In this episode of Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Courtland Goldengate, Marketing Director at Snowflake, discusses his data-driven approach to the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, highlighting how he leveraged data insights to identify customers and engineer successful marketing campaigns.
Courtland and Steve explore the power of data in gaining valuable insights and a competitive market advantage. They stress the role of an analytical background and the importance of sharing original data for exposure and media coverage. The conversation also covers Courtland's experience in marketing a web filtering product initially designed for consumers but eventually finding a lucrative business use.
They discuss the use of data in upgrading customers to a new business plan and the challenges involved. Lastly, they touch on the nuances of marketing to individuals versus organizations and the significance of fostering quality conversations at trade shows.
Key takeaways:
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: Hey everybody, it's Steve. Welcome to Studio 26 and the interesting B2B Marketers podcast. All right, I'm ready to have some fun today with Courtland Courtland. Welcome to the show and give us a quick 62nd intro about who you
Courtland: are. Thanks Steve. Thanks for having me. My name is Courtland GoldenGate. I currently work at Snowflake as a marketing director and.
All of my opinions I'm gonna share are my own, so I'm not here kind of representing Snowflake. I do have to disclose that. And my background has been in mainly B2B demand generation style marketing and marketing operations at high growth software startups.
Steve: Nice. And I think we should both get t-shirts made that have a similar intro.
Just say, my thoughts are my own. I in no way represent the business that I work for. Would save, it would save us so many lawsuits that we are engaged in every day. Right.
Courtland: It would, it would be nice. It's some of the joys of working at public companies.
Steve: Yep. All right, cool. So let's jump into the favorite part of the show, which for me is always the case studies.
I learned a ton from our guests. And the first one you're gonna share has to do with kind of the era of the subprime mortgage crisis and how you started using data. Driven insights to kind of fuel some marketing programs. So take, take it away in the first case study.
Courtland: Yeah. Th So this was actually my first real tech job, I'd say my first real startup role, and it was at an ad network platform company back in 2007 and, I actually didn't get my start in marketing.
So the, the role that was, you know, my entry level role that I could get into was on, on a finance team, doing a lot of billing and payments work, doing some, some accounting work, a little bit of everything since it was a relatively small company, about 50 people. And as a result of wearing lots of different hats as you do in startup land.
Because I happened to be very familiar with financial data, with how billing and payments were done internally. I got tapped by the product management team to design the billing and payment interface for the product. So the users of the product also had to bill advertisers, have agencies take a cut of that payout publishers that were in their network.
And do this in a kind of a complex way where the publisher might be getting paid in a different currency than the advertiser was getting billed and so forth. So in doing this work with the product management team, which was a bit outside of the kind of normal scope that you would typically have in a, you know, financial analyst role, I became very familiar with the company's ad server data.
And learned how to kind of access it and understand it and learn from it, and built a bit of a reputation as, you know, the data-driven nerd at the company. And so down the road when I was looking to kind of explore other paths outside of finance due to just, you know, I think a, a few issues that I really didn't, didn't enjoy about being a part of a, a finance department.
I started talking to other department heads at the company including the chief marketing officer. And she actually kind of fortuitously had interest in using. Our proprietary data to kind of tell stories and to put some thought leadership out in the world and asked if I could like mine or at server data to understand trends that were going on that might be interesting for external audiences to, to read about and to learn.
And so I, I did that and what I found was that there was a, it looked like there was a, a recovery in the rates that advertisers were willing to pay for online inventory on publishers that were focused on real estate. So imagine, you know, someone has a, a real estate blog or there's a, a site kind of like focused on that.
Advertisers were starting to pay more money to put an ad on those sites. And kind of coming up with the, those insights and looking at the, the trends and the rates that people would pay for that kind of web placement for their ads relative to other types of websites. I then made the case that this looks like a early indication of a housing market recovery.
And so authoring this, this post or this, this kind of thought leadership piece. Went, went well and it got picked up not only by all of the like online publications that my company cared about, but it got national attention. It got picked up by the New York Times and, and other major media outlets.
