ZOOM's CMO!! 🎯 Stop Calling It a Webinar 🍿 SPECIAL GUEST! Kimberly Storin | Ep. 492

0:01Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This Not That, and we have a guest. I'm way too excited. I'm so excited that she is here. So who is here? We have Kim Storin here. Now, who is she? You know who she is. She is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zoom. Zoom. Yes, that Zoom, the thing that actually became a verb, right, and rewired the entire planet overnight. And yes, you use it for all your meeting stuff, but we're going to be talking about webinars today because they're actually secret sauce for webinars.

0:43But before she was CMO at Zoom, all right, she's been crushing it. She was CMO at Zayo, okay? And she didn't just like do marketing stuff there. She built the entire function from scratch, scaling this thing, integrating stuff, acquisitions, growing the revenue. And then before that, she got her start doing M &A stuff at Deloitte. But the coolest thing is she has an MBA from the University of Southern California, which shout out to my daughter from the Marshall School. My daughter will be starting there in the fall. So fight on. There you go. And she also, there's two things about Kim that I love.

1:15I love that she's a champion for women because I'm all about, I'm more pro women than I am pro dudes. I just am. And why do I say that? Because she, in the Austin community. She is the chair of the Women's Fund for the Austin Community Foundation and also one of the founding members of the Austin chapter of Women in Revenue. She's all about uplifting women in their careers. And the other reason I think she's awesome is she thinks different. She's here because I read a post that she did about webinars and it blew my mind because it was the exact opposite of what everybody else says. And I cannot wait to get into all things webinar.

1:52Kim, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. And I have to just say like, thanks for the USC shout out. So fight on. But the real reason that the universe sent me to USC to get my MBA was because it knew that Vince Young was going to take Texas to the championship in 2005. And so I had a student ticket and got to see my Longhorns and undergrad always beats nba unfortunately when it comes to football so i got the front row seat to see vince young win in the last 11 minutes of the rose bowl in 2005 so yes so the most important stat i want to know on an annual basis do you say hook them or fight on more which one do you say fight on is only when like i'm talking about planning my reunion fair enough i'll just say hook them the rest of the time.

2:45Arch Manning, I love you. Okay, wherever you are. All right, let's get into this though, because you think when you have the CMO of Zoom on, you're going to talk about how to run meetings more effectively or whatever, because that's what people think about Zoom. What people don't know about Zoom, not that there's a commercial for Zoom. Yeah, right. People, I mean, trust me, I got to get, don't even, you're going to hang up on me or whatever, because I use Microsoft Teams, which I need to get off of. I don't want to even start, but so they're not going to be coming on the show anytime soon but anyway what they don't know about zoom is that you guys are a big player in virtual events and in webinars when we get to webinars you said something i'm paraphrasing here and i want to dig into it you basically said most webinars deserve to die i mean that's a from your seat that's a hot take like what why do most webinars deserve to die well if you if you kept reading that i actually don't think that they deserve to die i think the way that we're doing them deserves to die and and what i think we have it all comes back to the death spiral that we've gotten into with demand gen overriding the the need for human experience human connection and and brand investment and so as we kind of moved into the sassification of marketing, if you will, performance marketing became the end all be all.

4:09And it was MQL to SQL death spiral for us all. And people got addicted to what they believed was measurement, right? Being able to measure marketing impact. And so we started treating webinars in that same way. We started treating them like a lead gen machine versus really designing them to drive a human experience and a brand level experience, as well as moving people through the funnel, through that buying journey. And so when we design something just for lead capture, it shows in the experience. And so that's kind of what we're seeing everywhere right now. But I think webinars really shows that.

4:59And so it's not the format that is the problem. It's what the intention behind the webinars has really impacted and driven us to do some really bad behavior when it comes to trying to get our prospects and customers to sit through an hour, boring, uninteresting, gated-only webinar situation. All right. So let's dig into that though, because I mean, I totally agree with you that webinars live under the demand gen umbrella for the most part, right? Whoever runs the man, Jen, oh, we're going to put on webinars because we need our BDRs to get a certain number of leads and whatnot. So how do we insert the humanity?

5:43How do we make it not be a sales pitch yet? We kind of need these people to convert or else what are we doing the webinars for? Like, like, how do you make it all work? So I think it starts with really understanding where the buying behavior has changed, especially in the last few years. We have started to see now that most of the buying decision is happening before somebody wants to actually talk to a brand, before they want to talk to a seller. And so that preference formation, it's not just about awareness. It's about thinking about that time in the journey as being preference formation. That's where that narrative ownership, the category framing, the peer validation, the brand salience all matters.

6:33And when we look at it as awareness, consideration, preference, we're kind of missing the fact now that this is really the preference formation time period. And so they don't want to talk to us until we're on a short list. That means we have to spend that time during the preference formation era of making sure that we are on the short list. And that means something different if you're a transactional sale versus an enterprise sale. But you basically have to win preference during that upfront time. and it's very different than how the journey used to be. And so that means if you start thinking about that differently and you start thinking about the role of a webinar as part of preference formation and all of those things, brand salience, narrative, category framing, peer validation, it changes the content and the intent behind that webinar.

