#4 - Digital marketing challenges with on demand CMO Oren Greenberg

And he's one of those people that whenever I see him, he's just got his hand in all the latest tools and technology. And he's got a serious growth hackers mindset. Like he's always thinking about how to achieve new levels of growth. So I'm looking forward to seeing down Sam talking about , about data creativity, how the two things work together. And yeah, I hope you enjoy the episode.

Oh, actually cycled on the line to get here, which is pretty cool. They learn your electrical bike in Brussels the other day when I'm exac I was playing around with the scooters and that was a lot of fun as well. Nice. And it's illegal here.

Um , so yeah, a little bit more about my , uh, professional background, I suppose, but I , funny enough, I used to start as a, started out as an animator back in the day and then moved on to wink bingo, which to pick it up , search marketing, SEO, and PPC, and then moved on to touch local, which , uh, received about 6 million from bulletin. That was very interesting in business. Then I moved onto Wonga . She was probably the more infamous of some of the brands that I've worked with.

And probably one of the more controversial I headed up search marketing there as well. Are they still, I think on completely. Yeah. They've liquidated at times . Wow . That's how you look at it , but yeah. Yes . And then I moved to kind of a more independent advisory role. And since then I've worked with lots of different footsie, two fifties cannon Investec bank. HomeServe then also different funded startups in the FinTech space.

But now I work as a kind of a hybrid of advisor consultant and I build little teams, little Ninja teams and growth teams, I suppose, try and deliver results for clients. So, you know, building up the tech stack, bringing in specialists, resources, working some fantastic agencies already really great WordPress agency, I could recommend to you. Thank you very much. No worries. Yeah. And that's pretty much what I do now. So kind of , um , all the way from the very strategic as a non-exec yeah .

Through the very tactical managing specific channels for clients with different specialists resource

I think it just means different things to different people, but in terms of what it means to you and the kind of growth hacking framework, talk me through it.

And I think the misconception around that is because of the word hacking, I think that's created this skew and this assumption that actually you're hacking your way to growth. So sort of dodgy or unscrupulous way, we're kind of breaking every GDPR rule in the book. But in reality, the concept of growth was actually about rapid scaling and that's where it had shifted. But fundamentally growth hacking is a, is a hybrid of a philosophy and methodology, but also structured .

It gives you some tools to try and prioritize experimentation. Yeah . I think the core principle of growth hacking, which is interesting, which most people don't understand is a shift in the team structure. So if you look at most businesses now, you know, you look at engineering and then one side of the building and one department, you know , your data team and they're in another one, you'd talk to the product team. Then another one that your marketing is in another one.

And then they kind of have these group meetings, but what's really shifted some of these really interesting businesses like Pinterest and some of these other really rapidly growing ones like Uber, et cetera, is there's actually one core team. And there's a representative which each of those functions and they're in this new created department, which is driving growth.

So it's actually a much more holistic approach structurally rather than this siloed approach that was, is currently kind of very common,

And then your CPA is baked into the product and you get these viral group , they call it viral growth loops.

I think you also had some data which maybe you can run through about data and data analysis and data management skills being kind of the most sought after hard scale for marketers, I guess , digital marketers, but maybe marketers more generally, what does the modern kind of growth hacking skillset look like?

Cause I think I still have a bit of a vision of a growth hacker being like a 21 year old kid in that bedroom , in the dark kind of like just doing whatever they can to bring in new clients or sell things or whatever it takes. Obviously these days it's in bigger organizations, it's much more established and there's some proper process behind it, but what does it a growth team look like? And what are the

skillsets within it?

And they kind of think about it more like a 21 year old thinks about Instagram and trying to get as many likes rather than actually deep business Griff , like, you know , serious movement. And then you've got the original growth hackers, which is , uh , you know , uh, Andrew Chan and , um , arguably Neil Patel and some of these guys like Sean Ellis.

