Navigating a Rebrand: Why SurveyMonkey Went Back to the Monkey (With Katie Miserany, CCO & Global Head of Marketing)

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It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer. Before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams used to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at Webflow.com/4/exit5. That's Webflow.com/FOR/exit5. You're listening to the Dave Garar Show. Okay, we're live. Super excited to have Katie on the pod. She's CCO and head of marketing. CCO is a chief customer officer or commercial officer. Communication, communication, all that's right. A nod to your past life, which we'll talk about on this podcast. But chief communications officer and head of marketing at SurveyMonkey, someone we've got to know over the last year or so doing cool stuff at SurveyMonkey, one of the members in our executive community. Katie, I'm excited to have you on the pod before we get into your whole background. What's the last three months in your life been? Summer's done. We're getting back into September. What's been going on? How would you describe your last two or three months at work in life? Gosh, well, I've got kids. It was a lot of camps. All the parents understand the varying drop-off schedules. How old are your kids? That's kind of what I was trying to get. How old are your children? Yeah. Well, I have a first grader now. She just started first grade. Then I have a three-year-old who had the blessed experience of staying in preschool all summer. That was amazing. We did the camp shuffle all summer long with the first grader. In the meantime, at work, we were trying to be super interesting over the course of summer. We were able to pull off a lot of really cool stuff that's been a lot of fun to work on. Okay. All right. Cool. Everybody's kind of commiserated over the August Marcy. Who's one of the CMOs in our world? I think camps could charge double the price in August. That would be a good business strategy. By then, I know my kids were home for the last three weeks of August. Yes, it was the first day of school. I feel like I have a superpower today. Oh, yeah. So much focus. So much clarity. That's amazing. All right. So where I want to start, we have this awesome prep doc and sometimes I go in, you know, in and out of it. But you've been at SurveyMonkey for seven years, which is like, look, I interview CMOs and VP's of Marketing for a living. That's a long time, especially a long time in tech. What keeps you there? What gets you excited? Like, So I've been here for seven years, but it feels like it's been at least three different companies in that time. And we've been through so much if you think about the last seven years as an industry, things are changing so frequently that the learning curve just never stopped. I was able to just keep learning and going through wild new experiences. When I started, we were publicly traded. After that, there were the pandemic years, the transition to remote work. Everybody was doing the digital transformation acceleration thing. And so that was a crazy time to be at SurveyMonkey. Then we rebranded and took on a new name trying to move up market under a different company name. Then we had an activist investor. There was a failed acquisition by Zendesk. The activist gets puts on our board. We go private through a private equity transaction. We returned to SurveyMonkey. I mean, all of these chapters were so interesting. And I feel like I got 20 years of experience in seven years at the same company. And I think the thing that really makes it easy to stay is the people. I think if you talk to anybody in the industry who knows folks who've been at SurveyMonkey, there is an incredible, really kind, really loving group of people behind this company. And that has always made it a really safe space to learn and a place that is worth fighting for through all of those changes. So I love that perspective because I think if you told me all those things on the surface, I would say, usually when I talk to someone, when someone lists out all those things, that that's six different reasons to leave. Usually, oh, well, I talked to someone, oh, yeah, I was at this company for a year, but then this thing happened and I left. What you're talking about is amazing. If I could try to translate the career advice there, we talked to so many marketers in our community, right? Like you're not always going to be in the perfect job at the perfect time with the most amount of budget and the ability to attract uptown and the market is going your direction. And a mentor of mine once told me was like, your career is bigger than the current company that you're at, but you have to think of like, what are the things that I'm learning and adding like to my bucket right now? What do you think some of those things have been over that time? Yeah, I think about the phrase smooth seas never made a skilled sailor. Is that true? Could you feel that? Yeah, who wants smooth seas all the time? You're not learning anything. I have a good friend who's a recruiter and he took a job at Blackberry during the iPhone era and we were like, what are you doing? Why are you going and he's like, can you imagine how good I'm going to get? If I can recruit people in the Blackberry right now, can you imagine? I'm unstoppable. I love that perspective. I think that's such a growth mindset way to go back your career and you're always going to find meaning and value if you can really be anchored on what you're learning and the skills that you're requiring and not necessarily like, what does this look like to the outside? Is there been a crew of other people that have a similar tenure to if people you've worked with over this bumpy period? Yeah, Serving Lucky is kind of incredible like that. We had town hall this morning and celebrated a 10 year anniversary and those are not uncommon. So the company's been around 27 years. I think our chief people officer might be the longest tenured employee. She's been there for like 14, I think of those years, but it's not uncommon to have 10 year anniversaries and those people usually, you know, maybe they start in support and then they move in to a more technical role. They learn engineering skills now. They're on the engineering team. They're building cool stuff like it's been a place with a lot of mobility for the workforce and that has been really fun. What was the rebrand? I remember because at the time was close with Lila, right? Love Lila Lila Shrinavathan, our former CMO. Yes, so this was the publicly traded years and there was some hesitation on the sales side of the business, the folks who were trying to sell Serving Lucky Enterprise. They were saying, you know, people don't want to spend six figures with a company called Serving