Brand Building and Customer-Centric Marketing at Attentive

0:00If you want to really leverage AI, you've got to have all of your data and your brand voice and things that really matter in a really good place. Otherwise, when you go to use all that data to scale, you're not going to deliver that really custom personalized experience for a consumer. AI is certainly becoming more prevalent in marketing. There's no doubt there. And then I think it's also interesting and important to consider the human touch. That's been at the core of AI. It's like, how do you find that balance? People want to recreate that very personal experience. When you go to a store and you have that dialogue with the salesperson who goes off and finds it in the size and color that you need or that you're looking for.

0:35and it's very personal. It's all about you. Consumers want to replicate that in these online experiences. And I think AI is actually doing that in a way that the consumer doesn't feel like they're being talked to as one of many. They feel like one in a million. And I think that communication can be duplicated at scale through AI, which is something we haven't been able to do in marketing. So I think it's very human when you get it right.

1:03Welcome back to another exciting episode of Marketing Trends. This is your host, Jeremy Bergeron, as always. And today, our guest is Keri McGee. Keri is the Chief Marketing Officer of Attentive. And if you don't know, know that Attentive is a company that's revolutionizing how brands connect with consumers through mobile messaging and email. Attentive is not just another player in the marketing tech space. It's a game changer. And imagine a world where every text message from a brand feels like a personal conversation with a trusted friend. I know I want that. I know all my friends want that. And we're getting there.

1:47That's the world Attentive is creating. They're at the forefront of conversational commerce. They use AI and data-driven insights to help brands engage with customers in ways that are not just effective, but genuinely welcomed by consumers like me and you. Keri is the marketing mastermind behind Attentive's meteoric rise. We're going to talk about some of that rise today. She's got a career spanning giants like Zillow and innovative startups like Ethos Life. that Keri brings a very unique blend of B2B and B2C marketing expertise to the table. And she's not just riding the wave of digital transformation.

2:31She's helping to shape it. So under Keri's leadership, Attentive has achieved some pretty remarkable milestones. They've made the Forbes Cloud 100 list for not one, not two, not three, but four consecutive years. Nice flex. I'm the only messaging marketing company to do so from what I found. Their AI-powered solutions are driving massive change. That's pretty incredible. And these aren't just numbers out of nowhere. They represent a fundamental shift in the way that businesses are connecting with their customers. So very excited to have Kerry. And so whether you're a marketing leader, a fellow CMO, or a marketing executive, or just a business owner that's wondering how to better connect with your customers or simply someone who just is fascinated by how technology is reshaping our world, you're in for a treat.

3:25Keri, welcome to the show. We're so thrilled to have you here and cannot wait to leap into this conversation. Hi, Jeremy. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here on behalf of Attentive and just to get to spend some time with you and your audience. Indeed, indeed. Now, you mentioned before we started chatting here that you've been at Attentive for a couple of years and have now navigated your way to the chief marketing officer role. You're in your kind of first 12 months of that role. Is that correct? Still feels brand new. Okay. I love it. I love it. So I know having interviewed a handful of marketing executives that are in their first year, there's a lot going on inside of your mind, inside of your heart in terms of the strategy and what you find important.

4:06And so I love the seat that you're in because a lot goes down in that first year, as you know, personally. I want you to kind of zoom out of that for a moment because you've been a marketing leader. You've been in marketing for a long time. It's not like this is new, but I'm sure along the way, Carrie, you have learned some lessons. I'm sure there's been lots of interactions and things that have shaped you and molded you. And so if you could just consider a lesson, perhaps the hardest lesson or one of the hardest lesson you've learned as a leader in marketing, what was that lesson and how did that experience change you?

4:42Yeah. I'll go back to a time at Zillow where we were growing really fast. I was employed 380 when I left. We were 8 ,500 and that was a span of just over seven years. So our growth was incredibly fast. And with that comes a lot of change, a lot of new people, bringing in new people with new cultures and new executives and leaders with different ideas of thinking. And I think it's really easy to get caught up when you're in growth at that velocity or that speed to just kind of follow the ball to the obvious answer or follow like the loudest voice in the room. And where I had to spend a lot of time like seeking like coaching and mentors is getting spun up in maybe the wrong direction, like maybe following the wrong lead and the wrong voice in the room and forgetting to do what's right for the customer.