And so it was really kind of the, the first time I saw that there was this giant gap in marketing departments in terms of, you know, an analytical background, the ability to. Understand data and tell stories with it. And the, the appetite in the market for that sort of information, it just was not the sort of background and skillset that your typical marketer had.
No. Back in those days. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think I, I really found a, a niche to kind of carve out and ended up moving full-time into that marketing department. Focused on the more analytical aspects of marketing.
Steve: Yeah, I think it's fascinating. I mean, I think every great marketing program comes from an insight and sometimes it's a, it's a customer insight.
Other times it's data and when I've explored data and mining it, it can, it can be a very lonely world. But then all of a sudden something clicks and you see a pattern and you get to an insight that's really. Powerful like that. I've got a question about the pricing. So like, as you were looking at the data, was it an auction-based pricing approach or was it like a fixed cpm?
How did you, how did you look at the data to figure out like that you thought the recovery was, was starting to happen
Courtland: back then? This was like before the advent of trade desks and, and like programmatic ad bind. Adine was overwhelmingly done through insertion orders. And insertion orders just had a, a rate that the advertiser was willing to pay, and it was generally like a blended, you know, ECPM rate or ecpc rate.
So either paying for clicks or paying for impressions. And there, there was nothing really dynamic about that other than like literally human ad operations people. Looking at websites and how they were performing and saying, Ooh, okay, we want to move more traffic for this ad campaign to this or that website.
So very, yeah, manual and unsophisticated back in.
Steve: But also very ad advantageous to the marketer who was savvy because, you know, we, we live in an auction-based world today for the most part. So it was funny how like you could, you could find a really valuable CPM or you know, cost per click model where you were just funneling money in and I felt like it became a good secret for maybe a couple months until some someone like you discovered it and was like, whoa.
What's, what's going on here? There's, there's more demand. So what was, what did the CMO do? You know, you, you shared your insights with her at the time. What was her reaction?
Courtland: I remember what she said, which was, you know, something like, you know, I'm, I'm hearing Angels Sing, or, you know, like, something you don't like, like this is just, I'm, I'm hearing the music when, when PR works out this way.
It's really a delight for a marketer and, and A C M O. Yep. Specifically. And so the first thing that she did was offer me a job on our team and pulled me out of the finance department and, and into the marketing department. Yeah. The second thing she did was thought about how, how can I, you know, programatize this.
How can this not be just a one-off thing? And so this report that I put together was turned into a, a quarterly report. And so every quarter I would go, you know, go in, take a look at our data and then produce you know, a thought leadership piece on it. Yep.
Steve: Hey, you know, it's fascinating. This conversation reminds me of one with the previous guest's Steve Lafonte, who had a similar story and.
You know, as marketers, we look to get coverage. We want headlines, we want our messages being embedded into trade publications. But what works so good is what you described is just the data. And if you could just bring data to, to the table, your company's gonna get credit for it, right? It's, it's gonna get sourced and you'll get exposure that way.
But so often marketers don't mine the data and share the data, and it's, it's really interesting. Maybe that's because. Not, not a lot of companies wanna do that, or they don't have access to the data. But I've always thought when companies have that original data, use it, market it, cuz that's the, that's the interesting stuff that people wanna write about it because, you know, put yourselves in the shoes of a, of a writer or an editor, right?
And they're looking for something that's new and data is new and it often becomes kind of like, Hey, let's pick this up. We think there's something here that someone hasn't. Already discussed.
Courtland: Yeah. Yeah. It has the ability to be novel and, you know, novel things are, are interesting. If everyone has access to something, it's hard to have a unique opinion.
Yep.
Steve: Awesome. Let's do this. I'm gonna jump into case study two, and this is another job that you had worked for. This is also, you know, it's in tech, but this is. The evolution of a product specifically a product that had to do with web filtering. It was, it was the software product. So tell us about that story.
Courtland: Yeah, so I, you know, down the road in my career, I joined a consumer grade web filtering software company. And so what they did was through recursive DNS blocked. The connection to categories of websites that, you know, consumers might wanna block. So overwhelmingly this was parents blocking adult content on their home network, and that's what the service was used for by most people.
