See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 50 Navigating the Evolving Landscape of AI in Marketing and Startups 

0:00:01 - Alex Shevelenko

Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders! I have a super exciting episode with one of my role models, mentors and one of the innovative B2B marketers, four time B2B CMO David Karel. Welcome to the pod!

0:00:25 - David Karel

Thank you, Alex. I am excited to be here!

0:00:26 - Alex Shevelenko

David, so, just for the audience's background, I want to highlight some of the things that you've done, because they're benefiting the products and innovations you've created as a marketer. So you're now CMO at CrunchTime and Zenput. Previously, you were CMO of Bizo, which was bought by LinkedIn, where you spearheaded and led B2B marketing solutions.

You and I met back when you were showing me how to do proper product marketing at SuccessFactors. I've done some of the things, then went away and did other things. Then, David, you came in a few years later and I was like, “Oh, that's how we're supposed to do product marketing! That's the way it's done for real.” So I have nothing but love and admiration for your professional background. You've shared some of your nuggets with me along the way in building RELAYTO, and I think it would be just fantastic for our audience to get the benefit of your wisdom as well. So welcome!

0:01:56 - David Karel

Thanks, Alex, you've kind of said it all. I'm done!

0:01:59 - Alex Shevelenko

Yeah, did I? And you were an entrepreneur.

0:02:01 - David Karel

You're very kind. And I've learned as much from you along the way, for sure.

0:02:09 - Alex Shevelenko

Well, let's share some of these learnings. Bizo became the foundation of LinkedIn's B2B marketing suite. We're going to distribute this on LinkedIn and it's going to be a part of the milieu of B2B marketing distribution. LinkedIn itself has become the content engine. So let's dive into that experience. You were in the early days of shaping the first era of B2B marketing innovation there. What stayed the same and what's changed?

0:02:59 - David Karel

So you and I were together at SuccessFactors. I've been in B2B marketing tech for over 20 years. I grew up as a product marketer, so, as you alluded to, I kind of hit that point which a lot of us do in our marketing career journey. Product marketing is fun, but it wouldn't be fun to pull all the levers. I started to get confident, say, “I can do this!” And I took the leap. I joined a small venture backed company called Bizo which, as you mentioned, is B2B ad tech.

I think, when you take your first shot at this, you're not usually jumping and managing huge teams. There were 18 employees at Bizo at the time. I was the first marketer with a couple of contractors on day one and with a charter to build out the marketing engine. I think back about some of the lessons and learnings. The most critical thing I guess was self-awareness. You have imposter syndrome and it's like, “Shit! I can't believe I convinced someone to hire me as a head of marketing!” 

0:04:12 - Alex Shevelenko

You and I were former product marketers, so we know it's an important part of marketing. You could say it’s the brain's strategic positioning part, but it's not the only thing at all. There are a lot of gaps. Even the best product marketer in the world is going to have a ton of gaps to fill.

0:04:39 - David Karel

In product marketing, we don't have to get back, we don't have to spend too much time there. It's everything about messaging, narrative, product launches and how you've taught your story in the market. All of that stuff is a lot of fun and challenging, and you build competency in that over time. Suddenly you're running marketing and your charter is to how do I cost effectively reach all the audiences that we're trying to get in front of? All these programs and channels are things you build competency and expertise in. 

It's like you're going up all 100 different learning curves at once. The first thing you do is be self-aware. I tried to be. You get some investment in your first headcount and you build around your gaps. So it's straightforward. But it's knowing where you need help the most and bringing in great people, which I did. And you grow from there. So over my time at Bizo, the company grew to about a team of 25 people over four or four and a half year period. I had the SDR team, which is why it got to that size and then acquired by LinkedIn. Then that came into a whole different environment. 

I think the most fun and rewarding part was that you're building something from scratch. Marketing from scratch is a heavy lift. There's no friction, no legacy, anything. There's no bad habits. In a way, I was able to move really fast and there was no preconception. There were a bunch of people within the company who thought marketing should be done a different way. That lesson was really helpful and I've carried that through. I've picked opportunities since that time.

The second lesson was that sales were growing. Sales were also nascent. They only had three or four sales people at the time with a sales manager, so they didn't like it. What happens in many companies: you're investing tons of energy and time in sales, sales matures at a rapid click, while marketing is dramatically under-invested. You jump into that as a marketing leader and you've got cut out for yourself. Because you have this very well-developed sales force that needs marketing help and they're hungry for leads. Basically, because it's becoming very inefficient.

I also had the benefit of growing up together with sales. We grew at the same time. I had to not only mature the organizations in parallel investing commensurate investment. We were building all the lead management processes, all of like, “How are we working together? How does marketing set priorities?” All of that was done in such a tight, go-to-market fashion. I think that benefited me too. All these cliches with walls going up between sales and marketing, it's just true, it just happens really quickly. What was most paramount was making sure that whatever I was doing was tied to what sales was trying to accomplish.

The other major insight I talk about is that I had a few bets to place in hiring early on. So it was certainly around my own competency gaps at the time. I also had a sense that maybe it's the product marketer in me. But where I invested really heavily and it paid off, and I think it's how we differentiated really quickly in the market, it was building internal competency around content, messaging and brand. So it probably went counter to where others would have invested. But the first person I hired was really good. She was good at a lot of things, but she was a tremendous writer. I didn't want to have to outsource that to an agency. I really wanted that competency because I inherently knew when I started spending money — I started spending a dollar to advertise on Google or LinkedIn or went to our first trade show — what the effectiveness of those things was going to be. A total would be a function of the content I'm putting into it.

0:09:20 - Alex Shevelenko

Basically, there's often a desire to grow, grow, grow, leads, leads, leads, capture, capture, capture. But if you don't have substance at the end of that span, you're basically missing the opportunity. Or if people don't even get in, you're just leaving a bad first impression. I mean the perception is the stage gate.

