Branding in Hypergrowth w/ Meghan Marks

Welcome to he said she said razor branding podcast with Michael Russo and Jackie Russo to learn more about how to improve your brand visit brand russo.com Michael our guest today, Megan Mitchell marks with orca security is so good. She's dynamic. She's smart. She has risen to the top of not just your company, but her field and her knowledge and expertise around marketing is to me, it was like a far bird level class and how CMOs should handle their shit. Yeah, no, she was awesome. My dream and not that we haven't had great guests on, but she was like, she raised the bar. She was like really, really awesome. But just in her command of her position of the industry of, you know, what she does and her teams and yeah, it was impressive. Yeah. Yeah. No, if I ever quit this agency, I'm going to go apply to work for her. I'm already sending my application. I knew it. I can tell it's not at one point you look all distracted. I knew that's what you were doing. I'm going to hire him. No, no, I bet everybody does though. I would love her. I mean, she takes your team to Austin to do their yearly planning. I mean, come on that. And by the way, CMOs, that's the way you get the talent to stick with your team is you make the experience fun, which is one of the things we talk about. Yeah, and a apology for, oh man, just switch the views. So I'm sorry when Reagan gets this. This is why it switched. Sorry about that. Apologize for Jackie's microphone. It she failed in making sure that her equipment was working properly. And that's why she sounds like she's in a cave. They can't even tell the difference between last episode and this episode. You can tell you can tell I'm going to try to fix it, but I come some office and get me hooked up. All right, bye. Oh, wait, we're going to Megan. I mean, I thought I had done it when I said and she makes it fun. And then I thought that was a perfect segue to welcome Megan, but then you kept talking and giving me shit about microphones. So maybe Reagan could just stop it there. We'll see what she does. Fingers crossed. All right, and here is Megan. Oh, that was nice. Look at you. Good job. Bye. Bye. Come face on microphone. All right. Megan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm so excited that you're here. And I want to jump into all my questions, but I'm trying to kind of get this right because Michael thinks I'm an abrupt starter. And so maybe we start with you telling us a little bit about your background and where you are now. And then I can start peppering you with all the questions I have. I love it. Okay. Well, thank you for having me. I am a lifer as a marketer. I started out my career working at Oregon Public Broadcasting, which was the PBS station here in Portland. And from there, I went into tech and I have been into in tech ever since early in my career and marketing hardware. And then after a few years, I went into SaaS and I've been in SaaS marketing for 20 years at this point. And I've worked at companies, small startups, and I've worked at large companies like Siemens and Palo Alto Networks. And currently I am the CMO of Orca Security. We are a cloud security company founded in 2019. And I've been leading the marketing team here for four years. That is awesome. So when for our listeners who may not be a savvy about the space that you're in, SaaS is software as a service. Correct. Yeah. I just wanted to show off that I knew that. That was my goal. Well, and when it comes to marketing tactics, it's a little bit different than let's say, you know, marketing of physical asset. And it tends to be a really fast pace industry. I believe that might be the understatement of the day. We'll hold on and see if it changes later. But yeah. So let's talk about some of the kinds of marketing campaigns that you do for Orca. I mean, Y'all are the standards anymore, you know, Y'all are a real company that's gotten big. Let's talk about what does actually I'm going to retract myself. Let's start with your team. Talk about your internal team and the outside resources that you leverage for the marketing that you're doing. Sure. So when it comes to building marketing teams, I take a potentially different philosophy. And that is, I don't believe it's an accomplishment to have the biggest marketing team. I believe the accomplishment is having the right team that understands what their roles are across the marketing process. And I also believe that when you are grinding every single day running marketing, you need outside help. So my approach is internal team, strong internal creative and writers and field marketers and digital people. And then augmented externally with folks who are up to date on all the things that are changing. So quickly, whether it be creative, whether it's what's happening with AI and how do we best leverage all the things happening there on the marketing upside. And yeah, so it's a mix. Right. Well, and I think that you're wise to leverage both. I think the strongest teams, whether it's a one or 100 person in house team, those outside resources can help because that's the best of both worlds. Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I don't, I've been in organizations where there's a competition external to internal. And now that I sit in the CMO seat, it's really important to me that I diffuse that because I don't see it as a competition. So sometimes when it comes to creative, you might get someone internally that feels really threatened like how come the CMO wants to go out because I'm so talented, you are talented. But we also need to know when we need help. So I'm big on making sure that that relationship is one that is super positive on both sides and not competitive. You are my new best friend. I know you are my new best friend, Megan. We talked about that a lot internally. Actually, I wrote a, I wrote a paper recently for us. We were having some troubles with a certain situation. And it was, it was basically look, this is why we're here. This is what our goal is. This is what we're doing. Basically, how to