And it, it was broadly adopted, you know, at, at one point in time. It Had had some staggering amount of internet traffic going through this, this service to the tune of like, you know, near 1% of all internet traffic going through this surface. So very, very kind of like broadly used consumer service and ad supported, so generally free.
But then there, there was an advertising component, which is how that company made money, however through looking at how people were actually using their service they found out that there was a very different use case for their service other than kind of consumer web filtering. And that actually was an insight that came from a customer.
The customer, which was a, a big. Company A you know, a, a high tech hardware and software company. They came to the company I was at and said like, Hey, we, we use your product and we need a contract with you. And we had to explain like, Hey, we know we don't do contracts. We're just, we're a consumer service.
We're free, we're supported by ads. And they shared like, okay, well that's, that's great, but we use. Your service at our business, and we cannot use any service at our business unless we have a contract with the vendor. So how about this? We'll pay you $10,000 and just, you know, give us a contract to sign, like draft up, you know, m MSA, and and like, let's get something signed.
And so that was the first indication that the, the product could go in a very different direction. And and a potentially much more lucrative direction. So upon kind of figuring that out how I got involved at, at this point was then looking at the company's data to see if there were other companies like the one that just came to us with the, you know, a $10,000 check in their hand asking for a piece of paper and.
So I got familiar with the, the data working with the company's, you know, product management team and, and engineering team, a couple people in particular, and learned what the data meant. Learned about, you know how to look at the volume of filtered DNS requests per network origin per day in a way that I could see the, the patterns of usage that.
Looked like it was not an individual on a home network, but instead someone using this for a business purpose. And so upon finding that information and kind of uncovering the accounts that were used at at companies, I then built a campaign around that and, and a highly automated campaign around that.
To upgrade people onto our newly created, paid, you know, business plans. So it was an interesting experience. It it radically accelerated the growth of the company since it was so early on. But you know, more than doubled the, the sales bookings in the first quarter and then more than tripled the sales bookings the quarter after.
So it it like that use of, of data to inform a marketing campaign. Completely changed the trajectory of the growth of the company. It had some downsides. It was, it was a very aggressive campaign. It was like, Hey, just so you know, you're using this service in a way that it was not intended. You're using the consumer plan.
We have a business plan. You're out, you're, you're outta compliance, basically. You're gonna have to upgrade to the business plan or else we're, we're going to, you know, Turn off the service more or less, or reduce the, the functionality of the service. And while that was very effective at driving sales, you know, people that were relying on this service to block malicious sites, to block malware, to block botnet command and control center callbacks and to block sites that were known to be fishing sites.
You know, we were basically putting them between a rock and a hard place and saying like, yep. Pay us money now. Or, you know, or else. And so while it was incredibly effective at, at growing revenue and really kind of transforming the growth trajectory of the company, it created a lot of bad will.
Yeah. That, that found down
Steve: the road. Yep. That makes sense. So the, you know, what you described is almost the. I'll call it the accidental freemium model, right? Because freemium cer certainly is pretty mainstream today, but this, this was not an intentional thing that was created, it was just kind of stumbled upon like that.
It, it's, it's, it is fascinating how you can migrate people from consumer to business plans was what I assume the, all the ads went away in the business plan, but was there any other product changes specifically for the business plan?
Courtland: Absolutely. And not just the business plan, just the, the entire company, personal use of it, everything fundamentally advertising and security are in conflict.
You know, a advertising is a, a, a vector for malicious content. And so what the company had to do was wind down its ad business and focus entirely on its B2B business. So not only were there no ads in the B2B service, they got removed from the consumer service so that the company could be known as an enterprise grade predictive network security solution, not an ad supported web filtering service for your home.
Steve: Yeah. How long did it take for them to, to make that decision when you, when you started to present those insights to them?
Courtland: Well, I would say that, First of all, the, the customer that I mentioned that came with a $10,000 check, that was a few months before I joined the company. So that happened before my time.
