From ROI to Relationships - Tifenn Dano Kwan

0:26Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. Chief Marketing Officer at Amplitude. Tiffin's mission as a data-driven leader is to shape the future of work through superior digital experiences, great teams, and technology that customers love. What a novel idea. Wow. At Amplitude, she drives global marketing strategy and leads a team focused on helping organizations thrive in the digital era. Her career includes CMO roles at Calibra, hopefully I said that right, Dropbox, SAP Ariba, and SAP Fieldglass, a track record that speaks to her ability to scale brands, build impact, and lead with vision. Beyond the C-suite, Tiffin is a vocal LGBTQ plus advocate, a passionate supporter of women in tech, and an avid motorcyclist who brings that same bold energy to everything she does.

1:17Tiffin, dare I say my newfound friend, welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. Really, really excited for our conversation today. I'm so we chatted for a few minutes off air. And if that's even any sign of what's to come, buckle up. OK, I want to start with a high level, like aligning marketing and product to a 200 million ARR and beyond. Now, you scaled companies to serious growth milestones, right? Right off the bat. What's the key? This is like the age-old between sales and marketing, but here's another one. What's the key to aligning marketing and product when the goal is to hit that 100 million AOR or beyond?

1:57Great, great, great point. And, you know, I've actually really focused my career recently on this very critical topic. At times, people ask you, so as a CMO, what's your specialty? What are you great at? What is your passion? What is your expertise? And I dare to say, as CMOs, you have to have multiple expertise, not just one, but there's always one you gravitate towards. And the one that I really love is building bridges and building strategies between product teams and marketing teams. And there's a reason for it. The reason is a lot of companies, whether they are traditional companies or not so traditional, are pivoting their growth strategy to an online strategy.

2:47Turns out that what they sell online most of the time is a product. Think going into a logged in experience. You are an online retailer. You are a quick service restaurant online. I won't say brands, but you know where I'm going. you're offering online is your product. So when marketing tries to bring people into the product, it only feels natural for marketing to work very closely with the teams who own the product. And while that product is a digital surface, it makes a ton of sense for those two teams to just be extremely tight at the hip and do a lot of joint activities, joint work together.

3:34So what it takes for those teams who just really gel, I would say, is what I say, what I call a common language. And that's hard to do, a common language. What is going to bring them together at the table with a sense of purpose, with a sense of shared objectives and shared goals? So that's the first thing that it takes, defining that common language and translating that definition into very specific goals that you can track. The second one is when product teams work into an online logged in environment, when I mean logged in is you have a password, you have a subscription, you go online, you consume, you engage into that interface.

4:19The team are very much focused products on what will retention, Engage the users into the logged-in product experience. And oftentimes, marketing teams have very different objectives. Their job is acquisition, pipeline, making sure that they actually send the people into the logged-in experience. So those elements are really important. And what it takes is for marketing and products to really balance efforts between retention into the product and acquiring users. So that's this balance of retention and acquisition that really needs to be well understood by both teams. And last but not least, in my view, the third thing that it takes for those teams to be really, really connected is sharing the same insights, data insights, user insights, audience insights.

5:18So it works best usually when they have a single platform that connects all of these insights and try these insights along the customer journey. So, okay. So you laid out those three things, a common language, sharing data, and all those things. And on paper, quote unquote, it sounds amazing and seems relatively doable, but you know where I'm going. Why and where do so many in your position as a CMO get it wrong or hit those speed bombs or whatever when it comes to working with product teams? And then how do you bridge those gaps? This is the fundamental question. It's the multimillion dollar question, honestly.

6:00So it's a lot of trials and errors. I've worked in companies where there was divide, misunderstanding, and it's usually misunderstanding with that common language, common goals. There's also a little bit of tug of war in who owns what. So you have to be very, very clear about the definitions of ownership and roles and responsibilities. So it's not easy. And I've learned through trials and errors, like most of us, right? You know what not to do. You know what's not working. And you end up over time with very critical components. And I always gravitate around those three things, a common language with very specific objectives and usually a no-star, what is the actual top metric that everybody is going to go after, balancing the objectives of the teams around retention and acquisition.