Lucky. And so we created this brand. It was called Momentive. And that was kind of the, so Serving Lucky stuck around as the name of the flagship product, but all of our enterprise solutions were under this momentum name and it was designed to give the sales side of the business some tailwinds in those conversations. But like I said, we went private in 2023 and our new CEO, or Johnson, it was his first act as CEO. It was to unbrand, rebrand, back to Serving Lucky. What was your reaction to that? How did you feel? It was so well received inside the company. I remember I was sitting with Eric in the conference room because it was a comms person and I was doing the town hall with him where he announced this and down the hall I could hear the cheers from the people watching. It's like a scene on a movie and like we're bringing it back and everyone's like losing their minds. It's just such a beloved brand and a brand that sticks out and stands out. It's so interesting how much things have changed. It's almost like better to be the brand with the monkey in it now because of AI and everything, you know? Yeah, we talk about that all the time. So when I took over marketing around this time, last year, I set the goal. Our number one priority was to be relentlessly helpful and relentlessly us. And it took a lot of work to define what does it mean to be relentlessly us in this market where you have AI and all the sea of sameness and the great flattening of affect and tone and we are in the middle of launching this big. We're calling it today's Serving Lucky, but this big unveiling of what it means to be relentlessly us. And I'm so proud of it and so excited about because it really is what you're saying like let's lean into the fact that there's monkey in our name let's be different. Let's do the things that we've earned the right to do is this 27 year old brand that is different from a lot of the other momentives of the universe. Like we don't need that sheen and that shine anymore because I think it makes us stand out more to just beat us in this market. As a storyteller, like have you gone back into the OG, is there a lot of like OG ingredients in the survey monkey story that you're kind of like pulling at and like retelling now with the scale and size that you're at? Yeah, one of those is curiosity. So when you think about monkeys, there may be some unpleasant associations with them. But the thing that everybody latches on to you guys. I think about that scene in Jumanji when they're all in the kitchen. And the guy is to get his little tail out of the key. Yeah, so I mean like monkeys, you know, the best thing about them is also an almost universal human trait, which is curiosity. And we did this report the outside of the summer when I was talking about just doing really fun, really interesting stuff. It was called the state of curiosity report. And it found that 95% of people still describe themselves as curious. Only 30% of workplaces strongly rewarded that curiosity. And we thought that was so interesting because this is like nearly universal human trait to be curious at work and our workplaces are squashing it. And when you dug into the reasons behind it, it was like people think it slows you down to ask questions or be curious. But in the end, it makes it more expensive when you have to rework or do the work again because we didn't ask the right questions upfront. Or the more senior you are, the more likely you were to just ask AI, you didn't ask your peers or the experts on your team, you're just like chatting with Claude and taking that first answer that came back. And so leaning into curiosity, I think that's a core of our business and something that is just inherently related to us because of our name and the space that we occupy that we could make a lot out of. We actually took the findings of that report and we hosted something called the world's most uncurious meeting. It was 90 minutes because like you're not the worst. It was the worst time if you see a meeting that's 90 minutes long that like hurts already. If I get an hour meeting, it's like, what are we doing? Who's what are we doing here? Yes. And so is this improv troop in LA and they found this like hellscape of a conference room to have this live stream meeting and it was live streamed on LinkedIn. It literally took 90 minutes and they decided nothing. It was the world's most uncurious meeting and it was so fun. And like we saw reporters chiming in on the chat. Like it got this attention, like I said over the course of the summer when people aren't generally thinking about buying our software that we were able to capitalize on. And it was just was so fun and different and unique in a way that I feel like all brands need to be thinking about right now. Okay. So that's the big rock for like your work today at SurveyMonkey. This kind of like reintroduction campaign. Can you just talk to like the campaign? Let's just geek out on some of the marketing because I think a lot of people listening like it's your it's our peers, right? That wow. This is cool. That's a cool opportunity. This, you know, 20 year old company, whatever it is rebranding back to the OG brand. How do you think about this? How will you? I'm not asking this question because I want you to explain it. But just, you know, how will you measure this? How does this get rolled out across the business? How does this become more than just like change the website? And then like, hooray, how do you actually put this thing into action? What's going on across the marketing team in the company? Well, I mean, it started with laying down the gauntlet of we need to be relentlessly asked, what does that mean? And we had to do all the work to define like who we are in our customers minds, who we want to be, did our visual identity and every touchpoint that we were putting in front of customers reflect that. And so did the hard work decided on this redesign? It's a visual redesign done with a ton of intention. And to, you know, the team's credit, it didn't just stop at marketing. The product design team was deeply involved and they were thinking about the entire onboarding journey and how can we make that more personalized to represent this kind of more human centric, very curious, relentlessly survey monkey type of experience that we're trying to create. But we also were looking at the data and realizing that we had this real seasonality to the business where I mentioned, you know, we see this drop off in interest over the course of the summer. Maybe people are just not thinking about their goals for the year as much or they're not at their desk. They're not. We don't care as much about customer research in the summer. You know, it's like they're watching the World Cup. I don't know. Yeah. Wait, that's a real thing. By the way, I