0:10:00 - David Karel

Yes, I want to perceive there's just credibility there and authenticity and value. You know to earn the right To then unlock that further yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I want to be authentic. The second design, so the second hire, was a great graphic designer who also was doing web design and all that, which is also something that seems easy to outsource and it is you could outsource it, but I wanted to build that internal competency. Again to your point about perception they're not going to look at how you package up your content and how you package your message and how your brand looks. If that can break through the noise, if you're starting to spend money on a set of a marketing mix, these are going to be differentiators that can break through. So that was, it's something you were selling to marketers.

0:10:49 - Alex Shevelenko

Right, like you were. So basically what you're saying is like hey, if I'm selling to marketers, I can't have you know crappy marketing design you know like and effectively. So you had to get a good copy and a good marketing designer to pass that credibility bar, which is probably higher than if you're selling to lawyers but like accountants or some other field, that is not as message savvy.

0:11:19 - David Karel

For sure I think there's validity in that. I think because of the audience there was a higher bar because I was selling, you know, into a horizontal, like b2b marketing, like I could sell to any vertical that's trying to reach a business audience. That's like a big, big market. Um, that means there's a lot, of, a lot of noise in that kind of a market, versus if you're selling to lawyers in a small like, yeah, maybe it's easier to break through that noise in that kind of a market, versus if you're selling to lawyers in a small like, yeah, maybe it's easier to break through that noise and that smaller vertical.

0:11:48 - Alex Shevelenko

Right, because you're focused, because you're the focus allows you to concentrate here. You're in a large swimming pool, okay.

0:11:57 - David Karel

Last thing I could say about and this will be talking about ancient history a little bit, with Bizo, LinkedIn, I think it was around tech. I feel really fortunate it was 2010. This renaissance was happening with marketing. Automation was just coming online. Marketo was in the late 2000s. The earliest adopters were using them, but it was starting to really hit not mainstream webinar platforms, as well as content management systems. There were more ways to more nimbly manage your websites and optimize your websites really quickly.

All this stuff was happening. You had things like content management. Content marketing itself was kind of starting to come of age as a thing, even though it's hot. It's hot today. ABM guess what everyone? ABM existed for a long time, which is called different things. That was coming of age. How do you align weighted marketing and sales efforts around the accounts you care about most, which is ABM? Funnel optimization, just like the data-driven, like applying math to all of this stuff that you're doing to try to get the results you want.

All of this was kind of starting to take shape in different practices, so I was able to kind of get thrown in. That and I would say a lot of the technology supporting that benefited me a lot. I think it also created a lot of black eyes because I didn't know a lot. So you're eager and excited and probably adopted more or tried to take on more tech than my team could support. A lot of lessons around like taking on only what you can really operationalize within the team.

But again, that was an exciting time but also it was about to lead to. I think, if you fast forward, even by the time I joined LinkedIn and those post years, all of these tools I mentioned started to become hit the mainstream and their effectiveness, I think over time, fast forward has really diminished because everyone's using them in a pretty I'd say maybe not so sophisticated a fashion. People are even interested in content marketing. Every team worth their salt can create some blog post. Everyone can take that e-book and spend a few dollars on it, sharing it on LinkedIn. So there's a lot of noise and for us as a marketer or as a go-to marketing team, you have to raise our bar to stay ahead of this mainstream pack.

0:14:28 - Alex Shevelenko

Got it. Well, you mentioned Eloqua. So the founder and CEO of Eloqua was on the show and one of my funnier moments was him. He said something along the lines of, you know, we marketers, we tend to ruin every party we get invited to because we just overdo it right. It's a tactics driven world and tactics have a lifetime, and we just, you know, tend to. 

If you think about farming, you know there's this sort of thing where sometimes you let the field rest for a little bit, you're gonna just kind of have a slightly more long term thing.

0:15:11 - David Karel

Very true. Yeah, you can get the fluffy ebook. They think about the gift. There's a whole trend around gift cards and like, hey, let me buy you a coffee, like these things. That kind of worked really well for like a minute, and then we just like the whole everyone jumps at it and uses it in a way that's not very useful.

0:15:35 - Alex Shevelenko

Yeah, so. So, before we kind of dive into the kind of the from then to now, like I think for a lot of people it would be interesting, like the, you know what drove the acquisition by LinkedIn of Bizo. You know what it was like to be there in the early days of shaping LinkedIn's B2B strategy and marketing itself?

0:15:59 - David Karel

Yeah, I mean I think LinkedIn, I mean I, obviously being the acquiree, not the acquirer. There were many others at LinkedIn on the executive team that made those decisions. I think what it was marketing we became part of the marketing solutions business, which was really starting to become really strong at that time. They had just, I think probably at that time, maybe a year or two before, launched sponsored content, so the feed you know in the LinkedIn feed and being able to sponsor content and where companies, B2B marketers can play in that. So I think they saw marketing solutions as a really attractive business that could scale and Bizo just had to like it. It was a really good fit. It gave them some other products that we could bundle in the portfolio and the marketing solutions portfolio and had certain competencies from a product perspective and even organizational perspective that we kind of brought to that marketing solutions business unit.

0:17:01 - Alex Shevelenko

Got it. So now let's fast forward and know you like Clari again is a great, great story kind of another. Uh, you know we can come back. So some lessons there, but let's fast forward to your current role. You already mentioned that you know we tend to overuse, overuse the tools. Um, some of the tools you know, frankly, have not changed that much, like I don't think Marketo has tremendously transformed or Eloqua has tremendously transformed since those early days and then, but the usage of them is heavy, right. So guide us a little bit of what you're seeing now.

0:17:40 - David Karel

My current journey, it's kind of a combined six-year journey. As you mentioned, I joined Zenput, which is in restaurant tech, um, so I did where I was more of a horizontal back in Bizo days. Here I am in a um, a vertical. It's a big, big vertical, but it allows me as a marketer, like we're talking to a more specific audience and have purpose-built products to address the needs of. For us it's usually multi-unit restaurants. It's an emerging, fast-growing restaurant chain or a large global restaurant chain to you, the folks listening here I have a picture of it.

0:18:32 - Alex Shevelenko

I kind of talk about why and, by the way, just to blast it on track to 200 million AR pretty soon, you know, past a hundred.

