Steve sits down with Christopher Willis, Chief Marketing & Pipeline Officer at Acrolinx, the only AI platform that uses a unique linguistic analytics engine to “read” all your content and provide immediate guidance to improve it.
He began his career as a web developer, but before long became smitten with business and marketing within the tech space. Chris, who graduated with a degree in theatre, says that he enjoys marketing because it affords “the ability to be creative, but in a measurable way”. This is why he fell in love with the data-driven B2B world while appreciating the art and craft of building a brand.
Chris’s initial successes as a company leader taught him that “launching a business around an ideal customer profile (ICP) with a persona and a business case makes all the difference at the beginning stages of a new company.
He says that marketers should see advertising as a lubricant for their funnels, because it attracts new leads and facilitates the journey to that first meeting and beyond. But, if a marketer relies solely on waiting for that one-to-one that content syndication aims to acquire, they are much less likely to experience success.
Finally, Chris speaks on the qualities that make the best marketers, from a willingness to take risks—and the patience to wait for the potential long-term rewards of those risks—as well as the value of curiosity and proactivity when it comes to solving problems.
What you'll learn from this episode:
Connect with Christopher Willis 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.
Steve Goldhaber: Hey, everybody! Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Chris Willis, he is the CMO at Acrolinx. Chris, thanks for joining us today.
Chris Willis: Thanks for having me! I’m excited to be here.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. First, before we even jump in, I want you to tell us the story of who's watching behind you because I think that's gonna intrigue some of our listeners and viewers.
Chris Willis: Oh, so that's Willis. The short version of a long story, we were on our way to a conference in New Orleans and I said to one of my team members, “If we find a shrunken head, I'm definitely buying it”, and then I moved on. I didn't think about it again. This was a thing I said, I say a lot of things and off we went, we're in a store, it was a vampire store, I think. I just heard, “Oh no, get your wallet.” And there was Willis standing on his shelf. So he didn't come with the closure, I actually bought that and put him in it, but he's been with me now for the better part of four years and he's clearly good luck. He moved home when we went home for the pandemic, he moved back to the office when we came back, and as much as we're here he's just a good luck charm. I run my podcast from this exact space, he's in every episode, just quietly watching and participating as he does.
Steve Goldhaber: How did Willis get his name? Is it actually like 23 and me, we found Willis, or is this now just a made name?
Chris Willis: No, he's just Willis. I have a problem with naming everything. Just people names, my wife's not fond of it. The pets are just people. I just thought I looked at him and I thought, “Willis”. He seems to like it, he has not complained. Not even once.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, no words.
Chris Willis: His mouth is so shut, but if it were not, I feel like he would tell me that, it's fine.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. So now that we have that story out of the way we can move forward to the real story. So you're gonna first start us off by telling a story about launching a brand and this took place a while back. I think people are gonna enjoy this one. All right. Take it away.