don't know if you saw this in our in our group. Like there was fun. A couple of CEOs were like convinced that the summer's loadout was due in part to like the whole office watching the World Cup. You know, don't you think that's like they're watching the World Cup? Everybody must be. Of course, right. The executives are certainly not. But the people, you know, the people are. That's those people. Yeah. So summer's slow for us. And so what we decided to do this year was really lean into the seasonality of the business with a ton of intention. So over the course of the summer, we let our earned and owned channels be the hero. So we create this report. We put it out across podcasts and we're featuring it in all of our content. We had it on the homepage next to the sign up. You know, it's like check this out. We're remarketing to people who interact with that report. We're showing them the uncurious meeting. That's all going out over social. So is this like hero moment over the course of summer? We called it organic summer to try to make as much noise and be as interesting as possible so that when September comes and our selling season begins where we see this really heightened demand. Yeah. We can capture as much of it as possible. We wanted to have all channels firing. So what started as the visual redesign quickly became a real lightning rod for the entire company to be ready for selling season. And so we've got all of our influencers lit up in September like all the paid placements we're doing in flight ads with a lot of the same content. So it's not just the site or even just the site and the product experience that's getting a refresh. It's every single channel we have in marketing. Full bore pedals in the metal capture is much demand as possible while we are top of mind. And there's really high interest in what we are offering the feedback loops, the continuous listening programs that you want to set up in the fall heading into the new year. I think that's a really cool example of just you did it because you're using the seasonality to your advantage. It's almost like you know spring cleaner. I think so much in marketing it can be so easy to just like straight line the plan and you're just going to keep growing and crook and that's not just not reality. And then so many people that we talk to you never have time to go and like do the rebrand or seed the market or build up the organic stuff. And so now you've kind of done that intentionally. Is that because you don't have the pressure of being like, is there anything about being a private company that feels like you can kind of do that or am I making that up? I'm just getting at like you almost need to step back to like grow some stuff invest in it. Then you can do marketing and reap the benefits of it. Verse, if you're expecting these all to pay off overnight, it just doesn't work that way. Yeah. Well, we didn't start there embracing seasonality. We tried first what we call the defibrillator strategy. So we're like, could we beat it? Could we change the seasonality? Could we actually like, okay, so it's Easter and demand starts to weaken? Could we be out in market with like a big push and just change it? And so we had this out of home. We were in Boston. We were in Chicago. We had a whole digital national campaign. And it like worked in Boston, Chicago, but it didn't like change the trajectory of the business. And so I think it comes back to looking at the data on a very regular basis and trying to say like, what's working here and what's not? Is this the next best place to park a dollar or a bit of effort knowing what we're seeing? And so we swung pretty wildly from like, okay, that defibrillator, like we didn't beat the curve. We didn't change the slope of that line. Let's embrace it and see what we can do in the fall when we know demand is high to just be on max demand capture moment. But I actually think back to your original question, is it a private company thing or not? I think it actually comes down to the marketing challenge that SurveyMonkey has, which is that almost everyone knows SurveyMonkey. We do not have a brand awareness problem. We have very high saturation of awareness for SurveyMonkey. The problem is people are kind of anchored on what SurveyMonkey was in like 2009. And so how do we update their point of view and share a glimpse into how the platform has evolved in all the different ways it can help you if you're anchored on the 2009 version. So it's a little bit like, you know, the challenges that Kim Zoom has shared with this community in the past are like, people are anchored on what they know of Zoom from like the free era when they were all working remotely. Zoom is so much more than that. And we have the same story to tell at SurveyMonkey now. So I think that gives us the luxury of sitting back and we aren't out there with a blank slate trying to make SurveyMonkey mean something to people. We can kind of do these lightning strike moments where we're trying to disrupt a pattern of thinking about us instead of trying to get that baseline established. That's something that an earlier stage or a less well-known company has to do. Yeah. Okay. That's a super-industrial way to transition this because I'm glad you brought up the Kim thing and the brand awareness thing because you have this interesting challenge where I don't know if you called it this or our our generative AI briefing doc. But then the Swiss Army knife problem, which is moving to persona-based marketing, which is like a really interesting thing that a lot of people that listen to this podcast have to deal with was like, hey, we don't want people to think of us this way. We're actually really, you know, we have this use case for this persona and this use case for this persona. Can you talk about how you've kind of realized marketing around this persona-based approach? Yeah. It's all related, right? So this Swiss Army knife is like, you know, SurveyMonkey makes great surveys and forms. And then you leave it up to people what they need to use surveys and forms for. So like you're kind of counting on people to be like, "I need a survey, I'll go to survey monkey." And I think that we've kind of maxed out in this era on that horizontal type of marketing. Again, the brand awareness is critical. We are going to continue to count on our earn-to-known channels to drive that. But when we think about paid acquisition and the higher value customers that we're going after, they are specific personas. It's HR, it's marketing, it's CX professionals. Sometimes it's like a small business owner who needs all of that and wants to buy one platform that can do it all. And they have very specific jobs to be done that we need to be connecting our product to. So instead of talking about surveys or even employee