0:18:42 - David Karel

So, yeah, Zenput was acquired. So my four-year journey at Zenput. So I'll start with the punchline and I can work back. But we were acquired by CrunchTime. So I'm actually CMO of CrunchTime and that acquisition happened almost two years ago. And CrunchTime i's a company that's been around. It's one of the larger tech players in this space and the company passed an exciting milestone earlier this year crossing 100 million in revenue. Yes, so we crossed 100 million, which means, of course, we're on the way to 200 million, right?

0:19:18 - Alex Shevelenko

And, by the way, just kind of for the audience, how often do you hear that the acquired company CMO becomes the CMO of the larger entity? 

0:19:35 - David Karel

It's been a fantastic six years just from a career perspective, cause I had it again, the cliff notes. I went back to Zenput. It was almost the same situation. It was like a two-million-dollar ARR company. Um, I was not the first marketer but I had like two marketers when I joined, a very young early sales team as well, and so I kind of had a chance to go build this machine again with a little bit more resources to go on. Over the four years the company grew to about 150 people, my team grew to maybe 12-15 people. But now I found myself in crunch time in this very scaled way. We're a ranging product portfolio, we're a global business, we have a pretty significant international business, so now being able to lead marketing in a go-to-market that's much more complex is giving. So I've had a chance to go from again that early startup thing to back to say, well, how do you scale this thing, right, right? So you're asking about the context, like what are you? Drop yourself into the situation.

Now I think things have changed a lot. I think all of these you talk about certification on some of these tools and you can be up and running and moving. So in a way, it's been great. It's actually been. The democratization of a lot of these tools has been profound because you don't need to hire someone who's been doing this for 15 or 20 years. You can get going pretty fast.

The problem is it's created a lot of noise and a lot of unsophistication. And to your joke about the CEO of Eloqua saying, hey, give a marketer these toys. And we kind of overdo it, I think we've overdone it. I think prospects are largely numb to a lot of the tricks, these old tricks that we've been playing with here. You know the four-step nurture campaign with the e-book and the gift card. All it is, at the end of the day, our prospects are getting. You know our inboxes are filled with 98% of the stuff. This stuff is not targeted for us, so we just kind of turned it off. So I think, as I approach the role, like trying to be, you know, look in the mirror of like, what are we dealing with here? It still comes down to getting really good. It sounds trite, but it is. I have this conversation with my team all the time in our planning. Are we getting the right message in front of the right audience at the right time? How are we doing that? And I think it's even with campaigns.

Think about what most marketing teams are trying to do. In a campaign, you're trying to get people to fill out a form. Like that's a really low bar. Can I get you to fill out a form? A medium bar is? Can I get you to actually fill out the form? Maybe there's no form? Kill the form, right? But can I get you to read what I put out of the market? That's a medium bar. That's pretty good. If I can get you to take time out of your busy day to read, that's a higher bar. I'm aiming higher in terms of what I'm endeavoring to do the highest of bars. Can I change the way you think about something? Right, whatever? Whatever the idea, the notion of the topic, can I get you to start thinking differently? 

0:23:16 - Alex Shevelenko

I'm gonna challenge you on this one. Yeah, I, I think the highest of bars? Can I change the way you think and can I inspire a behavioral change as a result of that? Right, like, okay, let me bookmark it to come back to it for sure. Or let me book the meeting right at the moment of the most interest or let me drill into this particular evidence, uh, further, the way Wikipedia does magically for us, right, like we kind of can go drill in and drill in. For some reason, B2B content, once you get something you can't really go deeper into it, into that kind of in a safe environment, like we can come back to that.

0:24:03 - David Karel

So, I would just say to me that the challenge accepted, you're totally right that if we were kind of laddering up like you're right, that's the next step. It's like nodding, I've profoundly changed your thinking to the point that I'm like you have, you're prioritizing, like your day differently, you're going to take actions differently.

0:24:26 - Alex Shevelenko

Yeah, and I would say let's, if we go back to the low bar, which is to fill out the form. You just kind of triggered a thought and I don't know what I want to take, get your take on it, like kind of. So some very clever marketer somewhere you know, I think Uberflip came up with it or somebody else like that came up with it and said oh, we're going to help you get to fill out more forms on the thing. The way we're going to do it is we're going to make it look like you just have to put in your email, which is easy. Like it looks like it's a low bar and then, the moment you fill out your email, the form is going to drop down further and there's going to be a huge form right after that where you have to put in your zip code, your mother's maiden name, your social security, whatever. And to me it's interesting because it's so clever. We are so clever because we're reducing this friction and you're making a small commitment by filling in your email and then you know, well, once you make a small commitment, we expand the commitment. This is like Cialdini, you know, Wharton 101, marketing classes. Like that we were studying.

That kind of is a tactic, but it's a tactic for somebody who's sophisticated. In the back of their mind they're going, oh, what a fucking douchebag, pardon my French. You trick me by making it look simple but it's actually more complex and you just destroyed a whole lot of trust with your organization, subconsciously maybe, but in the process of trying to fulfill some sort of a marketing MQL quota. This is the type of stuff. This is not even you. You know this is a tactic that seems clever, but when you take a step back, you know what it says about you?

0:26:30 - David Karel

What's the long-term impact? I think we've all experienced that in consumer worlds, consumer websites. We go to buy stuff and they pull the same tricks on us and we feel bad about it. You don't feel good. You feel like you thought it was going to be easy and it's hard. You're going to be able to kind of remain anonymous and they're trying to break that anonymity before you're ready to do that. You don't feel good. If you're trying to build credibility and trust, I don't know, like, was it worth it?

0:27:04 - Alex Shevelenko

And name me a B2B brand. Name me a B2B brand that actually has an ebook right, like if you have to have an ebook. You're, by definition, not selling a transactional widget that I would just buy right away. You're, by definition, needed to educate people, build trust.

0:27:23 - David Karel

It's a long game.

0:27:24 - Alex Shevelenko

It's a long game.