Chris Willis: It did. So, it's really the genesis story of me as a marketer. I had come up in technology as a web developer, moved into new media, learned some Java, moved to Europe, and ended up selling in Europe. I came back here and we started a company. We were all project managers first and foremost, with the starting of a consulting services company, you sell but nobody was marketing anything. We didn't have a product at the time. We were a services organization. Something happened as we were moving through the evolution of this business and we ended up with not one but two products, and one of them was an online enrollment product for 5-29 plans– the student educational investment plan. The other one was, what was at the time we didn't know that it was the first packaged mobile application. This was the 2002-2003 timeframe, there was no Blackberry, and there definitely was no iPhone or Android. The first iteration of this product was running on a PalmPilot or a Handspring with a CDPD wireless connection or with a cable. We thought we were super modern when we moved it to Windows Mobile, Windows CE at the time. But it was a project that we had delivered for a company, and at the end of it, part of our delivery was we were going to keep this IP, this process, this idea of a package mobile application. So what do we do now? None of us at the time were marketers and there was no ABM marketing approach in 2003, but I had read a book by a guy named John Sultra, I don't know if I say his last name right. He owned basketball teams and had written a marketing book called Marketing Dangerously, it has a huge Sumo wrestler dunking a basketball on the cover. I will get the details of this story wrong, as this was a long time ago. He had owned a basketball team, I think it was the Portland Trailblazers. If you're a Trailblazers fan, I'm sorry about what I'm gonna say next, but they were terrible. He had recognized a gap coming in the sale of season tickets such as the season ticket holders not renewing. So interesting marketing mechanics to try and market the other teams that were coming to town. So you're not buying tickets to see your team, you're buying tickets to see Michael Jordan because he'll be in town on this date, whatever, and that worked to some extent. But he wasn't getting in front of the season ticket holders enough and he thought to himself, “Nobody turns down a FedEx box”. This was sort of the heyday, the late nineties, early two thousand of FedEx, really becoming a thing. A big triangular FedEx box shows up at your office, I mean, Steve, you're gonna open it. It's probably not a bomb. You're gonna open this thing because, “Wow, that's interesting”. So he took a rubber chicken and put a basketball Jersey on it, tied a note to its foot, shoved it in a FedEx box, and mailed it out to all the season ticket holders and got a great return on that minimal investment.
Chris Willis: This is the only marketing book I had read. I wasn't in marketing. I was a project manager and doing some sales work, read one book, and I was like, “You know what? That's amazing. I can get FedEx boxes, but I can do one better”. I had boxes made, custom boxes for my package with moons and stars on the outside of the box, and the message on the outside of the box was, “Is your CRM keeping you up at night?” Very specific to the audience that we were going after, we were gonna be selling to the national sales manager of global mutual fund companies. Very specific persona, it wasn't, “I wonder who we need to talk to or I need to talk to?” I know where he sits. So little box, stars and moons on it, open the box, I had custom-made pillows made of the same pattern, stars and moons. I bought the crappiest PalmPilot, I think it cost a hundred dollars, it was the one that did nothing. I built a demo of our software, the mobile app that we had built using PowerPoint that runs on PalmPilot. So all it was was a click through and I repurposed the operating system on this device so that it was all it was ever gonna do. You couldn't just black out of this and use your new PalmPilot. It was designed to be a demo device and put that face-up, powered on because I'm hand-delivering these across New York and Boston. So it can be on, it's fine. When you open the box, it should be on. You're gonna open it within the first couple of minutes and hand-delivered it to 10 national sales managers at mutual fund companies. These guys don't get sold to, you can't get through to them, especially not with technology products. These are the biggest financial houses in the world. They're not used to this. They're not used to an IT pitch or a technology product. They've never seen anything like this because it doesn't exist in nature. So hand-delivered boxes arrived, I wish I could tell you who these companies were. Because of this thousand dollars investment, $1,000 PalmPilots, and boxes that we had made by a friend, we ended up launching a business. Just those companies that we sent this one campaign resulted in 4.5 million in lifetime value at three of the biggest investment firms in the world and launched a company that became the first mobile application company and then, one of the leading mobile application platform development companies. That company ended up being measured and monitored by Gartner, by Forrester, and we were on the magic quadrant. The company was acquired 10 years later in 2014. I didn't know what I was doing. I literally followed a marketing book, which I really haven't done since then. Maybe I should actually. The fact that takes it back to the roots of marketing is, we built a product, and the product was differentiated, we identified a persona, we knew who we were going after, and we did the work upfront to get to the right target. Not to surround them or not to target a bunch of people in a business. “I want you, I'm gonna get you” And getting through to that person through any means had an impact. We ended up staying in those organizations against all odds because the IT department was mad. We sold around them, we sold to the user, and that was so novel at that point. We've replicated that campaign time and time again, over the years of just that careful identification of the ICP and the persona that we're going after, the messaging that resonates with that persona in a business case that actually impacts people's KPIs. Using the product that we delivered, you're able to do more business, you impact the top line growth of a mutual fund company. Like there's nothing else like it from a positioning standpoint. So taking that mechanism and overlaying that over everything that we've done since then. We continue to find that doing that work up front, like launching a business around, an ICP with a persona, and a business case that makes a difference. Those aren't just things that they teach you in business school, it's things that you should probably think about. It actually makes all the difference in the beginning stages of a new company.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's a cool story. What I really liked about is that, beyond just the male and the prototype part, the concept that was driving it was very pain-oriented, right? I've always been a big believer in finding pain, you're gonna better relate to people if you can start with pain, and the whole “sleeping at night” or “not sleeping at night” thing, everyone can relate to that. I think it's such a great insight into you. You didn't just start with a, “Here's what we are, here's the pitch”. It’s the “We get you, we understand your pain”. I feel like as a marketer, you build trust so much faster if you can start with the pain, because ultimately then, your prospect or client, they go, “These guys get us, they understand the pain that we're living through.” So I loved how you baked that whole thing into a really nice concept.
