a lot. My last point is sales and marketing still need to be in lockstep, in unison. So you may have a sales and marketing problem, but it's so often misdiagnosed as in the case that we're talking about here. And once you started to illuminate that it was amazing to see. And the way you can illuminate it is you bring product and operations people into those meetings and discussions. We're doing your go-to-market, your ideal customer profile. Your value propositions of the different pieces of your solutions. You're identifying not just the pains of your customer, but you're drilling into the jobs to be done and how they work, and all of a sudden you're going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We don't have all the pieces. We either need a partner, or we need to acquire something. Or do we need to build something different to be able to deliver against that? And now all of a sudden you're in more of a symbiotic flow and you want to keep that flow. So that's how you really begin to drive the natural scale and growth.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. That's interesting. So, if I'm recapping, what you're saying is when we hear sales and marketing alignment issues, that's just a symptom. The deeper problem is your go-to-market like it is when the software was built. Are we going after verticals? Different approaches, things like that. So that's very interesting. I haven't gotten there before yet but it makes sense that it's a deeper issue. Especially when I imagine a lot of the technology out there, it's a technical founder who is great at building something, and then, Hey, I think I've built something. Can someone sell this?
Scott Vaughan: You got it exactly right, with great intentions or companies acquired multiple companies. And so when it gets to market, the salesperson kind of gets into a, stop me when you like something motion because the pieces aren't fully integrated. Or you expect, your sales team to be completely versed on, well, if they say this, do that. I mean, there are certain products in markets that are the case. It's high-level strategic selling, big ticket prices. But in many, there's no way you can prepare an entire Salesforce to do that, or now you're asking marketing with this much budget to go out and segment so tightly that they have to be so prescriptive on getting this value proposition of this part of the product to that person at the right time. That's just not realistic, no matter how data-driven or how good the marketing team is. So that's where you step back and get the whole company in alignment. In revolving and focusing around, a strategy or a couple of different strategies and put the right motions where motions mean you've got the energy going into the market, you've got the right markets defined, and you've got the right solutions or partnerships. You have the right messaging and what happens, Steve, so often, and this is gonna be in all the cases I talk about. Oh, let's get marketing to do the messaging and we'll do a workshop offsite. No, no. You need core leadership at those finance ops product functions to be pulled into this process along the way and agree upon what the outcomes to be. That's where integration happens. It starts there and it's painful at first. In this case, I'm talking about the product and operations people are looking around like, are those people in the same company? I could see their faces, but once they start to define exactly how the solution works and how it was built, or what it was designed to do, they're seriously taking notes about gaps, product prioritization, but they're also saying, well, let's not emphasize that then let's focus on. And now all of a sudden you've got product experts or market experts and operational experts saying, why don't we just add on service to that? Oh, we can do that. And then all you get this whole dynamic that's going on in the room and now all of a sudden your go-to-market materials look different, your website value propositions, how you tell your story in your decks, and your narrative.
Yeah, you enter from different points. It's quite amazing. When you recalibrate and that's why I use go-to-market and that's the playbook I've run over and over again. And especially in these markets that are so dynamic.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. When I've gotten clients or, you know, when I worked at corporate companies, it always got so much easier to do the marketing when you had that alignment because all of a sudden the marketing wasn't just the company, it's about the audience. And that's where you could have the most creativity because really the role of marketing if done right is for the customer to say, man, that's me. They are speaking to me. They get me. And then once you've earned that trust, then you can go in and have the conversation around features, functionality, and how to buy the thing. But that's when marketing to me is most enjoyable when it's not generic product focus, it's all about you're speaking to the customer.
