June 26, 2022
Hire an iCMO to Help Grow Your Business with Brett Schklar
In episode 118, host Eric Dickmann talks with Brett Schklar - Managing Partner of Grow Powerful, a company focused on matching fractional CMOs with venture capital-backed B2B tech companies. Brett is a proven growth strategist who uses a powerful combination of brand building, storytelling, lead generation, and marketing execution to help emerging companies find their paths to growth and uncover demand for innovative technologies and approaches.
Grow Powerful brings growth strategies to its clients by leveraging a collective of top marketing professionals with industry expertise to deliver marketing, and revenue/growth leadership, and by creating measurable campaigns to meet rising revenue targets.
Brett Schklar also hosts the Grow Up with GROW podcast.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit: https://fiveechelon.com/hire-an-icmo-business-s8ep5/
Send us your questions or comments
A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.
The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at:
WEBVTT
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Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
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In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business.
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Today, I'm excited to have guest Brett Schklar on the program.
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Brett is the Co-founder and Managing Partner at Grow Powerful, an online platform that is assembling marketing professionals focused on B2B tech who can deliver expertise by serving as Fractional CMOs Brett, welcome to the program.
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Thanks, Eric.
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Glad to be here.
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I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today because as a Fractional CMO myself and having a podcast where we focus on a lot of Fractional CMO issues, this topic is obviously very near and dear to my heart.
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And before we sort of dive into the details of what you're doing there at Grow Powerful.
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If you would just give me an expanded background.
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What is your career history?
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How did you get to this point and starting up Grow Powerful?
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Like many it's a half, about 50% intentional, and 50% accidental way of getting to where I am today.
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I grew up in almost exclusively B2B technology, early stage software companies, telecom, rose up through the ranks between sales and marketing back to sales, back to marketing, and really enjoyed that.
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Had some great start-up experience with a couple of different companies of which had exited.
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And it was great to ride that train, and then about 17 years ago, 18 years ago, actually, I had some health events that made me just reconsider what I was doing.
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And these health issues were related to my heart, I had some problems with my heart, which is fine now, but it made me realize that I literally couldn't put my heart into something that I was doing before.
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And I decided that I needed to do something different.
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And I started a company, a different company called Market Creation Group, and my goal was to work part time, to do some consulting, to have some fun wound up growing it to about 20 people, fantastic revenues, and going from the idea of working 20 hours a week to actually working significantly more.
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However, I really enjoyed it.
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About five years ago, I sold that company to a private equity firm and it was an agency that was focused on B2B technology.
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So it was a really good matchup.
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And then I decided, you know what?
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My health is fine, my family is fine, I'm going to go back to work for a company where I don't have to worry about running a business or chasing after the business or things like that.
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And it took about nine months for me to realize that I really make a crappy employee.
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And I had a graceful exit from that company, but it was very obvious that the company honestly, is no longer there.
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I don't think I did a great job of picking the company.
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I also just realized that was not a good employee at the end of the day.
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And so myself and a couple of partners, people that were actually my customers who were Chief Marketing Officers operationally in companies that were my clients, we decided to get together and to build something to really support the Fractional CMO or the Virtual CMO model.
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And so we started Grow about 20 months ago now and we've had phenomenal, phenomenal success so far.
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It's always fun to hear about people's career paths and the industries that they've touched on and the jobs that they've worked in, and you rarely hear an entrepreneur that has a straight line.
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Usually there's some zigzags in there, some restarts, some pivots.
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So your story is interesting in that respect.
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And one thing I would love for you to comment on is, you know, we die right into the topic of Fractional CMO, but really this is a relatively new concept.
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I'm always amazed how many people I get into conversations with, and they've never even heard the term.
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And there are variations floating around virtual CMO, iCMO, on demand CMO, cetera.
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And there are an awful lot of people who call themselves consultants, but are really doing that role.
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And I often tell people, CMO is really a Fortune 500 title, right?