7:36Right now, it's not just about you sharing everything. It's about bringing in industry experts. It's about ensuring that you've got their peers, your customer peers, validating the category framing and validating the product experience and validating the challenges in the market. And so it's a very different mindset when you start thinking about how that journey has changed and the fact that people really want to do their research on their own. And they're using LLMs more than ever, right? More than 50 % of enterprise decisions are started on an LLM now and people are much more empowered. And so we have to leverage webinars as a play in that preference formation instead of thinking about it in the traditional funnel.

8:29So preference formation, I love that. And is a big component, because I think one of the big fails in webinars is that they are ultimately like these sales pitches. That's what they feel like. And everyone's like, it sucks, right? So is the secret sauce now for getting people to prefer your brand or whatever to lead? There's a value exchange there. Somebody's giving up their time and then you're giving them something. Instead of leading with, okay, here's our product, we're gonna break it down, we got all this cool stuff, we got new features, whatever. Is the move now for that preference, to get that preference moment to lead with, here's what's going on in the industry, here's what's going on in your sector, here's what other, all the different stuff that's out there.

9:13And at the end you're like, and this is how we actually also help to solve it? Or is it okay to weave in everything you do throughout? Like, should you be providing that thought leadership and then kind of close the deal? Is that a better recipe to success? I think it depends on who your audience is, right? Which is kind of a cop-out answer, right? It depends, but it's true. And when you're talking to technical buyers who are, you know, further along in their preference formation and they are in the shortlist consideration slash confirmation phase, you may need to be hitting hard with technical and product content and being really upfront about what problem is.

9:56you're solving that nobody else in the market can because you're further along in that process. If you're talking about early on and kind of prospect, then things like the community orientation, the narrative and category thought leadership may be more impactful. So I think the challenge is that A, you have to understand your business strategy. And I think part of the challenges is like we've gotten so hooked on our experience in our discipline that we forget that our discipline has to layer on to the business strategy and the category and the industry and the problems we're solving for our customers and if you can't understand that as a demand gen leader and you're just like bringing best practices for demand gen you're not going to actually solve the problems that your customer needs.

10:52And so it is that it's the ability to like have expertise in your discipline. Sure. But stepping back and truly understanding the problem that you're trying to solve and who that audience is that you're going for and where are they in their journey. And I think sometimes like we're just looking to find the easy answer. You just said something which was like, I feel like a doofus for never really have thought about this before but you know we benchmark for example we do our email marketing we know our email newsletters do this our promotional emails do this our retention emails do this whatever but we look at webinars we're just like webinars regardless of if they are for people that are current customers or prospects or further down the the whatever and i think it's really important for people to actually uh carve out the different buckets of webinars like you just detailed because you do speak to these people differently.

11:49I think that's hugely valuable. I don't think anybody's really, I'm not doing it because I'm an idiot, but that's a whole other problem. Okay, I have you here. I'm not wasting this moment here. I need to ask you a series of rapid fire webinar related things. I need all the answers. The first thing is you said something and now I don't even know how I feel about it. You said gated. And for everybody out there doesn't know what it means. Gated means you got a form, you got to fill it out in order to see the webinar, watch the webinar whatever so do we are we pro gated or we just want to let anybody see anything at all the time and not get their info again i'm gonna say it depends right of where you are and that if you are at the early part of preference formation you may not want to if you're talking about really technical details and you're you're down towards that shortlist confirmation it might need to be gated personally i i mean when was the last time that you filled out a form for anything uh the only thing that is worth me putting my contact information in is like compensation data like something that i literally can't get anywhere else um and and so it's hard to say like if i have to sign up for something in order to to get the information i i might not i might not participate But if that content is of the utmost value and that brand is of the utmost relevance to address that value, then that gated approach may work.

13:20And so I think it just really comes down to understanding again, that business strategy, that buyer journey, and what right to win do you have as a brand to demand that someone give you their contact information in order to, for that exchange of information? What's the value? All right. The next one is not going to be one that you said it depends. This one, you're going to have to say good or bad. 60 minute webinars, good or bad?

13:50So I might say it depends. No. So I believe bad, right? Like fully, I think they should be 30 minutes or less. Like this is people's time. But I was sitting next to the head of growth marketing at Snowflake the other day. And she said, I'm going to say I want 90 minute webinars. And my mind was blown. I'm getting her on a video tomorrow to talk about this. but when we really broke it down, she was talking about shortlist confirmation. She was talking about technical deep dives. And so is that the traditional definition of a webinar? Maybe, maybe not. But when I'm thinking about this with my team, I think people's time is very valuable.