And why they, why they hired me was both the kind of like more the data driven and analytical background but also the, the B2B background. So they were already thinking of making this shift to, to b2b. It. It took a while to fully make that transition and to fully wean itself off of its ad revenue because most of its revenue was ad revenue and the, the B2B business was, was very nascent.
So it was another two years after I joined, before the company was finally willing to turn off that completely. Yeah. That's interesting.
Steve: And was the aver, did you have your own ad sales team or was this, you were just plugged into different networks and you were, and you were extra distribution?
Courtland: It was the, the ladder.
There was one person that was working on the advertising side in the entire company and there was no ad salespeople whatsoever. Okay. Yeah.
Steve: That person probably met with the c e O every week, I would imagine, back before the migration. What's happening? How's our funding doing? Right. All right, cool. That that was a good case study.
We're gonna jump into the third one now. And this has to do with evolution of a product. Taking a company kind of from that series, A level early startup into something a lot bigger.
Courtland: Yeah. Well, so this third company I joined when it was a series a company, but it was a large series a company.
This is a company that was printing money almost from the outset and had investors begging to write checks to the company which they didn't need, like they were, they were profitable prior to raising their series A. And, you know, rapidly growing. And so it, it was a very healthy kind of consumer, you know, direct to developer business model.
So while I joined it as a series a company, it was, you know, probably over 150 people at that time. But its focus was predominantly on a consumer style, direct to developer offering. And. It had very much consumer roots, its approach to marketing, its approach to, to business. It was a bit more high-minded than what you, you know, often see in B2B enterprise software companies.
It was inspired by, you know, writings like the Clue Train manifesto more so than you know. Five dysfunctions of a team or good degrade or crossing the chasm or things like that. So it, it was, it very much had the mindset of people are people, we should treat them like people. And yeah, that, that also meant and implied, you should not treat them as leads.
You should not do something that will make them feel weird or uncomfortable or awkward or unhappy. You should make these people. Feel cool. And at the time, like, you know, this was, you know, long ago, developers like, didn't necessarily feel cool. This was like before the area of the programmer, you know, like, you know, the, the term.
Yep. And that, that mindset, you can imagine how foreign traditional enterprise, b2b, Sales and marketing might feel to people that were more of a mindset of like, how do we design like a really cool t-shirt so that next time we like go and hang out and have drinks with the, you know, developers that are using our service.
Like they can see these t-shirts that we've designed and, and like feel cool when they're wearing them. Yeah. To. Oh, let's talk about our, our pipeline and our, our sales forecast and, you know, our demand forecasts and how is, how are leads converting into opportunities. It was just like two different worlds within the same company.
And so what happened is that a sort of old guard formed with very strong B2C roots. And then kind of this, this new group of more enterprise B2B minded people kind of came in as a, a sort of of new guard. Add to that, that initially this company had more of a holocratic organizational structure, which is to say they did not have an organizational structure.
The concept of a, of a manager wasn't. Wasn't used. The idea that leadership or management was a skill. That could be done, done well and was worth doing was alien to, to this company. They, they could
Steve: be onto something. Management may, may not have any value at all sometimes, but if they have
Courtland: native value, like, like that's, that's true.
Authority mis wielded is worse than no authority at all. Yeah. But yeah, no, it was, you know, there's this, this point of view that really worked when the company was, was small. But it created just a lot more problems when the company got larger. And when it did really, you know, it, it became obvious that management layers needed to be added.
Some of the more revolutionary ways that they went about doing things that they felt such high conviction around it being a superior way. In part being due to the fact that they built something beautiful in terms of the software that they wrote, the community that was created around it the brand that was loved by so many people, they were doing things so differently and things were working so well that there was almost this belief of like, we're, we're just an exception.
We're an exception to the rule. We'll do things differently. And the way that things have always been done, that's probably wrong. And probably doesn't make make sense. And that mindset was applied to good effect in some areas and was over applied to disastrous consequences elsewhere. One of them being like not having any organizational structure whatsoever.