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It's not common in smaller businesses, but it's a concept really.
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A fractional CMO is a concept.
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How would you describe it?
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You're spot on.
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I mean, you're seeing the same thing that I am, which is you know, the concept is essentially a form of consulting, but it might be a little bit more of a specific niche of consulting.
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You know, we work with emerging companies anywhere from$2 million to let's say$250 million, they're typically VC backed or private equity backed.
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Most of our business comes through the VC or private equity channels, they bring us in to connect with their portfolio companies.
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My philosophy is pretty simple.
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I don't think any company that's less than a billion dollars needs a real CMO.
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Just going to put that out there.
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And I think they need somebody that has the entire front, you know?
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The cash register side of the business, AKA a Chief Revenue Officer.
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I think that the idea of the Chief Customer Officer is becoming more and more popular.
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And I really love that.
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And that really means that there's not room for a Chief Marketing Officer or a Chief Market Officer.
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And so it's not that the CMO is being squeezed out, is that the idea of a CMO was something people thought they really needed, but at the end of the day, they do need, but they don't necessarily need it as a function of the executive team as a full-time person.
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It's more of someone to be a marketing and market consigliere to the CEO and to have the customer be the CEO, the CRO, and in some cases, the Chief Customer Officer.
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And when that's in place, you definitely need a marketing team, right?
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You need people to understand digital marketing, understand the product really well, understand content, I think that every content marketing person needs to also know how to produce shows like what we're doing here.
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I don't think there's a place for a full-time Chief marketing Officer.
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And so I think that's why we're finding the Virtual CMO, the Fractional CMO, the ICMO becoming much more popular and being much more focused than the consultant, which in some cases is a good word, and some cases is a bad word as well.
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Yeah.
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Consulting has a mixed reputation, right?
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Especially, for larger companies who work with some of the big firms.
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You know, it's almost like a rash that you can't get rid of.
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You get consultants into some of these organizations and they just never go away.
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But I think you're exactly right.
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There are a lot of people out there that are doing similar things to what a Fractional CMO does, they just don't necessarily call themselves that.
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And having guests on the show and talking about this a lot, It's pretty well understood that this whole fractional model kind of started out in the CFO's office, right?
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That's really where it got its footing.
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And now we're seeing it expand out, not just for fractional CMOs, but we're seeing fractional anything in the C-suite.
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Do you think that period of time that we're in, especially considering you know, economic factors and certainly COVID that we've gone through, do you think that's helped or hurt the model?
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So I think that this is the springboard for the model.
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I think you've got, the RNR, you've got the Great Resignation, and you've got the what nobody is actually saying is officially happening, but we're all talking about it's kind of like the weird uncle that comes to the weddings or the Bar Mitzvahs or the funerals.
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You know, we don't talk about that weird uncle, but we'll call him Uncle Recession.
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And you know, we're in denial of that fact.
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But I think that between those two things, The Great Resignation, which really has been and should be hitting those CMOs really hard, for good reasons, not bad reasons.
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It is hard, especially as a B2B technology, as a business to business technology, focused Chief Marketing Officer, in very few cases, you're set up for success, in most cases, you're set up for failure.
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And there's a hundred reasons why, and if you'd like to, we can dive into the 116 reasons why current CMOs and B2B technology are set up for failure, but they are.
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Hmm
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And there's a few that are successful, but it's it's got an entire organization behind it.
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And so you've got the great resignation, which means people are re-evaluating their satisfaction, their joy out of the job.
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You've got as of a few years ago, the average lifespan of a head of marketing in a B2B technology company was 19 months now.
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There's no official data, but it's closer.
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But what I had been hearing and through anecdotal conversations closer to the 17 months, so you're already kind of treated as a virtual or a fractional anyway.
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And then, you know, on top of that, we've got, you know, people needing to cut budgets aggressively Every week, I'm on a group call with several hundred Chief Marketing Officers in B2B technology.
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And every Friday morning, we get together and we talk.