surveys, which is something that an HR leader might care about, we need to talk about the employee experience program that you're setting up. And the cadence in which you're sending these surveys and how our expertise and our benchmarks inside the product are going to help you understand where you are and where you need to go next. So it has to get, I think, in this day and age a lot more specific, a lot more personalized. We're kind of like mid-transition on this, but the early stats that we're seeing are really impressive. So if you go from kind of a generic like, "Surveys are powerful," type of ad message to something that is targeted at HR leaders or managers who care about employee experience, we saw a 73% increase in our click-through rate on those ads. I think people are hungry for this. They don't want generic marketing, especially if they think they know you. They want to understand how you're going to solve their specific problem in a modern way. It's like life, right? Like if the content is so dumb, this content that I watch, but like, my whole Instagram content is like other 40-year-old dads, like working out early in the morning, like before their kid. Okay, that's what you are. You're at golfer, you're a cross-fitter, whatever, and it's like the same is true when you're selling them products for work. It has to speak to me in some way, and I have to believe that you get it. This is only in top of mind because I'm working on my keynote for for Drive and I was referencing this, but there's this great old-school copywriter called Dan Kennedy, and he always used to say like, "You need to like pass the sniff test, basically. You need to, if you're selling to HR, you have to sound like an HR person. You have to get inside their head and know these things. How do you enable that on the team? Is it like a product marketing thing? Do you split people up by persona? Does someone go get really smart about HR? Does someone's go get really smart about marketing? Any lessons on how you've split up the team to do this? Yeah, we have a great shorthand for this. So I used to work with this guy, Ephraim Joseph. He's at depth. He's a creative director there now, and he came into, we host this internal learning series called The Marco Masterclass, and he was like, "You need to know their secret handshake. What is their secret handshake?" Because that is you extending to them their language, their vibe, like what they care about. So yes, as we get really specific on HR, it's HR season right now. You're going into open enrollment and all the benefit surveys and heading into the end of the year stuff. How are the HR people talking about this? We have a PMM who's dedicated to this. We're also lucky to have this incredible Chief People Officer in her team, and so we're mining the expertise around us. Right. You have somebody internally. I used to do this all the time at Drift with our CFO. We were trying to sell to CFOs, and we just sit down with him, and he just tried to crush every objection that he had. Yeah, we do that too. So we have the CFO and the Chief People Officer, and we're like, "Okay, what could she say to convince you?" So yeah, I think if you're going to move from horizontal to persona-based marketing, you have to move from a shallow customer understanding to a very deep one to extend that secret handshake. Okay. This is such a silly question, but it comes about time, and I can hear someone asking it. How do you handle the website then? Because people always argue, then everyone inside the company wants to fight over like, "No, we need more ads for this persona." When I go to the website, I used to always argue with the VPS sales like, "This persona is not on the website." Like, "How do you show all that?" How do you show like, "We're SurveyMonkey, the brand." Here's what we do as a company, but then we also have these individual use cases. You don't try to ask you. Yeah. I do. Yeah. So our newly redesigned website, which is out now. You should go check it out. It's part of this big launch that we're celebrating. So to back up a little bit, one of the benefits of having been here seven years is that a couple of years ago, we went to this model that we called Pillars, and there were like, "Pillard focuses on different personas." So the product and engineering orgs were polarized. PMM was polarized, but marketing stayed a center of excellence. And everybody listening has been in a team that's organized like that knows what that means, which is like, you become the battleground on which these skirmishes play out. Who is more important? How do we allocate the resources? Who's getting what? So I have fought very hard against that as we're becoming a multi-product brand. We have products for market research. We have products for more CX use cases like embedded listening on websites, things like that. And so we've had to hold the line on like, what are our priorities and making those really clear? The way we solved it on the website is the top hero section is a glimpse at the product because we have a product awareness problem. People know who we are, but they haven't seen inside the product in so long. And so we wanted to get people a glimpse of like, you think you know, survey monkey, but you don't. And then as you scroll down, there's like, we call them a bento. And there's this bento where you can click through and see like, okay, so for HR leaders and managers, what's the offering? And how is it merchandise there? And then you can click on like, okay, but I'm a market researcher. Why I'm a marketer or a product person who wants to understand the market? And so we have this great, really elegant way of merchandising the whole offering. Just to give people a sense of the breadth and they can kind of self-select into where they go from there. And obviously like the journey gets more and more and more personalized as you move through the site. Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is sponsored by Zoom webinars. Zoom webinars lets you host polished engaging webinars that actually drive pipeline. We recently switched to Zoom webinars for exit five live. I don't know if you've seen this. It's been everywhere. I think our conversation about webinars, everyone's talking about webinars right now. Let's do great webinars. That's what we're talking about, right? I've been super happy since we moved over to Zoom, just really the high quality. It just, some of it feels different. Our webinars feel professional and polished. Our media team shout out to Marissa and Rhea. They've been putting a ton of work in behind the scenes to get this thing right. And it really helps us run these exit five live sessions. And put on a performance. This is not a webinar. It actually feels like our performance and the results have been there. Our attendees and our teams been really happy. The platform gives you everything you need to run a real event from branded registration built in promotional tools. Live engagement features and post event follow-up that helps you convert attendees into pipeline. That's the difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. If you're a BDB marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one, you should go and check out Zoom webinars, right? You know Zoom, but go and check out the webinar product. And come to one of our upcoming exit five live sessions every other Friday. It's two Fridays a month. You can see it in action. Check them out. Check our sessions out. I think it really gives a good example of what you can do. Go and check them out. Zoom.com/exit5. That's zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. This episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funneled demand-gen agency. Look, I personally hired them twice. I think I was the very first customer before I was even a thought leader just when I was a VP of marketing, a real marketer back in the day, right? CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. I think that's because they understand the job. The founder John came from this background, knows what it's like, knows the life of a marketing leader, and they help high growth, cyber security and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They offer the combination of AEO, modern paid advertising strategy, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. This works because they were started by a former VP of marketing. Like I said, John, he really gets this space. I think that matters. By the way, for BTB tech companies, CGM has a special offer for people who listen to this podcast. You can get two free sessions focused on media planning to learn what channels are driving the best ROI, how much you should be investing in demand, capture, versus creation, and how to invest up funnel effectively. Hey, this is a really smart offer. Go check it out, compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Go check this out. Get some free help. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Bye-bye. How will you look to talk about this? A year from now, all this work is successful. What are the things you're talking to with the executive team, the board, whoever, when you're talking about this kind of reintroduction campaign? That's a good question. I think if we're wildly successful, we will have understood a couple of things. When this brand is resonating with people or breaking out of the sea of sameness, we need to enrich and continue building on what we have here. I think the next thing would be confirming the seasonality of the business and how we are going to lead into that in the future. It makes me think about if our season is September to Easter, call it April, how quickly can we come back from the holidays? What can we have in market on January 2nd so that we are at maximizing every single day of that journey? Then I think on the persona-based side of things, it starts to become how are we enriching the entire company's understanding of these different personas and what we need to build for them and how we're going to make sure that the content and the marketing and the products that we put out in the world are really resonating with them and solving their problems because I do think that shift from like the horizontal kind of shallow understanding of the customer to a very, very deep one is critical to pull this off. I mean hopefully It's like a maturation of all the things that we're trying right now, and that we're proven right. Okay, I want to pivot into talking about your career path because My job talked to VPs of marketing and CMO's and I think there's a belief that there's one Perfect little path and you must come up through this way And I love talking to people about all the different paths you came up with came through We talk about your path from comms I mean obviously it's still a big part of your job today You're a very easy person to talk to you're a very polished comms person so like that comes off But there's a story from earlier in your career when you were working with Sheryl Sandberg And I've used this example because I the LinkedIn CMO was Shannon Brayton She's not there anymore. I don't think no and I would always say she was the first CMO that I saw that was like Yeah, I came from a PR background and here's how this influence seems like you had a relationship with her can you tell that story? Yeah, I did it was actually I got connected to her through Leela when Leela was the CMO at Survey Monkey and she saw something and she was like you need to talk to Shannon because Leela came from LinkedIn She was there earlier in her career and Shannon was nice enough to hop on the phone with me And she told the story about when Jeff Weiner tapped her to take over marketing and she was like oh, I don't want to take over marketing I don't even like marketers like what are why I have no interest in this. I'm not doing it. Even though she's a comment She didn't think of herself as a marketer. It's interesting. Oh, no, we don't we don't think of ourselves. Oh, you have had a marketing You're sorry. You are one of us now. You have had a mark. I know like this hybrid I'm sorry, I mean comes people are having a real resurgence into C-sweets in a way that like I find really exciting in the age of AI Oh, well, I mean one year once the once the CEOs found out that like Getting mentioned you know, it's like mentions are back you know like PR coverage and backlinks and press releases Crawled by the LLM's like PR is definitely having a moment It's back big time and I think like if there's parallels with me and Shannon where She was trusted by the CEO. She was in the C-sweets so she's Very close to finance and the board and understanding the strategy of the company overall And I think when you give comms people that kind of access What it unlocks is this ability to help shape the strategy from a communication standpoint So it's not so reactive. You're not just like whoops We made it in stake now PR has to come in and clean it up PR can help steer by being like this is what public perception is going to be Of this this is what that was going to happen to our reputation If you go down this path and here's an alternate slightly different path I might have a better outcome for us and so that was the experience I had as well sitting on the C-sweets Being able to help steer the reputation of the company very very close to You know RCFO and the sales team and like understanding Those parts of the business that comes people used to kind of be left out of And so Shannon said that Jeff was like you have no choice. You're doing this and that she ended up loving it And that's