Relationships Still Drive Business - Heather McLeod

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Heather McLeod, Chief Marketing Officer at BNI, someone who turns big global strategy into marketing that actually works. She's built her reputation on cutting through noise and focusing on what actually drives growth, scaling a community of more than 345 ,000 members across 70 plus countries without losing what it makes it human.

0:53Wow. At a time when everything is digital, automated, and AI driven, she's right at the center of something just as powerful making a comeback. Real in-person connection. That speaks to my heart. Oh my God. Relationship marketing, community, and the idea that business still gets done between people, not platforms. No fluff, just what works. Heather McLeod, welcome to the show.

1:20Heather McLeod:Thanks for having me. You are very, very welcome. And if this is even half the conversation we had off air, everybody's in for a treat because you are an absolute gem. Thank you. I'm excited. Yeah, this is a topic I think you and I both can get kind of passionate about. So I think we're in for a fun chat. Absolutely. And I'm going to start right from the beginning or kind of the beginning of you're known for focusing on what actually works as as my intro said. Where would you say that mindset of kind of simplicity, right? Focusing on last year's work. But where would you say that mindset comes from?

1:54Heather McLeod:You know, I think it comes from realizing pretty early in my career that the head of marketing's best friend is the CFO. And if I wanted money to get things done, I needed to prove that I was doing things that drove revenue. And so oftentimes I would joke and call myself like the unsexy marketer because I would dive into things like, what's happening in the call center? Are we maximizing all these leads that we're getting that gray area that sometimes lives between marketing and operations. But I found that oftentimes there was a lot of juice left to squeeze out of, you know, leads that we were getting from revenue we were already spending.

2:34And so I just kind of made it, made it my mission to

2:38Heather McLeod:dig in and really focus on areas that were low hanging fruit to try and drive more revenue for any organization I was a part of. For those not familiar, the Reader's Digest condensed version, what's B &I? What do you do? Yeah, Business Network International. So we are the world's largest referral organization. So country by country, we meet weekly as chapters and help small business owners grow their businesses through structured meetings that help them generate referrals. Really, we're just a mechanism to help build trust among individuals and to help them grow their businesses. So it's a funny thing because I spent 15 years in marketing for pretty large franchise brands.

3:23Heather McLeod:And I would tell our franchisees, you should go join a BNI chapter. You should go join a BNI chapter. And now here I am on the other side of the table. Funny how life works like that, right? It really does. Okay. When you first stepped into your role BNI, what did you immediately see that needed to change or sharpen or what were some of your first I need to fix that or maybe not fix, but address. Yeah, you know, BNI is a really interesting organization because of the emphasis on people and relationships. It makes it a very powerful organization culturally to be a part of and its core values permeate the business in a way I've never seen before, which is like a dream to a marketer to have, you know, individual chapter members in BNI chapters know that our core value is giver's gain and they know what that means.

4:13Heather McLeod:It blew my mind. But then on the flip side, there was so little time and effort that had been put into kind of traditional marketing infrastructure. Things like our digital presence and how easy it is or could be to sign up to visit a chapter by going to our website. They had really been singularly focused on growth via relationships. So my goal really for my first year or two here at B &I is to put in the foundation that a traditional marketer would to try and accelerate the rate by which we're growing year over year. Gotcha. I don't know if you're aware of this, but everybody's talking about AI.

4:54Have you heard of that?

4:55Heather McLeod:Yeah, maybe, maybe a little bit. Hot topic. Fresh take. But as I said in the intro, you're seeing, you know, you're a big believer in in-person networking coming back strong, right? Yes. What do you think is behind that resurgence, if you will? Now, I'll give you a couple examples, but I think AI has made it easier for people to produce polished things quickly. So if you think about it, like think of how many things that you read now online that you see someone post on LinkedIn or an email that someone sent you and you know it was written by ChadGPT. You can feel it, right? You see the M dashes, you see the phrasing and you're like, ChadGPT.

5:41Heather McLeod:And on the surface, things might look like better, more organized, but I think people can feel the inauthenticity in some of that. And a great example I'll give you that I think is super easy for everybody to relate to. kind of older technology, but you know, it's like when you, when you pick up the phone and you call into a call center and you hit the auto routing system that tries to help support your answers to your questions. And it's not that it doesn't work, but it's like, you really just want to talk to someone. Like, I just really want to connect with a person who I can vent my frustrations to and hopefully get resolution.