5:29Whether you're in B2B or you're in B2C or direct to consumer, the best advice I got during that time was if you put the customer first, If at the core, you understand what your customer cares about, what motivates them, what they make decisions based on, whether it's emotional, data, whatever it is, and you lead with that through all product innovation, through all marketing strategy, through all brand, you typically come out on the right side. And if you get too hung up on the internal pieces of that, you really can miss the mark. And we did that. We learned. We failed. We definitely did that along the way.

6:03But it was something that I've anchored in, I think, in the last 10 years. of asking the question. And I'm not always the expert on the product or the technology we're building. I know very little about the intricacies of machine learning. But what I do know about and where I do focus is like, be the expert and be the voice of the customer. And if you do that in marketing, you can solve the right problems. And I think that's one of my early learnings. I love it. It's like, when in doubt, go back to the customer and go back to what's important to them. Is it easy to forget that? Is it difficult to kind of be distracted by things where it's like, wait, wait a second, now we're talking about this and that and there, we just maybe forgot about maybe the most important voice in the room, which is that of the customer.

6:40Is there just some distortion there for a marketing leader that can kind of get lost? I think as marketing leaders, it is our job to be the voice of the customer. And so if it's not in your DNA, it's not in your culture, and you're not going into meetings and starting conversations around taking a new product to market, and you're not speaking on behalf of the customer, right? You don't have a persona you're referencing. One of the epic ones, we are building that definitely attentive as we go multi-product and we're serving different types of customers and different roles in companies. But one of my favorite things that I took away from Zillow is we didn't start a question about building something for a buyer without talking about Beth or talking about Rachel the renter.

7:18And we lived like that through our culture and our dialogue. And if you just start talking about the products you want to build and the things you can build versus the things you could build or that the customer wants, I think it's really easy to get caught up in the velocity of like, we're shipping products weekly, monthly, features are coming at such a rapid pace and we have to always be rooted in like, who are we building this for? What are we solving for? And it's really easy, I think, to get caught up in the culture of sometimes even outpacing what the customer needs. Like that happens too.

7:47And if you don't have that language about speaking on behalf of the persona of who your buyer is or who the person is you're solving the problem from, you can get caught up in like the next feature, the next technology, RCS, like everything's coming so fast and you can get absorbed in that. So I think it's pretty easy to do. And it takes a decent amount of discipline. And as a marketing leader, you can shape that. You can build that culture at your company. Wow. As you think about being a CMO in your role and kind of drawing on your experience, probably working with other CMOs and now being in the seat of CMO, is there an aspect of being a chief marketing officer that you think most people don't understand or appreciate?

8:26That's a loaded question. yes i i think a big part of now in in today's environment every marketing leader has to be as obsessed with data as the rest of the organization so that's one thing that i think most people are starting to get it but i still think marketers are often seen as the fluff the creative like not thinking really strategically and so that i think will be you know continue to be a hurdle we have to jump over. But I think at the core of it, marketers are storytellers. And so a great marketer knows how to bring together the vision, the value for the customer, why we do what we do and deliver great stories.

9:05And I think that gets lost sometimes. I think people see us as like, just give us another enablement deck or another PowerPoint or another pretty website page. But it's really like the story has to come together and it has to be stitched together that anybody who encounters your brand at any point of the customer journey knows what you do and why they care. And I think that gets lost on what a marketing leader has to really focus on. I love that answer. I'm curious too, because I think about, you're in this position, you're in this role where, and I literally, we talked about this yesterday. I had a CMO from Trellix on yesterday, a shout out to Ash Parikh.

9:42And he was talking about the same thing, Kerry, about how it's not a role that is fluff. It is art and science and it's driving growth and driving demand. And he talked about brand building and balancing immediate results with long-term brand building. And I'm curious about how you balance that pressure, right? Because you're certainly, well, one, you picked a segment where you're on the cutting edge. You didn't pick this stodgy segment, right? You're literally on the front lines of communication with customers, with their phones and email, and maybe other things that we'll talk about, but certainly those two.