been my experience as well where you know, I asked to take it on and I was just very upfront about like Well, here's all the things I'm going to have to learn But learning it has been incredible and it's been so fun to work with this team and this brand and these customers That we have we have customers all over the world some of the biggest coolest brands and some of the smallest like fastest growing ones So it's been quite the opportunity and something that I would totally encourage other comms people to think about Let's talk about that part like the learning part of it because I think there's some things that when you come up from a certain path There's things that make you great as a marketing leader which is like your bias is your zone of excellence is going to be Comms positioning messaging communication strategy which I think grass is always greener But like a CMO or head of marketing who came up through demand gen I they could learn a lot from you about how Comms actually drive a demand we get so obsessed over channels, but there's so much you could be doing Where they're like blind spots or areas? I have a much smaller example I wasn't leading marketing at a company as big of Serbia monkey But I was a CMO of a small startup and I got to build a team of 10 people in my background is very much product marketing brand Comms and I wasn't a strong demand gen person and the first person I hired was a very good Demangent person and I got that experience because at my past company My peer was awesome at demand gen and I saw her and I saw what good looks like like how have you kind of Navigated building out your team that way Yeah, I'm a big believer in just asking around so when I got this opportunity I was connecting with CMOs, you know from the exit five community or Just from my network and I remember talking to this one woman and she was like mission number one for you is to get as close as possible to the growth team You need to look at everything they're looking at you need to understand everything about their strategy You need to ask all your dumb questions right now so that you can get Really good at this really fast and that has been a really great Strategy for us. I think I wouldn't have had the confidence to do things like You know shut down that out of home campaign or pull off the organic summer move to save all the budget for the fall If I didn't have that better understanding of how that organization worked and All the levers we could pull and what we were seeing in the data and what was missing but if you're Overcome by imposter syndrome when you step into something new and that prevents you from asking people Wiser than you for advice then you're just like writing your obituary ahead of time like you got a Embrace what you don't know and go in there and turn over all the rocks and ask all the questions and just really seek out some Some knowledge from people who have more experience. What's the role of comms today. So segue into like It's an interesting. Where does comms fit? You know, you see so many people asking about PR and in our group right now Is it more important than ever? Am I overrating that I want this as not survey monkey lessons But like I got a tier one comms person on the line and I want your advice about like what matters for you know other senior marketing leaders that are listening I think it's more important than ever. Maybe I'm biased, but I think it's again like okay Hey, I has changed everything for everybody search doesn't work how it used to your Facing traffic losses you're facing just like Easier than ever faster than ever content creation that just is all garbage and sounds the same and it's super boring So who are the people who can break out of these rats for you? It's both PR and like if you think about PR is like pitching media building relationships with journalists Journalists also operate differently all of my favorite journalists right there on substack now. Okay. This is what I was gonna say is like yeah, what is The media landscape is so different right my very first job out of college was at a PR agency And I was like literally cold calling reporters and I was like, please don't answer please don't answer Didn't know what to say But today the media like you know media has been democratized So are you are there like publications that still matter to people? I worked one of my clients was like a legal tech company and there was like 60 law publications now I don't know who matters to serve him. Is it all like micro is PR now like this kind of like micro influencer thing with like Substack is at the play or are my missing something there are bigger publications that still matter Yes, and it all depends on your story and and again if you go back to this like Not a swiss army knife, but a very specific tool for a very specific buyer You can find the micro influencers who are important to you We still want to speak to small and medium-sized businesses in general And so we'll often you know work our relationships with fast company and ink Outlets that have really great newsletter thinking like the morning brew type folks So yes, it is like a micro influencer push but also trying to get the bigger publications to think of you in that way And then leveraging your own internal experts to tell stories on their own channels Our CEO Eric Johnson is an avid runner. He's like this one of these crazy people who just like I was talking to him last night And I was like I kind of have to run a 50k who runs a 50k he's like it's not that hard So anyway, he has They're all crazy. There's not a normal there's not a normal CEO or founder, and I say that with love and I've worked for them You know, it's like it's and he's awesome So we were like looking for an organic angle for him to be posting online and we're like what are your running thoughts? You say that's either the most productive or least productive time of your day Like just share your running thoughts with the community and it's been so well received and so a comms person can build that Yeah, Eric Johnson Serbian monkey follow running thoughts great, and sometimes they're just like, you know post about kindness and his daughters And sometimes it's about pizza, but it's often about business strategy and how he's thinking about the hard problems and good I'd rather see you do this than like what a lot of people do is they just kind of like start all these CEOs They're just posting like slop generated from you know, it's just like they got a ghost writer or they're just slop Claude like I this is much better Yeah, much more authentic. Okay, this is great. He's sweaty standing in front of the peloton, right? Yes, and a comms person can find a really good comms person can find what is authentic and interesting About you your person your