Managing Up & Setting Marketing Expectations with Marissa Homere

[00:00:00] Discussing the Importance of Managing Up in Marketing

[00:00:00] Jess Bahr: Inherently understand marketing's value, then do.
[00:00:02] Jess Bahr: But it doesn't mean that they're not open to influence and that you can change them through, you know, explaining your program maybe a million times, but how you're educating them on it, how you're teaching them what good looks like so they can evaluate you properly, versus their idea of what good marketing is.
[00:00:22] Jess Bahr: Welcome to another episode of Market is Talking Marketing.
[00:00:26] Jess Bahr: Today we are joined by Marissa and we are talking about managing up and what managing up and helping really manage expectations looks like across different organization types, stages, et cetera.
[00:00:37] Jess Bahr: So Marissa throwing it over to you.
[00:00:39] Conversation with Marissa Homere, VP of Marketing at Erwin

[00:00:39] Jess Bahr: Why don't you tell the audience at home a little bit about yourself and then we'll just jump into the conversation for sure.
[00:00:45] Marissa Homere: So I am the VP Marketing at a company called Erwin and we are a series, a funded startup based out of Toronto that focuses on investor relations and capital markets.
[00:00:59] Marissa Homere: So we provide software to IR teams and management teams at public companies and their advisors.
[00:01:08] Marissa Homere: I've been in marketing for a very long time.
[00:01:12] Marissa Homere: I started my career at a company called Corel, very old software company based in Ottawa where I am located.
[00:01:23] Marissa Homere: And I started my career in social media and then was there for a few years, got the corporate experience for better or worse, and then moved agency side and joined a company that's now called Craft and Crew and was sort of built out the marketing practice there.
[00:01:39] Marissa Homere: I was there for seven years working with hundreds of clients over that time and then finally decided to take the plunge client side and worked at a unified communications company that was acquired and also rebranded.
[00:01:54] Marissa Homere: It's now called NETFone and helped build the Demand gen and marketing program there.
[00:02:00] Marissa Homere: And then recently, a year and a half ago, joined Erwin and we have been building the marketing team from scratch, building the company from scratch and sort of growing our presence, disrupting the market, all that fun stuff.
[00:02:15] Marissa Homere: So I also do some instructing and teaching.
[00:02:20] Marissa Homere: I was a founding instructor of a program at the University of Ottawa, which was the first of its kind to be accredited by an institution like UFO, but be completely taught and managed by private industry.
[00:02:38] Marissa Homere: And more recently the Modern Marketing Certificate, which was actually started by one of the original students in that first program.
[00:02:45] Marissa Homere: So yeah, I'm kind of all over the place, but that's a condensed version of my experience.
[00:02:51] Jess Bahr: Awesome.
[00:02:52] Jess Bahr: I mean, it's a great kind of gambit to go across of different areas and something similarly.
[00:02:58] Jess Bahr: I've traveled between different kind of functions and company sizes throughout the course of my career.
[00:03:03] Jess Bahr: And a really common thread that I found that I think doesn't get talked about enough is learning how to manage up, especially to executives with that and making sure that everyone else you work with internally, executives, stakeholders and other teams understand your work.
[00:03:18] Jess Bahr: What you're doing, your contribution, your impact.
[00:03:21] Jess Bahr: The converse is you'll see people and if you're listening to this and feel this way, drop a comment below with your story.
[00:03:28] Jess Bahr: If you're on the YouTube, so the comments, but you'll be doing work and you're like man, I'm doing great work.
[00:03:35] Jess Bahr: This project is fantastic and no one knows what I'm doing, no one knows what I do here, no one understands my impact and my value.
[00:03:43] Jess Bahr: Or people keep asking me to explain this over and over and over again and it can be super frustrating.
[00:03:49] Jess Bahr: I think managing up is really kind of the solution for it but not a lot of people talk about it, so we'll just start with that.
[00:03:57] The Value of Marketing in an Organization: Managing Up

[00:03:57] Jess Bahr: What do you think about managing up?
[00:04:00] Marissa Homere: I think it's really interesting actually.
[00:04:02] Marissa Homere: And I was having this conversation with somebody the other day about how sometimes it feels as a marketer, as a marketing leader, as an individual contributor that you're like shouting into the wind and about what it is that you're doing and you can't get people to use the things you're doing or appreciate the things you're doing.
[00:04:20] Marissa Homere: And I think in my experience, there are some foundational elements that can avoid that.
[00:04:26] Marissa Homere: And the first ultimate piece of you can call it managing up or just like making sure you're in the right spot is working with a team and at a company that appreciates the value of marketing to begin with.
[00:04:41] Jess Bahr: Oh, my God.
[00:04:41] Jess Bahr: Life changer.
[00:04:43] Marissa Homere: Life changer.
[00:04:45] Jess Bahr: Absolutely.
[00:04:47] Marissa Homere: Because if people know organization wide, how the marketing work impacts their own KPIs and they appreciate that and they understand it, then it's so much easier to get things done.
[00:05:04] Marissa Homere: And the education you do is all positive, right?
[00:05:08] Marissa Homere: As opposed to being reactionary and trying to prove your value well, you're consuming.
[00:05:13] Jess Bahr: All of your time convincing someone that you're needed.
[00:05:16] Jess Bahr: Especially with sellers have ran into this where some sellers just do not care about marketing.
[00:05:21] Jess Bahr: Typically they have spent their career self sourcing their own pipeline.
[00:05:25] Jess Bahr: They've never had marketing as a large contributor to what they're doing and so they're like, I don't need marketing, I can do my job.
[00:05:32] Jess Bahr: You hired me to sell.
[00:05:33] Jess Bahr: Don't worry, I got this.
[00:05:34] Jess Bahr: They're also the ones that tend to make their own decks and don't care if you have logo approval on it, right?
[00:05:39] Jess Bahr: They go rogue.
[00:05:40] Jess Bahr: And then you have sellers who come from organizations where they've had inbounds that convert and they know the value of marketing and they're open to partner.
[00:05:49] Jess Bahr: And those conversations are totally different.
[00:05:51] Marissa Homere: Totally different.
[00:05:53] Marissa Homere: Totally different.
[00:05:54] Marissa Homere: And a lot of that is leadership, right?
[00:05:56] Marissa Homere: So I feel like everything comes from the top.
[00:06:00] Marissa Homere: So if there is a sales leader who appreciates that about marketing, then you have a different experience with their team and it just makes such a fundamental difference and you spend so much less time just like running the rat race treadmill of being like I deserve a job.
[00:06:20] Jess Bahr: Oh, my God.
[00:06:21] Jess Bahr: I think it's also a universal marketing experience of having to really justify it.
[00:06:26] Jess Bahr: I think there's more organizations that don't inherently understand marketing's value than do.
[00:06:33] Jess Bahr: But it doesn't mean that they're not open to influence and that you can change them through explaining your program maybe a million times.
[00:06:41] Jess Bahr: But how you're educating them on it, how you're teaching them what good looks like so they can evaluate you properly versus their idea of what good marketing is on that side.