10:17And so you've also got stakeholders, you've got the teams and you've got, you know, there's so much that you get to, you know, juggle as a CMO. And so you certainly are able to ride that pressure. You would not be where you are if you weren't able to do that. But how does Cary balance the pressure of immediate results with, hey, we're long-term brand building here? And are there times when these conflict? Definitely. It's called revenue and growth, right? I mean, these are big numbers. So they're in conflict often because your sales partners, your go-to-market partners want that instant hit of, does this correlate into a shorter deal cycle?

10:55Does this correlate into a closed deal? And so having the conversation around where does marketing have influence and where does brand play? We went through an exercise and I think a lot of tech companies did where when we had the downturn and the shift in the economy as far as what the markets looked like in mid-2022 and a lot of marketing budgets were really cut back. The first thing to go was brand awareness. It was the one thing marketing leaders were fighting for. We're like, no, we can't cut that because it will impact. We promise 12 to 18 months from now, we're going to see a lot of metrics that matter start to take a decline from organic traffic and website visits and all the things that typically brand awareness really lifts and then start attributing that to longer things.

11:37Like do deal cycles take longer because your customer is having to be reassociated with the brand? Do you fall out of the hearts and minds of current customers, not just prospects, but current customers? Like there's a FOMO effect of everything we do. And so brand is a big piece of that. And awareness is a big piece of that. It's not just to drive that next high intent customer. So we went through that exercise and it started to happen. We were able to see the results and start lobbying and advocating brand and awareness and defining who we are and staying top of mind for anybody who's a potential decision maker, a potential influencer, a potential end user is really important.

12:14And so having that long-term view, we had to re-instill that belief. Like, okay, we had a really good use case about why we won't make that decision again. But when you cut budgets, it's often the first thing to go. And you have to focus on the short-term revenue gains. And we had to let go of some of that. But we're learning it has its long-term impact for sure. So I balance it every day. To answer your question, I do have to balance it every day. I have sales leaders that I'm accountable to as far as driving that pipeline. and I have CS and strategic account managers that I'm accountable to for retention and expansion and customers.

12:49And what they think is going to be the game changer this week or this month is not always in alignment with what I or the marketing team might believe will be the game changer. And I can give you many examples, but it's a daily thing that you just have to take a deep breath and have perspective that you have to do some parallel pathing, like give them some short wins, but you can't do everything while you focus the team on the longer term vision of the brand. I love this. And I think a skill that I find, I find a lot of skills that CMOs have very interesting. And I think one of the not so talked about skills, which I love talking about on this show.

13:25And if you've heard any of our episodes, you'll hear it come up sometimes. But there is a real skill and necessity in building trust with the other C-suite executives and the ELT, right? And just with your team in general. But you're talking about now in 2020, wrapping up 2024 here pretty soon, where I think the velocity of trust is so important across the aisle to the CTO, the CIO, and the CRO, and the CEO. And the trust built there is critical, right? I've talked to some orgs that, you know, the CMO and the CRO share goals. They have shared goals. They talk often. They hang out often. They, you know, they build that trust in a really solid way.

14:05And I imagine that you have to build and maintain strong relationships as well, you know, where you're at at attentive. Have you encountered any challenges in your career there? How does Carrie do this? How do you really, you know, speed of trust, speed of connection? Because there's got to be that. It's got to exist as you're, again, growing fast and the world is changing fast. So what's working well in terms of just building trust with your fellow execs? Yeah, lots of lessons. One thing I learned recently, because everybody in your stakeholder group is also probably on a different trajectory and has had different experiences and has different trusted relationships.

14:42So I think coming into an organization to build that is always your number one challenge. You have to build trust quickly. And it's definitely through delivering results, get aligned early and figure out what they care about. But for me on this leadership team, it's really about building the intimacy around one-to-one relationships because as a whole, that makes us stronger. So I make the time. If we're at an offsite for two or three days and I want to go to bed at eight or nine because I've flown in from the West Coast, I stay up and I make sure that I'm paying attention and I'm asking the right questions and I'm building those trusted relationships through the conversations that you can't have in a super targeted agenda of a one-on-one.