principal that you're supporting and tell stories about it And like what else is there in this day and age that's gonna help you break through or be a brand that's memorable Divinity insight as a comms person your peers I'm guessing you still talk about this stuff a lot. It comes up a lot. You're probably doing it every monkey Are there any lessons about mentions and stuff influencing search and LLM's like LinkedIn and getting included in a sub sack and going on a podcast or even writing press releases and having that bump up on your website Any insights and all that kind of mumble jumbo like it's just changing every minute of every day. We like a lot of people started participating on Reddit. How do you do that in a way that doesn't get like the pitchforks coming at you? So we have some internal folks who have like zillions of karma points. They're just like obsessed with Reddit. They're very active on the platform. Again, ask for help, right? So we're like, hey, if we want to have a brand presence here and we don't want to be gross, like how do we do it? What do we do? And they were like, you know, you need to respect it. And anonymity need to be helpful. So again, our number one priority was to be relentlessly helpful and relentlessly us. And so that first part I think is really important on Reddit. What we've heard from customers on the platform is they thought they didn't like our free plan because we were offering, you know, a limited number of responses and then you have to pay for the rest. And they felt like that was like holding the response at hostage. So we did our first post and we were so hard on this post was just to explain it was a flow chart. And it was like, when should you use SurveyMonkey and when should you use a free tool like Google Forms that you could just get unlimited responses from, but you don't need the bells and whistles that come with SurveyMonkey, the security, the like additional AI features, the ease of use, all of the things that make us a good platform. And so that kind of approach where you're not just like, hey, Reddit come by SurveyMonkey, but you're like, here's something useful for you to help navigate when you're choosing a platform. Don't pick us if you need 100 responses for free. We're not the platform for that. And like that kind of honesty and hopefulness I think was really well received there. But all the news now is that like the LLMs aren't citing Reddit anymore, but I'm still proud of our community participation there because there's a big audience and like we can be hopeful to the people there. But I think if you're just chasing like LLM mentions, you got to come back to like Who's your buyer? What do they care about? Are you being helpful to them? That content will find them if you, you know, are listening and like doing the the feedback loops that you need to be doing. But to chase the LLM mentions, it's like, oh, this can change every day. It's too much. Can you give me a overview of how you structured the team and how you run like the weekly? What does Katie running the marketing team look like? What do you're just kind of operating rhythms and cadences and people love that type of stuff? Can you tell me some of that? I know it's so helpful just to hear how other people do it. I'm now I want to know what other people do. Well then you have an opposite, which is like everyone learned that, you know, Jensen and Vidya has like 100 direct reports, you know? So everyone's like, I'm having any doesn't have any one on ones and everyone's like, I'm doing that. And it's like, okay, great. What are you doing Katie? So we have structured our week. There's a meeting that I call the weekly health check. And everybody who's a director and above comes to this meeting and chimes in on what they did last week. So it's like your key metrics for the moment. And then what happened last week that influenced those metrics and what's happening this week. And then there's also a section for issues and blockers and a section for it's a big spreadsheet. And it's like, do you have anything that we should meet about this week? Especially if that issue or blocker needs to get escalated. So this started as a weekly meeting. And it would be like about an hour, we'd spend the first five to seven minutes reading the thing. And then we'd go and we'd talk about it. But what we found recently is that we can do it async every other week for the most part. And then I'll call a meeting on any blockers or anything that's flagged in there. So now it's becoming every other week meeting, which I think is helpful because I'm a big fan of giving people heads downtime. And like, that's not me. If it's just a read out of what's on this document, like, we don't need a meeting for that. Oh gosh, especially now when it's like, if you just send me a freaking three page PDF from Claude and I get me on a call, like, you, I'm not going to that meeting. Absolutely not. Did you see what Sophie from Clay wrote? She's like an engineering manager and she wrote these rules for writing with AI and they're so simple. I posted about it because it resonated with me so much because that day I had gotten a 17 page Claude PDF. And I was like, no, no. I want to know what you think. Somebody told me the term for this. If you just pass Claude's work on, you're a meat proxy. I saw this. This is going around. Let's put a product in Marissa. When you listen to this later, let's link to Sophie's thing from Clay. And then we got to put that. What was it? Meat vehicle meat. Meat proxy. Don't be a meat proxy. Mean what you send around. Like if you need to stamp her basic premise was like, you need to stand behind every word and how it is presented. And if you cannot do that, you're not doing this, right? Like you really have to engage with it to make sure it's communicating what you want to communicate. Yeah. Okay, I distracted you on. I have a side tangent there, but we don't need to get there. Okay. So I like that. God, you're such a comms probe. I love the name naming it a health check as opposed to like Katie's management sink is like, you know, that seems intentional. Yeah. And then later in the week, we have time reserved for any meetings that we need to have or like strategy discussions. And that is an accordion meeting. So it's like it. Add people if they need to come shrink it if they don't. I just don't like. Is it a no industry term in an accordion meeting and accordion meeting? Did I invent it? I think you have the motion too, like yes, possibly. It can get bigger or smaller based on. I do love a one-on-one. I do them bi-weekly. I think I have seven direct reports, which is probably a lot, but you know, I really get a lot of value out of staying close to all of them. And so I haven't moved to change that at all, but I love one-on-one. What