How to Talk to Finance About Marketing Budget with Patrick Shea (Global Head of Marketing at BlueVoyant)

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2:52One, two, three, four, exit. One, two, three, four, exit. Hey, my guest on this episode is Patrick Shea. He is the SVP of Global Marketing at Blue Voient. They're$175 million revenue. Enterprise cybersecurity company, 500 employees. And this is an interesting episode because their whole business is built around this deep partnership with Microsoft. We talk about why field marketing is so important in this world, why sales enablement is important, working with finance. One of the CMOs that is my mentor said that this guy, Patrick Shea, is the best person he's ever seen to work with finance. And so if you're an enterprise marketer or just want to know more about how enterprise marketing works, I think you're going to really enjoy my conversation with Patrick Shea, SVP of Global Marketing at Blue Voyant.

3:42All right. My guest today is Mr. Patrick Shea. He's SVP of Global marketing at Blue Voyant, a 500-person enterprise cybersecurity company in an interesting space. And I know you from back in the day at HubSpot. You were employee number 100 at HubSpot, ran marketing. You worked for Mike Volpe at Cyber Reason. Mike's a good friend of mine, mentor of mine, and Tom Wentworth at Recorded Future, another good friend and a mentor of mine. So I'd like to hear one thing you learned from Tom and one thing you learned from Mike. Those are good questions. Thank you. I do this for a living. One thing you've taken into your job, into how you do marketing today.

4:21Yeah, yeah, yeah. So first of all, lucky to have the chance to work with both those guys, right? I think what I learned from Mike was I learned polish from Mike. We had a standing marketing meeting every Monday afternoon, and everybody had to stand up in front of the room and show their slide and talk about their number, and you needed to be ready for it. And, you know, I think that that's something that I've brought to different teams as I've, you know, joined different companies. Like I want everybody to get a chance to stand up and talk and practice answering questions because then you're, you're better for whatever spot you're going to be in the next day.

5:00So that was just like, I mean, you knew that, like there were a lot of really smart people in that room. So standing up and taking questions and like, yeah, it was, it was polished. That's what drew me to HubSpot in general and Mike at that time, and you all really was like, you guys made it cool to be a marketer because you made it like marketing. He made it so clear that like marketing is not just the arts and crafts department. It's an essential function to the health and growth of the business. And everything is metrics oriented. Everything has a goal. Everything is about having a purpose to drive some next things forward.

5:33Marketing is integrated across the company. It's a really good one, Polish. And I always have wondered, like anytime I've tried to do that standup, I always wondered, does everybody hate me for doing this? Is this a burden? But you have to do those things, I feel like. You have to force people to do some of those things. And to make marketing a crucial function in an organization, you need to feel like people can go out and communicate the value of marketing in this meeting and in that meeting and in this thing and in that thing. And if nothing else, it gave us practice, you know, about talking about things and sharing things and being able to articulate things.

6:05And every week you would hear him talk and you would write something down that he said and you would bring it to a meeting. And it was polished and it was also just a way of kind of cascading the confidence behind marketing through the company. No surprise he became a CEO after that. And then what about Tom Wentworth? Tom, the thing I learned from Tom was like structure as a strategy. I would say like, it kind of goes without saying, but we really put it into practice is we made sure that different, like, you know, sales leader over here that has this little project, like who are they going to go to?

6:36Like customer success in Europe, Who are they going to go to? Like the whole idea of, oh, this thing is 25 % of somebody's job, that never flew with Tom. It was like, you know, you need to know who is the person that they're going to go to with this problem or this idea. Everything needs a clean landing spot. And I think - Is that about ownership on the marketing team? Like roles and responsibilities? Oh yeah, roles and responsibilities. In retrospect, it might seem like an obvious one, but we absolutely did it. It was this sales leader, this customer success leader, this product leader. Like everybody needs to know where the responsibilities and the action is going to land on marketing.

7:18Is that from like clear goal setting? Because I feel like on paper, I get that. But where it breaks down a lot is like people will do the things they're incentivized to do. I'm kind of jaded. And so like I've had a hard time with like people being like, well, fuck you. That's not my job. Why would I do that? That's Mary's job. How do you not have that on the team? I think also it's like being able to be flexible. Because if you go into the year, it's like, okay, we've got, you know, revenue goal of this revenue goal of that is really about being able to like, you know, it's the middle of the year, it's the end of the first quarter, and something new has bubbled up.