So this kind of old guard, new guard, b2c. Kind of consumer minded holocratic, no management we don't like, or trust authority. Old guard group on, on one side, and then the enterprise, b2b, let's have the kind of the hierarchies and the structure and so forth. On the other, it really felt like, like just two groups kind of Yep.
Trying to run in different directions and so yeah, I mean, I remember. I was part of a wave of B2B people that got brought on and within a few months of being brought on, all of them except for me, got let go. And it, it was this, it was like a, a transplanted organ. Getting rejected by a body is the mm-hmm.
The best way I could describe it. I think because I was a bit. More analytical, a bit more data driven, a bit of a nerd, you know, glasses and beard and all, all the rest of that. They kind of didn't know what to, the body didn't know what to make of me. Right. It knew that the, the person with the Rolex in the suit had to get rejected from the body.
Yep. Yeah. But the, the person with B2B background that has fun with spreadsheets, not, not quite, You know, part of the body, but not quite this thing that needs to get rejected, something somewhere in between. And so it was, it was interesting. It, it was literally like everyone that that thought like me or had experience or background like me was like gone in in an instant.
And here, here I was trying to, you know, move objectives of the company forward that everyone knew we, they wanted to do. They just didn't. Know how to do it due to like the predisposition of the overwhelming number of, of employees that were in the company that just didn't think that way. And so it was a matter of a lot of learning on my part, learning about how this developer brand was built and about why you would want to.
You know, not charge for something and just create this, this sense of this company is giving you things and giving you things, and giving you things to the point where you just want to get back in return, which was a, a very kind of deliberate approach. This idea of not having any negative interaction between developers and the company ever under any circumstances.
I feel like at the time I came in and heard that and was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Well, we're gonna be at this event and I'm gonna be scanning badges for people, so we'll have leads to follow up on and we can send them to the sales team. And then it's like, you know, I, I might share that, that point of view and it's, it, you know, like walking into a saloon in, in the old West where like the, the piano music.
Stops playing and everyone kind of like looks over at you and you're like, you know, clearly an outsider had like a moment like that. And then someone explained to me like, well, would you like having your badge kind of like, kind of grabbed and, and scanned knowing that doing so would mean inviting a salesperson into your life for the next six months without even a conversation with the person that was doing it.
And, you know, my, you know, response was essentially like, oh shit. Yeah, yeah. No, no. That would, you know, no, that's not something that feels good. It's just something that I've grown accustomed to. I've got B2B callouses all over, you know, from my experience. And that didn't even occur to me.
Steve: What's, what's funny is that, that visceral reaction that you just described years ago, this is before email.
And your, your business card was essentially your name, your title, and your phone number. And someone I knew had put a order in for more business cards and someone had flagged it as, oh, you got your number wrong. I'm gonna change your phone number cuz it was off by a couple digits. And the person goes, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't change that, that's intentional. Those are my conference business cards. So when I hand them out to everyone, I can decide if I wanna get phone calls or not. I thought that was, that was pretty good.
Courtland: Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. It's like what, what people do now with their emails, they'll do like a, you know, a plus and then something to be able to filter it out more easily or what have you.
But that is that person was like an OG hacker, whoever Yeah. Did that with.
Steve: I want, I want that business card in so I can frame it and put it on the wall. It's just, it's just, it's so funny cuz it's just, it embraces that insight and, you know, I'm sure he had business cards where it was like, no, the, I do want you to contact me, take this.
And I, I would've, I would imagine they would've been able to have, like, this was back in the day when like, it wouldn't be crazy to wear a suit. To a a trade show. And it's like you just have one pocket with a good phone number and one pocket with a bad number. But now we have too much technology to sniff all that out with email addresses.
They would, they would, they would probably know as they went for the scan. Something something's wrong here. Can I, can you confirm your email? Can I send you, can I send you a message and validate it real
Courtland: quickly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would happen very quickly. Could happen very quickly. So, yeah, you know, it, it was a lot of learning, I would say on, on my part of kind of a very different way of thinking.