does your one-on-one look like? Is it structured unstructured? How do you do it? I ask for docs. And so my EA will go through and say like if the doc isn't filled out, do you really need to meet with Katie or are we releasing this time? So it puts some pressure on people to put some thought into what we're going to talk about. I always start with blockers. Does a doc have like some type of format or something? Or is it just like what notes do you want to talk about? It's blockers. It's wins that you want me to know about. It's like things you've accomplished and it's discussion items. Where'd you get this? You know what? I think it's originally from Frances Frye and Morris. I think this is what they recommend. And I just love it. They're also very anti-recurring meetings. Like meet when you need to talk about something. Do not meet just because it's on the calendar. And I like to live by that. So yeah, we start with blockers. I always read the wins and the things they've accomplished, but we don't necessarily need to talk about it. It's like I like comment on it or like send a little like emojis and stuff. But then we talk about like if they have questions about strategy, if they're dealing with something hard on the team, if there's a blocker and issue that we need to unblock, that's really where we dig in the meat of it. Is there ever any surprises? Does someone write in the doc like I'm thinking about quitting? And I feel like how do the personal things come up? Because I feel like a one-on-one is a lot of like I don't want to put on the doc. I'm waiting until my one-on-one with Katie and I'm finally going to like talk to her about this thing. Yeah. Well, I mean anything urgent, that's what Slack is for. And the beauty of like not filling your calendar with recurring meetings is you're available. So someone's like, do you have a minute? I'm like actually yes. Because I do not have a thousand recurring meetings on my calendar, I have time to talk to you about this. And they'll usually put something in there as a discussion topic that's like people matters. And it doesn't say more than that. But I know then that we, you know, it needs to be a serious conversation. And sometimes I'll even ping them if I see it ahead of time because this urgent should we talk now? So yeah. And I do like to know people personally too. So like I always save time for just those little conversations. How's the family on that good stuff? Yeah. That's a good reframe there is like you need to as the team leader, you need to have time to be available to chat where a lot of team leaders are constantly in meetings. You know, have you ever seen that? There's like a meme and it's like you're basically in meetings from nine to five and then you're supposed to fit when do you actually do the work? You know, it's like the work of the managers to lead the team and to be there for them. It's like that it's refreshing to hear you say that. Well, and I think it's easy to just go where your calendar tells you to go. But that's not what you need to be doing. That's not driving your own priorities or dictating, you know, what you need to be focused on. That's just that's somebody else's agenda. Okay. Do you ever bring the whole team together like everybody like hang out town hall type of thing? Yes, we have in all hands once a month where we it's the the marketing and communication scene we call it Marco where we all get together and we had it this morning. We talked about the campaign, some of the stuff we did over the summer, how things are tracking, some celebrations like, you know, somebody got married and other people had big anniversaries that we got to celebrate. And then once a year, we have a summit where from all over the world, all of the team comes together. We're doing it Toronto this year. It's going to be super fun in October and that timing lends itself really well to 2027 planning and getting the team all lined on the strategy. And that is such a fun week that we get to have all together because we've got offices in seven countries around the world and then a bunch of remote people too. So it's just absolutely vital for, you know, that team cohesion and making sure everybody knows each other and has a good relationship. Okay, last question. Shout out someone who has had a meaningful impact on your career as a marketing leader. And why? Definitely Lila Trunovason. She way back when when I was like a director of corpcom saw something in me and really worked to nurture that and kind of planted the seed that this could be my job one day. And she's also the type of leader that I really look up to. She would be the first person to volunteer for like a lip sync battle or to like film a silly video where she did hundreds of takes trying to just throw a basketball over her shoulder, you know, like she's that kind of CMO who brought the fun and at our CKO this last year was my first one as marketing leader. And I wore this like head to toe serving monkey green suit. And the sales leader and I, because it was ski themed, had like a 1980s appre ski like outfit for dinner that night. And all of that is because of Lila because of the person she was and the way she tried to bring the fun to everything. I really aspire to be a marketing leader like that. I love that. I've gotten to know her a little bit and I always kind of vibed with her and I love when I find out that someone actually is awesome from someone else like who actually went through them. It's like, okay, good. She is who we thought she was. She's actually awesome. That's true. All right. Katie, thanks for hanging on the pod. I'm pumped for you. I think this is a great story given all of the like AI and slop and I always love a story when like the company wanted to go enterprise and we needed to be more serious and we had to have this brand. It's like actually no because the things that I love about marketing is like the story about like why it was survey monkey, the curiosity of a monkey like leaning into that brand and showing people that you can sell to the enterprise even with a monkey in your brand. You know, it's like that's the whole point. Yeah, we got to lean into the monkey now. It's what makes us different. It makes us special. Lean into the monkey. Yeah. All right. Katie, thanks for coming on the pod. I appreciate you. Go check out survey monkey. Follow Katie on LinkedIn. I already got Eric. I'm into the running stuff. Eric added one new follower as a result of you coming on the pod today. So amazing. Yeah. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit five dot com. Our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. There's no better place to do that than with us at exit five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. 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