0:27:25 - David Karel

It's a long game and then you're using these pushy short-term tactics right, which, by the way, usually enterprise. You're selling expensive software or other services. It's multiple sales cycles. You're going through a process multiple times, educating different people. It's a long game. It's not about getting that MQL.

So, it's obvious, but in the campaign moment, where you're trying to get good results, people lose sight of it. Aiming higher is something that I kind of bring into and all of us fall in the trap. You feel like, ooh, you do you feel comfortable letting go of getting some of these progress metrics that feel good, right, so you try to coach yourself. The other, I think, the path I was on back at Bizo. I was fortunate, I said, to build a team alongside sales, and that happened again here. But you never do it perfectly the first time around.

So I've tried to be even more intentional. And how do I make sure that the marketing and sales relationship and what we're doing and so some of the things that we do, share KPIs, which I don't think I had in the busy days. My CRO, Nikki, who's my counterpart and she's also been on this journey from Zenput to CrunchTime, who worked together for a while. So we've built trust with one another. But we're modeling out the meetings and opportunities and pipeline we want across different segments and we both own those. Our teams own those together.

0:29:02 - Alex Shevelenko

MQL doesn't move the needle for you. What moves?

0:29:05 - David Karel

The needle is that I have my team tracks. It tracks it.

0:29:07 - Alex Shevelenko

It's an input, but it's not your success. It’s late stage deals, right?

0:29:13 - David Karel

I'm not going into the exec team meetings or my board meeting and saying, oh my God, look at all the MQLs. I don't even I don't share these things. They don't really matter right. They matter to my team so you can understand trending and progress, investing in time to connect, making sure you're investing. Don't keep bumping one-on-ones. It's important one-on-one. Not only with me and CRO, but my managers and my team, her managers in this remote world, investing time to fly like every quarterly business review, like if I'm at almost every QBR and if I'm not there, like a good short portion of my team is flying to be there for sales at their QBRs, so that you're part of the team and you're also really front and center with the challenges that you're having.

You're not just off as a marketing team and some ivory tower creating all this fun stuff and thinking you're being helpful. And, probably the most important thing, I think this is probably where almost every sales and marketing team I think just this is where they go off the rails and I think CEOs maybe don't have enough context to guide this the right way, but around. We've created, I think, a really strong culture of shared credit. It's about attribution and it's this old like was that a marketing leader, a sales lead.

Who helped get that? Was it sales or marketing? I say this in like every conversation I'm in marketing the history of the world, marketing has never gotten a meeting. In the history of the world, marketing has never created an opportunity. We're making it as easy as possible for sales to do that and in B2B we just talked about most, unless you're like small business, yeah, like, let's just level set right, like what's the average deal size.

0:31:08 - Alex Shevelenko

You know, ballpark.

0:31:10 - David Karel

Yeah, we have mid-market. We actually have three separate sales teams. So, mid-market commercial and enterprise. So enterprise could be up into the seven figures, right? And then the lower end, and then the lower end would be like, let's say, it could be 15, 20, 25k, so it's still a considered decision.

0:31:30 - Alex Shevelenko

People are not going to go and buy that on a credit card without talking to somebody. So, in this context right, like you're absolutely right, in this mid-to-enterprise context, it's a team sport. It was in marketing and we can come back. That's one of your quotes that I really love and I want to hear more about that, because it feels like marketing itself is a bunch of different disciplines, right, and how do you align them? Uh, but I think what's even more important is, actually, this idea of marketers joining QBRs. I don't think I've done that. When I was running salesops, I don't think the marketers certainly weren't, you know, maybe like it was opportunistic, but it wasn't a core requirement. So I think this is a fantastic idea.

0:32:19 - David Karel

You're either a part of a go-to-market team or you're not. And I think if you're not invested in staying really close to what's going on in the opportunities, it's really hard to do your job as a marketer.

But yeah, I'm just as my CRO keeps the sales team honest, so the same way I'm like, hey, marketers, that's not us, we're helping, but it's the sales team. In this highly considered long sales process or long buy process, there's almost no opportunity. Probably that was created without some touch by marketing, so it goes both ways. So then, helping the CEO and the board also have that mindset so they're not coming and teeing up a topic, say, oh, we're going to spend the next two hours trying to understand, like where sales has gotten credit, where marketing has gotten credit. Um, which is a super counterproductive and creates um is a culture killer, I think, and make distrust growing and thinking that someone is stealing credit, all that kind of stuff, all this kumbaya stuff, doesn't mean that like it's really important to understand, like where's performance coming from? Should I hire another SDR that's doing mostly outbound calling? Should I invest in another event? 

0:33:39 - Alex Shevelenko

But ultimately, though, all this stuff is working in tandem, so it's sort of you need to be analytical, but the insurance is insufficiently sophisticated about where there is rapidly moving water inside to go to market.

But I think you have to take out the ego and I think this is one of your master traits, right? I think humility helps where you are able to build that culture where it's not about me, like we got this right. Or here, look at all these leads, look at how cool we are and I, what I'm getting hearing from you, it's this mindset that everybody's in marketing and everybody's in sales, right? Or probably even you know if there's a retention component that's very significant. Everybody's customer success is probably a third pillar that comes to this, right. But you kind of need to have that mindset that we're, all you know, a great customer that's onboarded and successful, and in your niche industry, that's a huge gross and upsell opportunity. That's another marketing story you could sell, and so on.

0:35:02 - David Karel

There's a lot of pride in being a sales professional that has accomplished a lot. But I think — not to dilute or water down the specialization that has been built up — you're all part of one team. It sounds again a little trite but in practice I've just seen it makes all the difference in terms of how our teams are working together, sharing data and information and supporting one another. Um, so I'll give, I'll give you one more. I kind of go back to like how do you get ourselves out of this? Everyone's all this, everyone's using the same tactics. How do you break out of the noise?

The one thing that we're trying to do is and it's hard, it seems simple but it's really hard I think the number one thing you can do as a sales marketing org to do better than the rest of the competitors out there that are just making prospects numb is audience prioritization, like I just mentioned, like CrunchTime we're focused on yes, we're in the restaurant, larger food service industry right, we sell to different segments, but there's a lot of little sub verticals in there.