work well with an agency and that marketing director is so key to that relationship. I mean, you know, from an outside agency, we can't do anything without them. I mean, they're internal. They have the voice. They have the pulse. They understand things that we don't understand. But if they're threatened, that relationship is going to go nowhere. And that threat comes up a lot sometimes and the job security for, they're going to make me look bad. I'm like, look, we're here to make you look good. That's our goal. And when you have that kind of symbiotic relationship, I think you're able to do great things. But without it, it's a train request to happen. But I have worked in really, really large organizations where the best work is the work that is shipped out. And that is also something that I, I think leads to the tension and competition. So when you look at how you manage create creative work, if you take the Super Bowl commercial and it is the inside team doesn't get to work on it, that doesn't work either because creatives want to build a portfolio. So having the ability to help your internal team build a portfolio that they're proud of and not just take all the fun stuff. And you know, we're wrapping a race car or we're doing like a cool commercial. So a lot of the big brand stuff, then it just like automatically goes out and that you got to balance that with your internal team. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, it's emotional. I mean, people, if you're in a creative space, you're wearing your heart and you sleep, you can't help it. I mean, I've been doing this a long time and I always say, you know, if you're going into this business as a creative thinking that you're going to be an artist, you're in a wrong business because you're going to get hurt every day. It's your heart crushed, you know, everybody's got a pain, right? And so they're judging your work. So you have to have a thick skin. You say that out loud. But internally, I mean, we got we had drag your mentioning a disagree we had last night. It was over a creative thing that I had submitted that she do a side and I was like, I'm out. I'm not talking to me. To be clear, I said, it's good. And I asked a question and then shut down. I got nothing for six hours. So I think I think here's the thing. Marketing is emotional. And I say that as I'm a woman and I know that there I've worked with all kinds of marketers and marketing is emotional. That's our whole job. Our job is to make people react, take action, think, feel. And because of that, particularly when you're working with high performing people, they're going to get emotional. And by the way, it's up to us as marketing leaders to figure out how do you point that emotion in the right direction. And unfortunately, yes, the skin is required. I would say in B2B in a job like mine, the thick skin is required because it's not just externally, it's internally. You have sellers. I think they have the hardest job in the company. And they are out every single day in the literal trenches. And they're fighting the good fight. And they have opinions. And it's really easy for us as marketers to get really upset and say, oh, okay, I was, I was just on a QBR last night. Quarterly business review with a bunch of salespeople and they go one by one. They're talking through all of their deals. And as they talk through their deals, they also talk about what's their pipeline plan? How are they going to build pipeline in their region? And that of course requires marketing. And so they're making comments about marketing. I don't like this. I think we should do more of that. And you know, it's important that my team and the leaders on my team feel like that they put the armor down. God, I put the armor down and just be be comfortable that there might be some good inside of that feedback. Even though you know, you're working really hard. You put everything you had into that, whatever it is. We did this trade show. It was super complicated. We rushed to get it done. And then we didn't do maybe this one thing. And it hurts to hear that. Yeah, it does. It does. And I love that you brought up the sales team because I think that, you know, just as we talked about the challenge between the internal market team and external marketing teams. We've also got challenges in turn. We always hear about the silo marketing and sales siloed. So what do you do to make friends with the sales team across the whole? First of all, in my job, it's at the sea level. It is critical that the CRO and I get along. And similar to what I'm saying about my team at the, you know, sales rep level, I have to be able to put my armor down and listen. So I would say that's probably one of my personal secrets to my success is that I am willing to listen and build relationships and be super helpful. That's part of my job. I mean, we, we are the growth engine of the company that doesn't come with a specific playbook of exactly how you're going to grow the company in any given time. But I can guarantee you if your go to market organization is segmented and siloed and doesn't get along and blames each other, you will not be successful. No matter what, I don't care about the best marketing in the entire world, it won't work. Correct. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, you have to kind of check your ego a lot of times and which is hard and ego business because you get where your heart or sleep would stuff. But like recently, we. Jackie's normally not allowed to pitch things and meetings when I'm around because sometimes she'll come up with things that client me like and I don't like and I was a gravitate to it and I'm stuck with it. Yeah. And I'm like, all right. So whatever. But she does have a great idea sometimes and recently she pitched something and it was a really. I threw it off a silly at first. And then the more I did it, the more I liked it, the more we went into it, client loved it, end up being a home run. But it came from a really untraditional way, you know, and that happens all the time. Sometimes you hear something you're like, where do that come from? It comes from, you know, oh, come on now, you got to win. What I find is the most successful sales people are going to be your biggest critics, but also your best teachers because those, like I said, you're in the trenches, you're out there, they are working so hard. And I would not what I think that again, hardest job. And they're going to see things you're not going to see because I'm not at every sales meeting. I'm not at every partner conference. I'm not sitting and listening to every single conversation at the customer level. And, you know, it's those kind of like million dollar high performer reps where they come to you and they say, look, this, this is a problem like Megan, you're not paying attention right here. And it is a problem. And if as marketers, we just shut off our ears and go, la, la, la, we're great. Failure. And we talk a lot about, you know, our part of our process is focused and really connecting with understanding the consumer, understanding the end user, right. And they're the front lines. They're the ones that are engaging with them in a way that that nobody else is. And you have to listen to that insight. Otherwise, you just spend a wheels. Yeah, absolutely. And the other things that's fascinating to me, Megan, about what you've been able to accomplish is you've been in your position for over four years. And in your industry, that usually doesn't happen. So I'll have you managed to pull that off so that you've if continue to be successful this whole time. I feel incredibly grateful that I have been at Orca for as long as I have. I'll tell you when I left my last job, there was, and I'll never forget it, there was a coworker at the time and she told me two things. One, she said, Megan, you're not going to, you're not ready. And the second thing she told me is, you're going to fail as a CMO. And you're going to, you're going to, you're going to get fired in like nine months. And I remember looking at her going, maybe. You know, if that's what happened, it was worth the risk for me because I believed so much in Orca. And I still believe in our mission and our product and our people. And my personal passion and belief is what has kept me here for four years. And I would say probably my ability to adjust. It's super important that marketing be able to be that sort of, you know, heartbeat of the company. And again, I think that's emotional because it is emotional. We are here to get people excited to work here and proud. We get to be that professional voice make people proud. So my ability to adjust and lead in times of challenge and change is why I'm still here. And I believe in the mission. I believe in what we're doing. Who gave you that advice? Was there a friend? It was a co-worker and she was a really senior executive. She wasn't my boss, but she was a senior executive in my previous marketing team. And I think she was coming from a place of love, you know, because she really wanted me to stay in my current position. So she wanted me to stay. So that was her motivation. But unfortunately, anyone who knows me, if you're going to challenge me, that's only going to make me want to do it more. So, um, and of course after I hit a year at Orca, I sent her like a screenshot from LinkedIn with a. I was about to say, yeah, let's call her. Let's call her right now and say, hey, how you doing? Yeah, how that worked out? You were wrong. And where are you now and how is your career going? Exactly. Right. Yeah. You see a mole. Right. Right. Yeah. I kind of want to go kick her ass. But I think you've taken the high road. So I will too. Um, but I don't want to. I don't want to take the high road. Um, so good. I think you should take, you know what, I was going to say another thing that I'm seeing a big trend right now. And I'm curious if you guys see this. And that is, um, when you have talent, leave your organization. And the reaction to how, um, if someone says like, you know, Megan, I'm resigning. You know, I don't want to get down my dream job. And this is all the reasons why I, I, I am happy for you. And I do not understand this. Um, and I've seen it quite a bit lately, like other CMO friends calling me. And they're just so pissed off. And I'm, and I'm, I'm a kid. Do you remember what it was like when you were in that state for your career and you got somebody who said, I want to make you a senior director. And you've never done that job before. And the idea of the change is really exciting. I, I am happy for you. I, I, and I wish I could just say that on like the biggest platform. And I don't see what people think they're going to get by being nasty when someone resigns from your organization. No, don't get it. No, life is too short. The town is too small. The industry is too connected. Why would you ruin our relationship? Because you're going to cross paths again. We disagree on some of that. I mean, I wouldn't disagree, but we handle it differently. Um, for me, it's a, it's a, you know, it's an emotional thing. I mean, when somebody leaves, it's like, you don't like us anymore. You know, like, it's more of her, her feelings thing, like, you know, kind of thing, because you invested your time and your resources and your, and your trust in that person. You know, but yeah, Jack is right. She's usually want to talk me off the ledge and say, you know, there's upside to all this. And as long as we're leaving on good notes and all these good things, but it's hard. It's hard. No, but, no, but we wish them well. And we do, but you're right. You, you, you, you, we wish them well. And your investment paid off because that person five, seven, ten years down the road, they're going to remember. I still remember my first boss and everything I learned from her. So I mean, I worked at the hardware company I worked at the time was a $300 million company. And we had a four person marketing team. Again, margins on hardware are not like software. So, you know, it was, it was probably the most fun job I've ever had, because I got a chance to do everything. And this was