6:53and last but not least sharing the same insights. It takes a lot of time, Steve, and sometimes it takes months, years, but I would say the common denominator that I've seen is if the CMO and the chief product officer really align on those core principles, really want to make it work and just really create a collaborative culture, that collaborative culture trickles down with their teams. Yep. But the opposite is, you know, the old adage of it takes two to tango. And if only one wants to dance, how do you do that? Like you don't have that in your world right now, which is great. But a lot of people listening are going, Hey, that's great, Tiffin, but I can't get my product leader, answer my calls, let alone get on the same page.

7:42What do I do? Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's the same thing I would say with, With any sort of partner that you have, whether it's the CRL, the CFO, or the CTO, they may not at first pick your goal, but you have to try. You have to keep trying over and over. Recently, I was at a conference with a CRO, and she told me that in her previous company, she had never met the CMO in person. Wow. In the year and a half that they were working in the same company. So that's an example of really a relationship gone bad. It's just you've got to try. My boss says that to me all the time. He said, Tiffin, you may have disagreements, but you've got to try to pick up the phone.

8:31Try over and over and over. It's really important to give it a shot. So I'd say it's important we all mature people, mature leaders. We have to interact. The other option, if the interaction doesn't come naturally, is to use other teams as a way to connect you. I'll give you a very simple example. We have a revenue operations organization at Amplitude. It's a wonderful organization. And they create that sort of cadence and governance for us. So if you can't pick up the phone, at least you have to attend cadences. You have to attend reviews on a weekly basis and others. So you have to find a mechanism to connect on a regular basis.

9:19And the more consistent your cadence is, the more the collaboration will become enforced. Not in a natural way, but by default, because you're creating that structure and that cadence. So the cadence is important, right? And then the second one, which is the most difficult in any company, is the data. Because the universal language across any team is the data. You have disagreements. You have misunderstandings. I have found that if you can leverage the data to solve problems and disagreements and set aside emotions for a minute, but just really anchor into the data to drive the conversations, it neutralizes guesswork.

10:12It really does neutralize guesswork and it creates much more, I would say, stability and conviction. And over time, if the team start realizing, oh, the data tells actually the right story, they will focus on the data instead of focusing on emotions and likability factors, There's all those kind of things that are just really noise, frankly. Yeah. So, cadences and data. These are the two things, in my view, that are really important. And I would just add, to build on something you said, and it just, I'm a student of human nature in general. I still don't understand why people, I think when most people hear the word relationship, they immediately think personal.

10:52But relationships, for me, are everything we do. And it's no different than a personal relationship and a professional relationship. It's the same things that matter is communication, right, and honesty. It's the same things. Right. Oh, no, for sure. I would say the trick sometimes that I use, I'm not the only one using it, is deadlines. There's nothing like a deadline to mobilize teams. And I've seen it work over and over. So there's a lot of chatter. The teams are just tiptoeing, ping-ponging each other. Nobody agrees. But then you come and say, guys, we have a deadline. We need to execute. And we have a very clear ETA.

11:32So what are we going to do? And that is also a forcing function because everybody has a common goal, which is we need to deliver something. We need to achieve something that is set date. And those deadlines are incredibly efficient in driving teams along. Yeah, I want to I want to focus, if I can, on a couple of two things, acquisition and retention. And I think you just brought both of them. But I want to start with acquisition and the value economy. It's shifting really fast, right? How should marketers, in your opinion, be rethinking acquisition in this new value economy with AI at the center?

12:07Well, you know, I think that the one thing that I would encourage all marketers to do if they haven't started to do so is really take a hard look at their return on investment. So the ROI by channel, by segment, by geography. it's really, really important to understand the performance of every channel of acquisition that you're using. It could be inbound channels. It could be outbound channels. You've got to really track those very, very thoroughly on a regular basis. You've got to connect your spend to your outcomes. That takes a long time. It's really hard. But once you have it, you need to itemize it across all of your channels, right?