Within a bicycle there's four or five or six personas that we're trying to influence. We have a pretty robust product line that we're trying to. Can you promote everything you have at once? Not really. So you have to place a bet, like what? Like I was just literally in a planning discussion with our sales managers last week and we're planning late summer and fall and we're like we X and product Y, whatever, and as a team locking arms and saying good, that means by focusing, we're going to be able to build stronger messages, deeper, authentic, credible content. And then you're going to have marketing and sales actually focused on the same audience at the same time.

0:37:26 - Alex Shevelenko

And that's also kind of an important part of it is like you're doing this in a really integrated fashion, like it's not marketing, just creating great content, it's like making sure all that is being heavily into this repurposing right, because it feels from my vantage point, it feels like you know, not everybody, unfortunately, is as enlightened as you are in your CRO and the lining is that marketing use in my view, marketing teams use marketing lingo, marketing tools, maybe marketing training and mindset. Sales teams have their own tools, you know, and their own, you know, mindset, and so, like sales may use sales engagement, and you know they use sales enablement tools and you know some content there. Marketing has maybe really relevant books for, for the sales team, but they're sitting somewhere on the website and you need to fill out one of those forms that you know I'm sure your forms are much better but like, like, you have to fill out a form to get that and so, like you know, half, sure, your forms are much better but like, like, you have to fill out a form to get that and so, like you know, half of your forms are like, maybe, like, maybe, sales to people downloading those forms because they don't want to send the customer to that thing. When the content, as an example, resides in different systems, right, it's pretty hard to move that content across the journey and, as you very well know, in your world, right where you have longer journeys, you have different decision makers. Like a piece of content may actually kind of does not just flow linearly like oh, all this content sits only at the top of the photo and only when this company enters. Like the funnel has roughly some kind of a flow, but the way people move through it is very irregular, uh, and kind of bouncing back, and every you know was in the one organization.

There are going to be different people that will engage with different content. Even you know throughout the cycle. So long story short that you know how we solve for that Right. Like, obviously we're thinking about it from a technology perspective and from the RELAYTO world. We've seen that if you give one shared content experience layer, you know where marketers put it. Marketers put it out there in a way that's really easy for salespeople to reuse it and you reduce that friction. It helps. But it also takes a mindset that the content doesn't stop once. The e-book is still useful. You know after it got the lead right. If you do the right level of ebook right, the case study is useful all the way from the top of the funnel to post customer acquisition when they're trying to make sense of how other people justified the value and got the rollout done and what was the benefits right.

0:40:44 - David Karel

I guess the way I think about it is yeah, marketing we're gonna, we're investing in like any given period, like in a to create substantial content, right and all the you have a lot of. You're always repurposing content you're creating. But I'll give you one example to get our head around, and it's always, always effective, where we did our own work, working with an outside company, but did our own proprietary research. So we're surveying a bunch of people that were better, better kind of you know, in our ICP, if you will, trying to understand their sensibilities about different things and challenges and trends, and you package it up in a really good report, right. So there's a and it's timely and hopefully the information relevant.

But marketing, of course we're going to promote the hell out of it. We're, you know, we're, we're emailing our database, we're posting on social media, we're doing all the things that marketing can do, but in a way, the usefulness of that research is going to be really limited to. It's kind of like running uphill, like on a very muddy trail. There's just so much you can do. One to many, and the truth is, one to many, you don't have the credibility that you have. CrunchTime marketing, sending something out is still like a vendor and it's you're not other than the trust we've been able to build as an organization. So the power is getting that in the hands and cells. Um, and so one is this basic accessibility can sales find what they need at the right time, and all that. And whether it's on our website, whether we happen to use Hubspot, portals that help us to house our content and make it usable. But even so, even if they can find what they want, what we've done in the last couple of quarters and it's not marketing, it's like sales and our sales enablement team they see that car content is a differentiator and they see that reps can differentiate themselves to add value. But if you're just leaving it to every rep to kind of on their own, like some are really good at this stuff, some aren't as good it doesn't come as naturally. You know, some are just sending their note and then adding links, which isn't going to be as valuable as really mapping what they've learned through research about a prospect to the content, like really thoughtful stuff, and that's where our content can really start to fly. So we've done like we've at these QBRs as I mentioned in other training sessions and have been really focused on enablement. 

I'm like what is best practice? How would you, how would you leverage this new content? And we use their research as this piece as an example in the training exercise. But it's building muscle with sales reps on how to use this and put it into play. We try to make it easier whenever we launch a big piece of content. One of my senior content marketing folks creates a sales enablement kit from that content and which I'm sure other, all other great marketing teams are doing. Where you have you've, you've taken all these excerpts out of it. You've made it easy for folks to post this on Linkedin. You've created email templates they can use to send the content here's an infographic version that's not gated.

The content works best when you're mapping it to someone. You've learned something. You've really learned one-on-one about somebody. Marketing can't really do that, but reps can. And especially if they get some enablement about how to go about that.

0:44:35 - Alex Shevelenko

Yes, that's really interesting. So one of the superpowers that we've seen is giving this report, which is very credible, when it comes out like hey, this is the length of your report, but you have 20 pages and 30 pages, so it's credible. But the relevant page, let's say it's page 39. So the interesting thing is, how do you create the credibility right of like, hey, this, this page, is really relevant to you? I don't want you to, you know, open this thing on your phone and, you know, kill your thumbs by scrolling to page 39 until you have, like repetitive stress injury, right, like so, oh wait, I could have an atomic sharing of that page and get you in there. It would still have the context of where you are in the report, that it's a report. So if you wanna go beyond that page, go more.

But this sounds kind of obvious, right, but, like, most websites aren't designed to get you deep linked into the right part of a long form content, and certainly PDFs are completely not designed for anything like that, and so it's a. It's one of those kinds of duh features. But you can't do what you're describing while gaining credibility. What you could probably do is to kind of take a screenshot of that thing and try to hyperlink it. But, like you know, that's painful and that will look ugly and you'll not gain the credibility from the report and they'll say at the end the call to action is still going to be oh, you know, after this screenshot, go to page 39 and then, oh, what if you wanted to go?