[00:06:50] Marissa Homere: I think too, I've never met an executive who doesn't think that they can do marketing, whether that's a CEO, a CFO, a COO in some cases, I think that everybody thinks that they know.
[00:07:10] Jess Bahr: No one thinks that they can do marketing as strongly as a technical co founder who has never done marketing before.
[00:07:20] Jess Bahr: Yes.
[00:07:22] Marissa Homere: It'S a wild experience, but it is very common.
[00:07:25] Marissa Homere: So I think my best advice on that side is to create, even if it is only an illusion, but ideally, it is real co creation of these things of your programs and have them involved in the ideation and learn to have their ideas shot down or learn to explain things more or during that process.
[00:07:50] Marissa Homere: It's like, okay, well, why just asking them that question?
[00:07:54] Marissa Homere: But if they're not involved in the co creation, all you get is criticism.
[00:07:57] Marissa Homere: And that criticism, even if I have had programs that have done exceptionally well, come under fire by the metrics that we all agreed on come under fire six months later, it's like, well, it didn't do this thing that we didn't decide that it was supposed to do in the first place.
[00:08:18] Marissa Homere: I think part of it is just understanding who it is you're dealing with and then how to get them involved in the process so that they feel like they have some level of ownership without driving everything.
[00:08:30] Marissa Homere: But ultimately, that's not going to be good if the organization itself doesn't understand the value of marketing.
[00:08:38] Jess Bahr: Yeah, setting expectations up front, that's I think the key.
[00:08:42] Jess Bahr: If you're making a list of how to do this, number one is setting expectations up front.
[00:08:46] Jess Bahr: Number zero is go to an organization that likes marketing, that values marketing, that's like the precursor.
[00:08:53] Jess Bahr: Your life will be a lot easier.
[00:08:54] Jess Bahr: But number one is level setting those expectations.
[00:08:57] Jess Bahr: Because often people, especially executives, will have an idea of what marketing is.
[00:09:01] Jess Bahr: And it's typically either sometimes they're right, sometimes they are right, but typically it's maybe, like, a little bit outdated, or it's what marketing looks like.
[00:09:12] Jess Bahr: When marketing has been established and was running well.
[00:09:15] Jess Bahr: The number of times I've had a conversation with a fellow marketer who is like, my manager, my boss, my executive team is looking at competitors and wants us to be winning against competitors in Google Search and X, Y, and Z.
[00:09:29] Jess Bahr: But I only have $100,000 budget for the year, and I look, I have a client right now where their main competitor spends half a million dollars a month on advertising and you're never going to win against that setting expectation.
[00:09:43] Jess Bahr: What is actually achievable?
[00:09:45] Jess Bahr: What's our roadmap to go there?
[00:09:47] Jess Bahr: I'm a huge fan of decks.
[00:09:48] Jess Bahr: I have a deck for everything.
[00:09:49] Jess Bahr: A manager early in my career told me whoever has the deck runs the meeting.
[00:09:55] Jess Bahr: Here's my plan.
[00:09:56] Jess Bahr: Bam.
[00:09:57] Jess Bahr: We all agreed upon this.
[00:09:58] Jess Bahr: We're building our foundation right now.
[00:10:00] Jess Bahr: This is what it looks like.
[00:10:01] Jess Bahr: You're not going to get a thousand leads coming in because we don't need that yet.
[00:10:04] Jess Bahr: We need to get our routing set up.
[00:10:05] Jess Bahr: We need to get X, Y and Z.
[00:10:07] Jess Bahr: It's like really getting that expectation there and then reporting on progress towards that expectation with the reminder that we all agreed upon this.
[00:10:16] Jess Bahr: I know that you want to see more mentions on Twitter as your main KPI for marketing success, but we're going to look at Pipeline.
[00:10:25] Marissa Homere and Jess Bahr Discuss Aligning Sales and Marketing Efforts for Effectiveness

[00:10:25] Marissa Homere: Yeah.
[00:10:25] Marissa Homere: And I think too, it's so difficult to balance performance and potential.
[00:10:35] Marissa Homere: And I think this is why I like startups.
[00:10:39] Marissa Homere: Because you can often drive the way forward versus if you rebuild something.
[00:10:44] Marissa Homere: Like if you go into an existing organization to rebuild something, there are expectations that are preexisting and there are things that have worked kind of somewhat for long periods of time that you have to kind of tear down.
[00:10:56] Marissa Homere: The thing is that I find really interesting is as a really pertinent example at Irwin, our competitors are multi billion dollar public companies that have existed and know roamed the earth for decades, if not longer in some cases.
[00:11:15] Marissa Homere: And they have huge marketing budgets and they have basically unlimited spend to do things.
[00:11:23] Marissa Homere: And so when we decided what we were going to do to build our program, we were like, well, there's a gap in, I think, the empathy with the audience and really taking an unvested interest in helping them do things better, whether that's like content creation or things of that nature.
[00:11:42] Marissa Homere: And all this to say, we've grown the marketing department from basically 10% of company Arr to 70% whoa in the last year and a half.
[00:11:57] Marissa Homere: And that's for many reasons, a leadership team that backs us and gets the strategy and they obviously have ideas too, and they have great ideas and we take those and run with them.
[00:12:09] Marissa Homere: But the performance program and those are the things that I think are really important, like balancing short term wins with long term vision and strategy.
[00:12:18] Marissa Homere: Because if we didn't do that, we wouldn't necessarily get permission to do the things that we have been doing that are maybe a little bit more out of the box.
[00:12:27] Marissa Homere: But as we started to get results on some of those things, you know, are going to work, it gave us the leverage to be like and we also want to do some kind of crazy shit.
[00:12:38] Jess Bahr: Yeah, you get this incremental wins and that buys you the additional kind of bandwidth to do some of the less expected things.
[00:12:44] Jess Bahr: How are you sharing those wins internally?
[00:12:46] Jess Bahr: So it's one thing to get a win, but it's another thing to make sure that everyone is really seeing the win, understanding the win and appreciating the win.
[00:12:53] Jess Bahr: Maybe not appreciating, but at least understanding.
[00:12:57] Marissa Homere: Yeah, I would say probably maybe too much transparency sometimes into performance and that is shared with the entire company.
[00:13:07] Marissa Homere: So we are very clear and we have a model and we have metrics and KPIs.
[00:13:13] Marissa Homere: We have a space in our town halls to talk about it.
[00:13:16] Marissa Homere: We have ongoing revenue leadership conversations where we talk about contributions from various teams.
[00:13:24] Marissa Homere: And I think too, the sharing becomes a lot easier when you're not fighting for your life.
[00:13:29] Marissa Homere: To be completely honest.
[00:13:31] Marissa Homere: The sharing is more collaborative when you're not like but look, it's fine.
[00:13:39] Marissa Homere: We share that win with Sales.
[00:13:40] Marissa Homere: And because we're so I think collaborative in this environment, a win for us is a win for them because that's their pipeline, it's their closed one revenue and we have the same goals, so we have a shared interest.