7:54We need to be able to realize that this is like, you know, Tom would always say, like, is this our biggest problem? And it would be like, this particular thing is not our biggest problem. but the problem is right now we're not staffed to take advantage of this opportunity so we would figure it out we would break the structure to figure it out yeah i like that like you could make a list of 100 things you should be doing right now okay we have awesome prep here from producer marissa which is great i have a couple places we're going to take this but first tell us about your job as you know you lead marketing at blue voyant tell me about the company about the space we do talk to a lot of marketers who are i love talking to marketers who are not in like the traditional B2B SaaS, Martech space, because I think everybody thinks that's just the only people I talk to.

8:39And it's not, you're wrong. And you're a great example of that. And you left HubSpot and you've basically become like the cybersecurity, like enterprise marketing guy. And I'm curious to hear about why that's interesting to you. Yeah, I left HubSpot and I wouldn't necessarily say that I had this like incredible hunch on the company I went to go work for because I went to go work for Mike Volpe. Yeah, you follow a guy, right? Follow Tom Brady, like you're going to go to the box. So that was kind of how I got into cybersecurity. And I think I'm like 10 years plus at this point. So I've worked at three cybersecurity companies.

9:11This is my third. And BlueVolient is a managed detection response company. I'll say a little bit more about that. Managed detection and response is basically like every organization has a security operations center, which is a bunch of really smart people sitting in a room with lots of monitors, making sure that bad guys don't get in. And if they do, you find out fast and you don't let them move. And those security operation centers use lots of different tools. And sometimes, depending on the size of the company, you might be able to afford an amazing security operation center, or you might need to really have their priorities across a bunch of different things.

9:49So you hire companies like Bluevoyant, and we run it for you. I was going to ask, because I remember one of my first jobs out of school was I worked at Constant Contact. Sure. there was a room and I'd always walk by. I was like, you know, 22 years old, didn't really have much work to do. I was just trying to like see who works in the office or whatever, get a coffee. There literally was a room and there was like four guys in the room and there was huge monitors and that's what their job is. But today, does everyone have that? Like, does it have to be on site or is it because so many companies are remote now?

10:22Is that why you guys solve that? It's a whole variety of things, but it could be, it could be like, it could be budget, right? Like this company knows that it's IT and security strategy needs to mostly be over here. So they'll outsource to companies like us, this part over here. Now, is it a crazier time to be in this space than even when you started to cybersecurity because of all the AI in the last couple of years? I think so. There have been a lot. I mean, cybersecurity is a fascinating space in general. There are a lot of new companies that are coming out that are agentic in lots of different interesting ways.

10:58And they're disrupting these old stalwart companies because they've got cleaner and more AI driven ways of solving the problem. But what's interesting is that like the people that are also using AI are the attackers. So we're using AI to provide better defense around the problem around our organizations, but hackers are thinking hackers and bad actors as we call them. They're thinking just as quickly and just as rapidly about us, but their problem is getting in, not keeping us out. Okay. And you guys are roughly hundreds of employees, hundreds of millions in revenue. I'm just saying that to lend some credibility to like the scale that you're working on.

11:39What does marketing look like at this company? This is not in my wheelhouse. I'm more of a like, write it on LinkedIn, do a thought leader ad, get leads, you know, but that doesn't work. That doesn't work in your world. So what's the marketing mix? Look, all that stuff is still relevant, but we're about about 175 million. We've got about 600 employees worldwide and we've been around for about nine years. And what attracted me to the company, why I was excited to join Blue Void, why I love working at Blue Void is like, you know, people that are like, oh, well, we work with this partner, We work with that partner.

12:11But they don't really mean it. It's just kind of something you say. We have built a great business alongside of Microsoft, building solutions inside of what Microsoft does and provides the company. Because Microsoft has a lot of security products on top of just Word and PowerPoint. So we help companies build great security operations around the products that they're already using. Because it's the stack thing, right? Like your defense and your security operation tools have to be in line and play nicely with the company infrastructure you're using. Yeah. So it's like a channel. Is it a partnership?