14:35And if we don't have the right level of content, I'm going for shorter is better. All day. We do 22 minute webinars and they crush better than 30. gives people eight minutes back on their calendar. They love it, so I'm all in. All right, we've been saying the W word a lot here today. I hate the W word, but I know you have swag that says Zoom loves webinars. Do you think the word webinar itself is stained? Should we be calling these things something else? Yes, I think as a category, it still works because people know what you mean. So I'm selling a webinar platform to a buyer and webinar works better for me to be able to have that sales conversation.

15:19But when I'm talking to get somebody, like actually get somebody to join a webinar, don't call it a webinar. So the category exists. The category is clear. People know what it means. Great. That doesn't mean I want to join a webinar. Okay. This is huge. The CMO of Zoom probably puts out more webinars than anybody on the planet. Just said, you can call it something else. You know what kills me? I don't know if this kills you. Every time someone's promoting a webinar they have, they'll send out an email and they put the first word in their subject line and it will say, webinar colon blah, blah, blah.

15:53And I'm like, dude, why don't you just write, this is going to be boring, blah, blah, blah. Like, don't you think that's terrible? Yeah, agreed. Okay, go. We agree. Amazing. Okay. So I'm just curious. how do we get the chat going more? I feel like you guys probably have all these doodads in Zoom I'm not even aware of. Do you think you, I hate when you're starting out webinars, like, oh, we're gonna start in two minutes. Everyone just relax and then everything just dies. Do you think you should be doing polls out of the gate, firing up emojis? What do we do to get everybody kind of engaged out of the jump so that way there's energy there?

16:28Absolutely. So I think it's important to drive a great experience from the moment people join until the moment they leave. And so when we're doing a bigger experience, like we recently did a very large scale, high production quality event for students and educators around AI with some very high profile talent, YouTube, educators, others. And so for that, it was high energy, that YouTube influencer, opened that up immediately, got the team like kind of excited. And it was that high energy experience from the get-go. I also host a monthly community webinar. We don't call it that. We call it a table talk for exactly that reason.

17:21And it's less structured content. It's all about building community with CMOs. It's all about sharing best practices. And so I kick off that monthly table talk with a standard question for my whoever I'm having join, which is, you know, what's your theme song? And the reason why is we've created a playlist. And so this playlist, we share it with the CMOs that join all the time. People will use the chat to share. That gets the ball rolling. So as soon as I ask the panelists who are not panelists, because I would never call them that, my strategic thinkers that are joining the conversation, that question, you then get the 50 other CMOs that are on the table talk putting their theme songs into the chat.

18:13And the whole dynamic of that, that, you know, hour long, because this is a community builder, so it's a little bit different, right? That time together sharing insights is so much more engaging. People are coming off mute, they're having conversation, and it has a very different vibe than if we started in a different way. So it is about maximizing that initial moment and building that initial moment for whether it's like that highly structured content or less structured community building that matters. I think it's so important that people are intentional about people, getting people to talk in the chat, not just what city they're from, but doing like what you just said and doing it throughout.

18:57We've done a lot of studies. We see people that comment in the chat stay longer and they go to pipeline actually faster. Right. Once you're engaged, you're engaged. You got to get them going. All right, before we wrap up here, are you like such a Longhorn fan? Are you going to all the games? Is that like football season? We're not going to find you on a Saturday? Look at the color. You're wearing orange right now. Is that all that you're all about? No, not at all. I mean, I do love my Longhorns, although we're a little bit more focused on our surprise basketball situation with the women and the men's this year.

19:32Right. But, you know, it's funny because when I lived in other cities, I spent about 11 years on both coasts. And and I was way more diehard Longhorn sports fan when I didn't live in Austin. And and I think it's because, again, it's kind of bringing that human connection. Like you're walking on the street and you've got your your jersey on, you're going to the game and you end up meeting all these people that are also Longhorn fans. our alumni club was so strong that it really was the community connector in in a lot of ways and so i do go to the games not every game but i do go to a lot of them but it's a little different when you're surrounded every day by longhorns versus when it's like this special moment you know on the streets of san francisco or the streets of new york so well if you see kim out there you say hook whatever city she's in you say that and then for everybody out there listen uh kim did not tell me to say this but this is a fact zoom is an incredible platform for webinars and virtual events it is not just about having a meeting it's not just a verb if you haven't checked them out for that we'll put in the show notes you got to do that and follow kim on linkedin kimberly store and s-t-o-r-i-n she is an amazing follow amazing human being kim thank you for being here oh thanks for having me.

20:53This was fun. Wait, the party is not over. Go to jayschwedelson.com because I want to do stuff with you. I want to partner with you. When you click on the button partner with Jay, you let me know what you got going on. Work with my agency, work with me directly, get access to all of my free resources at jayschwedelson.com. And I got a book coming out this April. It's called Stupider People Have Done It. And all of the net proceeds are going to the the foundation for cancer research. Go on Amazon, buy stupider people have done it. That way you can help kick cancer's butt with me. And if this podcast wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, it might've been, leave it a review, follow the show.

21:37You are awesome. Go out there and crush it.