[00:13:59] Jess Bahr: It's definitely in a world I've been at companies in the past, not recently, where there was such contention for budget and there wasn't that alignment at the leadership side.
[00:14:10] Jess Bahr: And so anytime you talk about a campaign and you talk about we spent $10,000 on direct mailing because that stuff's not cheap, they'd be like, why'd you do that?
[00:14:19] Jess Bahr: You could have spent $10,000 on this outsourced BDR firm to set meetings.
[00:14:23] Jess Bahr: It's.
[00:14:24] Jess Bahr: Like what?
[00:14:24] Jess Bahr: No, this is not the same thing.
[00:14:27] Jess Bahr: You don't have that psychological safety almost of the partnership to be able to really talk about it freely on that side.
[00:14:34] Marissa Homere: Yeah, and I think they're in the very big difference.
[00:14:36] Marissa Homere: And this is why I think shared metrics are also so important between marketing and sales because I've been in situations where marketing has lead metrics and people in marketing get paid on those lead metrics.
[00:14:50] Marissa Homere: So their number one goal is number and volume of leads and Sales's number one goal is obviously like closed worn deals.
[00:14:57] Marissa Homere: And so they're pissed off because we're all successful because we hit our lead numbers or they're resentful because they're not able to hit their targets.
[00:15:09] Marissa Homere: But no one has incentivized that team on quality that drives revenue.
[00:15:14] Jess Bahr: Nothing will drive a division between Sales and Marketing quicker than being in a meeting where sales is reporting that no one hit their target and marketing is celebrating hitting their targets because the targets are not aligned.
[00:15:27] Jess Bahr: Nothing will get like the death laser stairs going quicker than that.
[00:15:31] Marissa Homere: And how unproductive at the end of the day, right?
[00:15:34] Marissa Homere: I think everybody wants to win and everybody, when they don't win, looks for blame.
[00:15:43] Marissa Homere: And I think that having a vested interest and educating for Marketing to educate the Sales team and vice versa for Sales to educate marketing on what is driving interest?
[00:15:55] Marissa Homere: What is driving deal closing?
[00:15:57] Marissa Homere: What is driving opportunities?
[00:15:58] Marissa Homere: What are the challenges you're running into?
[00:16:00] Marissa Homere: Because that shared communication is great, but the metrics, the KPIs for your team drive the behaviors.
[00:16:07] Marissa Homere: And I think if BDR teams are only comped on demos as an example, you're going to get a lot of demos.
[00:16:14] Marissa Homere: They're all going to be good, but they're just doing what they're expected to do at the end of the day.
[00:16:18] Marissa Homere: Right.
[00:16:19] Marissa Homere: And then everybody gets mad at each other and it's not productive and it doesn't drive any kind of vision forward.
[00:16:27] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:16:28] Jess Bahr: Having that relationship also is so crucial.
[00:16:31] Jess Bahr: If we have like, number zero is going to a company that appreciates marketing and number one is aligning on your goals and then reporting on those goals.
[00:16:37] Jess Bahr: Number two, I think, really would be forming that relationship.
[00:16:41] Jess Bahr: And having a good relationship internally comes not just from doing good work in your role and having an impact on their programs.
[00:16:50] Jess Bahr: I think understanding your partners in the organization, what their goals are, how you can impact their goals, even if it doesn't serve your goals to all make them better.
[00:17:00] Jess Bahr: There's the idea of first team mentality, and that's something I talked to.
[00:17:05] Jess Bahr: I have an old employee that she hasn't worked for me in, I want to say, like a year and a half, and we still have a bi weekly one on one.
[00:17:14] Marissa Homere: I love that so much.
[00:17:16] Jess Bahr: Yeah, we were talking about the other day, but when you come into an organization, your main team is your peers.
[00:17:22] Jess Bahr: So if you're head of marketing, your team is head of sales, head of partner channel, head of X, Y and Z.
[00:17:28] Jess Bahr: And so how can you really ensure that you're impactful and helping all of their goals and programs, even when it doesn't directly result in you saying, I hit my goal.
[00:17:38] Jess Bahr: How do you really work together on that?
[00:17:39] Jess Bahr: And understanding their pain points, their needs.
[00:17:42] Jess Bahr: That's where I think a lot of partnership comes from.
[00:17:44] Jess Bahr: So when you walk into a meeting and marketing didn't hit their target, but sales hits theirs, your sales partner saying, hey, Marketing, what can we do to make this better?
[00:17:53] Jess Bahr: It's not that throwing each other under the bus mentality because you all want to just get your goal at the cost of everyone else.
[00:18:00] Jess Bahr: We're all in this together.
[00:18:01] Jess Bahr: Let's work towards this together.
[00:18:03] Jess Bahr: And that creates that space for, I think, experimentation and understanding on that front, because I might not get what you're doing, but I know that you know your shit, so go do it.
[00:18:16] Marissa Homere: And that buys you favor.
[00:18:17] Marissa Homere: Right.
[00:18:18] Marissa Homere: In instances where, like you said, you need someone to have your back or in getting buy in for experimentation or navigating, challenging employee situations or leadership situations of the company, knowing what motivates people is the key to helping.
[00:18:40] Marissa Homere: As long as your intentions are good, I would say get things that you want to get done.
[00:18:44] Marissa Homere: And that really is all it comes down to.
[00:18:47] Marissa Homere: It's like I know what motivates you.
[00:18:48] Marissa Homere: So I know exactly how to frame and discuss this piece of information because I know how it's going to impact you.
[00:18:56] Marissa Homere: And that will get you to be a partner in the marketing organization so that I can count on you to approve these things or even it affects so much, so deeply.
[00:19:08] Marissa Homere: Like even giving people raises is another thing, right?
[00:19:11] Marissa Homere: I've had pushback because it's like, oh well, this person may handle every single dollar that comes out of our business, but I don't think they're a great communicator and it's like based on what yeah, so it impacts so many things.
[00:19:26] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:19:27] Jess Bahr: Being able to I always advise people, especially early in your career or newer to a company, really think about and map out your sphere of influence because your boss may want to give you a promotion, but who ultimately can decide it, who really gets to decipher it.
[00:19:43] Jess Bahr: I was in a role once where I was doing just a ton of work and leveling wise I was working beyond my level.
[00:19:51] Jess Bahr: It's happened a couple of times throughout my career and so typically I go back and talk about here's what I'm doing, here's the level, let's talk through this.
[00:19:58] Jess Bahr: And I've been in Orgs where they said, okay, yeah, we agree, you're definitely doing that work and here's the next step is we need to make sure that everyone internally understands that too.
[00:20:07] Jess Bahr: So let me go have a conversation.
[00:20:09] Jess Bahr: And I've been in Orgs where they've said, okay, cool, agree, you're doing this.
[00:20:14] Jess Bahr: But really for that level, what leadership wants is someone with I literally was told one time that they want someone with gray hair and they want someone with decades of experience.