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And the last few weeks I was in the last three weeks, it's gone from, you know, excitement, optimism, getting back to events, finding that ROI and the events to now the conversation is, Okay, my board is asking me for a plan B for a scenario, you know, map of letting go of half of the marketing team or letting go of everybody except for a few core people or hunkering down, and how does it look to get outside help versus inside help?
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So that's a very long-winded way to say, Eric.
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This is the time that we can solidify, rationalize and amplify the value of a fractional, virtual, or ICMO.
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I couldn't agree more.
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I would just add to that, that during COVID, people got used to remote work.
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I mean, this is pretty clear, right?
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Companies are really struggling getting people back into the office, but there was a broader acceptance that remote work is okay.
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And I think there was always some hesitation in the C-suite or in the executive suite to say, well, we don't want to have a remote executive.
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You know, they need to be here to see if people are sitting in their cubicles, right?
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You know, but now I think that that's changed.
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Have you seen that as well?
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I sort of seen a split.
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And so I would say more times than not the companies that are really trying to be employee focused.
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Yes, it is very much that way and there's a lot more flexibility and companies are adopting more of an asynchronous communication model versus synchronous.
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I'm also seeing companies who are mandating coming back to the office, whether it's two days a week, three days a week, or whatever.
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And the feedback as I go to the office, cause I have to, and I wound up being on Zoom calls with half the people anyway.
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So I'm doing the same thing that I was doing at home.
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It's just in the office and you know, it's a little bit chaotic.
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So I think that most companies are embracing that idea of flexible, fractional, but virtual, as far as you know, not being in person, and really doubling down on what does asynchronous productivity look like?
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We're doing it, I mean, we've got an office, but everybody that we have except for one person is in some other state than Colorado.
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As a business owner, it's a little bit complicated because instead of mastering the art of Colorado employment, I now have to, you know,, my CPA tells me, here are certain states that are good to find people and certain states they're not good to find people.
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And I try not to use that as a decision on where to find people, but it's a benefit because I now have, you know, 50 states and maybe other countries as well, we're not there yet, but you know, 50 states at least to where I can find talent versus being limited to people within a 20, 30, 40 mile commute radius.
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Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast.
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But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level?
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If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you.
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We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step.
00:13:48.131 --> 00:13:50.682
We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads.
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How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers.
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How to strategically package and position your products and services.
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How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business.
00:14:04.091 --> 00:14:11.861
To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services.
00:14:12.312 --> 00:14:13.572
Now back to the podcast.
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So you talk a lot about working with VC and then bringing you in as a fractional CMO and VCs have a real benefit, right?
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They're mentors to many of these companies, right?
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They have templates, they know what works, they know when people need to come into a business at what particular stage, but for companies that don't have that support that don't have that sort of mentoring, I think oftentimes it's very unclear when they need to bring in marketing help.
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Have you found that as well?
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Yes.
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Especially technology focused companies.
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If they don't have it.
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And by the way, there's a lot of forms of mentorship, there's the VCs, there's a private equity, there's also, you know, non-VC oriented board members, for companies that don't have that level of financial or board level support, there's a lot of great organizations such as EO entrepreneurs, organization, YPO, Vistige that offer levels of support.
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But what I find in B2B technology companies where you've got the founder that is the technology guru is a strong resistance to the idea of marketing and almost a theory that marketing is a shortcut if your product isn't good enough, and a sense that my product is so good, it should sell itself.
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I've heard this before
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There is a concept of product led growth, and I'm sure you've probably talked about this on your show, but the concept of product led growth is great and there's probably 1 to 2% of technology companies that are actually doing that.
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Then you've got the other 80% that are talking the product led growth message, but they may not actually have a true product led growth or strategy or real plan in place.
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so you know, trying to get out of the buzzwords of things, but yes, if there is not really good mentorship in place with a CEO, there tends to be a resistance.