And you can find a lot that , you know , community like the growth conference in the U S and there's, you know, some of the biggest minds and growth of them, they go to conferences and the , you know, the, from MailChimp to infusion soft to other SAS B2B software providers. So yeah, growth is the growth team, the growth hem hybrids kind interesting ones. So when I speak to a lot of different heads of growth and I asked them, what's frustrating you in your current workplace, yeah .

They talked about this silo about how growth isn't full funnel. They want to have more ownership over the product. They want to be more integrated into engineering. And I think that creates this double edge sword because now you're developing new skills and new attitudes and you need new knowledge.

That goes a lot deeper than just marketing, but then you also have to stay on top of marketing, which is incredibly challenging, especially as the MarTech landscape continues to proliferate as this constant feature changes in different channels. Like LinkedIn now has this new look alike audience or targeting is improving that you have to stay on top of that. You have to experiment with that . There's this constant conflict about how it pulls growth into these different areas in the business.

And I think it's only with a certain type of person kind of at the top or leadership team that these things can be broken down. Like it's almost like there's one, there's one key hire or there's a kind of a champion within, that's kind of pioneering a new way of thinking about how these teams are structured. Yeah. I mean, what, how do you think it will pan out over

the years ahead?

And in larger organizations, definitely the more mature ones and whether the businesses I was working in, they had 13 different CRMs and then 13 different CRMs . Yeah . So how , um, how does the head of growth, how does a person owns marketing even have clear enough data to attribute success on marketing qualified leads? And then how is that evolving?

But so the thinking, if you think about SAS specifically, B2B, that thinking is evolving from marketing qualified leads , sales qualified leads towards something called PQL is product qualified leads. So how do I get more free trials in the product? And then how do I try and get them to be a paying customer? Right? So it's evolving in terms of the philosophical view of product marketing.

And then you've got this cultural forces inside these businesses and these different silos with lots of different people in growth. They're finding very challenging. I think the UK is definitely lagging behind in terms of the , the cultural adaptation and what it had for us. Yeah . The us is leading by far, but I think so I think cultural is one issue, but I think there's a massive shortage of China in the UK.

So one of the biggest issues CMOs have, this is like a, for sure, it's recently done by the light . And they found that the biggest pain point for CMOs is finding good talent. So in a way you kind of, you've got this , these existing people who are owning it, and they're saying, I'm frustrated with the culture. I'm frustrated. They don't have the right tools. I'm frustrated that I'm not empowered. Then you've got the CMO saying, I can't find good people.

And it's quite interesting because they're both true. It's a slide . This is a very fragmented landscape. There isn't a clear answers and different companies that like light years ahead. And some companies are still struggling even with basic digital transformation and they're 10, 15 years behind other businesses. So it's a very fragmented because different businesses have different legacies in terms of software , uh , legal implication.

Some of them are very constricted because FCA regulated and FinTech, right. And then you can really see this with like, you know, HSBC 4,500 cake internal systems versus Monzo is not kicking off with too many new customers.

The research we talked about before was really interesting in terms of, I think it was 93% of people felt that strong, soft skills were just as important as hard skills.

And then all the soft skills were coming and what it was, it was on the Econsultancy report, but it was very much like lateral thinking, emotional intelligence, things that, yeah, Banno relevance to like how well you can handle it, SQL dump of data or something with your framework and how you approach kind of finding the right person. What's the balance of , of skill soft scale. And just more broadly, like how do you, how do you approach the

process?

You know, the creative market here , the performance market here , the brand builder, the PR knows this there's different types and everyone's a hybrid. There is no such thing as someone who just does one thing, the key is finding the skill sets that that client really needs to have, that the best candidate fits into the salary range, the appetite in terms of growth, you know, are they going to be managing a team of, they already manage a team and they're going to get bold .

But yeah, the soft skills is very difficult to crack. And a lot of it's about cultural fit. There's a lot of interesting biases that happen a lot of the businesses behind closed doors, which is very interesting. And some of the feedback that I get, you know, stuff that you would never publicly see available, but very curious, what I'm specifically focused on is the quantification of technical skills, right. Which is very hard to do.