Chris Willis: Those customers that came on at the beginning of that process, stayed with us all the way through. The coolest thing was that we showed them a new way to do business. I mean the downstream impact of that first application that we built, we ended up being the first company to deliver mobile applications that people were trading portfolios on. We had institutional products, hedge fund products, portfolio management products, and pre-Blackberry. Like this was the earliest days of mobile that then turned into Blackberry, then onto iPhone, then onto Android, and then a platform that would deliver for all of those. If we hadn’t identified all of that upfront, none of that would've happened because we would've just pitched a neat idea. Like, “Hey, we're a cool company. You should check us out.” Uninteresting, not impactful. The impact was like you say, identifying a real problem that they had something that we could solve and make it easier for them on a day-to-day basis that impacts their top and bottom line.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. The thing I think about is that what you did back then was so innovative that their first interaction with your company brand is such a good one, right? Like, because they're not expecting it. It's like, “Wow, these guys are doing things that no one else is doing.” You've got a demo with an actual unit, right? So it's such a great experience. When you talk to some of the prospects, I would imagine that probably one of the first things they would say is like, “Hey, what a great idea, who thought of it?” What were some of the reactions that you got?
Chris Willis: Yeah, well, these are not technical people and they weren't carrying smartphones because they didn't have them yet. The reaction was, “Oh, my God. I had no idea.” That was the immediate response from our initial prospects was, “I didn't know that this was a thing.” Because what we were doing was taking a collection of data. This wasn't just taking a system that they already had and shrinking it down onto a screen that makes it unusable. We were collecting information from multiple backend sources and making it usable on a small device and changing their day. That wasn't a thing before we did this, so they opened the box and they're like, “Oh, it's a PalmPilot”, press the button, “Oh my God. You know exactly what we're doing! How is this even a thing?” Because we're building it out in a firm, branch rep, and the touch model. It's not designed for sales, it's designed for mutual fund positioning. They don't sell anything. They walk in, they talk to you and get you to remember them. They're walking through an office place, they're not leads and opportunities. Their firm branch rep touches and ongoing communication and the ability to understand who in an office place is already doing business with them, they recognize themselve in the product. They didn't know us, they didn't know our company name, they didn't care what our product or our company name was. We did suffer from that a little bit as we moved forward. They recognized our product, most people just thought of us as the product and didn't know that we actually had a company name because the product was directly impactful to them. What we were doing over here? “I don't know what those guys do, but the product works the way that we work.” It's interesting that we never changed the name of the company to the name of the product. Yeah. but it didn't happen.
Steve Goldhaber: All right, I like that story. All right. We're gonna jump into story number two. This is something that every B2B marketer either loves or hates, and certainly, a lot of the B2B world grew up in the annual conference or exposition. It was like, almost like the world's fair, every so often the greatest minds get together and do great things. So anyway, tell us about your second story.