12:57And say, okay, what's working well? Is paid social performing? Is paid search at a good ROI level? What are events producing? You index that and you really, really measure the ROI and the time, the timeframe it takes from an investment to start yielding results, right? So this one, in my view, is really critical. So just equip yourself with the data as early as you can. Work with the finance teams, work with your CIO team, your ops team, your systems team to just give you the data that you need to actually identify the channels that work. And then one of the best things I would recommend is diversify.

13:41Allow, give yourself in your budget enough room to test and experiment channels. Yeah. AI search. AI search is a big deal right now. Everybody is moving through it. And I don't know if you've heard this, Steve, but everybody says SEO is dead. Well, my data says otherwise. My data tells me, no, SEO is not dead. It's changing. It's evolving. We see new channels. AI search is actually starting to emerge, and we have to change the way we build content, make it much more authored with a point of view. But had I not asked the team to just really track the efficiency of the channels, I may have false positive or false negatives.

14:26Right. So tracking, tracking, tracking, really critical. Invest in it early, diversify and then test and experiment those acquisition strategies. Because when you put all your eggs in the same basket and you get really limited into the channels of acquisitions that you have, If for some reason one is dropping or one is too expensive for you to go after, what other options do you have? So leaving room for your teams to experiment, to learn. I know nobody likes the word failure, the big F. Everybody is like, I know, we don't want that because obviously for marketing, we're not allowed to fail. And I would tend to say you absolutely have to let your team fail and learn from it.

15:13It's part of the process. In fact, that's how product teams work. Product teams run experiments all the time. And that's how those experiments are telling them if the features and the products that they're building are actually good or not good. So that experimentation and a fail fast iterate is part of the culture. I would recommend, especially in the acquisition channels, that the marketers really adopt that mindset quickly and have the backup of their boss, whether it's a CMO or the head of gold market or the CEO. You're going to absolutely have to let you team experiment. It's a core element.

15:53So diversification, experimentation, and monitoring and tracking the data for the performance of your channels. So that's acquisition. In the AI era, how do you... keep customers loyal, retain them? Oh, that's a great, that's a very great question. We have multiple ways to do it. I am a firm believer, and that's one of the key benefits of working closely with product team, that when you start making the experience in the product as optimal as possible from the moment the onboard activates the solution and start engaging, if that experience is frictionless or has minimal amounts of friction, they will start engaging.

16:40And what you do from that point on is you continue to engage them and invite them to share their experiences, to share advice within their own organization to start driving a lot more usage. So the way to drive that loyalty is number one, create a frictionless user experience with very, very strong onboarding adoption flows that are going to continue to incentivize them to come back and use your solution. That to me is a very pivotal usage. And then encourage them to expand their usage to other users within their organization. So there's ways to do it. Share, sharing, create virality into your product.

17:22We call it the nth user activation and onboarding. So it's like you start seeing a lot of great loyalty and elements when you have more than one user, when the users start sharing with their groups. That is a signal of engagement and loyalty. The second one, in my view, is community. It's a big one. So that is outside of the product. but create forums for your users to have ways to generate their own content, interact with their own peer groups, and find ways to resolve or increase their intellectual curiosity out of features or capabilities. So you create that loyalty by creating that sort of community and network.

18:08That is incredibly efficient. At Amplitude, three years ago, we had 3 ,000 community members. Now we have more than 30 ,000 community members. We even have members from other companies, and they're coming to us because we're becoming the place where they can find answers to their critical questions around digital analytics and product analytics. So that community is super critical. And then the advocacy components, right? Work with your customers. Give a lot to your customers. Make them so successful that they will get back to you in terms of references, testimonials, stories. Involve them into your events.