[00:20:26] Jess Bahr: And so because I don't have decades of experience, they're never going to approve that promotion even though I'm doing all the work.
[00:20:33] Jess Bahr: And that's something that if you come in and you're trying to move around in the you're trying to be impactful, you need to understand where are those stops, where do you need to form allies?
[00:20:43] Jess Bahr: Who ultimately is going to be able to say yes or no to these things that you need done?
[00:20:47] Jess Bahr: Because it's probably not you, it's probably not your boss and it's probably not someone even in your function.
[00:20:51] Jess Bahr: Often it's like finance and then forming that relationship so that when it comes time for you to promote an employee, for you to try and get promoted, for you to ask for more budget, that person already knows you, they know the work you're doing and they have that oh yeah, that makes sense.
[00:21:06] Jess Bahr: Instead of well, I don't really perfect example too that you brought up.
[00:21:11] Workplace Promotions and Keeping High Performers

[00:21:11] Jess Bahr: I had an employee once that I wanted to promote and I could not promote them because two tiers above me, the person two roles above me didn't know what they did I was like, well wild, I'm telling you weekly here's all the employee wins.
[00:21:25] Jess Bahr: Are you not sharing those boss person?
[00:21:28] Jess Bahr: What do you need from me for you to do that better?
[00:21:30] Jess Bahr: Because now I can't promote on my employee who deserves it.
[00:21:34] Marissa Homere: And all that happens and we see it and we see it more and more is you lose your high performers.
[00:21:40] Marissa Homere: Who wants to be in that position?
[00:21:43] Marissa Homere: No place is so great to work that a high performer isn't going to be like, well, this place literally by title and salary and all these things value me more.
[00:21:52] Marissa Homere: So I'm going to take my talents elsewhere.
[00:21:55] Marissa Homere: Losing your high performers and sometimes even as a leader of those A, requires I think, strong leadership skills to navigate and to elevate that profile where they can't build those relationships yourself.
[00:22:08] Marissa Homere: Like whatever, for whatever reason, there might be barriers there or they just are uncomfortable or whatever.
[00:22:13] Marissa Homere: So you have to consistently push, have documentation, all of those things.
[00:22:18] Marissa Homere: But I really think it's and it's definitely harder for women, it's definitely harder for minorities.
[00:22:26] Marissa Homere: There is more battles to be fought on perception and bias in that state.
[00:22:30] Conversation on Executive Presence and Gender Bias in Marketing Industry

[00:22:30] Jess Bahr: Part of executive presence.
[00:22:33] Jess Bahr: I hate the term executive presence.
[00:22:34] Jess Bahr: I went on a rant, the other episode about this.
[00:22:36] Jess Bahr: Executive presence I think is such a loaded term.
[00:22:41] Marissa Homere: What does that mean?
[00:22:42] Marissa Homere: It means white man is what it means.
[00:22:45] Jess Bahr: It's a bucket for all your biases that you don't want to say publicly.
[00:22:49] Jess Bahr: And so you're just going to put down and say needs to work on executive presence.
[00:22:53] Jess Bahr: Fuck is that?
[00:22:54] Marissa Homere: It's literally nothing.
[00:22:56] Marissa Homere: Literally.
[00:22:58] Marissa Homere: And there's that quote and I say it a lot, but I've yet to have run into very many instances where it's not true that men are promoted on potential and women are promoted on performance.
[00:23:12] Marissa Homere: And I think I have seen that especially in marketing, which tends to lean more towards a more women oriented makeup.
[00:23:23] Marissa Homere: At least maybe that's just the teams I'm building also.
[00:23:26] Marissa Homere: And that's fair too, but it's challenging.
[00:23:29] Jess Bahr: I will say something that I personally get frustrated with is and where I think is a very great example of this is if you look at I'm going to say this and someone is going to come for me on it.
[00:23:41] Jess Bahr: If you look at let's look at the top marketing conferences and speakers, and if you look at a lot of the men that are speaking in marketing conferences and how many years they have been in their function or how many roles they have had in their function.
[00:23:56] Jess Bahr: There are a lot of very prominent white men in the marketing world who have been in their function for one or two companies.
[00:24:03] Marissa Homere: Yes.
[00:24:04] Jess Bahr: And they are speaking at conferences telling you how to do the function.
[00:24:09] Jess Bahr: When the women speakers have grown four or five companies from zero to a million arr they've done this so many times.
[00:24:17] Jess Bahr: But you have this world, this ecosystem, and I find it to be.
[00:24:20] Jess Bahr: That's why I started the podcast.
[00:24:22] Jess Bahr: I started this podcast because I'm getting frustrated of seeing the same individuals who do not have a ton of experience on a stage talking about how to run marketing.
[00:24:32] Jess Bahr: When I look at that and I say, I would never have my first role in revenue marketing, would never be VP of revenue marketing coming from an ancillary marketing function that is not a role that exists for women.
[00:24:48] Marissa Homere: No, not a role.
[00:24:50] Marissa Homere: You have to actively pull yourself out of it.
[00:24:53] Marissa Homere: Sometimes I'm scrolling things or I'm on LinkedIn, and it's the same five dudes always.
[00:25:00] Marissa Homere: And it's not that everything that they say is bad, but most of it is just I find it very surface level.
[00:25:06] Marissa Homere: I find that they don't have the substance, they don't have the emotional intelligence a lot of the times to navigate situations.
[00:25:15] Marissa Homere: And sure, it's been easy for you, but for every guy like that, there's 100 women who have demonstrated program growth, who have effectively managed relationships, built, like you said, built companies.
[00:25:30] Marissa Homere: And there's a video, and I forget her name at the moment.
[00:25:34] Marissa Homere: I think it was on, like, Diary of a CEO, I believe.
[00:25:37] Marissa Homere: And this woman was like, I have walked into rooms with some of the most successful men in history and been like, you?
[00:25:44] Marissa Homere: Yeah, really?
[00:25:46] Jess Bahr: There's a guy that if I said his name, everyone knows who he is.
[00:25:49] Jess Bahr: And I know people who've been at companies with him before in the past.
[00:25:54] Jess Bahr: And so I know what it's taken to actually build the programs.
[00:25:57] Jess Bahr: And what he says on how they're successful isn't the case.
[00:26:00] Jess Bahr: Like, you had phenomenal product, market fit.
[00:26:03] Jess Bahr: You had an amazing sales team.
[00:26:04] Jess Bahr: You were early to market mover.
[00:26:06] Jess Bahr: There's other things that make you successful.
[00:26:08] Jess Bahr: And I encountered him at one spot because we were on a shared situation together.
[00:26:13] Jess Bahr: And so I looked at what he had produced, and I was like, oh, my God, this is absolute shit.
[00:26:18] Jess Bahr: Grammar.
[00:26:19] Jess Bahr: It's just shit.
[00:26:21] Jess Bahr: I redid most of it, and I just sat there.
[00:26:24] Jess Bahr: I was like, wow, this individual is heralded as a pioneer in B two B marketing.
[00:26:31] Jess Bahr: I'm being a bit like, maybe not pioneer.