Chris Willis: So this one made me uncomfortable, in a good way. It's important to know my management approach. I don't come from a marketing background. I have a theater degree, and I directed for four years. A big part of my approach is that you can save the show, right? So I need to get the right people in the right roles, give them their priorities, their context, and their blocking, and make them the best they can be. In doing that, I don't always need to be involved. My creative director brought me an interesting idea to which I said, “Oh, let's never talk about this again. You can totally do it. I just, I just can't. It makes me uncomfortable. I can't be in your meetings.” What they wanted to do is we were going to a developer conference, just a boring old developer conference out in San Francisco. They were trying to get more than the average amount of attention at a smaller company that wouldn't get a lot of attention at a large developer conference. The concept was that the company was in mobile testing and the campaign was, “Don't let bugs get you down.” Get it? Mobile testing bugs.
Steve Goldhaber: There you go. There you go. Yeah.
Chris Willis: In laying into the bug imagery, but not the way that you think, they wanna get a sign truck. First thing, Steve. Sign trucks are bigger than you think they are. I think a sign truck is gonna be about the size of a small moving truck with a sign on the back of it. It is not, it's frigging huge. So, they want this huge sign truck with the ”Don't let bugs get you down” in a URL. They want to rent or procure somehow 13 to 15 Volkswagen bugs. They want to run a parade around the Embarcadero and up and down the market street during this conference, throwing t-shirts, and stickers out at the conference goers and anybody else that's out on the street with the intention of driving the call to action was the click to the link on the sign track.
Chris Willis: “I can't be a part of this. This makes me uncomfortable. I'm a person of a certain age and this sounds dangerous in a dangerous marketing way. But you guys go do this, I think it sounds fantastic.” They never invited me to a meeting and I didn't participate at all, what I got was plane tickets. “You're coming. You're coming to the show. Better than that, you're driving one of the cars.” Okay. So we touch down in San Francisco and we go to a parking lot at Trader Joe's in Oakland. There's my sign truck and as I said, it's bigger than you. It's uncomfortably large. It's a huge truck, like a flatbed, with a huge 20-foot by 50-foot sign on it that has our branding and the link. That's uncomfortable. We have to now go and collect Volkswagens because it's the car borrowing thing. I don't know if they used Touro or some service where we drove around the greater San Francisco area and collected a bunch of Volkswagens. Okay. “Well, you didn't get the number that you thought you were gonna get. What happened?” They said, “You don't know what's happening yet.” As they're telling me, I don't know what's happening yet. A parade of another 13, antique Volkswagen bugs, driven by a car club out there, come with a clown car. Every single one of them has four or five people in it because it's families that are doing this out for the day. Yeah. So moms, dads, and the kids are in these Volkswagens. So we've got now somewhere just shy of 20 Volkswagen bugs and the sign truck. “Are we done yet?” They said, “No. Um, the drone guy isn't here yet.”
Steve Goldhaber: The drone guy. All right.
Chris Willis: “I'm sorry. I'm sorry, the who?” They said, “The drone guy isn't here yet.” And all these details are important because we parade around the Embarcadero, we pull into the conferences out on one of the peers in one of the warehouse buildings, we pull out there. It takes two times around the parking lot for us to get kicked out. The conference does not think this is cute, does not think it's fun that there is a sign truck, 20 Volkswagen bugs, a drone, and cameramen. They think that's inappropriate for their event and we're psyched because that draws people out. So now we're getting people out of the conference to come out and see the kerfuffle that's happening out in the parking lot and the drop-off area. So we're getting the attention that we want. We are noticing though, in real-time, that we're not getting any call to action. There's no visiting the link that we had. That was part of the bet that we can get people to come out, we can get people to take pictures of the QR code, end up on the link and that's not happening. Part of my whole approach is that we know our cost per lead, we know our cost per meeting do things. We experience new things and maybe they'll work, maybe they won't, and it'll all wash into our cost per lead, but we shouldn't be done with this. Let's just say that this isn't gonna work and it's not getting the intention that we had hoped, we need to repurpose right now. We have a sign truck, 20 Volkswagen bugs, a drone with a camera on it, and multiple cameramen. This just became an ABM campaign. We're gonna go to all of our prospect's offices throughout San Francisco. Let's go. There's, for instance, a jeans company, there's a home goods products company, all within San Francisco, many companies that we sell to in the Greater San Francisco area. Let's take our sign truck, our Volkswagens, and our drone and go and surround their building. We're going to have a very loud, very public parade, horns