Scott Vaughan: So easy to say, but it's so difficult. And in this case, there's so much about the what versus you gotta market the problem. As much as you know, there's obviously where you need to represent your company and bring it to life. And today even more because of sustainability and diversity and inclusion. It's a powerful story and so authentic to bring your company mission and values into it. But that's not the lead story, that's the supporting character in the play, so to speak you really wanna make the villain the problem, the challenge, and market that of how to knock it back, knock it down, overcome it, and that's, you know, another conversation and another podcast. It's that idea. If you do the work right in the company, those things come out and they're so obvious and you get the company behind the problem and then you're able to articulate your value. And it's not just today about being unique or differentiated. That's not what's gonna help you stand out. That's important. But so much of that exercise when you did the traditional. You know, marketing ideal customer profile and your audience and your value prop was how are we different? The customer doesn't care necessarily how you're different. You have to answer some of that, but they care about whether can you solve my problem in a unique way, not as your mouse trap different and they feel it from the entirety of the company and everything you put behind it, the way you communicate how you do. How that message is delivered. How the company delivers during their engagement before they become a customer or after they become a customer. And that's the whole idea of having a more holistic customer experience that takes a company being organized and thoughtful about their go-to-market strategy.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So tell us more about this company that you're working with, like, Have they evolved their thinking on their sales and marketing alignment challenge?
Scott Vaughan: Well, first of all, they realize now like, oh, okay, boy, do we have a lot of experts? Because we only tapped into 'em when they needed something at the point of sale. Or to a customer, and they realized quickly like, wow, these people, well, they're handling the customer's stuff. In this case, they're all of their records and software and everything, so they know what they're talking about and how do we unlock that power more so these light bulbs start going off that we have these incredibly knowledgeable people that work every day on customer needs and problems, but we only think about 'em when, you know, when we need something or at the point where when we have those product input meetings and then they go away. So this becomes a consistent element, and this is exactly the case at the organization that I'm talking about. And to watch the light bulbs go off and to see that they're experiencing it in sales and marketing now, it's like, wow, okay. This is more than a value proposition exercise that you kind of get, you call on those people when you need the details of the information. They actually have a pretty good perspective. And you also gain empathy the other way, where the product operations, finance people now understand like, okay, woo, they gotta bring the customer a long way. I see why now our sales cycles are probably six to nine months and not just three. And when we're in those QBR quarterly business review meetings, now I'm gonna have more empathy and understanding and maybe bring some ideas to bring more resources to the fight, to the battle, so to speak.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep, We need more empathy in those meetings, especially from the finance people.
Scott Vaughan: They have some great ideas and especially today because they understand all the mechanics of the numbers today and the new business models, whether it's a subscription or ARR. Or especially when you're trying to do a lot of renewals, so you've got net dollar retention and net logo retention and customer acquisition costs, lifetime value finance can speak that language and help you and understand that, but they have to understand the whole picture.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right, cool. Let's jump into case number two, which is all about helping someone move from a startup environment and, and helping them scale fast.
Scott Vaughan: Yeah, so this was one of my favorite chores and things to do. And I work for a lot of enterprises and still do with enterprises, but this is a case where you come to market and a lot of the younger companies, and when I say startup, you could be anywhere from a million to 10, 15, even 20 million, but you're still kind of working around your market problem, you know, fit and is there a product market fit? You know, our first hundred customers were great, but they need to scale this thing. Now, is it a real company that's beyond a product? And in this case, it was software as well, but in specific markets, segmentation and the first thing that the CEO or the executive team wants to do. Well, when I worked at Salesforce, right, so you can't play that playbook. You are coming in with a new kind of solution, in most cases, you might have the greatest solution ever that's gonna change the world in most cases. You have to find the problems that you're solving, but you have to go down and I'm gonna go old school with Jeffrey Moore in crossing the chasm said You need to find a bowl. And in this case, the bowling wing was, let's not go out and try to generate a ton of leads in every market. And that stop you when you like something and hope something sticks. But rather, let's drill in that go-to market on a set of maybe a couple of verticals or segment the market by the type of buyer that we have. In this case, they were the most advanced buyers. And to reach those, they typically have been there, done that, seen that. So you have to go, what I call, kiss the ring. You have to bring the market to them and make them part of the solution. So once you get those people one over, then you can unlock a lot of the rest of the market because they have voices, they have the brand either personally or from their company. And if they like it, now they're gonna talk about there's a change going on. So in this case, when we started and I joined as CMO, it was, okay, I need you to build a demand generation and lead engine. And I took a deep breath and I said, actually, we're gonna wait about six to nine months. We're gonna be building that in the background. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna find, in this case, it was 47. I'm being very specific. If you can't tell the therapy that's happening, Steve, that you're giving me. 47 influencers who are either buyers, customers maybe people like yourself who have a voice that people follow that are a believer, and are known in this segment for something of being, of understanding, of being breakthrough, of being able to articulate. And we worked those 47 people for six months. And it started with, in our go-to market, we had a sketch in what we thought it would be. We would bring that to them and say, we think that there's a change going on. Here's what we're seeing. Can you help us? Can you define it? And not like, can you help us, but do you want to be part of this? And they'd be up on the whiteboard or virtually sending us stuff. Well, no, it looks more like this. And before they're part of the challenge and then you still are in the market using social, using high-value educational content. And if you do a webinar, it's not about your product and how to use it. It's more about the problem and really pouring salt on it. And then this becomes the way then that, well, I've gotta see what these guys are up to. I'm seeing them everywhere and I see they've brought in a lot of people and a lot of high profile customers that are talking about a change. So we wanna make them part of the movement and that segmentation and that ability to win those, by the way, they typically spend faster because they're more confident if your solution works. And in this case, this is exactly what happened. We built in and segmented and layered there, and then we would expand out to the next segment, the next segment. We'd even hire the right sales team to focus on segmentation, but you had to slow down to hurry up, in this case.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I'm gonna jump in on the 47. Here's why I really like that. And I'll pull from my own experience. So this is when I used to work for a big company. We had the ICP, right? It was a beautiful five, six slides in PowerPoint talking about the profile and. I got really frustrated with that because it was so specific, yet they didn't have names. So my question was, can we just start using these people's names? Like why don't we go spend a week? And there was only like 800, 900 of these people, cuz they're mostly like C-suite buyers at bigger companies. I said, let's just do the research and get the list. So we actually know. So that's why I really like the specificity around here are the people that we're gonna reach out to for influencing is because so often we marketers hide behind this profile that you just are like, well, yeah, I get the profile, it helps me create marketing materials. It helps the creative team, but just use the people's names and then if you really wanted to get sophisticated, do some email matching and some list of pens. So that you can target just those people.
Scott Vaughan: Well today, still so much data, Steve, to your point, you can profile off an actual person and understand everything from their LinkedIn profile to their presence. Exactly that, that's exactly what you do. They're real people with real challenges. And by the way, they're trying to solve the next challenges. A big part of the market still looking around going, well no. Well, we've got this. We're good now. Yeah, it should have set up front this case. We were changing the way to approach or solve a problem, so it was a change. Management had to be part of that go-to market as well. It wasn't a radical change, but it was, they were thinking like this marketing automation, they needed to think like this and they needed to open up the aperture a little bit to do that.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I think one thing, I've seen too, get in the way of getting to real people is most of the salespeople are typically not aligned by their relationships of who they know. It's by vertical or territory. So Like you'd never be in this environment where it's like, well, I've got a really good relationship with that CTO, but you know, they're not in my territory but of course you should be helping a fellow rep to be like, Hey, if you want, I can get an intro and help work that, but it's almost like that'd be a really interesting sales model is relationship based.
Scott Vaughan: That's how you hire in the beginning when you have a young company you hire based on relationships for a part of it. The challenge becomes when you try to replicate it, to scale it, and then you hire people. And if you're not a domain expert when in a change movement at the point of the field, it's very hard to be a good salesperson because you have to know what you're talking about. So this is in your go-to-market model. In those earlier days, you're building people who have relationships with those influencers or with that type of professional where they can, I'll say, lean on a bit, but they love communicating and selling and making the customer part of the solution to define it. They're comfortable in that world. What happens then, you get all your mojo and you try to replicate that. So you go hire maybe a really good, let's say enterprise salesperson. But they're not a domain expert, so it falls down. So that's the problem when you go to that scale-up stage and especially in this last phase of the era of the market where investors say, well if you hire 10 more salespeople, that's 20 more million in ARR. And that was a formula. Well, the nuances of the formula that go-to market are so intricate because that next, that's where you have to be able to repeat and do domain expertise transfer to a new set of salespeople. In this change movement era you have to time it right. That it's not just a formula on a spreadsheet that some unicorn followed that you can do. It's much more prescriptive.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. What are some of the other challenges for this company? As they were scaling up?
