Marketers of Technology
00:12:54 · Andres Figuera, Ralf Paschen
[00:12:54] S1: It's true, it's like cats and dogs. [00:12:56] S0: You know that, it's kind of normal, right? Because, hey, you cost me money, I make the revenue, I don't need leads. Leads aren't good enough, blame game, sales blame game, marketing blame game happening. They're not taking care of all my MQLs, their MQLs aren't good enough. You all know this, right? Do you know what the reason for that is? [00:13:13] S1: I believe I could, but I'm not even sure now, so I'll wait until you tell me.
00:13:18 · Ralf Paschen
[00:13:18] S0: And I tell you everybody in the room now, when they listen to this podcast will know it quickly, because marketing does not have the same KPIs than sales does. So... And that is the main problem. If you're being paid on... Your bonus is paid on impressions, CPC, CAC, ROAS, whatever. You're not in sales. Sales get paid on revenue. So why is the revenue team like marketing not paid on revenue? So every marketing team I joined, I switched the bonus to next level after the, you know, the bonus payment date, all the revenue. Do you know what the difference is now? Everybody's interested in the deal. Everybody's interested in what's the deal moving forward. Everybody's interested in the MQL being a high quality. Everybody's interested in CSQL high enough or where we are staying in the M1 deal, why isn't moving forward sales. And now it's a clashing, how can you support you after the POC to get this going? What kind of customer marketing can we do to help you to get this ongoing? So that's their interest. And interest stops when you're doing this impressions, CAC, ROAS, whatever thing at MQL stage. The interest stops there. So therefore they never talk the language of sales. So they cannot force anyone. I delivered you a 100 MQL, they give you a 100 meetings a day, whatever you kind of LinkedIn thingies. That's not a thing I can tell you about. It's all over the last six months about, I booked with AI a 100 meetings. My first comment under every post I saw, you can look it up on my LinkedIn profile is, and how much revenue did you generate with these meetings? There's absolutely never an answer below that because there was no meeting with revenue. It's because that's what I'm interested in. Right? I'm interested in revenue. So you book 100 meetings, you can book thousand meetings. I don't care how much revenue did you deliver with few thousand meetings. If it's zero, you had thousand meetings with my salespeople being all sitting in there, including SDRs, whoever did these meetings, if people sitting there, which cost me money, you didn't do anything for the revenue. So you have to explain it to the board. You have to explain it to me as a CMO. Why did we do that? Because it's revenue driven.
00:15:21 · Andres Figuera
[00:15:21] S1: No. And I see then how you level the playing field between both of the departments by making them all worry just about the revenue because it is true that it turns into this passing of the ball that once the marketing team sends it over to sales, they're like, my job's done. It's their turn now. And if it's not appropriate, then if they don't show the interest that they had when it started, even the customer feels abandoned a little bit and then they are passed on to a new person and it is something that can be felt in the process. So I think that is so cool, that you're able to really join both of those worlds and have them understand each other because it really is crazy how sales and marketing marketing do not get along.
00:16:00 · Ralf Paschen
[00:16:00] S0: And that's a normal behavior. It's an anecdote. Everywhere I can touch these sales in red, I'm not changing anything in sales, I'm changing the marketing behaviors. But this means when I change the marketing behaviors, then I get sales on responsibility because now the MQL deliver have high quality. Now you better take care of it. You cannot lay on me anymore because now I have... So the the first connection, by the way, as CMO, the first connection you should do as a CMO is not your CRO or VP of sales. Everybody believes that CMO, CRO or VP of sales, whatever, they should be all get along. Are you sure this is the best combination? Everybody believes that. No, the best combination is the CMO of the CFO. If nobody believes that, who do you get the money for a great campaign idea to move the needle for revenue? Who do you get the money from? From the CRO? So if you can explain what you make a difference and you always can report back because now you talk revenue, right? Now you can talk with a CFO about upcoming revenue, which you potentially see when you invest in marketing at this level. Now you're talking about a totally different language of CFO. Now it's all revenue driven. That's the difference between a VP of marketing, head of marketing now, and some startups call it CMO, which is nothing else than the marketing person. This is a strategic part of a CMO. Get the CFO and the COO along to be a revenue driver for the company and not just a cost center. That's the difference in being a CMO.
00:17:23 · Andres Figuera, Ralf Paschen
[00:17:23] S1: Okay. Wow. And Ralf, I love... I I also wanna ask about this because because this is... Believe with how you think and how you do your stuff, this could be a very interesting to anybody who's listening. How are you leveraging AI to help you out with your work? [00:17:38] S0: Yes. And I give you a lot of examples of that. I'm an AI advisor. I learned my stuff from the MIT, by the way. So nothing in Germany, always MIT. Designing AI products and services, two things. Number one, I have my own startup. Building content marketing with AI as a full platform. So I code on AI fully since six months, full time, not white coding, really. Remember, I'm a technical person. Can do this as well. Okay. So but my point on AI is, and people should understand it. AI is not your solution for everything and people should understand it. I think that people get this more and more that these agents and all that kind of stuff. This is great. And I wrote a book about that, Stop Prompting. And to Stop Prompting, it's all about think about the use case first, which brings you the fastest ROI and not just, hey, we can do this with AI. Nobody cares. If it's crap, it's 10 times more crap. [00:18:28] S1: It's true.
00:18:28 · Andres Figuera, Ralf Paschen
[00:18:28] S1: It's true. [00:18:31] S0: It doesn't make a difference. So also what people are now seeing in the content marketing, especially marketing, that's the reason why I give... I I train when I get into companies just doing this right now for a client on their own AI tool. I train this thing to be their marketing buddy in their language. I come to point back in their language. What's their brain voice? What's their profile? What they're talking about? And what I do on top is I talk with all the people. Who's your target persona? What's their problem? What's their pain? What's the solution? What's the benefit? Which target persona are they? Which ICP, which ideal customer profile? Which target industries? Which markets? And I train this to any LLM the customer has and give it to the marketing teams to build wireframes, landing pages, emails, campaign approaches to give it to engine, to agencies and so on and so forth. So everybody talks with one way. So nothing which I learned twenty years ago as a product marketer is changing. I just utilize AI to have it bundle in one, hand it over to the customer side. Now you can build it based on that. But have in mind, this thing only produces 60%. The rest of the 40 should come from you. Set up your brain to make it happen. AI, because the problem, if you're doing this too much generic, you sound like anybody else. And that's the problem. [00:19:50] S1: That's the issue today. Everybody who's using AI is just creating the same type of noise, and there's so much noise now that it's just static whenever you put something out.