I didn't have any B2C background, so a lot of things that may come naturally to people who were used to marketing to a person rather than marketing, to an organization and a buying committee just didn't, didn't come naturally to, to me, and I had to, I had to learn and adapt. And compromise. And that's, that's a lot of what my time at this company was like, was finding ways to compromise.
And so in this, this example with the trade show thing and the scanner, and like no one wants to have their, their badge grabbed and, and scanned. We went from not doing that at all and not, you know, knowing who we not having any record of who we interacted with at a trade show. But just focusing on kind of the quality of conversation and making sure people felt good, we kept doing that.
But then as a matter of process, what we did was train anyone that was gonna be at a trade show to say, when you're having a conversation and it starts to get, get deep, and it sounds like there's something to follow up on at that point, ask, say like, Hey, you know, like that's, that's a really great question.
I don't work on that area of the product. I do know who does. So can I, can I just scan your badge so I can get back to you with, you know, following up on that specific question that you had? And, you know, of course people are like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. You know, like, you want to answer a question I have.
Go right ahead. That's very different then. You know, spamming me with emails that I didn't ask for and, you know, sending a sales development representative to cold call me three times a day. So it, you know, it was things like that where I was maybe bringing in, you know, 20% of the B2B and enterprise thinking and learnings to the company.
And the company was bringing 80% of the, you know, treat humans like humans, mindset. To me, so I, I learned a lot more than I taught at this particular company. Yeah,
Steve: yeah. The management philosophy you were describing earlier, very much minded me. I, I went to a, a marketing conference out in Las Vegas and Zappos was part of that conference, and we got to spend a day with Zappos, which was really interesting.
And half of the day I got to go, just hang out with Tony. You know, who's, who's the late c e o of that company. His vision on, on management styles was just so interesting. And I feel like even though most people would describe it as off the culture that he put in place was, was so interesting and powerful around customer service.
I remember we walked the call center floor and. They pointed out specifically, all right, do you see that girl over there? She holds the Zappos something record. And I was like, well, okay, what is, what is that about? And they said, oh, that record is the longest time spent on the phone with a customer.
It's, and it was either 12 or 13 hours straight phone call. And I've, I've worked in, you know, marketing environments where I was managing call centers mostly to kind of. You know, half of it was service, half of it was sales. And I just remember being blown away by that stat. I'm like, here, here this culture is celebrating that stat.
Which by all means, in any other company that would be laughed at, right? Like, no, no, no, no, no. We measure, we measure call time, and the lower the better. But I'm always fascinated with that is, is even though that's such a bad decision on almost every business metric, the the culture. That it creates is so big that it, that you don't have to worry about that metric.
You know, like, hey, if we need to spend two hours on the phone with someone to get them through the phone experience to then order a pair of shoe, you've, you've won that customer over, right? So maybe, maybe that $50 investment and someone talking to someone pays off. You know, the first transaction's a wash, but then they think.
I've had an amazing experience that I'm not gonna get anywhere else. Therefore, you've hooked me. So I will now buy five pairs of shoes over the next couple of years. Yeah,
Courtland: Steve, it's, it's more than that too. It's and this was this mindset of, of Zappos was very present at this company I've been talking about as well in this situation where you talk to someone for 13 hours, They didn't just buy a pair of shoes.
They didn't just buy five pair of shoes down the road. They became a super fan of Zappos. They became an evangelist for Zappos. Like they would tell other people about how great and different this company is because they are no other company would do that. They're, you know, you're metriced on how quickly and efficiently you get people off the phone.
So that, that being different and, and saying, you know, we will do what's right for the customer at all costs. It's another way of saying that we as businesses just didn't have a good way of understanding that network effect. We didn't have a good understanding of how communities impacted the health and growth of a business.
I mentioned the Clue Train manifesto before. One of the things that that talks about is understanding that markets are fundamentally people having conversations with other people, including about your company. So it was all about understanding that and this, this particular company that I was at it's investor had invested in in Facebook.