What if it's three pages? What if they're right, not x to each other? Right, and this has been before AI, right, like where? Now we have AI that you could ask questions like hey, my client is x and they're interested in, you know, anything in this report that has to do with why? And so we could literally recommend the three pages in the report or in the library of reports. Right, that would be relevant. 

0:46:52 - David Karel

It's a good point. I think the bandaid we do today and I think most do it in the repurposing game is we break that ebook, that research guide, into like 10 blog posts, which is laborious and it, but you're trying to slice it up and you post it so that the reps can now send something more specific, right, right but it's still.

0:47:16 - Alex Shevelenko

It's like specific-ish. It's not really specific, right?

0:47:19 - David Karel

Yeah, so I see what you're doing, um but that's kind of the band-aid of trying to get it into the bite-sized pieces that can be a match for a key topic.

0:47:27 - Alex Shevelenko

Yeah right, yeah, I think we and we see this a lot in X like where people, um, just just basically take photos, right, like so it's sort of like a little photo and you know, and that's equivalent of TikTok, is an equivalent of a photo, but just in a video form. That's really short, a little bit more elaborate. But my worry in this world is, like it's good, like it's a starting point. You want to have a thumbnail that's relevant to whoever you know, to the person that's the audience. But there's something lost and I'm curious at your take when, when you're keeping it that shallow. So there's this. It feels like there's a trade-off where you’re doing the report to gain the credibility that you've done your homework, and the first perception of the report is that it's shallow while accessible. You're kind of maybe not maximizing the value from that investment. So it's some sort of trade-off between ease of access and credibility.

0:48:38 - David Karel

It's also a trade-off like, did I choose the right topic? Again, like, I'm going to send you one thing, and I think that's the one thing that will get you to, like, think differently. Right, but what if I chose the wrong thing? I'm kind of tempted to send you the whole ebook, because maybe you'll find that one thing on your own right. That's the extreme. That's kind of a double-edged sword.

0:49:04 - Alex Shevelenko

That's double-edged sword and I think this is where people, where I would say, you know, we all love the idea of marketing personalization, but it somehow, like I think you, like you said, the sales team may have better ideas sometimes of what to personalize, but it feels almost like the, the marketing, whatever the template for marketing personalization feels a little risky the moment you get into substance because it will be like, well, based in our, you're going to care about this and that and like, seriously, like, do you, you know what? Do you really think your CRM and the data inside it is that smart, Because majority of the marketing messages that look personalized, that I get you know. Like you know you're lucky if they get your name right. I see a world where you let the client decide, you ask them a question, right, like you can take a conversation on multiple levels and you let them personalize their journey right and like is there, clearly there for a reason?

Right, and you know, just like the best salespeople, right, they don't go and say, well, here's you know about us and here's this and here's this, right, they say, hey, you know, people like you may have three types of things that we help them with our, you know, retail optimization strategy. Do any of these sound relevant? Right? And then they say, oh yeah, number two, and then they go. Okay, so now you have an interesting conversation. I wonder why I can't understand the content?

0:50:42 - David Karel

Do that yeah I mean that is where I mean I'm just some of the stuff that you guys are doing at RELAYTO, but with AI, I don't know that's. I mean we talk about all the shiny toys that I had back at Bizo. I mean we're kind of at the beginning of a new renaissance where it's really hard to see how AI and all these new tools are going to affect. But what you describe kind of seems to me we're all in so far as we've all kind of started to learn and understand the power of these large language models and ChatGPT and the other tools. It feels like instead of forms, you have a prompt that's starting to learn a little bit and you're offering up only as much as you'd like as a buyer. But then you're able to start to personalize. Pretty. You can use your imagination and to see how some of these GenAI can kind of change how all this happens, right.

0:51:36 - Alex Shevelenko

Yeah, and I think what's fascinating is obviously, when we integrate, we see some adaptation for this.

But I think what's really important to say is, somehow people conflated GenAI and AI in general. Was this prompt interface, thinking that's end-all, be-all? And I'm just not envisioning like that many you know, senior decision makers or even mid-level decision makers going down the prompt route. But they do want some visual cues and they want, they want to know what's inside and they want to preview and they appreciate other ways in which you could save them time, right, and sometimes maybe the sales reps, right, like they already know that they're just looking for, like some efficiency gains, right. So it's just there's this assumption that everybody wants this AI chat as the only way to consume content, and it feels like if we've learned anything from marketing is that there is a visual people, there are text people, there are, you know, big picture first people and then there's linear people, right, and and sometimes the same person is going to have different needs. What do you think about, like, the way you structure content for consumption?

0:53:00 - David Karel

Well, I mean, it's as it gets. It gets back to again my vanilla statement of getting the right message and content in front of the person at the right time. Like how do you do that? And I think it is the more you know. So I think you're right. Like it's hard to see the tea leaves. Like we talk about the prompt and AI who knows, if that's I that can end up morphing and evolving into many forms. It's not, it's not quite what we see or play with today, but I think that does. I mean here's what you want to, here's what we all want to solve. For it's like Dave Carroll I'm sitting on the couch at 11 o'clock at night, my wife just fell asleep or watching Netflix, something or other, and I I shut it off because we're gonna restart the show tomorrow, right, and I open my laptop and I'm there's someone on my team's like hey, I'm really interested, we should look into buying this thing or we're trying to solve a problem.

The buying process happens when I am sitting on my couch at 11 o'clock at night, when I have this time and headspace for it. So if I can go to some website, I don't know if I'm prompted by AI or whatever it might be, but if I can navigate to what I want in the next 15 minutes, what might have taken a year and a half sales cycle is I close my laptop, I go back to work. I'm not thinking about this for months and months. So that's the opportunity in terms of feeding content at the right time. It's like the guy on the couch who has time to actually think about this. Can you get that person what he wants or she wants?