[00:26:33] Jess Bahr: I don't know if I would say that.
[00:26:34] Jess Bahr: But he's heralded as someone he's at every conference.
[00:26:37] Jess Bahr: And does it mean that he's bad at his job?
[00:26:39] Jess Bahr: No, it doesn't mean he's bad at his job.
[00:26:41] Jess Bahr: But when I look at it, there's so many other women that have done more and do more, and they're not up there, and they're not up there because they're not white men.
[00:26:52] Jess Bahr: Yeah, there's no ridiculous.
[00:26:54] Marissa Homere: Yeah, there's no space for them.
[00:26:56] Marissa Homere: And it's so pervasive, and it's such a problem, because what this has created is an echo chamber of bullshit shit best practices that don't actually work.
[00:27:07] Marissa Homere: And the majority of B, two B companies in the world do not only market to sales and marketing people, they have maybe more technical requirements of their marketing and their audience.
[00:27:19] Marissa Homere: They have maybe bigger challenges.
[00:27:21] Marissa Homere: Like, sure, if you're one of the five companies that everybody lists as a best practice, but like you said, how easy has that been for you?
[00:27:30] Marissa Homere: And that growth has so many variables.
[00:27:34] Marissa Homere: What about when you walk into a situation?
[00:27:36] Marissa Homere: When I'll use my last role as an example, you're selling business phones to small and medium businesses across North America and nobody is like, man, this is revolutionary, but it's a required aspect, and none of those best practices help in that situation.
[00:27:54] Jess Bahr: Yeah, and what do they do when the best practices don't work is they become fucking bullies about it.
[00:28:02] Jess Bahr: So that's what I've noticed, too, is they'll say, okay, so here's the reality of why most companies grow is if you have good product market fit, and you spend half a million dollars a month on advertising to a targeted audience and you have really aggressive sellers, that is going to get you really far.
[00:28:21] Jess Bahr: But what they'll do is they'll say, oh, this worked because marketing had this ad type.
[00:28:26] Jess Bahr: We did X, Y and Z this campaign.
[00:28:28] Jess Bahr: No.
[00:28:29] Jess Bahr: And so there's these companies out there that are heralded as leaders in it that everyone should file for best practices that really just spend a ton of money, and they engage this echo chamber that amplifies their voice continuously.
[00:28:41] Jess Bahr: That's why they're successful.
[00:28:43] Jess Bahr: But when you look and say, hey, I did what you said and it didn't work, they'll be like, oh, you did it wrong, you did it wrong.
[00:28:50] Jess Bahr: Or you did.
[00:28:50] Jess Bahr: X, Y and Z.
[00:28:51] Jess Bahr: No, this is the way we go.
[00:28:53] Jess Bahr: Well, hey, I get what you're saying, that seems great, but you're literally spending $400,000 a month on LinkedIn advertising, and I can't spend that.
[00:29:04] Jess Bahr: And so I don't think it's going to work for me.
[00:29:05] Jess Bahr: I need to do something else like, no, this is the way you're not doing it right.
[00:29:09] Jess Bahr: It's like, no, you don't have substance to push back.
[00:29:13] Jess Bahr: Because the reality is, if my technique doesn't work for you, let's talk about it.
[00:29:18] Jess Bahr: Maybe your audience is different.
[00:29:19] Jess Bahr: Maybe they engage differently.
[00:29:20] Jess Bahr: Maybe you have different budget constraints.
[00:29:22] Jess Bahr: Maybe you are in, I think, one of the I was going to say financial services, where it's a lot more heavily regulated with what you can say on the marketing side, which these people never touch and never talk to.
[00:29:32] Jess Bahr: Because when you start questioning your shit doesn't work and you start questioning it, they have no substance to defend it.
[00:29:39] Jess Bahr: And so they crumble and then they start attacking what you're doing as being wrong.
[00:29:44] Jess Bahr: It's the most frustrating thing.
[00:29:47] Marissa Homere: It's so frustrating.
[00:29:48] Marissa Homere: And I have gotten more cold outbound outreach from these companies, literally these big companies that has not understood the problems that I face.
[00:30:00] Marissa Homere: It's borderline insulting.
[00:30:02] Marissa Homere: And so most of them go unanswered in my inbox, and I.
[00:30:05] Marissa Homere: Know, it's driven by people like this.
[00:30:08] Marissa Homere: And then I look at the care and empathy that just, I think comes more naturally to women brand leaders.
[00:30:18] Marissa Homere: The amount of discovery that they do, the less reckless approach to understanding customers and to not spraying and praying and doing these tactics that everybody does that just fall short.
[00:30:34] Marissa Homere: How many ebooks have you opened with promising headlines that have no substance, that are not helpful?
[00:30:42] The Challenges of Adopting Marketing Technology in Companies

[00:30:42] Jess Bahr: Okay, we talked about revenue a little bit earlier in the show.
[00:30:45] Jess Bahr: Only like 70% of B, two B companies have a revenue target or a pipeline target.
[00:30:51] Jess Bahr: And a lot of these places too.
[00:30:52] Jess Bahr: When you say, hey, I understand that you're talking pipeline, we're not there yet.
[00:30:57] Jess Bahr: For whatever reason, we're just not there.
[00:30:59] Jess Bahr: We don't have pipeline targets.
[00:31:00] Jess Bahr: Like, well, you're not doing marketing right.
[00:31:02] Jess Bahr: There are a lot of marketing teams that don't have pipeline targets.
[00:31:06] Jess Bahr: That's the reality of the situations.
[00:31:07] Jess Bahr: There's historical companies that exist that aren't ready for it yet.
[00:31:11] Jess Bahr: They're not tracking it.
[00:31:12] Jess Bahr: There's an infrastructure that comes with it.
[00:31:14] Jess Bahr: And when you say no, that stop me, like, well, you're doing it wrong.
[00:31:17] Jess Bahr: Just completely ran off.
[00:31:18] Jess Bahr: Have you related?
[00:31:22] Jess Bahr: I don't know if you've noticed also how many martech companies are started by non marketers who start the company because they're like, well, marketers don't know how to do their job and we can do it better.
[00:31:36] Jess Bahr: There's a company that does dynamic site personalization and their founder was like, yeah, we built this tool and it was cool, we sold it.
[00:31:45] Jess Bahr: And then we said, where else could we use?
[00:31:46] Jess Bahr: Well, marketers marketing sucks.
[00:31:48] Jess Bahr: Like, marketing is an echo chamber.
[00:31:50] Jess Bahr: Marketing today is horrible.
[00:31:51] Jess Bahr: And so we think we could make a tool for marketers to do better job because marketing sucks.
[00:31:55] Jess Bahr: It's like you have no marketing experience.
[00:31:57] Jess Bahr: You've never done marketing.
[00:31:58] Jess Bahr: There's so many martech companies that the founder is not a marketer, but they started a marketing company to make marketers do marketing better because they think again, that they can do marketing better than marketers can.
[00:32:10] Marissa Homere: And it's all garbage.