And what I have essentially done is I've compiled lots of different tests that allow to evaluate candidate by also use different personality tests to try and understand what is the qualitative aspect of a person, but trying to give it some sort of quantification in a scientific methodology rather than the existing bias that exists in businesses today. It was very interesting.

I mean, it's still very much in a black box phase and still in beta and I'm running it with some clients I've been interviewing a lot of different candidates now, and I'm constantly refining the type of questions that I need to be asking to get real insight. They have something that's actually really meaningful,

I guess one of the biggest debates that I seem to have most frequently with people and that we see pop up on campaign and the drama. And it's just one of those things that's talked about. Um , and there's always someone writing some kind of thought leadership piece on, on how to solve it or how to get more balanced on it. But that's this balance between data and creativity is two different things.

Two different entities, I guess I see it often in our own clients when we know that if we go back to a client with an idea, if the idea is underpinned by a spreadsheet where the expected return on an investment of some kind , they're much more confident about walking into a boardroom or getting sign off or unlocking budget with that than they are with just some creative, big bang idea that yes could change the world, but how can anybody prove that in any way?

And so I guess, inevitably we exist in a time where the spreadsheet always beats. The creative idea person with the spreadsheet is always going to win in the boardroom. So I guess by proxy, I'm kind of having a bit of a stab at the boardroom, maybe in the C-suite and saying, well, maybe they obviously just don't get marketing to some extent, but who can blame them?

Like if we weren't, if we , if we were there and we weren't a marketer, then maybe I'd be looking for a spreadsheet that makes, makes me feel confident. My money is safe as well. Right. What's your perspective on how do you see the two working together and when you're working with clients and other things that go hand in hand, are you more have any way to one way

or the other?

And so there was a significant improvement in the results that they drive when they integrate data and creativity, philosophically speaking, but also in terms of resources, instructionally . So I think that a hybrid approach is really the ideal approach rather than thinking, Oh, we should only do this. If it's data back then we should only do this. If it's that creative idea, that's big bang, big splash. Yeah . Now this really ties into brand building versus direct response, right?

So brand building is really a long-term approach where you're trying to really get sentiment. And you're trying to prime people to be familiar with a brand, and you're not gonna expect a short term , immediate return on investment, but most founders of businesses, I speak to understand the importance of brand, but they don't know what it means really. And they don't know how to quantify it. So they really have a hard time.

So that's why they always lean towards direct response or short-term ROI, but then they're conflicted about brand building . So I think there's a recommended ratio, which ties into the second piece of research that I came across from the IPA, which suggested that you invest 60% into brand and the 40% into direct response. I think that's a really nice, healthy split in terms of your thinking of your budget and resource allocation to try and to get the best of both of those worlds.

Yeah. How can, how can a senior marketer be thinking about like long-term, brand-building when they're not even staying in their job for five years, ultimately they're still able to walk into a room and go like our latest campaign where we just, many people have LinkedIn ads and capsulated email addresses generated this level of ROI and this was our cost per acquisition or whatever, whatever the numbers are. That's just hard, hard data behind it.

So you said like it doesn't necessarily have to be that a big creative idea is underpinned by data, but I guess these days, like, is there any scope for a creative idea that doesn't have some kind of indication of impact that's backed up by quantifiable amount underneath it? I just can't see that getting signed off or budget behind that . And

And then how is my marketing automation set up properly? They even have the tracking available in the product, a sales actually even updating this CRM and the attributing it correctly. So you to you've got these eight technological challenges and it's not really the technology. The technology is an enabler. It's really the educational silos and the lack of commercial incentive across the different teams and always aligned.

I was telling someone the other day and they had them that a BDR SDR who was working on to them and they, the boss just wasn't winning to resolve this issue that the sales rep had was having with the SDL who's meant to generate the leads for him. So his performance just had a massive debt because of his personal relationship that wasn't technology based . That was in a real challenge. It was a very interpersonal ties into the soft skills that we're mentioning are there.