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And honestly, for me, personally, there are a ton of technology companies that I would love to work with, but if they don't understand the network effects and the amplification, and the economies of scale you can get with a strong marketing program and a strong growth program.
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I'm not going to have a lot of success with them as a customer, and I need to go, you know, I'll walk the other way.
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It seems like with many of these product led companies and the great product that they've developed, what I often see, and I'll be interested to hear your feedback on this is that when I look at the product, it's really a variation of something else that exists.
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It's not that often that something truly revolutionary comes along.
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I just finished watching the keynote at Apple's development conference, you know, the most valuable company in the world.
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And there really wasn't anything new, it was all incremental.
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Improvements, which yes, those are new things, but they were incremental improvements.
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There wasn't that brand new thing that nobody's ever heard of before.
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And I think when I see so many product led companies that think the product is going to sell itself, they kind of forget that they're competing with many other things that are very similar.
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So I did watch the WWDC.
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I love more from a presentation style and to understand
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They're fantastic, right?
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Just as much as, and they are fantastic.
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I think they're going as they are doing more virtual, as they're doing less live is becoming a little bit over the top if you will.
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But the interesting thing is right before that I read a book and I forgot the name of it and the author.But I think it was called like beyond Steve or After Steve.
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And it was the story of what's Apple like in a post Steve jobs and Johnny Ive world.
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And the innovation may not be there like it was before because Tim Cook has operational excellence, but he's not a product visionary.
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And so to your point, you know, and now they don't just have product led growth, they have ecosystem led growth, right?
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So the products create an ecosystem, that ecosystem creates, you know, variations of products, but they're moving towards a services business just as much as they are a product business, and you can see it in where the revenue comes from.
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And so they are really doing the most to become an ecosystem led growth or a services led growth company, just as much, if not more than a product led growth company.
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Yeah, it's interesting to take such a big ship and steer it, right?
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Because they've got so much going on.
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It's not easy to move some levers anymore, but I think that this whole idea of innovation is really interesting.
00:19:25.829 --> 00:19:37.845
And I'm curious when you engage with new clients, what do you see as the number one problem that they are coming to you for to solve?
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So what is it that they understand they don't have a marketing strategy and say, now is the time we need to build that marketing strategy.
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Are they stagnating in some area?
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Is it usually because of a problem or because they're proactive and saying, we need to start to prepare for our marketing strategy so that we can grow?
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Yeah.
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There's a lot of different ways to explain what people need, but the reality is there's two reasons why people engage with us.
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Number one, they are getting there.
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They're finding their product market fit really well.
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And they're ready to double down on the growth, which means taking what's working and amplifying it.
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And in that scenario, we are a great fit, we help find, we test, we help measure and we help expand, expand, expand.
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And then once we figured out the things that allow the expansion, we focus on building out the scale.
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The second reason which is not always the best reason why people come to us, especially through the VC channels, as we've been flailing and failing and missing our targets and our salespeople are frustrated and they just need, you know, they're in the sales, people are telling us they need marketing and we don't really know what that looks like.
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And there's a lot that you can do to enable that and empower that.
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The first scenario is great because it tends to be people that say, we know what we know, but more importantly, we know what we don't know.
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And so let's build a plan together.
00:21:13.914 --> 00:21:18.625
The second one is where, where they are sort of in panic mode.
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It is more often than not, we know what to do, we just haven't been doing enough of it, we just need more of it.
00:21:24.264 --> 00:21:31.644
So we just need you to do this and that can be accomplished, but it doesn't always set someone up for success.
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Yeah.
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I tend to see that at companies where there is a VP of sales and marketing or somebody who has that title, where sales and marketing are very closely aligned because selling and marketing are two different things, right?
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They require different skill sets.
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Salespeople want leads, leads, leads, right?
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And marketers tend to know that you have to have a strategy to develop that over time.
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It's not a faucet.
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Yeah.
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Yep.
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Absolutely.