12:49And is that the main piece of it? It's a partnership. So all the enterprise marketers out there, certainly all the cybersecurity marketers are out there. There's two types of partners. There are these large technology partners that are like hyperscalers, like get in with Palo Alto, get in with Snowflake, get in with Microsoft, build things in line with how their business is, you know, like what products are they building? You need to know that answer. You scale your business in line with that answer. There are also just resellers. So those are like the CDWs of the world, people that provide lots of security services to an organization and that's a different way in.

13:27I would say just from my time in cybersecurity, you know, you see people like the reseller piece is one. The hyperscaler tech alliance piece requires years of effort to get right. And that's something that I had not seen in my career. So I was excited to get in and start learning about that. And BlueVoyant also has new products and new services that are coming out that aren't as directly tied to what has got us to where we are with Microsoft. So they liked my experience because I've got experience bringing cybersecurity products directly to the market. Okay. What does the marketing team look like?

14:07So we've got a really good digital team that includes design. So we've got people running email, managing the website, as well as designing really good copy and ad creative, things like that. We have field marketing. So we've got like a West Coast field marketer, an East Coast field marketer, and a field marketer that is over in London working with our European team. So I love field marketing. I think that it's like field marketing needs to become, it needs to be thought of an account-based job versus just an events job, which is how the role has kind of grown over time. But like, these aren't people just getting us to an event.

14:45Go to that event because you know the right accounts are there. Do that thing with a reseller because you know that they have these six accounts up for renewal in the next two quarters. So that's how we try to think about it. We don't just throw a pop-up banner in the car and drive to a trade show. We go there because we know the accounts we want to sell are there. Yeah, you know, in the enterprise model, you're physically trying to go drive revenue from that event, which is, I think, so healthy. I think so many of us could learn lessons from that. I made a lot of mistakes in the past, but it's like, we're going to go there.

15:17We're going to close 10 customers, right? That's why we're going to this event. And I think when you have that guardrail, it changes the approach. You're not just showing up with a banner to post a picture about it on LinkedIn. I mean, that's a huge difference between SMB and enterprise. When you have longer deal cycles, there's going to have to be an in-person element to it, especially in security, where it's like, I got to look you in the eye and shake your hand to be able to trust you and your company. So this in-person piece is always a part of it. So if you don't have a sharp pencil there, you have to, and it's also a big line item on the budget.

15:49So you have to make sure that you can explain it in terms of your ICP and the accounts that you want to sell to. You mentioned like ABM. Is the marketing org rallied around that, some set number of customers and accounts that you're trying to get into versus casting a wider net, like doing inbound? Yeah, absolutely. Like we also have some things that we know just need to get fixed and get better. So we've got pedal to the metal on a lot of top of the funnel initiatives, but we ultimately come back and say like, did this hit our target account? Like this past quarter, we want to do, you know, 5 ,000 engagements or, you know, interactions or MQLs, whatever you call that top line number.

16:28What do you guys call it? How do you do it? So we're like, we have an MQL definition, but it sits inside of that ICP list. So an MQL is an MQL. I think you've probably beaten the MQL horse a fair bit on this podcast, but it's more about like, can you get somebody to pop up and be qualified in the way that you define it at an account that matters? We'll end up moving towards more of that like qualified account measurement. But right now we use it because it works. And we know that we're trying to get those things to land inside of this segment accounts that we care about. Hey, look for every guy on LinkedIn that has, and it's usually a guy that has written about the MQL is dead.

17:09There's a person who's actually running marketing inside of a, you know,$175 million enterprise company that's like, no, they worked for us and here's why and here's how we do it. And, you know, it's like, it's an eye of the beholder thing. Like if you go in and you say like MQLs are bust, like, I don't know, I'd raise my eyebrows at you. Yeah. What's the definition of it? Right. That's like, what are we talking about? Like I'm defining MQL as engagement in an account that matters. I mean, you call it whatever you want. Yeah. Okay. So all of marketing is working under that umbrella. You mentioned digital web yeah ads copy field field marketing okay what else product marketing so we have a pmm team that sit like directly above the products that we have and they own we can talk about everything that they own but they basically own the entire stance around that product and that is both does sales know what to say can they articulate the value can they sell it do i feel like they're certified on the right content all the way to, I need to create some really, really strong top of the funnel stuff to make sure that my product is represented the right way inside of our demand mix or our growth mix.