Like it's not, there's no reason or need to be using, but I want you to dig into why that is. It's actually just because they don't have the people or the process to be able to use it. There's , there's been no proper configuration of it. There's no one to actually support them in using it moving forwards and that person or that team don't have the hard skills to actually use Pardot as a piece of software.

Um , so they've probably spent years battling for sign off to, you know, thousands of pounds a month of spend to be able to support that product. And actually all they're doing now is going out emails . It's kind of shocking in places.

And the truth is they don't really have the traffic by whom they, they don't really understand the marketing automation benefits and they , they just, people are really eager to get a result and justifiably, you know, their career is dependent on that.

And the problem is on the so many tremendous , um , forces in the day-to-day of trying to keep up to date with what's going on in the environment with older , the changes in the technology and the channels, but then the internal politics that they need to navigate and then trying to always justify their role and the value that they're delivering. That they're very time poor and being time poor.

It's very difficult to have the energy and the time, and sometimes the lack of resources to really deep delve, into figuring out what the best tech stack solution is for that stage of the business's evolution.

And do you think that drives some of this short-sightedness and this short-sighted outlook of kind of, let's just focus on the data, improve our numbers and look one month ahead, rather than looking at what your net promoter score will be in three years time, or how will you know, what your market visibility of your brand is, and in three

years time.

How do you even, how do you attribute that it's very complicated to do that, right? So I'm saying those cases, it's not that they don't exist. They definitely do exist. They're just less usual rather than the average kind of person. I assume that sense . Surprise , hardcore enterprise, huge deal sizes, very complicated sales, multiple stakeholders. Yeah .

That's the first component it's that this attribution complexity isn't applicable to the majority of B2B businesses on average, but it is to some that's the first. And then the second is I think this kind of the misunderstanding of attribution and how much data you need for attribution to be meaningful, but then it's the dependence on the further down the funnel and B2B, which doesn't exist in B to C, which is the sales team.

If the sales team on updating the CRM effectively, and there isn't real measurement, you know, some clients, they don't the sales calls. So the marketing don't have the insight on how to produce the right landing pages and creative because they're not really dealing with the real pain points. They're just dealing with the perception of what the interpreting the clients they have. And there's a, there's a kind of the silo between sales and marketing.

And that's where there's this , um, you know, the new CRO term has come in and the way marketing ops and sales ops have merged into rev ops on that , the CRO role. So it's kind of going through this evolution of trying to break down those silos. It's just very interesting to see how that's happening as marketing owns more of that funnel.

And then sales are kind of being suites down and then sales are kind of kicking up a fuss with this new CRO title, which now is encompassing and owning all of marketing as well. And in a way that makes sense because marketing and sales is about driving revenues about driving real growth in the business, right?

And that, that, that belief is that it's all about the user and therefore put your X as the umbrella over everything and everything else sits quite nicely underneath it. And you break down those silos. And so as you say, if you focus on revenue as a, as a top level objective, then actually sales and marketing fall into alignment potentially quite nicely.

I think something that I see in that , like a frustration I've found is often we're talking to quite experienced and quite senior marketing people, but they're just in organizations that marketing isn't viewed as something that can be invested in maybe in the way that they were expecting before they took that job.

Or there's not that much room for creative solutions, a tool, I think it's even worse in the B2B technology space and that all of these businesses are run by typically quite technical people with technical backgrounds and they like numbers, right? Yeah. The irony is they're in the B2B space. It's even more ripe for creative to cut through, right? Like the emotional side of marketing just doesn't come up that much.

There's always something that we're trying to drive clients to invest in a bit more and talk about a bit more and tell that story. And Simon center is kind of why rather than just the , the how and the, what of what they do. Is it just something we have to accept that might come with time that CEO's might change?

And eventually they might be a CEO who used to be the CMO and actually that company just strides ahead in terms of marketing, because you know, they know that they're happy to allocate a decent budget to marketing and give them the freedom to make creative decisions.

It gives you something that somewhere in the deep strings of people's minds, it just pulls on enough that actually all of that logical thinking isn't really engaged with the tool, because I think so many of the classes we work with have incredible backstories of how they've either built their business or how they've come across their solution, the challenges and pain points that have actually gone on their website. And all you see is like, this is our solution, has the product sheet.