[00:32:12] Marissa Homere: It's all $20,000 a year, $30,000 a year garbage.
[00:32:16] Marissa Homere: And it's incredibly annoying and frustrating and none of these quick fixes that all of these martech products end up being, they're silver packages, silver bullets, and then they don't do anything.
[00:32:30] Marissa Homere: And then they end up on a.
[00:32:32] Jess Bahr: Shelf because you need ten different tools for it to integrate and they only do a limited thing.
[00:32:36] Jess Bahr: And ultimately, I'm sorry, but if you're building a tool on an API that is not completely public and that platform has ability to change the API, it's a risk.
[00:32:49] Marissa Homere: Absolutely.
[00:32:49] Jess Bahr: So why am I going to use your tool that does a limited set of things that I can do natively instead of doing it natively?
[00:32:57] Jess Bahr: But you're going to again convince, try and ostracize me that I'm like the bad person here because I don't see value in your tool when your tool may not have value to me.
[00:33:07] Marissa Homere: Yeah.
[00:33:07] Marissa Homere: And I'm not spending all of this because I think when you really understand the economics of what it takes to be not just a successful business, but a successful business that has good cash flow and reserves and things of that nature, none of these things are worth the cost that they come with.
[00:33:29] Marissa Homere: And you're not solving a problem big enough for me.
[00:33:31] Marissa Homere: And you didn't understand that problem when you built the product, and that is so many of these companies right now.
[00:33:38] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:33:38] Jess Bahr: One of my favorite tools in the entire world is RollWorks.
[00:33:42] Jess Bahr: I'll publicly shout it out from the mountaintop, and every year, I use them for, like, six years, and every year I've been on them since they were so they're RollWorks now.
[00:33:53] Jess Bahr: They're ad roll before I use them when they're adrolling.
[00:33:55] Jess Bahr: The early 2010s, too.
[00:33:57] Jess Bahr: Every year when we would evaluate I'm including the cost of technology in my evaluation for them, and the first year, whoever working with they were like, okay, interesting.
[00:34:08] Jess Bahr: But I was no, like, you're including the cost of technology, and I need to know that your platform plus ad spend together is giving us an ROI for it.
[00:34:17] Jess Bahr: And the CS rep I worked with was fantastic.
[00:34:19] Jess Bahr: We went through it together.
[00:34:21] Jess Bahr: But there's so many tools where we go and you say, I need you to justify your cost of the tool plus the return.
[00:34:28] Jess Bahr: It's not enough for you to save me.
[00:34:30] Jess Bahr: I'm not going to save ten cents a gallon by driving an hour away.
[00:34:33] Jess Bahr: It doesn't make sense.
[00:34:34] Jess Bahr: And you start questioning it, and then they just lose their mind.
[00:34:38] Marissa Homere: My favorite example of that has to be and maybe just because it's timely because I looked into it not that long ago, but automated gifting platforms.
[00:34:46] Marissa Homere: Yes.
[00:34:47] Marissa Homere: Oh, my God.
[00:34:49] Marissa Homere: The pitch is fine, I get it.
[00:34:52] Marissa Homere: But then they all have these completely inaccessible startup fees, so you have to prove $30,000 USD because I'm in Canada, which is 40% more some days.
[00:35:04] Marissa Homere: I have to prove 40K before I send a single thing out, which I'm like, I can spend five K on a local small business to deliver things and get exactly the same thing.
[00:35:17] Marissa Homere: Maybe it's a little bit harder, but it's not solving enough of a problem for me to give you $40,000 before you do anything.
[00:35:25] Jess Bahr: I use thanks for a long time.
[00:35:26] Jess Bahr: And it was someone hopefully I'm not super wrong in this.
[00:35:30] Jess Bahr: Sorry if I am.
[00:35:31] Jess Bahr: When I signed up for thanks, it was a $500 setup fee because we had branded items in it, and then you just paid a percentage on the send, and it was like, There we go.
[00:35:40] Jess Bahr: And so we went from them to looking at Cindoso, which was like, $30,000 platform fee, not even getting into the cost of anything.
[00:35:50] Jess Bahr: And you have to pay shipping and handling all this stuff.
[00:35:53] Jess Bahr: I've used a distribution company, a distribution a swag company in the Northeast for a long time that does free they do fulfillment for you, too, and they'll do storage.
[00:36:01] Jess Bahr: It's not all free, but they'll do free warehousing, which is how we ended up getting with them.
[00:36:06] Jess Bahr: And then when I looked at it, I was like, well, I can buy incremental from them, have them do the packaging.
[00:36:12] Jess Bahr: And it's like, I know the person doing it, and so I feel a lot more safe with it.
[00:36:16] Jess Bahr: Or I can pay Cindoso a ton of money a year to have their platform, which is a beast, to use and set up anyways, and have to pay incremental on top of it and pay higher incremental fees.
[00:36:28] Jess Bahr: Why would I do that?
[00:36:29] Jess Bahr: Not everyone has to be a SaaS platform, have a service offering.
[00:36:35] Marissa Homere: Sure, there are some cool things, one or two cool things, but it's not enough.
[00:36:39] Marissa Homere: And that's what I find really funny in that I gave that feedback to, I think, all of the vendors.
[00:36:45] Marissa Homere: I was like, you realize that also, my other beef with a lot of these service providers turned SaaS companies is they completely disregard non enterprise business.
[00:36:56] Marissa Homere: And that has the potential to become enterprise business.
[00:36:59] Marissa Homere: And I was like, Look, I can't even try this.
[00:37:01] Marissa Homere: There's not even a way for me to test that this is going to work.
[00:37:04] Marissa Homere: And our CEO is a CFA, which is actually great for the business because he's very aware of financial waste and inefficiency.
[00:37:14] Marissa Homere: And it's given me the tools that I need to be able to evaluate those things more closely, too.
[00:37:19] Marissa Homere: And I was like, tell me how I sell this.
[00:37:21] Marissa Homere: And there's no answer.
[00:37:25] Marissa Homere: Your bullshit ROI metrics that you have on your website actually don't mean anything.
[00:37:29] Jess Bahr: Oh, my God.
[00:37:30] Jess Bahr: You paid Forrester $150,000 to make a calculator to show the value that you have.
[00:37:37] Jess Bahr: Holy shit.
[00:37:38] Jess Bahr: That must be very unbiased and real.
[00:37:41] Marissa Homere: Absolutely, I believe that.
[00:37:43] Marketing Misconceptions: A Rant about Inefficient Data Collection

[00:37:43] Marissa Homere: Oh, God.
[00:37:44] Marissa Homere: And that's where we've gotten into this pit of despair.
[00:37:49] Marissa Homere: And at the same time, the peak of Mount Stupid, which is just like all of this smoke and mirrors when it comes to how something is actually helpful.
[00:38:01] Marissa Homere: No real understanding.
[00:38:03] Marissa Homere: And people come into sales conversations with me all the time, assuming that I have a very basic marketing function.