before marketing automation. So, you know, I was building emails. I was writing Google ads. I was doing press releases events. I mean, anything you can imagine that you kind of would sprinkle around to a specialist. I got to do. And it was really fun. And I will never forget that boss because she is, and when it was time for me to go when I stayed three and a half is years. She was my biggest champion. And we're still friends to this day. As it should be, no one should expect 40 years and a gold watch anymore. That's not the reality we live in. And so I think we should support and train and encourage everyone while they're with us and know that they won't be with us forever. And that's okay. I don't agree. Yeah, Michael would agree with you Michael. It's hard. You can't take a sign. May get some chance. I do. Whatever. All right. So, let's talk some more about Orca. You know, the space here and is so competitive. And I feel like there's such industry language and that role of translator and megaphone that you have to sit in is kind of hard. What are some of the things you do or lean on or things that you think about to help separate Orca from competition and really make sure you're trading a message that's going to resonate. It's incredibly tough. I would argue it's probably outside of AI, the most competitive space in the world right now. And that's because so many people are innovating in the cloud. The cloud is critical to growth of every single industry. So everybody wants things that their fingertips faster, better, etc. So the cloud is at the center of all that when I think about differentiation, there's what how you differentiate in terms of what you're offering. And then there's how do you differentiate as a company. And so I really push my team to make sure we understand both. So why are offering the best that it can be against these, you know, giants that we compete against. And we have it in an interesting way. You have these large giants and you also have small startups like it's again, it's a really hot space. And so how do you think about the differentiation there. How does that articulate into your messaging as marketers. I see a tendency to want to jump from messaging into tactics right away. And so I'm like pull it back. Let's who are we trying to target. What's the message. How do we differentiate ourselves. So there's the messaging side of things. And then there's, you know, the tactics as well. Right. What are the kinds of that we we will experiment with and what are the kinds of things that we won't experiment with. And so as you go through that process is that all internal is that internal and external. Do you have an annual strategic planning workshop. Everybody gets together. How do you actually put that piece. Those pieces together. We just had it was so fun that for you to bring us up. We just had our what I call marketing kickoff. So for us, we're on a calendar year. So marketing kickoff happens in the fall. And then the sales kickoff happens in the first quarter. So for marketing kickoff, I fly everybody in. We were just in Austin at a beautiful resort kind of locked together for two and a half days. It was great. And that's where we start working on. Okay, what does the vision look like for the year. What's the core messaging. How does this tie into the at this point. You know, the company stuff is done. So now it's my job to take the company stuff and translate that into marketing. And I think it's really important. Again, marketing because we tend to be a service to everybody else. We run sales kickoff. We help make sure all the company meetings have the, you know, sparkle, etc. But it's really important for marketing to also do the same. In this case, it is more internal. I don't bring in many agencies in the beginning. It's more our team working through the key tenants of the strategy. What's it going to look like. And then from there, we branch out. I like that because now you're giving something to the outside resources, your agencies that they could work with. You're not expecting them to figure it all out on their own. So I think that's a good blend of internal and external. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I agree. I feel like they have the need to. I think when people come in, they feel like, okay, my start from scratch. Do I have to reinvent the wheel or do I take the ball and run with it? You know, and I think that's a whole different dynamic. Well, I'm curious on your side. I mean, when you think about successful projects that you've worked on, I, at least my opinion is that they are successful because we've done the pre work ahead of time. Yeah, 100%. What we find is, you know, we created razor branding in 2005 and trademarked it back then and then wrote the book on it in 2000, published in 2001 by Forbes. And so for us, that process you just described, I have yet to see anyone be successful with their marketing that they're not going through something like that to have the time and space to think to really say these are who our target audiences are. This is why each audience would choose us and those answers differ. This is the messaging we need to create to connect the audience to our solutions. And then this is where we're going to put those messages so the audience sees it over and over again. That's magic. And it's a, it's a step that a lot of people want to skip because it's fairly the sexy part. And you know, that's, that's part of it. Now, I will say the other fun thing that I did this time around is we did our first AI hackathon as a marketing team. And it was really fun. We gave, we broke everybody into teams and there was a prompt and you had to create a campaign under sort of a set of parameters. And then we gave you six to six to 10 different AI tools that you were allowed to use. And then you got, you got to come back and present the campaign, the campaign concept, a video, add social cards, sort of like a whole little build of elements. That was super fun because I bet it's great to do the core work, but we have to also remember our