6:17Heather McLeod:And I think AI is, is in a lot of ways the same. I think people recognize it. I think we're going to get sharper and sharper at recognizing it the more and more we're exposed to it. We don't always know why it feels off, but we know that it does feel off. So when everything is scripted and everything is super organized, it starts to feel interchangeable and nothing really stands out. And that's why I think that being in person, being face-to-face and building authentic relationships is even more important than it's ever been before. yeah um by the way for the record um and and i have proof of this back to my forbes days i write with em dashes i always have too and i feel like now people think of like that's i write like i talk and so that's how i you know and i refuse to stop using em dashes so anybody listening if you see something on linkedin you're gonna see em dashes but i wrote it how's that well same goes for me same goes for me i feel like it's made me a little paranoid though to tell you the truth.

7:17I get it. But anyway, do you think brands, I don't want to get societal because that's really deep. So we'll keep it in the context of brands. Do you think we're, they're underestimating brands? I mean, how much people actually want real connection right now?

7:31Heather McLeod:I do. You know, I do. And, and I think some brands intrinsically are good at this and have been doing it for a long time. I don't think there's anything new about people wanting to connect. I don't think that's anything that's like all of a sudden unique, but I think that over emphasis of AI, just like most things in life, I think a lot of things are kind of on a continuum or they're like a pendulum. And sometimes you kind of swing too far one way, and then you kind of crave what's on the opposite side and it pulls you back towards neutral. But there have been a lot of brands that have been doing really cool stuff with in person for a long time.

8:10Heather McLeod:You know, if you customization of product and recommendations of product via app, but then, hey, come out in person and join a running club. Like, you know, it's trying to tie the brand to personal experience and relationship building and connection and community. I think good brands have always done that and tried to do that. I think right now it's just, it's the conversation has taken a little bit more of a backseat because everything's been focused on AI as, you know, a way to do more faster, to scale bigger and better. And so I think, I think we've just stopped talking about community in the same way as maybe we did going into and around COVID because I think we all felt, we really felt it back then.

8:57I completely agree. And the converse to that is how would you say like digital fatigue shows up in the real world?

9:05Heather McLeod:I mean, I think it shows up a lot. I think marketing fatigue shows up a lot in the real world. You know, I was going through TSA the other day and there was an advertisement printed in the bottom of the bin that I put my bag in to send it through the scanner. I mean, there's messaging everywhere. There's messaging everywhere. And I think fatigue on messaging is, is real. I think you, you start to tune stuff out when it's everywhere. And especially when it's not really saying anything particularly unique or poignant to who I am as a person, as a consumer. So, I mean, I think it's everywhere. I will tell you though, I did just see one of the best commercials I think I've seen in a very long time.

9:49Heather McLeod:And oddly enough, I have no idea how much of this was done by either an individual or done by tech, but it was, I thought it was hilarious. And it's been a long time since I saw a commercial that I really lapped at. And it's the Buffalo Wild Wings bottomless appetizers with the buffalo bottomless, which I thought was hilarious. I'm like, look, they blurred out the buffalo. Like he's wearing bottomless chaps. Like that's really funny. So I think people create, now I don't know if that's real or not. I don't know who did that, but it felt really funny and it felt really real to me. So I'm gonna bank that that wasn't computer.

10:27Well, listen, it did the ultimate goal. And you know this as a marketer, it touched your emotions.

10:34Heather McLeod:Exactly. It made me laugh. Right. It moves you to some emotion. So that to me is a win. I agree. I agree. We talk about a lot of relationship marketing, and I know you're a massive proponent of it. And you've seen it outperform just straight digital. So why does relationship marketing still work? And will it always work? I think it will always work. I think that's an easy one. I think it will always work. I think the thing that's been interesting about digital, and I'm a digital marketer by background. I mean, that's the path I came up through. And so I have a love for it. And I think it is an important part of anybody's strategy.

11:09Heather McLeod:I am a big believer in diversification as a part of a healthy marketing strategy. You know, we like to put our dollars in the bucket that give us the most return first and kind of waterfall from there. But I think they're all important because things can change. And, you know, if we had been talking about relationship marketing in March of 2020, we would be having a little bit of a different conversation because COVID caused some things that caused us to pivot. Now, thankfully, B &I was able to pivot to online and continue on our track record of all these years of continuous growth. But I think the thing that's challenging about digital is with digital, you're always like One click away from being outbid by someone else.

11:53Heather McLeod:Money can dramatically impact how your strategy performs. And it's really easy to be kind of disintermediated. It's easy to be pushed out of the way and to be replaced by a competitor when it comes to digital. And that doesn't happen with relationships. Now, not to say that all of our relationships don't change over time, but it is much harder for a competitor. to replace a trusted relationship than it is when we're talking about digital. So it's a much more kind of stable, secure channel in a lot of ways. Yeah. So where do companies get it wrong? I mean, we're all consumers, first of all, right?