[00:38:11] Marissa Homere: And I'm like, no, we have a borderline scientific, inbound and marketing generated model that if I put your numbers in there, it's going to explode.
[00:38:23] Marissa Homere: And they just are just like, well, are you looking for XYZ?
[00:38:26] Jess Bahr: It's like, no, but you're doing your data collection analysis in a spreadsheet.
[00:38:32] Jess Bahr: That's not efficient.
[00:38:34] Jess Bahr: Yeah, because none of your fucking systems talk to each other.
[00:38:36] Jess Bahr: It's the best way to do it.
[00:38:38] Marissa Homere: Honestly.
[00:38:39] Jess Bahr: Honestly, this is going to be a bonus episode.
[00:38:43] Jess Bahr: Rant.
[00:38:46] Marissa Homere: The world has become crazy.
[00:38:48] Marissa Homere: And I think to Circulate back to the original, I think Rant starter it's because we're in this vacuum.
[00:38:57] Marissa Homere: And when I have conversations with other women in marketing.
[00:39:01] Marissa Homere: I get so much value out of them and there's a whole other world, so I have to consciously disconnect from that world and not fall into it.
[00:39:10] Jess Bahr: Because I think it's also I was speaking with I recorded an episode yesterday with a woman, Joyce, who is in Hong Kong who does content.
[00:39:19] Jess Bahr: We're talking about AI and she's doing experimentation on have.
[00:39:24] Jess Bahr: If I have the clip recorded, I'll insert it here.
[00:39:26] Jess Bahr: I don't think it was on a recording, but she went a month where she posted on LinkedIn but didn't comment or engage with anyone.
[00:39:33] Jess Bahr: And then prior to that, she did a month where she just commented and engaged.
[00:39:37] Jess Bahr: And she was saying that she noticed that her newsfeed is a lot of the same looking people who are saying the same thing in different ways.
[00:39:44] Jess Bahr: It's like fake emotional story about my life tied into a sales pitch.
[00:39:50] Jess Bahr: Right.
[00:39:50] Jess Bahr: It's like that same kind of format and it's a lot of the exact same things.
[00:39:54] Jess Bahr: I think that's why the marketing Illuminati I'm going to call it now is we have this world that's telling us that we need to do short form video on everything.
[00:40:04] Jess Bahr: Short form video.
[00:40:05] Jess Bahr: If you test content on LinkedIn, you're going to find that oftentimes text and images do really well.
[00:40:13] Jess Bahr: HubSpot for a long time did text only LinkedIn posts and they crushed it.
[00:40:19] Jess Bahr: We copied them.
[00:40:19] Jess Bahr: The company was at, we copied them for a while.
[00:40:21] Jess Bahr: Text does well.
[00:40:22] Jess Bahr: Images do well.
[00:40:23] Jess Bahr: People aren't as stupid as people want us to think.
[00:40:25] Jess Bahr: But when you listen to the echo chamber, the marketing Illuminati I'm calling that now is they're going to tell you it's video.
[00:40:32] Jess Bahr: It's short form video.
[00:40:34] Jess Bahr: It's this stuff that has worked for us when it's not the thing that's making it work.
[00:40:39] Jess Bahr: It's like a piece of content you're using that you're putting a ton of money behind.
[00:40:43] Jess Bahr: So it's going to be successful.
[00:40:44] Jess Bahr: It doesn't mean it works exactly.
[00:40:46] Jess Bahr: They just say the same stuff and then what happens?
[00:40:50] Jess Bahr: You have an executive that comes to you and says, hey, I heard MQLs are dead.
[00:40:53] Jess Bahr: So I don't want to see MQLs anymore.
[00:40:55] Jess Bahr: We shouldn't use MQLs.
[00:40:57] Jess Bahr: MQLs are dead.
[00:41:00] Jess Bahr: You read half the article.
[00:41:02] Jess Bahr: MQLs have a point.
[00:41:04] Jess Bahr: They're not dead.
[00:41:05] Jess Bahr: And then they start asking why you're doing MQ?
[00:41:07] Jess Bahr: Why aren't we doing product like Growth?
[00:41:09] Jess Bahr: I don't know, Joe.
[00:41:10] Jess Bahr: Because you got an enterprise sales motion and there's no way for anyone to sign up for a free trial account.
[00:41:15] Jess Bahr: We can't do product like Growth, but it's the new hot thing.
[00:41:18] Jess Bahr: We need more ABM.
[00:41:20] Jess Bahr: You don't have a target account list sales.
[00:41:24] Jess Bahr: We can't do just the M of ABM.
[00:41:28] Marissa Homere: They hear absolutely insane demand gen versus capture, creation versus oh man, there's been so many.
[00:41:38] Marissa Homere: And all of these concepts have always existed with the exception of maybe some of the new tools and whatnot.
[00:41:43] Marissa Homere: But it's like, okay, everybody gets into a tussle.
[00:41:49] Marissa Homere: I can't get myself to engage in a lot of that stuff because I'm like, this has no historical context into how marketing has long since worked.
[00:41:58] Marissa Homere: It is disconnected and it's like such a small distinction most of the time.
[00:42:03] Marissa Homere: There is a whole thread, multiple posts from one company on LinkedIn about Attribution and using self reported Attribution in their form.
[00:42:12] Marissa Homere: And there have been so many posts about it.
[00:42:15] Marissa Homere: It's like, yes, we know that Attribution is not perfect, and we know that there's a whole other element of decision making that happens outside of a digital marketing campaign.
[00:42:28] Marissa Homere: But is this really worth that amount of space?
[00:42:30] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:42:31] Jess Bahr: Because Attribution is dead.
[00:42:32] Jess Bahr: Is the new MQLs are dead?
[00:42:34] Jess Bahr: It's the new version of it.
[00:42:35] Jess Bahr: And I look at that as and I'm going to introduce my bias here.
[00:42:39] Jess Bahr: I have a master's in business analytics.
[00:42:40] Jess Bahr: I spend most of my career in something data function related.
[00:42:44] Jess Bahr: I love Attribution and marketing and data fucking love it.
[00:42:48] Jess Bahr: It's not easy to necessarily set up and collect, but we're not John Wanna maker here, comfortable in our 50% of marketing.
[00:42:57] Jess Bahr: Then we don't know what it does.
[00:42:59] Jess Bahr: It's worth it.
[00:43:00] Jess Bahr: It's not that hard.
[00:43:01] Jess Bahr: It's not that hard to do.
[00:43:03] Jess Bahr: But you know why they're doing it?
[00:43:04] Jess Bahr: You know why people push back against Attribution?
[00:43:07] Jess Bahr: It's the same people that don't want to have any metrics, they don't want to report on it, they don't want goals.
[00:43:11] Jess Bahr: It's because when you look at the work that maybe a person who's saying that and their agency is doing and the impact they're having on clients, maybe their impact is shit.
[00:43:22] Jess Bahr: So they want clients to stop measuring impact.
[00:43:24] Jess Bahr: Because when you measure impact and you say, hey, I want you to justify the cost of your service, your platform, and the benefit that you have incrementally compared to me hiring someone to do this in native tools, or do it in whatever we have, I want to know that there's a benefit there.