Scott Vaughan: Well, first time CEO so did a fabulous job of learning and nursing and being on the frontline. But that has some of its own challenges in terms of there's all new stuff being implemented and maybe they have an idea and it's not always a challenge, but it's one of the realities. The second thing is the company had moved from a previous model, so there was baggage. And by the way, that baggage wasn't so much baggage, it was a cash cow to fund this next element. And navigating those two pieces, and what we did there is we separated the go-to-market motion. We actually put a team on, and even a product team focused on maintaining that cash cow solution, why we're building out this new element. So it wasn't just a pure startup, by the way, that's not atypical because a founder, or a team may start something and all of a sudden step into something like, oh my gosh, we're right at the right time in the market. But we spent three years building this and it's not quite aligned. So there are ways to navigate go-to market. By the way, reason number 1032 of why to align product operations, finance, sales, and marketing, because especially in those younger companies, you may have the right concept, but it may take some time to develop the right solution set and time the market.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Well, I like both of those case studies. I mean, of all the time I've spent in marketing, I've lived in the bubble of marketing and sales and marketing and this has been a really good conversation. I've really gotten underneath those issues, which are not sales and marketing and all, they're just reflected in those teams kind of going to market. We're gonna jump over now into Q and A. So tell us about your first gig in marketing, what were you doing?
Scott Vaughan: Lucky, I'll tell you that. I had done a paid internship my senior year of college, just reflecting now. This is like therapies.
Steve Goldhaber: I'll send you the bill. Don't worry about it.
Scott Vaughan: Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate that. So I did it actually for a city government of all things, but it was an incredible learning experience cuz it was hands-on putting together things like newsletters and slideshows and trying to bring the community and what the city was doing. It was fabulous. So of course when I took my first job, it was in tech. I knew nothing about tech. And I fell into it and it was 21. But I really liked the director of marketing who was super smart, very focused took a chance, and I was actually a leader of a couple of people. And it was in marketing communications at that time. It wasn't about demand and revenue as much, about you know, value propositions and brochures and logos and brand identity and trade shows and PR and that type of activity. The company went from 20 to 450 people in three and a half years. And my eye would go, well, this is how it works, right? And then the company got acquired. So I got a little check, nothing big, but this is really cool. This is gonna be my career. Nothing but blue sky, and upward. Well, quickly you get into the reality of that was an incredibly unique time, right product at the right time with the right. And you start to appreciate those moments when you know you have something special. And I think three times in my career when you get that feeling, and I think every, anybody listening will go, yeah, yep, I'm looking for that. And that's when everything clicked. So I think there's a lot of luck in it of being the right place, the right time. But I was a grinder in that team, and I gotta learn everything because I worked for someone who was a mentor and gave me the keys with some tough love, with some guardrails. I became a product marketer. I didn't know anything about tech, but because I was competent and worked hard and I learned all about product, and before long I was in the field with, after about a year and a half, I was in the field with salespeople being a voice, and that that light bulb went off for me. That you have to become a domain expert in your industry. If you are in the market, or in my world, I call it go-to market, you have to really understand not just the audience and as you said, those faceless names for profiles and kind of that agency at times mentality. You really are in a service bureau to sales. Your customer is your customer, not sales is your customer, sales is your partner, your product team's your partner, and I think that was shaped so much at that I actually went into sales in my next job because I was in the field so much and I felt like if I knew sales, I'd be a better marketer, which is what I love to do.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. You know, it's funny, you described one of your first jobs where everything was going right, they sold the company. It's amazing when a company is doing well and growing, everyone just seems to have fun. And I've been in those environments. Where like literally you could do an average job of marketing and you're still making a ton of money and everyone views marketing as like, wow, you guys are doing great. And then I've been another slower growth industry where just by the structure of the industry and yes, the health of the company, you could be doing amazing things, but the company wasn't growing and healthy. So therefore, that mood just was like a cloud, and it's amazing how that environment really just dictates the day-to-day happiness and personal growth of a lot of marketing and salespeople.