15:20You have to listen and find the time to be able to convey how in it you are with them. I constantly say to my team, it doesn't matter if marketing is hitting our metrics on pipeline this month or if we're hitting a metric that we care deeply about on our scorecard. What matters is if our company and our go-to-market teams or other teams are not having the same success scenario, we feel their pain. We are in it with them. We are here to solve the problem as a company. And so whenever I'm building those relationships, I really take that approach. Like I am not here to take over all of pipeline. I'm not here to like change how you think about where the value is or to insert myself into something that I don't think is going well or my team can do better.

16:05I really focus on what's right for the company. I always make sure that we're aligned on what are you trying to do this quarter or this year? How can I help you? And just really listen and figure out what they care about and then enable the teams to do that work. I think that's the other missus. I own these relationships. How do I push that down across my team to make sure they understand how that relationship matters across sales and enablement or CS and what do they care about? And I have to make them really pay attention to what matters most to our stakeholders right now versus maybe what cool campaign idea we want to have if it's not going to actually correlate to their goals.

16:39So I think it's like those intimate relationships are one that I spend a lot of time listening and forcing, honestly, inserting yourself in a new leadership group. you have to figure out like, who are you going to be in that group as a voice? And like, what point of view are you going to have? Those one-to-one intimate relationships of really getting to know somebody I've found is my quickest way to trust along with delivering results and getting aligned. Is there a role on the ELT that you feel like as a CMO is more important to connect with these days versus maybe in the past, right? Like I have a suspicion that because of data privacy and how important that is in the world that Attentive is serving, that maybe you and the CTO have to probably be pretty tight or pretty connected to the CIO, if that's a role there.

17:25Or maybe it's the CFO. I talked to a CMO last year who was like, yeah, I invited the CFO to come to our agency and we spent three days together in the room to go over the strategy. And I was like, that's fascinating. You brought the CFO of a huge Fortune 100 brand into this creative think tank for a couple of days. And I was like, that's cool. So is any of that kind of floating up to the surface for you where it's like, hey, I mean, all members of the ELT, I'm certain are important, but I feel like in your industry, your sector, and the way the world's headed, is there someone or a role where you're like, yeah, we have to be tight now?

17:57It's all of them. I mean, that's the answer right now. Like product, engineering, revenue, like you have to be tight with all of them. I think here we spend a lot of time as an ELT together. We really work to break down silos and align weekly. We align constantly in person and online. So that's really helpful to get in a room and actually have the conversations. The one relationship here that I've not had at other organizations that I am really working on nurturing and making sure we're really connected is our finance. Because finance has been very much around high growth and the visibility that finance sometimes has in forecasting and how can we predict churn?

18:33Where can marketing help influence different metrics that are just non-traditional, right? Like where the landscape's changing constantly in B2B and where marketing is showing up more and more is owning a piece of this customer expansion and retention. And that's not been the norm. And so you have to work with all of your friends in finance, including the CFO to say, how do we build the right models? How do we make sure that we're showing up to be accountable? If we're going to have those shared metrics between a CRO and a CMO, what are the models that actually are like significant and people believe and are pretty bulletproof from we believe they work and they can have impact and change?

19:04And so that's where I've been partnering a lot more with finances. How do we build the models so we can make the right bets for the future? I love that. Okay. I always love this question too, but I'm particularly interested in your answer because again, as I mentioned, you're serving an incredibly fast-paced world. You're serving lots of sectors and segments and you're at the front lines of new trends in tech. And I imagine that at any moment of the day, at any, literally any minute, you could probably divert your attention towards the fire hose of new trends in tech, you know? And I can also imagine that that could be overwhelming as well.

19:43It's like, where do I go? Like, how do I stay current? How do I, I mean, you have to stay current. You've got to be, you know, you've got to know what the new trends are and what's happening. How do you do that? How do you kind of block other things? Like, do you have a couple of resources or sources? like, hey, I go to these things or I have three people that are mentoring me and I trust them? Or do you just kind of open up the search and look around and kind of always paying attention to what other brands are doing? Again, how does Cary stay current with new trends in tech? Yeah. New trends in tech is really hard in the MarTech space, right?