00:21:58.821 --> 00:22:05.682
If I flip the coin around, how do you find new Fractional CMOs to work with your business?
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So you're trying to create a business, right that's for lack of a better word, sort of a dating service, right?
00:22:11.352 --> 00:22:26.731
You're trying to match opportunities with skillsets and we all have industry experience, we come from different areas, but you're trying to find matches for businesses and Fractional CMOs who have experience in those kinds of industries or challenges
00:22:27.402 --> 00:22:39.759
So at Grow Powerful, we have a vision that is, I love our vision and that is to assemble the greatest marketing and growth minds in all of B2B technology.
00:22:41.049 --> 00:22:54.275
And I think because our vision is so specific and really about bringing the best of the best of the best, sorry, Top Gun, but bringing the best of the best of the best together.
00:22:54.664 --> 00:22:59.164
And it really has done great to attract people to us.
00:22:59.940 --> 00:23:07.420
So we have a form on our website where somebody wants to apply to be an iCMO, they can apply.
00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:13.319
And then we take a look at them, and then, you know, I meet with them and I look at several factors.
00:23:13.950 --> 00:23:24.500
Number one is, have they really had some great success operationally as a Chief Marketing Officer in our target, you know, size and type of company.
00:23:25.119 --> 00:23:26.500
And so, that's number one.
00:23:26.589 --> 00:23:41.589
Number two is I want to understand their leadership style because at some point, even though there are virtual or a fractional or an iCMO, they are going to be leading either marketing team or managing the manager of the CEO, and I want to understand that.
00:23:42.525 --> 00:23:52.545
The third thing is how collaborative are they and how willing are they to look at the processes that we have proven works and can work within that.
00:23:53.474 --> 00:24:01.125
So we've had hundreds of people apply, I say over 600 people have applied so far.
00:24:01.648 --> 00:24:04.229
I would say that amazingly.
00:24:04.318 --> 00:24:11.009
And I would say that that half of them were just completely not qualified, never had a CMO or VP of marketing role, never had it.
00:24:11.249 --> 00:24:23.608
The other half actually have had a CMO or VP role, may have been qualified, but aren't the attitude and the culture aren't a good fit, their ability to understand the followup processes are not a good fit.
00:24:24.118 --> 00:24:36.128
We have scaled, we have fine tuned it,and we now have I think, 15 people that are active as operational ICMOs in our circle.
00:24:36.838 --> 00:24:38.908
And I love them all.
00:24:39.239 --> 00:24:49.709
Each of them have some greatness that they bring, each of them are very transparent about their weaknesses, we can serve a client really well to get a company from this point to this point.
00:24:50.128 --> 00:25:02.663
And then once we reached the capability of that Fractional CMO, we can possibly engage some other Fractional CMO on our team to really go and take it to the next level as well.
00:25:03.423 --> 00:25:04.913
So we've had a lot of success.
00:25:05.243 --> 00:25:09.834
My mission is to, um, have a team of 250.
00:25:10.614 --> 00:25:11.834
Oh, that's a big scale up.
00:25:11.834 --> 00:25:11.923
Yeah.
00:25:12.023 --> 00:25:14.523
within five years.
00:25:15.263 --> 00:25:19.074
So we have a lot of work to do, but we're going to do it in stages.
00:25:19.074 --> 00:25:22.463
So the people I've got on board now, I'm very happy with.
00:25:23.023 --> 00:25:34.908
And the goal is to get them busy, get them full, get them at capacity, whether their capacity is 40 hours a week or 20 hours a week, or they just want to take a one project.
00:25:35.398 --> 00:25:44.459
Additional is to get them feeling really good and feeling fulfilled in their engagements, and then we'll start to add more Fractional CMOs over time.
00:25:45.388 --> 00:25:52.115
I'm interested too, in your process, are you looking or do you today work off some templated strategies?
00:25:52.134 --> 00:26:04.355
So in other words, everybody on the team follows a similar process, or do you let those individuals and those personalities kind of engage with the companies in a manner that sort of they see fit.