18:51Make them speak. Make them proud of the work that they do. Gamify it if you can. Create awards. Create all kinds of things that will make your customers want to be part of that amazing community that you're creating. and will be empowering to them and will also be really, really important for their career. I got to pivot to something that I want to get to this because I know you're very passionate about this, as am I. And a lot of my listeners, a lot of people I coach in Council are too. And that's building trust in the C-suite. And it's one of the age old questions that I get asked a lot is how the CMOs and marketers, and you sat at those big tables, right?

19:29I put you in front of a room of CMOs and marketing leaders. How do you build the trust with the rest of C-suite? So first of all, and it may sound cliche, but you've got to hit your number. That's the number one goal. It's a numbers game at the end of the day. So the C-suite, everybody is accountable to a number. The only number that matters is the net they are. It's not just the acquisition number and how much pipeline you generate and how many new customers you have. At the end of the day, you have to deliver a number that's in line with what you promised your shareholders or the street, at the end of the day, you've got to be part of it.

20:08So you've got to make sure that no matter what happens, you hit your number. You build trust by being a reliable contributor to the top-line number. I really believe this. So whatever it takes, and that one is important. The second one, and I work in a sales-led organization, is if the sales team needs your help to close a deal, you drop everything and you prioritize them. So I think you need to understand who your customer is in the organization. If your business model is a sales-led business model, your customer is the CRO and the sales team. So when the CRO calls you and say, hey, I need your help with client and a deal, and it says in quarter, and you got to do everything you can to help those guys.

20:57So that to me is important. Adopting customer first, like customer mindset is really, really important. That's how you build trust. They know that you are there for them, that you have their back. Trust is earned. It's not something that's given. So in addition to hitting your number, you have a service oriented mindset and you know who your customer is and you're going to do absolutely everything you can to support them. I feel this one is important. And then the last one is taking a data-driven approach and solving, like having a problem-solving mindset. One of the things that I keep encouraging my team to do is if you found a problem, you have one point.

21:42If you have done a root cause analysis on the problem, you earn 10 points. If you started working on the problem, you got 100 points. And if you solved and you actually executed and solved the problem, you get a thousand points. So you got to go from problem identification, root cause analysis, execution and delivery, all the way through. So action, you got to really, really make sure that you got the action. Very oftentimes, I see teams just being very good at finding problems, not as good as finding solutions. So the most effective teams are the teams in my view that find a way and find a solution.

22:23And that is always the one that I've observed that can get in the way. I would imagine inherent in building that trust with the C-suite is being able to translate the age-old question, translate marketing's value into business impact, which we know can be tricky. So how do you explain marketing's value to a CFO, a CEO, and board members, and on and on and on? It's a very great point. And I've done this in a few companies. So when I was at Dropbox, we had this whole CAC to LTV model. So for those who are curious, cost of acquisition divided by lifetime value. So you have to really understand for a dollar that you invest, what's the actual lifetime value that you're going to get?

23:07and sometimes it takes three years, four years and is the ratio a profitable one? That's the CFO language and that should be the CMO language. Now, Steve, we started the conversation earlier the same way. It's like, it sounds really great, but how easy is it to do? How easy is it? It's not easy. I'm on that journey myself now at Amplitude and we're building it. It took me 15 months to connect my span to my campaign outcomes, to my pipeline outcomes, 15 months. And that is, it feels like a long time. And imagine if you're the size of Walmart, if you're the size of a gigantic company, the complexity of connecting data sources is huge.

23:54But it's very important. So if you're able to connect your spend to your outcomes, that's when you start crafting a ROI conversation with your CFO. And that's the only thing that really matters to the CFO. The CFO is going to come and say, Tiffin or whoever CMO, dear CMO, show me the ROI by segment, by channel, by sources, by geo. So they want to see a cut and then tell me how you're going to optimize your marketing mix or your channel mix or your investment between awareness or Pygen, right? And others. So this is all about numbers. And the sooner you share your roadmap with the CFO, you make the CFO part of it.