20:17We have hundreds of players and new players coming in every day. And with the introduction of real predictive AI, it's been intense to stay up to speed on like what is everybody doing so i rely on like several different resources but i spend like the first thing i do in the morning is kind of go through like all of our industry pubs that we follow um figure out like who's actually pitching what what are customers what are analysts saying and just like really understand what are people talking about i try and stay really focused to our industry because there's so much going on in retail and e-commerce there's plenty to keep me busy so i i go to like uh retail think retail i go to some of our CTI, like some of our governance and compliance sites, because what is happening with data and how people think about it and sharing data is also really important.

21:00And then I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I follow a lot of B2B companies that are at our same trajectory as far as like size and going from single to multi-product. There's a lot of those learnings that come through when you're adding products, but like what's coming in tech, it's really like figuring out like who's actually doing it and following what those companies are talking about. Analysts always, But the companies doing it, I find, have a really good perspective. And some of the engineering and product blogs are also really interesting on how they're thinking about using new technologies.

21:30We are doing a lot of research on RCS right now. But that to me is like this, what could that possibly be? And what does it mean to our customers? So there's lots of different places. And then our CTO, Antonio, he's amazing. He is a wealth of knowledge. If you want to know anything about what's coming, I don't know how he sleeps. He says he does, but he knows about it before everyone else. And so he's definitely like a new trusted advisor that if I have a question, I can quickly ping him. And he typically has a pulse on what's going on. I love that. Since you mentioned it, we have another show on our network that if he's not been on IT Visionaries, we need to have him as a CTO on that show.

22:09We love nerding out with CTOs. So Carrie, something else I'm really curious about, and again, this is just the nerd in me wanting to know about like your visibility? Cause I imagine that being at the helm of marketing for attentive, you see a lot in terms of consumer behavior. Um, zooming out a little bit, like what, what industries it is attentive serving, like what segments and sectors is attentive really focused on? Yeah, we, our core and where we got started was really in retail and e-commerce. And that has really been the majority of where we focused like building products and building relationships with customers.

22:45But over the last couple of years, we really have started expanding into some new verticals. So we've spent a good amount of time doing research and building relationships in food and beverage. So serving like big vendors like Wendy's or a Pepsi or like a big food and beverage vendor or a Chipotle, all types of customers that have use cases. And then in the last year, we've really started leaning into travel and hospitality. There's some great use cases. We just brought on all of the MLB. and so some really fun sports teams that are coming up on the sports and entertainment side, which there's also some great use cases.

23:16So we're really finding new ways to reach consumers and create these personalized experiences. But we're really stepping into it and improving out doing the use case and making sure we're building the right tools that apply. But e-commerce and retail is where we started and that continues to be our core because the use case for personal shopping, True personalized shopping has been where we've spent a lot of our time innovating, but adapting that to these new verticals has been a really fun exercise on the marketing side. Sports and entertainment are fun. Do you see a difference in the way consumers are interacting with marketing on retail and e-com versus sports and entertainment?

23:56Are you seeing like, hey, this community actually doesn't respond to what this community does? Or are you seeing kind of across the board, this personalized AI experience happening and it's applicable in all the sectors that you're serving? Or is it actually different? The use cases are slightly different. How people are adopting it or how consumers are just ready for it is not different. The level of interaction, this is how consumers want to be reached. We're learning more and more, there's tons of data and research around it, but consumers want to engage with mobile online experiences. They want the easiest, most seamless experience to meet them where they are.

24:34And they want it to be as hyper-personalized as they can. There's nothing more frustrating when you get a message or when you get some communication, if it's from a sporting event or a ticket sales, and it's the same thing over and over again. What you want is you want that ticket sale that's like you're heading to New York and you want to go see Disney Aladdin because you haven't seen it yet. And you actually want to show up and know that there's tickets for the show on the day and you've been browsing for it, and you're getting targeted messages around the ticket availability and price and promotions that apply to you.