00:26:04.991 --> 00:26:07.602
Yeah, so we have a model.
00:26:07.602 --> 00:26:22.241
We call the five phases of market led growth, and it allows us to look at things from brand, from execution, from content, product market fit, go to market strategy.
00:26:22.271 --> 00:26:23.801
It looks at these different things.
00:26:24.646 --> 00:26:29.116
And so that I think is very organized and something we feel very good about.
00:26:29.626 --> 00:26:54.656
And part of what that allows us to do is we can use that as, when you go to the doctor and you have a chart of the body and say point to where it hurts, we use that five phases of market led growth as that entry point to build a plan based on what the biggest pain point the company has is, and then we can develop customized solutions.
00:26:54.906 --> 00:27:05.267
We try to do everything on a rolling 90 day plan, and we do everything on a very agile, you know, model where we do either two week or sometimes one week sprints.
00:27:05.987 --> 00:27:07.696
So that is established.
00:27:07.696 --> 00:27:13.287
So we use either a Trello board or Asana boards to make sure that we're organized and we're flowing nicely.
00:27:14.446 --> 00:27:31.997
Having said that, we also, you know, as far as filling in the blanks with what the strategy is and the workshops we need to do to build the plan or the collaboration and how that works, we leave up to every one of our ICMOs because there is a gift that they have.
00:27:32.767 --> 00:27:39.227
Every single one of them is 10 times smarter than I am and a way better marketer than I am.
00:27:39.527 --> 00:27:51.616
I'm an okay marketer, I love branding, I love establishing process, and I'm an okay marketer, but I don't think anybody should hire me to get their growth that happened.
00:27:51.876 --> 00:27:57.977
They need the magic that our team brings in as our Fractional CMOs.
00:27:58.336 --> 00:28:19.196
So I'm establishing a process that I know gets us to find the pain points the quickest, and gets us to building a process that works well so we can measure and test and communicate really well with our clients, but everything else, the magic, the secret sauce, the plan, and the process, that's up to every one of the Fractional CMOs.
00:28:19.841 --> 00:28:23.892
It's interesting to me how this space is developing out.
00:28:24.192 --> 00:28:33.632
I've seen some what I would call partnerships where a number of people who are in the space, join a company almost as a partner, they're almost starting a consulting type company.
00:28:33.932 --> 00:28:38.311
And then they get clients, they farm them out to whoever is the most appropriate.
00:28:38.311 --> 00:28:42.481
But I think that there's a fair amount of collaboration with the people on those teams as well.
00:28:42.811 --> 00:28:55.366
And then I've seen things like what you're doing there at Grow, where it's a bit of a matchmaking service where you're bringing in independent people, trying to match them with clients, give them a little bit of structure, and grow that over time.
00:28:55.666 --> 00:28:59.686
And then I see a lot of independents that are out there just kind of doing their own thing.
00:29:00.136 --> 00:29:03.047
And I think there's good and bad toll of this, right?
00:29:03.047 --> 00:29:08.314
There are a lot of businesses that need help, and I don't think a lot of businesses really know where to look.
00:29:09.253 --> 00:29:11.114
And I think that's a huge challenge.
00:29:11.144 --> 00:29:27.913
And so I think the more that organizations like yours get some scale, get some visibility, it helps everybody in general become more familiar with the concept because all you need to do is do a Google search and you can see that, you know, Fractional CMO, virtual CMO, those aren't high ranking search terms, right?
00:29:27.913 --> 00:29:30.124
You know, people, it's not top of mind.
00:29:30.403 --> 00:29:32.644
But there are so many businesses out there that need help.
00:29:33.450 --> 00:29:36.430
So you know, I have seen a lot of different models.
00:29:36.460 --> 00:29:49.855
So first of all, I think the reason why we got such great response to our iCMO search is because there are so many people that are saying, I want to do something else than working for one company.
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