And actually like came to the company to, to share some learnings from, from Facebook and, and its network effect. I think Facebook has something they call like the, the k coefficient or, or something, something like that. But Facebook was an early company in understanding the network effect, right. Of, of and not only that, but having one person on the platform re like, Referring more people to the platform and like, if you could become, you know, just known as the place to, to be even if it was like a very high cost for that, that one person that you're trying to, to appeal to the ripple effects that that one person could create, the positive ripple effects they could create, could make it well worth the initial effort and, and outlay.
Yep.
Steve: Yeah. All right. Awesome. Let, let's jump into q and a and the first we usually start with how you got started into marketing, but you've already told part of that story. What I'm gonna focus on is the theme that you've been talking about in all these cases, which is data and insights. Where did that curiosity come from?
Like when you look back in your career, is it just, Hey, I've always been wired that way, or, Did it, did it take time to, to make that such a central part of
Courtland: who you are? Well, you know, it depends on how, how far you want to go back, but I, I think due to just the circumstances of my personal life I've been very skeptical in, in general.
And when I hear something oftentimes, you know, especially if it's something that everyone else believes. Oftentimes my first reaction is, well, is that true? You know? And, and let's see. So, okay, it's conventional wisdom, but you know, like I, I wanna verify for myself. So I've got just like a low degree of trust in general for other people, other things and, and so forth.
And as a result, that's led me to be very kind of curious. About facts that might conflict with things that other people just take on trust. Yeah. So as a, you know, as a result you know, I, I was a political science major and, and, and so, you know, a bit distrustful by, by nature anyway, and you know, see seeing the difference between what people say and what people do.
How governments and states position and describe themselves versus their actions and, and so on and so forth. But that also you know, put me in a, a field that, that had a, a pretty quantitative component to it. And so my first like real data driven kind of role was as a research assistant for a PhD candidate analyzing campaign.
Contributions to political candidates and whether or not that influenced whether the, the donor was awarded like a government contract. So in this case it was construction company donations to political candidates to related back to government construction contracts awarded to people that donated to the campaigns.
And so, you know, shocker, it turns out that when, you know, you donate to someone's campaign, their, their political campaign, they're much more likely to award a government contract to your company, to, you know, perform whatever service to the government. And so that got me used to compiling data and analyzing data.
And I've al you know, I've also just been very predisposed to, to math, like, My favorite course in undergrad was linear algebra, which was like an elective course. You know, other people are taking a course on, like film or, you know, art history or whatever. If they, they have room for an elective. Like I, I was more gravitating to those sorts of courses.
So I think that's, you know, a, a long and roundabout way of saying like, this is, I think how and why I became. More opposed to be curious about data. Yeah. You
Steve: know, it's interesting this, as you started talking about your curiosity, it reminded me of a story that was told on the previous podcast too about Big City has their first meeting to talk about a bridge they wanna build and they bring, you know, mathematicians, engineers, e economists, and they get into this.
Bridge discussion. How big should it be? What material should we use? And someone stands up and they said, we're, we have actually not talked about the most important question in this whole process. And the question is, should we be building a bridge? And it just, I love those moments cuz I feel like in marketing those are those amazing moments when someone in a meeting or in an email, whatever, stumbles upon the, those really good questions.
And they're usually from. A very curious mind trying like what you just described, right? Like I'm, I'm, I can call, I can call BS on data, right? Like, I want to really get to what's happening and, and question those conventional truths. And sometimes it's a lot for people to handle someone like that.
But my experience most of the time is like, that was the thing that people in the room wanted to say. They just didn't know how to say it. But that, that's always an inflection point that I've seen in companies that have fueled marketers to think differently and go in different
Courtland: directions. Yeah. Yeah. I there's an old VP of sales that I worked with.
It's really like, just great guy solid person, and I think he, he des his, his description of me was, You know, the guy's an acquired taste I think is how I would describe me. Because yeah, you know, it's not, especially people that are really good with people and have other strengths like that.