job is fun. Well, I always say like we're not digging ditches in Louisiana and August. There are way harder jobs than what we do. Well, we have a stock kitchen of snacks and an air conditioning building in the middle of downtown with all these fun activities and 36 restaurants within a block. And you know, it's like, come on now. You know, we're not carrying cancer. And so yes, it is fun and heavy is the head that wears the crown because we have a responsibility to our clients to ensure that we're providing solutions that help them get results. And so we're not doing that. The fun to end quickly. Absolutely. And I do think internal teams get burned out. It's a real thing. I know that's an overuse term, but it is true. They do. And there's just a lot that happens inside of a company to run a marketing organization and to get things done. There's the stakeholder approval. There's, you know, the opinions that you need to manage. There's all the different things you need to do to produce marketing. And it does wear people down. And you know, especially when you get other folks saying, well, I mean, look, this, my favorite is the links in Slack. Like, hey, did you see this? And it's like, you don't think I follow our competitors on LinkedIn. I do. I saw it. I think when the hardest parts, too, I just didn't interview a few minutes back with somebody and they were asking me, what was the hardest part about my job? And I thought about it for a second. I was like, just working in today's environment is the hardest part because again, the world has changed dramatically. And even with our clients, we have a, you discovery firm we work with. We do data processing and digital forensics and really in the weeds of very smart people way smarter than we are. Yes. And we basically are trains leaders for them. How do we take the information and put it out there in the world? But they're recently going through a lot of dramatic changes in their industry just because of the technology chain, you know, is disrupting them dramatically. And they're having to rethink everything and how are they not just today, but where are they going to be in five to 10 years from now? Right. With all those changes. And so we're kind of on that that train with them. And figuring out messaging and where we're doing and how we're positioning this and that. And that's the struggle I think more than anything because marketing is one thing and that's like said, it's not, you know, that's what we do and we come up with things and we message and we do these things. You throw in all the roadblocks that come into that and that's where it becomes more of an obstacle. I think from small business to big corporate giants, everybody's going through the same thing right now, which is what is what is next. Well, we're in a time of transformation and there's been these, you know, mega trends over the history of technology and we're living one right now. The last one we lived was cloud. I remember when people were saying, oh, I don't want to put my data in the cloud and I'm so afraid. Now with AI, it's about how do you lean into it in a way that is going to be effective for you at this time, but also being aware that it's changing so rapidly. I think on the design front, I was just in a creative meeting with two creatives and there was some someone had created something in one of the AI, maybe mid journey. They said, well, you know, Megan, if you want to change it, it's not like I can just go into the file and change it, I have to redo the prompts and I'm shaking my head like, come on, we've been doing this for years now, I know that. And understanding that it's not it's not as it's not an easy button for graphic design or design creation and it's going to change it will change the process. It will change the accessibility. It will probably even change the speed, but it is absolutely not an easy button particularly when you want to have brand consistency that it's going to be interesting to see how this evolves in the next few years. I have a client send me something every once in a while and they're like, look what it did last night, I'm like, this is like the president of the company, I'm like, what are you doing messing around with this, but they love it, they love messing around tinkering. And there's some of this video he made, I'm like, all right, first of all, that's that's that's great that we can't use any of it and these are the problems with it and I'm like, the samples that you see, these are people that that basically spend weeks and months creating this 30 second beautiful thing that is really hard to create. You've got to have a huge budget, you've got to have a huge resource, you've got to have it, it's just like, you know, if I'm going to go film a movie, I've got to have a helicopter in a crane and this, you know, there's so many bills and whistles that go into creating great AI stuff, you know, you can you can get by with the basic stuff. But to get great, it's still a little bit of an obstacle, you know. Well, it's going to be like figuring out prompts and how to write prompts that's going to it's its own, I don't remember the name of the university, but there was one in California that now has an entire coursework on how to write prompts because it is a skill and it will be a new skill. I'm a mom, so my kids have a teenager and the way he uses AI in his life already is absolutely incredible. And it's the art kids, so we had three who just graduated college in the past three years and our youngest is a senior right now. And so it's going to be fasting to see the school your kids go to and how different it is from the school our kids went to in the same generation. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're not talking kids in 2020 to kids in 1950. We're talking 2023 to 2026, the world has changed. Absolutely. And it's not going back. And now one of our kids is an English teacher, 6/7th and 8th grade. No, sorry, 7/8th and 9th grade. And so the challenges that she has in class are so different. And so I'm like, why don't you just teach him to use AI? I said, I want them to be thinkers. I said, okay, how do you stop them from cheating? She said every assignment is handwritten in class. Yes, my best friends at high school English teacher and they went back to the blue books where you're. Which by the way, if you think about it, how, how many of these kids have not been writing for years? Right. Chromebooks are like elementary school. So if you've been typing and then all of a sudden, I'm asking you to write an essay. That's my biggest concern with all that with all the I just not to get sidetracked with that, but it's just. I think if we stop using certain skills, we lose them. And so I think we have to still write everyone's wrong. We have to still put pen of paper. We have to still think about things and and AI is a great tool. And it has moved so fast that process decision information. I just took a meeting and put it in there and it gave me back notes and bullet points and highlights and action items. It was great and saved me hours. But I still need to go in and process that information and think and come up with my solutions for that. I think when we stop doing that, we will run to problems in the future, but that's a whole other subject. It's going to be really fun and I don't know when it comes to waves of change in technology. If you look through history, it's not going to benefit anybody for folks to opt out. So you may as well figure out, you know, as a as a CMO and a leader of marketing. I've seen it be incredible. So one of the hardest things that we have to do is make sure that we're investing in targeting and really honing in our marketing to the right people. So being able to use AI for figuring out the intense signals to figure out how you define your ideal customer profile for how you make sure that the right message is getting to the right person at the right time. It is a huge leap forward from where we were two years ago. And by the way, it's we have re-evaluated our entire MarTech stack. And I had my team started about 90 days ago. And one of the reasons was, unfortunately, the tech has changed so much. So if you have these core, I won't call them out, but let's call them like the core ABM tools that used to be Chrome, Delacrem. Unfortunately, I'm looking at what they offer and I'm going, you know what? I see these tools over here. They all connect together really well, all the data services and Salesforce, and they're all AI powered in. It's incredible. People are writing their own code, their own software, they're developing their own systems internally, where they don't even need the formulated one that they're buying off the shelter. Like, how can I take this and, you know, rig it up to work for me and what I need? It's the thing. I've been, so it's funny. I teach AI classes and I'm taking AI classes, right? That's cool. And so, well, the ones I teach are beginner AI, how to use it for marketing. The ones I'm taking are intermediate, how do I learn so that I can be a better teacher, right? And I do them sometimes on the same day, which is very complicated. But in the classes I'm taking, we started vibe coding a couple of weeks ago, and I've been building apps, bonnels, all this stuff, and it is mind blowing to think to your point. How, and we're not there quite yet, but how soon we will be at a place where the next time we evolve our whole tech stack, we're not replacing one thing with another. We're just building something completely custom to us. It's an option. And when you think about, in B2B, one of the biggest challenges that B2B marketers face is, how do you attract attention? And when you think about attention, you know, and I don't mean like big brand moments, like everybody's not here. They're a giant conference, especially cyber security CMOs. We've got our big, you know, one conference a year and everybody's got to show up. And if you don't show up well there, it's really not good for your personal brand. But outside of that, how do you do outbounding? How do we enable the SDR teams that are calling on the phone? What does that look like? How do you have the right engagement and the right tools? And what does email look like? And how is it tied into social and like all those little interactions and all those data points? That's where, to me, AI is going to be truly transformational when it comes to the go to market. Yeah, 100%. The thing that's fascinating to me is no matter what, it still comes down to one person selling something to another person. And so that leads me to my next set of questions around that, you know, we've always talked about B2B is considered to be so segmented and hard and complicated. But if you bring a little bit of a B2C philosophy, you can do really good things. And so one of the things I kind of want to talk about next is trade shows and conferences. They're bad, baby. I mean, we may have gone quiet 2021, 22, but all of a sudden everything is an in-person event again. I think it's people want to be one person selling to another person. So what are your frameworks for really making those investments pay off before during it after trade shows? So the first thing is, you know, we talk about collaboration with sales. So, you know, in B2C, you're selling to consumers in B2B. I'm still selling to people, but also I have people in the middle that I have to make sure are on the journey with me. So in terms of the frameworks week in cybersecurity, you could do 10 events a day. I'm not exaggerating here are cyber security and cloud security events around the world. So the hardest kind of initial challenge is deciding what's the threshold for where you invest. How do you and that's where knowing who you need to talk to is important. We have RSA that's our kind of largest trade show that happens in San Francisco every year this year next year it's in March. So that's kind of one like what are your anchor I call them tier one. What are your tier one events and then for each one of those tier one events. How do you build the story for the year so making sure you have the store so you're not