Scott Vaughan: Well, Steve, here's the philosophy, right? I want to work with people I enjoy, I like, that share similar values. The mission today, it's even more important, but don't be confused. This is a conversation I have all the time with other marketers. It is a lot better to have where tailwinds behind your market where marketing can actually have an impact that you can shape and do something pushing a rock uphill all day with people you like. You can do that for a while. But after a while, it's really hard to have impact and vice versa. You could be a skyrocket ship, but every day it's brutal because the environment or the culture or the people that you work with are just not of like minds or the environment that's been created. We've all been there. We're all visualizing, I'm sure as we listen here. But that's where, and from a career spreads perspective, you're trying to calibrate that as best as you can.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right. Couple more questions here. Let's say next week comes along and you've got nothing on your calendar, right? You get to determine your ideal week. What are the things that you love to do?
Scott Vaughan: I love the ideation phase. So for me one of the things I like about this gig is that you get to work with five or six different companies, or three or four different companies, and you actually have time to think. And when I think of doing that, I think about don't fall off your chair program. Because sometimes you're so immersed in the mechanics of the market and building the strategy. Activation really is a lot of the reason people get into marketing. And if you can step back the ideas that you can go out because you've been in the market and talking to real customers or real profiles of people, not fictitious and taking research and building, you know, mechanical models. I think that's really what I enjoy doing that ideation with a team of creating those programs and campaigns with themes of problems to solve and ways to creatively do that. I think it's a lost art. We're in the era right now and I was a publisher of a big IT, the biggest in the universe for about a three year period where you could meet with anybody you wanted because the brand had that kind of power and clout, but you had to know your markets and you had to be able to articulate Well, I translate that today to content, and right when we have chatGPT and AI. It's easy. I did a session yesterday where I just plugged in a bunch of stuff and it's pretty damn good. And the idea though here it's this much differentiation often, so you can use that as a base, but that today I think of AI and chat G P T as a tool and it's a great foundation, but you're looking for that breakthrough piece. You're looking for that thing that connects, that's where you connect uniquely with people to be able to build the right kind of connected content that today we can apply against the journey. So, another one of my areas is don't create content for content's sake or to check the box, but actually, a little less with more impact. That's the way I always look at it. And that's tied back to your kind of program themes and your go-to-market strategy. That's that whole activation, Steve, which would be probably a different podcast and conversation. If you can't tell, I get used when we get to that phase cause we've got the other part. Now you can be truly creative and interesting and provocative. And that's the good stuff.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Now, I'm gonna ask the opposite of the question. What I just asked was, there's five meetings on your calendar next week and you just want to decline them all. What are the things that you were just like, And maybe not the type of meeting, but like, what's the situation where you don't enjoy being in, you know, you deal with a lot of change management, I'm sure. What are some scenarios where you're just like, Hey, I'll stick it out, I can roll up my sleeves. But these types of things I know not to pursue.
Scott Vaughan: I don't like intellectual exercises, so a lot of times, well, we're gonna review the product roadmap. I love reviewing product roadmaps, but it's clearly disguised or misunderstood as an intellectual exercise. It's not being done to move something forward. And that, to me is those types of meetings, and we all know them. When you walk in, it's like, okay, we went over this. What's the real thing that we're trying to solve? And that to me is what I ask, especially when I'm in the role of facilitator or owning. What is it that we're trying to get out of this session? Why are we doing this? What does it need to look like when we're done? And those meetings? And I use product review. If you can't tell because that was last week, like, that's not our problem. Our problem is how we find and develop the package, the right solution set outta what we have to bring to market. That should have been the meeting. That's one. Then the other one is when you go see the meetings that are continuous, that are actually going back and they're passive aggressive. They're trying to get you to review what you've done or trying to get somebody on board to an idea. And that doesn't happen in a meeting necessarily. It really needs to happen. That's part of change management. You need to find your advocates and then you need to go show and prove and then bring that into the bigger group and keep building from there. But the passive-aggressive trying to get somebody on board to something. I know it's reality. I'm not naive, but those kinds of meetings and I've had a few over the last three weeks. It's just never healthy. That's a sign that you're not moving forward. It's a sign that you're standing still or slipping back.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's interesting. I feel like culture really drives so many of the good and bad meetings we have. And in that example you just talked about, I can relate to that in spending 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, whatever it may be. Where the core issue isn't even discussed, right? There's always something going on behind the scenes and it's almost as if you could have just opened up with the meeting to say, look, I'm gonna have a brutally honest conversation. Here's what I'm seeing. Is this accurate? Do we believe in it? Should we fix it? But to your point it becomes presented very much like a business. Academic perspective, which yes, you don't know when those conversations start or stop. They're just ongoing.