Maybe not super analytical, maybe not super skeptical, but like just relate well to humans. It's not always fun to hear like, Ooh, well, well actually that wouldn't work. Or, I don't think that, should we be doing this thing when they're just trying to get something done? You know, they're just trying to, you know, and potentially why they're trying to get it done is like, for other reasons to make someone happy, you know, to, to, you know, return a favor to a person.
And even if there's not like a sound logical backing for like, doing that thing. They might have a very re valid reason for it. So it it, yeah. It's one of those personality traits that can be really powerful, but can be over relied on and companies can have too much of it at times. Yeah. But usually it's the reverse.
Usually companies don't have enough of that. Yeah. Mindset. Yeah.
Steve: All right. Two questions before we wrap up. The first question is gonna be advice to, to B2B marketers who. Let's say they're building a brand new team, and like how would, how would you suggest that they build a team philosophically today, as opposed to what you may have said 10, 15 years ago?
Who are the people on the team? What are their mindsets? How would, how would you recommend they go down that
Courtland: path? Well, I think my, my answer to this has, has Changed dramatically with the advent of large language models and their popularity. So I think specifically how open AI and chat g p t has become ultra mainstream, that makes me inclined to think that you can get a lot more done with much fewer people and.
I think any role that is a derivative role that takes what someone does and then makes something else out of it can go away. The people that create the core, the people that, that originate the idea, the concept, that first flagship piece of content that have that tight relationship with their.
Customers, those are the people that you want. And then for the work of, well then how do you enable a sales team? How do you adapt that content to different industry verticals or different personas or different buying stages or different, you know communication channels content mediums, all of that.
Can be done very, very, very fast if it's AI assisted, but it needs that initial kind of seed before it can grow and branch out and all this. Yep. Different directions. So maybe a little bit of a, a vague answer, but I would think have a smaller team. Have a smaller budget, make a bigger impact. How would you do that?
How would you make, you know, 10 times the impact that you made in your previous, you know, department that you led with? Yep. You know, a fraction of the resources because it can be done and the way it can be done is through ultra high scale work, which is generally creating community tapping into the power of a community.
And being ultra efficient in every kind of internal aspect of the kinda work that you do. Yep. All right. Well, I
Steve: like that. All right, final question. Let's go back in time. What, what advice are you gonna give to yourself in your first job? What would, what, what are some of those big shifts looking back that you're like, ah, I should, I should have done more of this, or less of that?
Courtland: You know, a a, a few things came to mind. The, the, the immediate thing that came to mind first was learn to code. But giving that a little bit of thought, I would say, you know, talk to more customers, talk to more people, is, is I think probably the, the better advice when I think of the major mistakes that I've made in my career.
The times where I've crashed and burned, the times where you know, a work situation became so uncomfortable, I felt like I needed to. Leave the company. It's all been people related. You know, it's not because, ooh, you know, I, I can't get the data that I want, or I can't analyze things in the right way.
It's, it's all, it's all the, the messy, complicated human stuff. So yeah, I mean, I think the, the advice I would give is don't just think in terms of aggregate trends. Like do that, but then enrich that with high context, detailed in depth interaction with other people. You know, the, the first or I guess the second example that we're going on where I was talking about the consumer web filtering thing, and I ran this campaign and it worked out so great financially three and a half years later, the, the biggest source of, of churn was people that were a part of that campaign that I ran.
They ended up hating the company. They had once loved it, but they felt like their arm got twisted and you know, a gun was put to their head to upgrade and as a result they became detractors. So, you know, you gotta understand the people and, and you have to have that, that that depth of of context Yeah.
To pair with maybe the more data driven than. Aggregate trend analysis type work.
Steve: Yep. All right. Let's get insight. I like that. All right. Thank you, cor Lynn, thank you for all the listeners out there who tuned in for another episode. This was a great one. I love, I love the data and insight themes throughout your career.
It's just you, you were a Renaissance man before most marketers. Claim to have data scientists on their team. You, you, you don't need the title of data scientists to prove your value. You, you've been doing it for a long time. So thank you for sharing your thoughts today and take care everyone.
Thanks again for joining us live from Studio 26. See you next time. Bye-bye. All right. Cool. Cool.