beeping, t-shirts throwing around these company's headquarters. It's not so much for “the today”, it's for “the tomorrow”, but “the today” is gonna be fun because people will come outside and they did. So we did, you know, five or six laps around each one of these buildings. Employees came streaming outside to see what was going on. People are very excited to get t-shirts. It doesn't even matter what's on them, but we are recording all this. So we've got the drone camera, so we're getting it from the sky, we're getting inside their office building, showing them looking out the windows, and this is important. Then we leave with all this footage and we go home. The initial campaign was completely useless. We got next to no visits through the web. There's nothing to trace how much awareness we built. But the video that we captured and the reaction that we got from our prospects became that packaged ABM program. We took all of that video, individually packaged it up, and sent it back to them and said, “You may not remember, although I think you do, because I think I see you in the window, the day that we came with our signs and whatever…” Out of that 75% conversion rate with those companies, because they remembered, they remembered this ridiculous thing and much like your last reaction.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah.
Chris Willis: “Who thought of this? This is ridiculous. Who thought of this?” I was very uncomfortable, but we did end up getting something, getting quite a bit out of this, a lot of new customers, and a lot of engagement in the audience in which we were trying to sell in the San Francisco area from something that made me completely uncomfortable. I think that the takeaway for me was, “Teams that are gonna do the best are the ones that are willing to take risks.” I can't say that I was the one that was willing to take the risk, I green-lit it, and then I walked out of the room. My team at the time went way overboard on this crazy stuff. But in the end, they understood the assignment, which is to get leads at the average lead cost to get meetings at the average meeting cost through whatever method that you think is gonna work. Be able to think on the fly, and repurpose as necessary. We had a drone accident. The guy flew with a drone into one of our customers. It wasn't the best thing in the world, but we still made it work when your drone pilot shows up to fly in downtown San Francisco. Hypothetically, we might not have done that. We might have– I don't know. I'm not gonna say, I don't wanna get in trouble, but if he has a huge neck tattoo on, on his neck, he probably doesn't have FAA clearance to fly that drone down market street. Just saying that's probably where you're living right now. Yeah, but I mean–
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it's funny. The whole drone thing, as much as there are the FAA regulations, I'm guessing maybe 80% of the drone people out there are just kind of like, you know-
Chris Willis: “Catch me.”
Steve Goldhaber: You drone, you do it, and then you ask questions later.
Chris Willis: Exactly. “Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I was supposed to, Ooh, sorry.” And then they just run away. It's fine. It was a great experience. I'm glad that I let it happen. The team was able to find success with it.
Steve Goldhaber: Well, it's interesting, both these stories. There's an element of delayed gratification, both in the mailing, waiting, and this one where you did the follow-up campaign. I think it's a good reminder that you can't always ask for something in the present. Good things are seeds that are planted and then you connect the dots back. I do think so much of getting traction with prospects is just being unique and memorable. To your point with the whole campaign, like, “Oh, we were the people who did this, remember that?”
Chris Willis: Mm-hmm
Steve Goldhaber: “Of course, I do!” Even if you're not interested, you almost just wanna meet the person to talk about what was going on there, right? So, the delayed gratifications.
Chris Willis: Great. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you overlay over much more mundane things like advertising. It's very hard for B2B marketers to get money for advertising because it's hard to measure the direct impact of advertising, but it's actually not. If you are able to put in the time, wait, and measure in the right way, you should see advertising as a lubricant to your funnel. It's gonna make it easier to get first leads. It's gonna be easier to get first meetings. It's gonna be easier to progress through the pipeline and be handed off to the economic buyer because people know who you are. But if you're waiting for the one-to-one that you get out of content syndication, well, that's not gonna happen. You got to have faith. You got to put it out there, believe that it's gonna do something, and then be able to find the measurements that are gonna bring it back. That's how all of these are, I don't know what's gonna happen, but we're gonna do it, then we're gonna pick up the pieces when it comes in, and in most cases, if you do it right, those pieces are gonna be positive.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Cool, great story. Let's move into getting to know more about you as a marketer, you've already told us that you started in theater. What was that moment when you realized, “You know what, I'm digging marketing. I can do this long term.”