Scott Vaughan: Yeah. And have we identified, do we know what the challenger opportunity or do we know where we are in our journey against our goals. And when I'm saying that around the meeting concept I think that comes a lot, Steve, with maturity. But if the culture doesn't allow for that or you're stuck there, that's when you start slowing down. When the mission is to accelerate. And that's when you start to really feel that you're stuck. And sometimes you need a new view. I always go into market when you need a new view and bring people with me. Let's go get underneath the hood and figure out what's going on out. Including your CEO or executives or leaders. Let's go test this. Let's go throw it up against the wall and see, and let's try to break down what the real issue is. And when I say go in the market, it may be by Zoom today. And it's not always great to be face-to-face, but the concept of let's go to the truth-tellers and see how it works.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Final question. A lot of the folks who listen to the podcast. Our senior marketers are figuring out how to navigate this whole go-to-market thing.For those people who've already at established companies, what's the one thing that they could start thinking about or doing tomorrow to kind of say, all right, maybe I should go on this journey to recalibrate everything.
Scott Vaughan: Okay. Titles don't mean anything. But there's a group that I kind of grew up in marketing with and still rely on my tribe, so to speak this concept of the chief market officer. So I dropped my ing. I love marketing, I love all the programs, campaigns, all that stuff I love. That's activation. I just kind of recalibrated my role as chief market Officer. I represent our customer opportunity and I represent the pain and that orientation reprioritizes a lot of things. And people start to look at you differently in meetings. They start to think, oh, okay, you're not the marketing person. And you know what I mean when I say that. Where are my leads? Or how come the T-shirts don't do this? Being facetious and dramatic for a purpose here, but when you're known as the market person who understands the mechanics, the drivers, the opportunities in the market, and you speak that language across the organization, when you have an opportunity to get on stage to represent your company, big or small, you're that ability. That's the one thing I would say that orientation that I see when the light bulb goes off and your opportunity and role change. If you stick in the marketing chair in most companies, your executive peers or other leaders are going to put their own definition of marketing on you, their definition, and by the way, that's mixed depending on who you're talking about, because they have a perception of what marketing does. And today, marketing's been dragged really down through the mud. It's really four or five jobs today, especially as sales has been dis intermediate and doesn't have the same kind of access to prospects and customers that it did, as we talked about earlier, because of the buying process. Now marketing's carrying a sales burden, marketing's carry a market burden. Marketing's carrying a customer experience burden. Oh, by the way, you still have to build that killer demand or revenue engine and oh, by the way, the brand identity looks and feel. We need to increase that. You know, the list just keeps going. And you can't win that game. And that's why you see a lot of the CMO or heads of marketing in that couple-year range of job tenure because of that. Don't play that game if you're set up to lose.
Steve Goldhaber: I like that. Good advice. Take off the ING. It’s a small thing that makes you be perceived by others as just someone who can have a bigger impact. So, great advice.
Scott Vaughan: Yeah. And it's not just changing the title, of course, it's living, walking the walk and all that. Yep. But yes, that's the focus.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Awesome. Well, Scott, I wanna thank you for joining us on Interesting B2B Marketers today. Really enjoyed the conversation. And thank you to all the listeners and viewers. If you haven't already, make sure that you like and subscribe. You can listen to us, you can watch. And sometimes you can read about us too. So we push this content out through our own company and personal LinkedIn channels. So be on the lookout for that. And Scott, once again, thanks for joining us.
Scott Vaughan: Love what you're doing, Steve. Thanks for having me.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Take care.