18:19Okay. People love hearing about people's marketing team. Sure. I'm just curious if there's like a question I should be asking you there. I don't know a lot about your marketing team, but, and the reason why is because every company is different. And it's almost like comparing, you know, the Patriots to the Eagles and like how they run their, you know, people are really interested in the systems and the rhythms and the routines for like how you actually run marketing and go and achieve these goals with the ingredients you have. Well, a couple of things we've got. I mean, I think this comes up a lot in the stuff that you published, but back to basics.

18:54Yeah. I saw this in your doc. I love this. It's not talked about enough. Yeah. And like, you know, we're not trying to create any new marketing channels because anybody out there will tell you that getting back to basics is probably just as much of a lift as doing something crazy new and totally challenging. But what we've got, like what we've been trying to do is really lean into that ICP definition. So taking, you know, we've got these accounts, what content syndication vendors line up with these accounts? And we just recently added the BDR team kind of back into the mix like six to nine months ago.

19:25So we're basically saying like, we want to get more out of the money that we're spending and we need to make sure that we've got hits on these ICPs to keep BDRs busy. So back to basics for sure. We also have, like, we do a fair amount of marketing to, like, in a world where you rely on these big companies like Microsoft and other tech alliance partners, it's not like, oh, I'm going to send them a newsletter every month and they'll totally plug in. We have an entire team at the company that focuses on making sure they know how Microsoft is ebbing and flowing. And marketing is crucial to all of that.

20:02Like we are marketing to Microsoft, like almost as aggressively as we market to prospects. How do you do that? Is it internal? Is it emails and meetings? It's emails. And it's also like, we need to make sure that we are tightly aligned with the reps that then go out and meet with the Microsoft reps. So we're almost doing like - A lot of sales enablement. Yeah, like third level sales enablement. But then it's also like, hey, Microsoft is having a QBR in Texas in a couple of weeks. If we ask the right person, if we ask nicely, maybe we can get in and be the sponsor of the happy hour. So it's like nothing is really off at the table.

20:39And if you did something like that, would that be something that even with the relationship with Microsoft, would you be able to go down there, do that event and be like, yeah, we met four or five interesting prospects from going there? Well, we would meet. So that's the interesting part about it is you basically like your marketing qualified leader, your qualified prospect is that internal Microsoft person that then has the keys to different parts of business and different segments. Dang, this is so crazy. This is so outside of my league. And there's one guy who always comments on my podcast, like, how was this guy a VP of marketing?

21:09He doesn't know anything. I have a lot of LinkedIn followers, buddy. That's how. Wait, so if you sponsor a Microsoft event, you pay Microsoft for that event. Where does that money go to them? Is it like their marketing team is making money on their events or is it just a shared cost? That's interesting. It's a shared cost because they want to, and you know, the inner workings of Microsoft, there are a lot of other people that know this better than me, but for all of the customers they have, for all the products that they deploy, they can't run all those services in-house. They can't onboard everybody using Microsoft Word or the security equivalent of it.

21:46So their whole ecosystem is working with service providers like ours. So if you're the right type of service provider and you've done the work, like you can't just fly in and say, I'm going to be Microsoft's number one partner. Okay. We've actually, I think three out of the last five, we've been Microsoft's security partner of the year, but that's because we've been invested in it for 10. I mean, well, that's like how you got to be in, you know, Gartner or G2 or whatever. That's like the ultimate badge. Like that is like probably becomes your best marketing ingredient is that bad that you can put on all your stuff.

22:19No, it is. And I think that like the trap people fall into is they just use that to market to like the Microsoft people. But it's also like, that is your market, right? Like if you're working with a hyperscaler like that, a big tech company like that, they've already defined the market. It's huge. Just use that and use that as like, that can't be your only tagline, your only value prop, but it certainly has to be one of the best. Pretty dang. It's like having, you know, being an Uber driver with 4.9 stars. You're like, oh, I'm not going to get kidnapped. Another way that people get, especially in enterprise, get the partner thing wrong is they kind of treat all the different things that you do with a partner as a demand gen activity.