Chris Willis: I think, it happened at the beginning because the room spun and one person became the head of customer success, one person became the CEO, one person became the technology lead, and one person became the marketing and it happened to be my corner. Prior to that role, I had been at a golf training software company and was the VP of technology and operations. So it wasn't from a grown-up desire of, “I've always wanted to be in marketing.” What I like about it, is the ability to be creative but in a measurable way. I've been brought up in B2B with tight budgets and expectations, so I'm very data-driven. I'm very demand, gen driven, and I'm expecting a result. I've had the benefit of also being very involved in brand and brand creation, but it always comes back. All of this comes back to a number on a page. I'm not actually compensated for marketing things right now in my current role, I'm pipelined, and I'm a hundred percent focused on driving pipeline and my lever is marketing. I think that's what the initial draw was for me was, I can do fun things and I can play with colors and pictures but I can make it impactful. I can see the value of the impact in the contribution to the pipeline, and in the contribution to closed businesses, so it's the best of both worlds. I'm directing the success of the business, but I'm doing it through things that are kind of fun. I like it. Also if I was a salesperson, like if that was more of my personality, I'd probably be much more successful, but I'm not, I'm in marketing. I'm not in sales. I know my lane.
Steve Goldhaber: As you spent more time doing marketing, what are some things that you can look back on today where you're like, “You know what, when I started doing this, I had so much confidence in this thing and looking back, I won't do it again or I'll do it a different way.” What are some things that you've learned?
Chris Willis: Well, back to conferences, I think one of the things that are sort of an earmark of me is I enter businesses and the first thing I do is I stop doing conferences. It feels like when companies start, they put their first marketing teams in place, leads come from conference participation, and in my very short story on my current experience, is that I walked into the business where I currently work and on my first day, I was in Germany. I was asked on my second day to go to the DMEXCO, a big conference in Dusseldorf, where we were exhibiting. So I did, which is a fun story itself, being asked to go from Berlin to Dusseldorf for an afternoon is like being asked to go from Boston to an hour outside of Chicago for an afternoon. I'm not from Germany, so I just figured it was all close, live, and learn. So from trains to planes, to trains, to walking and back again. But I get to the conference, we're in the back of hall nine. I don't know how many halls there were, but nine is a lot with a view of the back wall and no signage. The signage that we had expected that came with the booth was actually hanging 25 feet above the booth. So you can't see it. You're not, there's no interaction with the brand. So my first reaction to what we were doing was not great. The other thing that I thought was interesting at the time was there were no marketing people here from my company. The booth was entirely staffed by the executive team because we were all there and salespeople, which is strange because there's nobody responsible for the KPIs associated with this conference. Eh, I'll come back to that. Cool, the conference is over. “How many leads y'all get?” Great show, lots of great conversations, and we have 150 leads. Okay. That's not great. That's not great. “Let's look through them. Can you send me the spreadsheet?” Yes. I'm on day three, but to bang this up against the ICP and the personas that we're trying to sell to. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Cool. We got one lead. You got one lead.” How much did we pay for this? I feel like this is expensive, 24,000 euros. So I said to my boss at the time, does this mean– and I don't mean to be leading –that my acceptable cost per lead at this company is 24,000 euros? He said, “I feel like the answer is no.” He's like you're right, it's no. That's generally how I come into a business. It's the first thing I do to shut conferences, and it's not fair because conferences are great for awareness. They're great for keeping you in an industry space where you're recognized, but it's gotta be more strategic than just showing up at a big show with a booth with no signage and a bunch of salespeople hoping that you're gonna generate leads. We've gotten really good over the course of the last 15, 20 years at being strategic about how we participate in industry conferences in the big expose, because we're not, I've never been big enough in any of the companies that I've been in to make a dent. It's about creating strong partnerships and being at shows with