[00:43:41] Jess Bahr: When you start measuring and you start asking questions and the data doesn't line up, they're trying to convince you not to look at the data.
[00:43:49] Jess Bahr: That's what it is.
[00:43:51] Marissa Homere: I think I've gotten this question probably about 100 times.
[00:43:54] Marissa Homere: But how do you measure the impact of brands?
[00:43:57] Marissa Homere: It's actually very simple to do.
[00:44:00] Marissa Homere: Not perfect, but simple.
[00:44:01] Marissa Homere: And you can do it with native tools and you can do it with one or two tools.
[00:44:05] Marissa Homere: You don't need massive enterprise level tools.
[00:44:08] Marissa Homere: The data exists in one way or another and you can get it and you can report on it and you can keep interaction, track of interactions throughout the history of someone's buying cycle.
[00:44:17] Impactful Discussions on the Importance of Marketing and Being a Woman in the Industry

[00:44:17] Marissa Homere: I think one thing that you said that has really been, I think a theme for me in the last few years is impact.
[00:44:24] Marissa Homere: And I think that is the key to this whole discussion, which is like if I can walk into a room and say, our efforts in marketing have directly contributed to seven or $8 million in pipeline last year and 70% of revenue in the last two quarters of last year.
[00:44:46] Marissa Homere: And that alone gets me favor in many other areas.
[00:44:53] Marissa Homere: I can prove all of that.
[00:44:54] Marissa Homere: And I have a sales team that obviously contributes to those numbers greatly, but that are also engaged in making that easier for them and interested in their own impact.
[00:45:07] Marissa Homere: And so it's like my team makes an impact because they're smart people and they know what they're talking about.
[00:45:13] Marissa Homere: They execute wonderfully.
[00:45:15] Marissa Homere: They're trusted within the organization.
[00:45:17] Marissa Homere: That's impact.
[00:45:18] Marissa Homere: We can generate the numbers.
[00:45:20] Marissa Homere: And you know what?
[00:45:21] Marissa Homere: We don't ever really report on leads.
[00:45:24] Marissa Homere: We talk about only revenue almost and opportunity and pipeline generation.
[00:45:30] Jess Bahr: And it's so much easier.
[00:45:33] Jess Bahr: One of the favorite parts of my experiences in my career is we had a QBR and I presented all of the numbers, the dollar numbers.
[00:45:44] Jess Bahr: And then I watched all the sellers go and they said, hey, here's how I did this quarter.
[00:45:49] Jess Bahr: And I had 15 Ops that came in, ten of them closed.
[00:45:52] Jess Bahr: And of those, five were marketing sourced.
[00:45:54] Jess Bahr: And I let my sellers, my partner sellers who I didn't run, sales partner in the I let the sellers talk about marketing's impact.
[00:46:01] Jess Bahr: And that for me was like, there it is.
[00:46:03] Jess Bahr: That's my validation.
[00:46:04] Jess Bahr: I can talk about the dollar impact my program is making.
[00:46:07] Jess Bahr: We're driving X percentage of pipeline and of that X percentage of revenue because our close rates are higher.
[00:46:13] Jess Bahr: The win rates from Marketing source pipeline is higher.
[00:46:15] Jess Bahr: Here's what we're doing.
[00:46:16] Jess Bahr: And then the sellers and you let other people talk about your successes, right?
[00:46:20] Jess Bahr: You get there because they know what you're doing, because you're sharing what you're doing.
[00:46:23] Jess Bahr: You're aligned on goals.
[00:46:24] Jess Bahr: You're having an impact.
[00:46:26] Jess Bahr: And then let them speak for you.
[00:46:29] Jess Bahr: Speak for you.
[00:46:30] Marissa Homere: You have a North Star.
[00:46:31] Marissa Homere: Everybody has the same North Star.
[00:46:33] Marissa Homere: You can collectively move forward instead of bickering and working overtime and spending so much time and company money in trying to justify your own existence.
[00:46:44] Marissa Homere: That is a horrible existence.
[00:46:46] Marissa Homere: It's draining.
[00:46:47] Marissa Homere: It causes burnout.
[00:46:48] Marissa Homere: It's like demotivating.
[00:46:50] Marissa Homere: You've never felt so much imposter syndrome in your life and not worth it.
[00:46:55] Marissa Homere: They never change.
[00:46:56] Jess Bahr: Anyway, in summary, number one is go to an.org that appreciates marketing.
[00:47:00] Jess Bahr: Because if you don't, it's a wild card if you'll ever actually get them to appreciate marketing.
[00:47:05] Jess Bahr: Number one, align on goals and expectations and then report on progress towards those goals.
[00:47:10] Jess Bahr: The number two is form relationships with your counterparts, with those people so they can also share your success for you instead of you having to be the one who's constantly saying like, marketing did something good.
[00:47:20] Jess Bahr: Marketing has an impact.
[00:47:22] Jess Bahr: Like us.
[00:47:24] Jess Bahr: Number three is if you're a woman in marketing is share your shit and tell your story because you're probably more qualified than some of these fucking white men we see talking at conferences submit to join the podcast guest application below link below.
[00:47:41] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:47:42] Jess Bahr: Well, Marissa.
[00:47:43] Marissa Homere: Thank you.
[00:47:44] Jess Bahr: Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:47:47] Jess Bahr: We did go on a little bit of a side tangent.
[00:47:49] Jess Bahr: I think I might package that up as, like, a little bonus episode linked to it, so we can also keep kind of the focus concise.
[00:47:56] Jess Bahr: But I think it's stuff that we're all thinking, not we.
[00:47:59] Jess Bahr: Stuff that women in marketing are all thinking and might as well talk about it.
[00:48:04] Marissa Homere: Absolutely.
[00:48:05] Marissa Homere: More awareness there is, the more that people have a view of shared experience and that you're not alone in this.
[00:48:13] Marissa Homere: We all Facebook and get out of the vacuum.
[00:48:17] Jess Bahr: Yes.
[00:48:18] Jess Bahr: Escape.
[00:48:19] Marissa Homere: Escape the matrix.
[00:48:20] Jess Bahr: Come sit with us on the edge of the vacuum where we're eating popcorn, looking at everyone in it, talking about them.
[00:48:26] Marissa Homere: Yeah, it's a great place to be.
[00:48:27] Jess Bahr: Yeah, our vacuum is better.
[00:48:29] Marissa Homere: We have our own vacuum.
[00:48:32] Jess Bahr: All right, we'll see everyone on the next episode.
[00:48:35] Jess Bahr: That was a great episode, right?
[00:48:36] Jess Bahr: Thanks for joining us for it.
[00:48:38] Jess Bahr: If you want to make sure that you don't miss out on any future content, make sure you hit that subscribe button below, click the bell to turn notification.
[00:48:45] Jess Bahr: Patience.
[00:48:45] Jess Bahr: And if you have any requests for content or guests you'd love to see on the show, leave them in the comments below.