It's all about how it works and what it does and how it integrates. And it's all about the tax backs and any, any sense of like we're out to really change the world is kind of gets lost that emotional side of like, come on this journey. This is what we believe isn't really pushed much at all .

And I think, yeah, and I think that's where B2B is kind of shifting where B2C is much more about, you know, the brand and how it fits into your lifestyle. And as part of your identity, when B2B, the brand building is not about, this is who you're going to be working with, and this is where we're going together on this journey. And we're kind of building the features, but I think it's much more feature heavy and a little more value driven, and it's actually more logical.

It isn't as emotional, there's a decision making process. So the context of how brand building happens in B2B, I think is actually quite different. And that's quite important to point out now, how is it shifting there's a businesses? I think as marketing shifts to have stronger, more effective measurement.

And I think through this educational journey that the C-suite is going through, they'll start to understand the value of the CMO, but saying that you can see the challenges CMOs have with this complexity of the tech stack and having to rely on a very complicated internal supply chain to try and drive an effective result.

I think my biggest disappointment in auto life is the degree to which the world is run on the absolute inability to take any form of tiny risk. I'm amazed at how hard people work and yet how reluctant they are to stick their neck out. The tiniest amount, the whole world seems to revolve around risk reduction, blame management, excuses, prepared. It's absolutely baffling to me, fear cripples the chances of anything interesting happening it's like people are afraid to live or accomplish anything.

I mean, pretty, pretty extreme words, but I like I'd met . I liked it. Like I , I gave him a like on LinkedIn that resonated with me. Like it felt like particularly a lot of our bigger clients and to just kind of pin it based on size, but like, you know , I'm sure you've been in organizations like this too , where people are just preparing their next move for themselves, regardless of whether it's in the C-suite at all. And so it's like, well, why don't we just do what we did last week?

Cause that worked or, I mean , that campaign we did six months ago, we got quite good result from that. So why not like copy and paste and no one's really gambling on anything. And if it doesn't work, we can just go, Oh, we just did what we did before. And it worked fine that time and shrug our shoulders

So you need three just to break, even on the negative experience they needed one more just to help

And in my conversation with the CMO, I said to him, you know, it's weird because the way you're picking up the undertone of what you're saying, it sounds like you've already made your decision on which of the nine you're going to work with. And he says, yeah, he says, yeah, of course I've already worked with them before. So I'm like, why are you wasting so much time and energy and resource ? Of course you do .

And if I can imagine the other eight agencies and he goes, maybe I can learn something so interesting. And he had already made up his mind,

And at the end of the it's about the numbers, about the peanuts, where the financial financial director, where they have so much sway, that's the risk aversion is an issue. I think there is an important culture shift that is, you know, people do want change and they do want to take risk. And it's really interesting. How do you see it? Do you see it as a risk or do you see it as an opportunity? And the truth is it's birth. Every opportunity has a component of risk. And how does this shift happen?

I think the shift actually ironically happens when they realize that the fear is so stifling that their competition is out doing them. And the fear of not taking action is greater than the fear of taking action. And that's when companies start to get mobility.

So ironically, you use fear as the tool and there's actually a psychological bias towards loss, which is greater than gain and that as well as you just have to use a mental human juristics and work with humans, biology, if you keep resisting human biology, you're fighting, in my opinion, a losing battle. The key is how to be effective about getting the result that you want. Yeah . Wise words . I mean, it's kind of sad, but I can see why it's not sound there's .

The sadness is a judgment of the way things are. You see it's the way things are. It's not sad. It's the way it is. So you either adapt to the way that it is or you just as the suffering in your little bubble. Yeah . Well , on that , uh , optimistic finish. It's time to wrap up the conversation. It's been a pleasure. I think we could probably sit and talk for hours. So I'm going to watch the clock.

Maybe we can record another episode on something else another day, but in the meantime, a big thank you for joining me. I such a pleasure as always