partners and having partner traffic come to your booth. It's about leveraging things outside of the conference. So maybe I don't do a booth at all, maybe I just do a dinner event and invite people, and leverage my BDR organization to maximize the idea of the conference. But there are lots of things that we do peripheral to it that make much more of an impact than standing in a booth for eight hours a day, like pirates row, waiting for people to walk by so we can grab– nobody wants to do that. I was at a major analyst conference two years ago, we sponsored and they had designed it so you couldn't get to the exhibit or to the conference space without going through the exhibit hall. But these are smart attendees, they found other doors, they got them unlocked by the staff of the facility, and they found ways to route and nobody wants to walk past that. So you have to differentiate and find different ways to do that in and outside of conference hours. So yeah, conferences, not a fan.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I think there's horrible marketing at conferences, but there's also some funny and great marketing. So here's an example, years ago, as a side hustle, I was a photographer and I probably did this for maybe seven years or so. I would go maybe three or four times to Vegas for like the annual photography convention out there, typically the big players are on the software side, the photography hardware side. There was this startup company that was doing, I think, website development. It's a pretty steep price to get on the floor. This guy's company couldn't compete with Canon or Leica, or anything like that. So he was pretty clever in that he said, “I've bought a huge suite at the hotel that the conference is on”, and he just said, “Lunch is on me because you don't want bad conference food.” I have purchased all the fun like in-and-out burgers. He just said like, “It's all on me. Here's my sweet number.” There were all other things he was giving away, but I was like, “That was amazing.” He totally outmaneuvered having to pay the fee to get into the conference, people just got his suite number, and went up there and I thought, what a great idea? I'm sure that's kind of a one-and-done thing because once you figure it out, the show tends to come down on you hard, but I've seen some clever marketing at conferences.
Chris Willis: Yeah. Work right around you. Are you ever doing that again, yep? I miss sweet parties at conferences. Yeah. Those are the good old days.
Steve Goldhaber: He could be. Maybe that's how Willis came to be on your studios. He got excommunicated from the photography world.
Chris Willis: He could be, definitely, could be.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Now I wanna, I like to touch on marketing tech. I'm always fascinated with that, because it's an exploding world over the last 10 years or so. What do you find a piece of software that you just can't live without? It could be a collaboration thing or it could be something that helps you run the business. What do you get addicted to and are thankful for in the MarTech front?
Chris Willis: The real-time engagement metrics. We use it so much. So we're using it demand-based, I don't know if I can say that. But you could just easily use 6 cents or any number of different things, but we're on-ramping a lot of new salespeople all the time. Marketing is responsible for the acceleration of their pipeline. Right out of the gates, they get a target account list, they come to our field marketing organization, and we go out and find the people that they wanna talk to, load them into campaigns, start nurturing them and get them up to MQL. The ability to show salespeople in real time their engagement growth from zero– there is nothing, you have nothing –to over time seeing engagement grow, is so important to building the relationship between sales and marketing. Building that faith that we're doing things that are providing value to them, that's the number one thing right now, just from an “I love this product” standpoint. There's a lot more that we use, we experiment a lot but that's my favorite right now. I also, just to be fair, love Power Bi, there are lots of different analytics tools out there or dashboard tools, but we use Power Bi really well here. That's where I spend most of my day, looking at data visualization, understanding how the business is running, and moving all the way down to the individual sellers and their individual pipelines. To be able to ensure that the company's going to be healthy as we enter next quarter and the quarter after. So Power Bi is definitely underrated old technology, but still super cool if you use it right. Wow, that sounded old. I sound like an old person. I love that Power Bi
Steve Goldhaber: Seasoned, seasoned, you're a seasoned veteran.
Chris Willis: Exactly. Don't tell me about your Tableau, you kids, I'm out here on Power Bi.