0:54:24 - Alex Shevelenko

This is so fascinating and you know I think back to the relationship between sales and marketing, like the old school marketing would be like hey, we got to book a meeting and we delay the demo. You know, we trade for the demo.

0:54:42 - David Karel

Remember, at SuccessFactors we had a thing where yeah, to get a demo.

0:54:46 - Alex Shevelenko

We need you to, you know, to give us something. You know what we get in return? Right, and look at the difference like I don't want to dismiss. There are some cases where that's the right thing because the demo may be very expensive to set up and it's it may be irrelevant if you don't understand why you're doing the demo, but the the point is, the more you can reduce that friction in those 15 minutes when you got the time between your your go off to sleep and you got some mental bandwidth to do.

It is fascinating and I'll tell you, the insight that we get is we know, you know a lot of our customers are signing up and you know they are giving their emails right, they are giving their contact details and, like in the sales context, sometimes in marketing. And you know, when we look at some of the analytics of what happens in the evenings and on the weekends, it's exactly what you're describing. The senior decision makers don't have bandwidth to go and dig into some of ours or our clients' stuff, maybe during the work hours, and so you basically need to figure out how to orchestrate a personalized buyer journey for the most important person Signing off on that proposal or whatever it is that you're doing Right and so like without any control. Yeah.

0:56:19 - David Karel

And, yeah, we all wanna we all know it, we all wanna just educate ourselves. That's it. We don't actually want to go through these formal things to learn, like if we're all in our consumer lives, and have gotten really good at searching the web and all that it has to offer to learn about stuff. We kind of want to do that at work. So just how are we and this, this is not new, I know I'm not saying something new and earth shattering. We've known this for a decade, but how can we start getting really good at scratching that itch for the buyer that actually wants to self-educate? Where they can have what they need? They don't have to go to a formal product demo, they can see that online.

It gets a little scary because it's competitive. I know everyone gets maybe nervous. What if our competitors are looking at that? There's all these things that create friction and us allowing self-education to happen as seamlessly. But I think it's all, um, it can be tackled, it's. But it's kind of like, what do you where you're aiming, where you're aiming.

0:57:29 - Alex Shevelenko

So I think the gap, it feels like the bigger gap, is in the B2B or sort of scientific universe, right, like where there's complexity and we're just um, maybe not as well like science is probably a little bit better because people do. We have life sciences customers and they love it. They just, you know, provide the references to the articles and the academic magazines and publications. People dig into it. It's a major source. So I'd say, science, if you remove friction, people will do it In the B2B because they're motivated, they already think in terms of references In the B2B world.

It feels like we're just not like, if we're copying B2C, we're not doing it well, but we shouldn't be copying B2C right, we should be actually taking the best of the sort of substantive credibility, building content and bringing it up front. And you know my view on what you're describing. You know competitive information or doing too much up front around. The problem with like buyer centric, like self-guided, this doesn't just happen up front, right, this could be, you know, proposal stage the most like right now, like scrutiny is pretty high up there. So if you want a CFO to sign off on the proposal and there is like some sort of documentation either from a vendor or you put something together, they need to go and find you know their section that they care about right, know that it's there, get see the ROI and then, maybe validate it somewhere around, poke around and that feels like okay, I'm not sold, I've made my own decisions.

I'm an independent, atomic, autonomous decision maker and or effectively have a conversation with the person trying to sell this when they're not. That person is not in the room, right, and you don't even know who might be in the room, but you still secure it right like it doesn't. You could restrict it right to people in the company or to specific names. So I think that dichotomy that you're giving away too much without talking. You know, face to face, there's some truth to right. 

1:00:00 - David Karel

There's some of that. It might be more like, I mean, good enterprise selling is around discovery and understanding. It's hard to do. Pure self-education is hard because you need to learn. Will AI be the panacea? I don't know. But it does seem like the more you can learn through self-education, you can then tee up the right content. Today it's been harder to do that. There’s where some of the trepidation would be. It's like I don't. I don't know where to lead you because I don't understand I don't know you, I don't understand your problem, right as much and I think that's a valid, a very authentic place to come from.

1:00:42 - Alex Shevelenko

Yeah, and I think the key question is, well, you know, a good website or a good intro sales deck will kind of have give you a menu of choices where you could go right, and I think you know, but it's probably I think the challenge would be, instead of like a table of contents mindset, which we're all in, it would be in the question mindset you know, where do you, hey, excited, you want to learn more, where, like, want to take this, and it doesn't have to be a singular asset or a singular landing page. It just creates these journeys and I feel like the AI could be an enabler there of the problem, a marketer that understands what sales are talking to customers will guide AI tools much better towards what are the big buckets of problems that people can identify with, right? So, anyway, this is fun to wrestle with. I think one of the insights that I got from you know a time when we were just starting out RELAYTO you also kind of frame this, you know, the big, big rock content concept and then you fill it out with smaller rocks. So we've talked a little bit about examples where you're doing a campaign and then you fill it out with supporting materials around that.

How well is that? You know, is this changing? Is this kind of big rocks and you know around the big, big events changing in the modern world where you could create a lot of content, run a lot of campaigns with all these tools? Is it still the same? What's your take on it? Look over the years and the value like? Is this the right strategy in terms of content creation at least?

1:02:48 - David Karel

I'm torn.

I think that you wanted to say it earlier that, like, when you do something long form it gives you a chance to show that, create substance if you're aiming for it to be substance and not fluff.

But I do think there's, you know, there's like diminishing attention span and like, do people I have this horrible joke internally, like with my content folks or my head of product marketing and we all we're about to launch a big, new heavy content piece and we're all debating and sweating the really small stuff in it and I say it and it pains me, I'm like you do realize, like how few people and I think even my joking, I probably believe it how few people actually read that whole thing.

So it says something. The fact that, like there's only you only think a few internal people are the people are going to notice the small detail in this big. So I think it is a sign of the times that I think, with so much out there and people being trained in the land of TikTok and Instagram and all these things that make there has maybe there's a balance you need to, based on what people want to know, giving them more bite-sized content, but it's striking the balance. You were saying that screenshot of that one thing which maybe lacks substance, or um, doesn't build as much confidence. So how do you balance?