redoing it every single show. And that's kind of one and then for smaller events I agree with you I think in person is back I was in San Francisco two weeks ago. And San Francisco is a notoriously hard city to get people to show up in person because there's so many options. I think it's harder than New York I really do I think it's one of the hardest cities in the US and we had a jam packed dinner on a Monday night and I was so surprised. But the reason why we had it with a partner I think that was a big part of it. We were at a Michelin star restaurant so the attractor was experience. Yeah I mean the food was amazing and the content was light so it's figuring out your event strategy of like where are you going to be at the big anchor tier one trade shows. What does it look like inside each one of your regions if you will it's how you know we think of them. And then what is the human experience people still want at the base level they want to do cool things and be part of cool things. I because events are back I think the threshold for people wanting to go to events is it's it's harder to get my attention like I you know I get invited to all kinds of cool events as I'm sure you all do too. But I you know I take maybe one out of 50 invitations and it's got to be something pretty cool so being creative on whether it's the experience whether it's on the content. The you know doing it on a Monday night versus asking people to go out during their family time on a Friday or Saturday you know just like thinking about all those different elements they really matter. Yeah no I agree completely and I love that you're talking about ways people can make that experience even more interesting because you're right the competition has reached a fever pitch it's so loud. And yet you know we're in a smaller market mid major left it Louisiana and so we look around and HR has all these things the CPAs have all these things the lawyers have all these things marketers nothing. And so we got some other agencies together and we're collaborating on putting on a marketing conference in January because all the in house marketers don't have we don't have that chapter we don't have an AMH chapter. And so we need that community and collaboration so we can grow together have to talk you have to be able to talk to each other. Yes it's so important to be able to have to be able to phone a friend I can't tell you how many times I call my CMO friends and I'm like did you go through this right for you. Right because you need somebody you need to be able to phone a friend and say I am going through hell right now how did you manage this or hey do you have an agency that can do this because I need to turn a global road show on a dime what's a good event agency who can I work with. Right right so important and I love and we're going to talk about agencies now because I love that you specifically put a qualifier in front of that agency I find all too often agencies try to be all things to all people. And so how do you all know who to pick is everybody's out there saying I can do anything pick me pick me that scarcity mindset makes me crazy. Okay good yeah I don't I don't I've worked with enough in my career especially because I've worked it Fortune 500 companies as well so I've worked with like some of the biggest in the world when we're doing commercials and big things like that. And then it kind of scales down from there the ones that I see that are most successful are the ones that are comfortable knowing look I'm really good at let's say trade show experiential design. But I'm over here I'm really good on social do I think the same company can do both yes you got to have the teams of people in the experts but it just as a marketing leader I can tell you I'm not going to hire one company to do it all no way. I've seen that model by the way I worked in a large company recently where we we had one of those dream agency scenarios and it was a major fail yeah it's going to be there's no round way around it it's totally going to be. And so it's just it's crazy to me when agencies try to claim especially mid market agencies try to claim they're big enough to be all things to all people and big agencies try to claim they're small enough to be nimble responsive and affordable I'm like y'all can't have at all. No you know to me it's it's too risky as a market for you to say I'm going to go all in here I believe in having multiple agencies multiple you know outside help by different functions and sometimes you might discover in fact we had this recently where we had. This amazing team that was working on content that turned out was amazing at video it was it was an accident that we figured out but you know what I go all in on all things no I think it's too risky. Michael just picked up the pen of ideas I know he's got something he wants to say know just think about all that and like our journey we. One on almost 25 years now but like for a long probably the first 10 years Jackie working L.A. I worked in Seattle we both moved home to our hometown Louisiana and started an agency and it took a while for us to not be the pretty girl in the room I mean it was it was always the guy in Houston or Dallas or Chicago you know. And the past 10 years has really changed for us and that we started I don't know what happened but technology really because these kind of meetings zoom meetings and that you didn't need to be down the hall and all said people realizing oh they're a lot more affordable from the smaller market and they can still do you know big city work and and it was a game changer for us as far as being able to get invited just invited to the table you know just be able to have the opportunity to go do the work and because for a while there was the. The giant hundred 200 person agency and again we partner with them on certain things and it's it's a it's a mess it's really hard to figure out who's doing what and and the accountability level is just all over the place and and usually those relate what I've seen is that usually in badly. Something it's like you know