12:34We all know that. So we all have our own relationships with different brands in any company. Like you just said, you saw that ad at the bottom of the bin, right? That's a company looking to establish a relationship. So where do companies still get it wrong when they try to scale relationships? Is it a matter of being too creepy kind of thing and sharing too much that we know about you kind of thing? Or what do you think it is?

12:58Heather McLeod:So marketing in general, I think the biggest mistake that people still make is the one that they've made forever. And it's trying to be everything to everybody. And when it comes to relationship marketing, the same kind of basic principle applies. So we teach this thing in BNI where we basically teach people how to stand up and introduce themselves and communicate what they're looking for from the group. And one of the things that people default to do, marketers do it, I think we as humans just do it, we assume that by being specific, we're being exclusionary. So if we try to be a specific thing to a specific group of people, we're worried that everyone else will miss the point or, you know, we're leaving people out who could possibly be customers of our brand or, you know, we're not we're not communicating this giant laundry list of things we can do.

13:48Heather McLeod:But it's kind of that old adage, right, that by trying to be everything to everyone, we end up kind of being nothing. So I think I think that premise definitely applies when we're talking about relationship building as well. So we teach to say something very specific, talk about something super specific that you need, that your business provides, and ask the room to help you connect with people who have that exact need. So something as super specific as a realtor standing up and saying, hey, I'm looking for people who are looking to buy a house in this specific neighborhood, in this specific part of town, versus just I'm looking for everybody who's trying to buy or sell or do this or do this.

14:28Heather McLeod:So I think that is still kind of a problem in marketing just across the board, whether it's relationship or otherwise, is that, you know, whether it's the marketers ourselves being afraid to be specific or it's the other people who are involved, who have a voice in what marketing does, not wanting to quote unquote pigeonhole a brand, but missing the point that sometimes when you're so broad, But it's hard to really get your point across to this specific group of people you're trying to target. You said something a few minutes ago about the mistakes that brands make about trying to be all things to all people.

15:09That gets exacerbated to the millionth degree with a company like yours where you're operating across 70 plus countries, right?

15:19Heather McLeod:Yeah. So that's even, how do you keep that global consistency without losing that local relevance, if you will? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. We are crystal clear in what we're doing at BNI. It is our vision to change the way the world does business, period. And that at the core kind of of who we are and what we're trying to do, that simplicity scales. Complexity breaks when you're trying to go across as many countries as we are. So being very, very simple and clear about who we are and what we do. You know, when BNI was first created, the meeting that we have every week with every chapter all around the globe, the agenda for that fits on one sheet of paper.

16:06Heather McLeod:It's about as simple as you can get, right? Now, how that's executed locally, it's the same. You can go to a BNI meeting, and I have in other countries and other languages, and I have no idea what anybody is saying. but because I know the format of the meeting, I know what's happening as it's happening in the room. So the standardization for us to keep everything from breaking, it's the simplicity around the what. The local piece sometimes comes in the how, right? It's about how we're attracting people into BNI. It's about the specific messaging that works to explain what we're doing. And some of that is different market by market, but the actual execution of the business model is the same country by country by country.

16:47Heather McLeod:Because you're right, We're now up to, I think, I think as of the end of this month, it'll be 77 countries. That's a lot. It's a lot. That's a lot of countries. A lot of cultural. That's a lot of countries. Cultural language. So what, take what you guys are doing at BNI and step up and take a step back to those listening who are operating across multiple countries. What are some things they can take from what you're doing? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the core beliefs that we have as an organization, we call it talent on territory. But it's this idea that we need to have people in market who are executing in market.

17:25Heather McLeod:You can't run BNI in the Netherlands from Charlotte, North Carolina. We have to have talent on territory, on the ground, people who are from the culture, connected to the culture, who understand both the business model and the market in which they're operating in. So I think that's a big one. I think that's a big one. And that's probably, you know, if you're a business who's going from being primarily U.S. or North America-based to expanding into Europe or something else, it's probably one of the first pain points people feel is trying to execute from one place in another place. And so perhaps having talent on territory is incredibly important, especially because we're in the relationship business.

18:08Heather McLeod:We need to have someone in market who's building those relationships. So I think that's one that stands out as an important one because you need to have voices from all of those different countries, being able to speak up on behalf of kind of that local culture to help the rest of the team understand where some of those differences are so that we all start to think with a more global mindset. Yeah, and that sounds so simplistic, right? But that's the point. Like you just said you're on calls or reading things. You have no idea what you're reading or listening to, but you have faith and trust in the people that do.