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25:17Like, I think marketers in general get into trouble when they set the expectation to either the finance team or other people in the organization that, hey, online money is going to behave the same because it's not. I was going to ask you this next, actually. So there's a quote in here that said, Tom Wentworth said, you're the best marketer he's ever seen at working with finance. So you're going to make you answer that. But why? Why is that? Wait, and why is that? And then the other thing was what you were just kind of riffing on, which is like, you get into trouble when explaining specific things versus types of things.

25:48Channels behave differently. And so will the money. First, let's talk about your reputation with the finance department. Yeah. So he said that. He might not remember it, but he said it. I wrote it down. It's like being the Microsoft top partner. It doesn't matter. That's right. I should put that quote from Tom. I personally. Get you a Canva badge or something. Yeah. Like, you know, show of hands to everyone that's listening. Like how many times a week are you explaining a PO to somebody on finance? Like the handker up, Dave. It comes up a lot. So the reason I wanted to ask you that question is because I think, and I can say this as the host, but I see that most people, when they are asked marketers, we get very defensive.

26:27Sure. What do you mean? Of course, this is the buddy. We get very defensive about our things and we don't understand how to communicate to the CFO and the finance team about these things? The way that we did it recorded future, and I'm using the same structure at Blue Voyant, but you basically need to make your budget as small as possible. You need to cut it up in as many ways as possible. And so the easy way to do that is to cut it up by digital marketing events. So you should figure out what those key categories are. And then you can also chop it up by region. So then you can explain to yourself, you know, in Europe, we're going to get this amount of event money to spend across this amount of events.

27:11A lot of marketers miss the opportunity to kind of explain that high level structure of a budget. And then you keep getting smaller. So you say like inside of digital, I've got ads, I've got content syndication, I've got sponsored X, Y, and Z. And you explain that each one of these buckets behaves a little bit differently. So I don't want to explain and defend every event that we're going to do. But what I want to do is I want to make sure that finance understands the type of events that I run. So I do regional stuff, like, you know, Gartner is analyst type of events. And I call them backyard events.

27:52And that's like the rep in Kansas City is going to do this for$10 ,000. And you explain how those different buckets of money behave differently. And I also try to use, instead of like, I don't like talking about cost per lead, or any of those like that level of metric. What I like to do with finance is I'm going to say, look, I took all of the marketing money that we spent in the last year, and I divided it by the number of new business opportunities that the company created. So if you buy that marketing drives all of the pipeline and helps lift up all those different people trying to find business.

28:31Okay. So let's say that - Wait, and is that true? Is that your model in the company? Because I feel like this is where a lot of people argue over this about like, well, what was marketing source and what was sales source? But maybe because you're doing this ABM motion selling to enterprise, you're assuming that marketing's job is sales enablement heavily at this company. Sure. I do it both ways. Like I know the marketing number, but I also have a position, this is just a grounded belief of mine, is that marketing should lift up all those channels. Like if you do great marketing, sales should have an easier time sourcing pipeline on their own behalf because more people have heard of you.

29:06And that's kind of the mission of marketing, right? Now, what I like to do is like take that total amount of like net new opportunities. And I've listened to all of your Dave Kellogg podcasts and he's an opportunity count guy, not an opportunity dollar guy. So take the raw number of opportunities and divide that into the amount of money that you spent, and you'll come up with the average cost of an opportunity. And the first time you look at it, the number will shock you. It will be way too high. But then you work with finance and say, look, I think if you give me this amount of money next year, and let's say that cost per opportunity number is like 5 ,000, if I get that down to 2 ,500, I can hit my contribution target.

29:51And then you go out and you fix. Wait, explain that if you can get it down, how do you drive that down? Let's say that finance gives you a certain amount of money. And if you use that average cost of opportunity, you're only going to get halfway to that contribution goal for marketing. But if you make that average cost per opportunity less, so if you go from like 5 ,000 to 2 ,500. Yeah, so if you can be more efficient, you're going to get more budget back to do fun stuff. Be more efficient. Yeah. And finance will love that. And then you come back. And I think what Tom really liked is that, you know, that's a fun math exercise.