that's when you end up laying off after team because you you know you you lost a huge account it's like luckily we haven't been through that and for good reason because we're you know we know what we can do like we're tracking the sand we know we're good at we try to stay in those lanes you know she's come to us many times and said hey I have this project and can we do that we're like no we can't we don't we don't have the resources and for that we're otherwise we're going to pull from everything else you know and to go all in on one thing just doesn't make sense. Well it's kind of like what I was saying about building marketing teams it's a great idea to and I've been a part of these teams to build three four hundred person marketing teams. What happens is if you don't have the marketing process down the boring process. Who are you marketing to who is the message who is selling it what's the routes to market like all of those fundamentals and then by the way take it all the way through how does the program get out the door if you just throw bodies on projects it it actually costs more and it takes more time. And that's how you end up in a situation where you know I don't know 10 years or so 8 years or so in my career where I was a very large international fortune 500 and it took like 80 people to approve a press release. I mean come come on you know and by the time you got all the way down the chain I couldn't even tell you what the message of the press release was and so I think just having the right understanding of the marketing process. Having people understand their roles and responsibilities and defined goals. I can't tell you how many times I see this where you know a friend will call me like all this person they're not doing very well and it's well do they do they know what they're supposed to be do they have a goal. Like what's the company's goal and how is their goal related to that goal because I don't know about you but I when I get up in the morning I want to know the work I'm doing is helping drive something larger. And I felt that way when I was 25 and I was writing web copy and emails. Right. Yeah you have to you know like jagged some of our process earlier and it is basically that it's four elements is focus promise fiction harmony it's the who the what the why and where. And it's basic elements of advertising but people like you said they skip steps and we just did a presentation and it's always the same thing we have like a two hour window to do it. 30 people in the call and the first 120 pages is nothing but that it's about this and that and competitor profiles and who you are an audience is internal interviews and all these other stuff. And then like almost past the halfway point then we get to the good stuff like I get to show creative and you get to like show the result of all the other stuff. It's like we're not changing that because that's important it's so important that everybody understands how we got here and why we're here we didn't just have a good idea when I say hey let's just try it no this people's money you're working with I mean you know I'm going to try it out. The approval process Michael I mean think about like defining the approval process how many times do you start something and then you realize and it doesn't matter if it's a small company or a large company again I've been in both. Some they all have their opportunities let's say but that's to me is marketing by committee just I mean forget about it you think that you're going to get better work by having 12 people approve the same campaign no so understanding that approval process who's going to approve it it's almost almost like in sales okay what's the estimated close date okay how many people have to sign the contract who's going to review it the same thing is true in marketing. If we're running a campaign does this mean every product marketer has to sign off on the writing no like we don't so that figuring out that as part of the overall work is super important right. No okay we can do this for another hour and I don't think anybody would be sad about it because this has been so good what if I don't tell somebody's going to be late for their next thing it's probably going to be me so Megan I'm grateful for your time your intelligence your willingness to share and get that into the dirty with us this was awesome. I think you two are hilarious and I really really am happy that I got to meet you and learn about your process as well and what you're doing in Louisiana which is really neat. Yeah yeah no it's been it's been fun I mean the 25 years have flown by. But it's been it's been a good spot it's nice to be home and be here with food and family and festivals and all the fun stuff that makes this area so great. It was funny though so we came home and we did like I said the first many years is a lot of a lot of local regional work and now we have maybe one client in the state right now so everything we're doing is been exported back out which is kind of great you know it's you know. But don't you think I mean look post-COVID what we what we realize is that talent wants to be where talent wants to be and all the people that move from the big cities and they moved let's say you know back home to where they want it to be or maybe because they're fly fishermen and they want to live by the right I don't know they don't want to live in the valley anymore it's good it has changed to the way that we've worked has changed and a lot of the companies are calling people back to the office and I totally respect that if that's what's for your business. But there's also lots of examples of talent where it doesn't matter where the talent is because we're all virtual in this world together and yeah let's go let's go drive cool things. Yeah exactly what's for having me thank you okay so for everybody listening we're going to put in the show notes where and how you can find Megan so you can follow and continue to be with her on her journey and thank you we appreciate you. Have a great rest of your day thank you so much thank you.