18:46Heather McLeod:Yeah. I mean, it's funny. My first international trip for BNI, I went to Austria and I went to Poland and I went to a BNI chapter meeting in Poland. I don't speak a word. Like I had no idea what was happening. Right. And they had an interpreter for me sitting with me and like a couple of minutes and I was like, don't, don't even. And it's okay because literally the format of a BNI chapter meeting is the exact same thing, whether you're in Charlotte, North Carolina, you're in, you know, in Poland, Austria, anywhere that we operate, Vietnam, the structure is a structure. And so once you know what's happening in a meeting, you know what you're watching happen around you because the format is the format is the format, which is really kind of cool.

19:30Heather McLeod:Like it was, I thought it was really powerful. I'm like, man, I have no idea what this person is talking about, but I know that he's standing up giving his, you know, 30 second, 60 second presentation on what his business is and what he's looking to gain from being in this chapter meeting. And it's kind of cool once you, you know, once you kind of are familiar enough with the business to understand what you're, what you're watching. Yeah. And I love that the brand is that consistent, right? Right. Because you don't understand a word they're saying, but you know, the format is going to be the same no matter where you're at.

20:02Heather McLeod:Yes. Yes, exactly. And that's a great lesson. Okay. Let's throw your CMO hat on agnostic of BNF. Yeah. What should CMOs be focused on today, in your opinion? Man, we started this by saying I'm super, I'm a super simple back to basics kind of girl. And I am. And I am. And so to give one answer where there's not really probably one answer, it's whatever is the largest revenue driver of your business and plugging the holes in the funnel where you can to try and capture as much revenue as possible. So in my past life in home services, that had a lot to do with how easy or hard we made it to marry capacity and demand.

20:44Heather McLeod:So I think that's something that's maybe not often talked about enough when it comes to marketing, because it's a function that lives. It's an issue that lives kind of in the intersection of marketing and operations or product or delivery. But I'll tell you, as a consumer, it is my biggest pet peeve when I'm doom scrolling at night and I'm advertised something on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, and I click to go and buy it and it's out of stock. why are you where are you advertising something to me if i can't even buy it right so for me that intersection of demand and capacity it's where a lot of efficiency comes from but it's also where you know you can put your marketing dollars to work in a way that have a more predictable revenue generation number attached to them yep and so that's that's always been the space that i play in like i i know that a lot of marketers are kind of you know sexy brand marketers I'm a nitty gritty kind of girl.

21:39Heather McLeod:I'm in the nuance of trying to squeeze as many dollars out as I can out of the system. So I would say that's always where I would focus on. And that might be in the marrying of inventory to advertising to demand, or it might be capacity in terms of how many appointments can we book for service, if you will, relative to what we're pushing or promoting or advertising. but that's the space that I think is the most fun to plan because it drives real revenue real fast but not agree more and I love the fact that you kind of married the two of identify what's going to drive the most revenue right but then also do everything in your your power to make sure that path to purchase is as seamless and easy as possible because I do the same thing as a consumer if I get hung up on that path to purchase I'm gone I'm out I'm out and it's the funny thing is right If we were talking about this 10 years ago, we would be talking about a specific industry and comparing competitors in an industry.

22:41Heather McLeod:But Amazon, the great equalizer. Now, everybody wants everything to be as easy to purchase as the one button click or the integration with Apple Pay or anything like that. I don't want to manually enter my address anymore. I don't want to manually enter a credit card number. I want it to be as easy and simple as possible for people to take my money. I really do. I think most people do. Exactly. I'm on the lot. I want to buy. Yes. Yes. Make it easy. Don't make it hard. Because if it's too hard, I'm just going to quit and go do something else. I'll go to the next one. You're going to lose my attention span.

23:17Heather McLeod:I mean, we're goldfish, right? Isn't that what they say? Six seconds is about how long we have. Better make it easy. I don't know. Man, this relationship building we're doing. All right. Hey, here's one, Maria. I want you to think about this. What's one belief that Heather McLeod has about marketing that most people may disagree with? What's your most controversial, you think, take on just the world of marketing that people get? The most controversial marketing take. Or belief. Like, what is it that other people would disagree with? Is there one? Okay. Yeah. Oh, do I want to say this out loud, though?

23:55Heather McLeod:Nobody's listening. Come on. God. Yeah, nobody's listening. This is not going to come back to bite me later. Not like I'm recording it already. Bad. So listen, I don't think it's probably not super surprising to people who know me well, especially given all the things I've said about like where I focus and how I think. I think that brand as it used to exist is probably dead. I think it's a little overrated and I don't, I'm not really a big believer in brand awareness as a solo. I do think there's benefit of people, you know, clearly knowing about your brand, but kind of to my point earlier, I don't think that you need the entire globe to know about your brand.