Steve Goldhaber: That's right. What's something that the people who know you as a marketer really well, they would say, “Here's one of his pet peeves. Don't don't do this. He'll roll his eyes or he'll shake his head.” What gets you irritated as a marketer?
Chris Willis: I need people that can solve problems. I think there's an answer to everything, not everybody needs to know it, but you need to at least try. What kills me is that, not to be willing to try and solve a problem. It sounds obvious, that sounds like I'm just taking the layup answer, but it's not, there are a lot of people in this world that need to ask every question or that need to have things done for them. I feel like most successful people– and the reason that I'm here right now –is because I was willing to solve a problem. I can tell you that a problem is super simple. I worked for somebody that wanted to have something shipped to Korea overnight back in 1996, when you couldn't ship things to Korea overnight, the answer was not, “I called FedEx. I called UPS. I called DHL.” The answer is no, that wasn't the answer. The answer was, to get the box to Korea overnight, and figure it out. There are so many people that I've worked with over the years that can't get the box to Korea. They just are unable to make the leap beyond, “I did the things you expected me to do–
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah.
Chris Willis: –and it's not possible.” The answer in the case of the box–
Steve Goldhaber: The answer has to be, “you just buy a ticket”, right? Tell me that's the answer.
Chris Willis: Hundred percent that’s the answer. I was 23, I didn't even have a passport, so it couldn't be for me, but you know who it could be for? The box. I bought the box a ticket on Swiss Air. I handed it to a flight attendant who put it in her pocket, flew it to Geneva, and handed it to somebody else, and it got to Korea overnight. Here's the fun thing, nobody ever picked it up. Yeah. It's probably still sitting in Korea. My boss was like, “I changed my mind. I don't need it.” But that's the thing that gets the most is, try to figure it out. Maybe you won't, but trying to figure it out is so important. It's not a senior versus junior thing. There are many successful senior people that don't try and figure it out, but it's so important to the way that I run my department, that people are gonna make that next move to try and figure out the problem.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it's great. I mean, I'm passionate about problem-solving. I've I wrote a book a couple of years ago called, “What's your problem?” The whole premise was, if I'm trying to help you with your marketing or business problem, if you don't know what it is, then I can't help you at all. It was a question that I used in some of my corporate marketing roles where I was the head of digital and everyone wanted digital things. As soon as I said, “Let's take a step back, what am I trying to solve for you? What's your problem?” And when I would ask that question, half of the marketing requests went away because people were just like, “I don't know what I'm doing here.” Like they were just told, “We need to do more digital. You should talk to Steve he's in charge of digital.” And I gotta tell you, the churn that those types of requests have on an organization and on a digital team, they just are horrible. They will suck the life and the energy out of your team and that ability to define that problem and then solve it is so critical. I think too, one thing I've learned about myself and other people, there has to be some sense of curiosity that you have as a marketer where, “I'm curious to solve the problem. I'm excited that I haven't solved the problem yet.” That to me lies the fun, is the tension of, “There's gotta be a way, but I don't know.” That's the journey to me as a marketer is you figure out how to get there.
Chris Willis: I feel like not figuring things out must be really boring. There are a lot of people that don't mind that level of boredom. I mean, the fun comes from figuring it out.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I don't, I don't get that too. I’m agreeing with what you're saying, but for the people who just aren't motivated to figure it out, that to me is the excitement. The best way to motivate me is for someone to say, “Here's a problem. No one's figured it out.” And I just, I love that. Yeah. That's like a badge of honor for me is to be like, “Ooh, do I get to figure that out? I want this.”
Chris Willis: Makes sense to me.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Awesome. Well, Chris, I really enjoyed speaking with you today. If anyone who's listening or watching wants to reach out to you, what's the best way? So the easiest way is LinkedIn. I'm CP Willis on LinkedIn. Within the next month, you could also find me, on my new podcast Word Birds, which is launching in September.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Well, thanks again for joining us, Chris! Thanks, everyone for joining us today. Take care.