24:42He understands where you're starting from and how you're building this, the more trust you'll build and he'll be even a partner. I have a great relationship with our CFO, and he's given me amazing support. His finance team is at the head with us to build that LTV2CAT model. We had nothing to start with, but he gets it. He understands the vision, and he's going to say, Tiffin, I'm going to give you the resources to help you build that, and we're going to build it together. That, to me, is how you win the hearts and minds of the person who gives you the check at the end of the day. Yeah, and it's that R word again, relationships.

25:18Yeah, it's about establishing trust by doing, literally by doing and having also a shared vision, but being also very committed and accountable to the roadmap and the timeline. That one thing is also really important. I found that accountability matters. If you say you're going to deliver something, you have to deliver it. If you can't deliver for any other, like many reasons, you've got to give regular updates on what's getting in the way, how they can help you communicate, communicate often. What advice would you give to CMOs? And I hear this a lot from CMOs who are stuck in that, quote, brand versus business or brand versus performance trap where they're being seen as creative leaders, but not business drivers.

26:04One thing that I'm asking sometimes, so the CFO or even my president is, how would you like to see the information? What would be for you the ideal data points and the things you'd like to see? Because sometimes we spend so much time trying to figure out the format. How do we show information? How do we do we report on things? Only to present and then be told, we don't like what you showed. So I would reverse it. I would go up front to the CFO, the president and say, what is the view that you've seen in the past work really well for you that a CMO in your prior company showed that you really like?

26:45Can you give me an example of things that really matter or on the top three or four things you'd like to see? And then you build based on that. and sometimes leaders are very specific ideas of what they want to see. So start there. Ask them, what would you like to see? Because nobody has a magic wand and then suddenly you're like, wow. Sometimes I'd like to reverse it and go back and say, I just want to make sure that I'm building something that makes sense to you. Not to me, but to you. Is there examples of things you've seen that you feel really comfortable and that's the kind of stuff you want to see or not?

27:21So that's a very practical example that I think has paid off for me big time. And when I don't do it, and then I end up creating a view that I don't like, I always remember, darn, I didn't start there. I should have asked. Okay, it's time for some fun now. I end every episode with what I call the random five, and I ask you five very random questions. Some are about your personality, some are about your business, but I pull these completely at random. You have to trust me. All right. What's one leadership mantra or quote that you go back to often? When there is a will, there is a way. Done. Full stop.

28:03I love that. Okay. If you could instantly master one skill outside of marketing, what would it be? Cooking. Okay. People are going to think I set you up for this, but the next question, I'm not making this up. If you could eat only one type of cuisine for the rest of your life. Oh my gosh. you know you know i'm french so it's gonna be really difficult for me to not say something like that everybody's gonna be like what no french of course okay what's a common this is a good i don't want to hear your thoughts on this and what's a common misconception people have about cmos the common misconception that they don't add value you know sometimes so So something I've noticed sometimes is CMOs are in the middle of it all.

28:49You know, if I had to be one animal in the zoo, I'd say we are the chameleons. We have to pivot. We're in the middle. And it's never enough, of course. Right? There's never enough brand awareness. There's never enough good content. And what about that pipeline? You need more, more, more, more. and it's because the job of your boss and bosses was is to get more out of you that's that's the game of course because if you don't your competition is going to deprive you so you get this and i often say you know if we were not there you'd suffer because we orchestrate so many things behind the scenes you don't even know about but if if if that engine was to disappear that'd be difficult, that'd be chaos, especially if you want to scale a business.

29:42So I think the CMOs should really focus to your point on doing a little bit of value, like selling their value. The misconception is that they can't do it. I actually really think I've seen so many great CMOs that inspire me every day, do that extremely well. Give them a shot, work with them. We are very flexible, very resilient. That's the one thing about CMOS because we are in the middle of the chaos all the time. I love chameleon. Chameleon. It's a perfect, very one-word description. That's it, chameleon. Okay, last question. Describe your leadership style in three, four, five words. What would you say?