1:04:11 - Alex Shevelenko

I think it's it again. It's this fine thing where this is really easy to access and really easy to digest and you're not going to kind of overtax yourself unless you want to go in there. But, by the way, this is based on interviews of 500 people, just like you, and validated by X, Y and Z. And that little credibility source. It actually means a lot, I think to at least the B2B audience, right, like so. Everybody else can make up things, I can make up things for you. Fact, it does quite a lot. So the idea particularly in the world which is a low trust environment, the credibility, contextual credibility, I think, is going to be the name of the game. Uh, at least for this type of content, right?

1:05:12 - David Karel

I'll give you what is big. I'll try to answer directly like, where do I think it's going? Like, I think you can have heavy content. I think it's gonna be very effective if you've, if you place the bet on an audience, don't try to have that heavy content that you're trying to like send out to the whole market to kind of collect all the leads and MQLs because you place a bet, and if you build out deep content. Alex, this is for you, like, given who you are in your role and what you're trying to accomplish, people can viscerally, when that's being marketed to you, um, you viscerally kind of know oh, this thing is for me. 

1:05:56 - Alex Shevelenko

It's for me and it's relevant.

1:05:58 - David Karel

Someone has actually taken a lot of time understanding this is for me to create that. I don't think we do a lot of the content, and even our team is probably guilty of it. For sure, a lot of the content probably is trying to cast too wide a net to too many audiences.

1:06:18 - Alex Shevelenko

So this has been fun to riff on the content, on the tools and evolution of the tools.

You know we started touching a little bit on the future, Dave.

I think one of the things I love about you and your approach is measured, patient but persistent and very empathy driven approach to customers, to your team and you know it sounds like your partners across the organizations you know where. You know if this is the characteristic of a world-class CMO, how did you acquire this? Is this sort of intrinsic part of just growing up, David? Is this something that you worked at, developing the skills I mean we obviously talk about like the technical toolkit of becoming a CMO, um, but like what makes you effective in your roles, where you get acquired, you become the CMO of the acquirer, same thing happened with LinkedIn. You were acquired for the expertise that you guys brought on that led a part of the organization. There you're advising people kind of where do you know what's behind your professional success story?

1:07:38 - David Karel

It's a big question. I think I have to do some soul searching.

1:07:44 - Alex Shevelenko

No place better than authentic conversations, but on Experienced-focused leaders. Unlock your soul!

1:07:51 - David Karel

I think it just bringing like knowing who you are, like I, we all have our strengths and we have things that, like we know others are much better at, or that there's things that are really important in my role that I've had to get better at over time. Right, for example, like suddenly you're in a head of marketing role and you're having to speak in front of people often, or more often, internally and externally, and I had never met practice at that and it wasn't something that came naturally. So I had to like, really, I think that's one of the things that's not natural, that I've had to get better at. That's not. I didn't bring that into the role. I think all my personality is and what I am naturally with my wife and my kids and my family, like that I very naturally bring that into my business life.

So I think that when you start to see how people respond to who you are, you try to be your authentic self in your role. That is how you're going to succeed in any role. So leaning, allowing just being who I am. I always make it my number one with my team, others in the company. I don't want them to see me as someone in a hierarchy, like I'm just Dave, right, and I don't try to pretend to be anything other than who I am. I think there's dividends that pay off when you bring that to your role. So I don't know if that's directly answering. When you talk about bringing empathy, it's just being human.

1:09:23 - Alex Shevelenko

Right, it seems like a good recipe for a congruent life.

1:09:29 - David Karel

And whatever you're trying to do, yeah, tips for our kids. You know, just be you.

1:09:41 - Alex Shevelenko

This is the the last kind of question for our guests like to be a better human or to be a better professional, has there been some books, some individuals that you follow or kind of just get these nuggets of wisdom and inspiration from, whether it's in kind of filling in professional gaps or saying, hey, I need to develop in this area and this looks like a person I could learn from.

1:10:06 - David Karel

Yeah, I think it's more.

I mean, I'm sure I've read good books and podcasts and over the time I honestly most of the real nuggets are probably like observing managers that I've had, um other mentors that I've had through my life and other peers, like folks that were on the same journey with me, like starting out as heads of marketers, kind of. At the same time I think those are the people that are most vulnerable with just like really worried about x, like because, because I've been able to just be open and like vulnerable around what's on my mind and what I'm worried about, I've gotten the best, most authentic, most impactful feedback, which has been always, I think, made the most different. It's certainly like reading and podcasts and all that certainly helps, and I always pick up an idea when I'm listening.

1:11:07 - Alex Shevelenko

So you're saying vulnerability, and opening up also opens up to your own learning. That better feedback and it is because being open up, there's a lot more at stake for you. It sticks. This is great and actually not something I expected, but it makes a ton of sense, like it's one of those unconventional thoughts. That's what you learn from when you open up. That's when you learn the most.

1:11:33 - David Karel

And build around you build as you're going, navigating your career, Like I think it's just more yes, be a voracious learner and reader and all that, but most important is to build a circle of people that you can be really open with about what's troubling you, what you're worried about, where you're feeling lack of confidence. So that you can grow. And usually with the insights you're getting, you have a self-awareness that's very different from how other people perceive you. So there's so much illumination when you can have that conversation and kind of over time, well.

1:12:09 - Alex Shevelenko

What a great way to wrap up a fantastic episode. My to-do list next time you and I connect as I'm coming in really vulnerable, because I love learning from you. So my to-do list next time, I connect as I'm coming in really vulnerable. Cause I love learning from you.

1:12:20 - David Karel

You can have a box of Kleenex, it'll be good.

1:12:23 - Alex Shevelenko

David, so good to connect in this and share some of the reasons why I love chatting with you with our audience. Thank you for joining us! 

1:12:41 - David Karel

Thank you. I really, really appreciated the chat. It was fun. Thanks!