30:28Sure. But then you come back and you apply that number to like a field marketing event that you're going to go to. You take the cost of the event, you do the math and you're like, hey, sales rep A, sales rep B, BDRC. Yeah. You spend 10 ,000 bucks. We've got to come back with three ops. No, it's really great. Because it really helps with like the sticker shock of like, I used to have to be like, hey, we want to go spend, you know,$100 ,000 on the serious decision summit or whatever. And it was always like a hundred grand, you know, from this person and this person. And it's like, no, no. But if we just look at the opportunity math on this, here's now it's kind of a little bit of a, you kind of make your own bed and you have to lay in it though, because then you better go to that event and generate those opportunities though.

31:09Right. Like you have to create a presence that's going to generate opportunities. Yeah, totally. And what you'll usually find is that like this event overperforms and this one underperforms. And like, but I think what you'll find is that if you can create that level of awareness and explanation with finance, it's like, yeah, I get it. We missed on this one thing. Yeah. But then you understand your methodology, right? You're also smart for like getting people out of the weeds of like cost per lead on meta or something like let us worry about that in our house. Like I'm going to tell you the overall mix and how we're going to drive revenue for the company.

31:45And we're going to use the money. You know, I think that's wise. Because in enterprise too, the partner stuff. And if you're in enterprise, if you're in enterprise security, you're working with resale partners, that money behaves much differently than other stuff. Because that's where you have to say like, look, this$10 ,000 is not your standard demand generation thing. This is like, you know, I'm spending this$10 ,000 to try to build a relationship with this partner person. What's the cadence for you personally? How often are you meeting with the finance team? Who are you meeting with? We do pretty regular checks on the budget just inside of marketing.

32:23We're in a process of re-forecasting our budget for the second half of the year here at Blue Voyant. But our recorded future where I think the demand gen budget, the growth budget that we were running at Recorded Future was between$9 and$10 million a year. We had a strict finance partner that we worked with every week, taking a look at, and the way that we built trust there, which was very productive for us, it was like we tried to remove as much guesswork as possible. We had a very straight line spreadsheet that said, here are all the things that are pending approval and how much money it adds up to.

33:00Here are all the things that we've approved and how much money it adds up to. and here's how much is left. And we would have that broken out in lots of small ways. So we knew those three facts for every person on the team. So if so-and-so was over or so-and-so was under, then you had like a sales manager and a marketer that you could go talk to about why are we under, why are we over? Tell me about the marketing org of the future. You have some opinions on this. I'll remind you of a couple of bullets here. think small, act big, kill long-term planning and act bigger than you are. That sounds like a guy who's close with Tom Wentworth.

33:37Give generalists good tools and direction, creativity matters, and demand is experiencing another renaissance growth loops versus PLG. Yeah, I'll start with that last one. And I think that this kind of goes back to your, you know, how is security being disrupted by a lot of these agentic first AI security companies? Like all of these great AI companies, like if you remember like product-led growth, if it was like a free product or like a trial. Like if you think back five or six years when we were all talking about this more, now it's about like what's inside of the product that you can share with different people.

34:10Like if you get in and there's a really kick-ass dashboard that shows X, Y, and Z, how do you share that back out? Or how do you make it super simple for people to share that back out with other members of the buying team or with other prospects? And I think that like, especially in security, it's tough in security in general to give somebody free access to a security tool. Because if you think back to the PLG days of HubSpot, it was like, you can create a free version of our CRM and create some deals and move things like their Trello cards. That was the free version of the HubSpot CRM. It's a lot harder to spin up free versions of security software because you need to integrate it with how the business is running.

34:51And not a lot of people do that. But what AI companies in security are really getting right is how to share versions of the product out with other people. Something that I think is like long bent hard in enterprise, but these AI companies are getting right from like, you know, the bottom up. They're building their product in a very shareable way in a way that a lot of these legacy companies aren't necessarily built. Yeah, and it was interesting, like the early wave of AI, people were like afraid to share stuff because they're worried about competitors seeing it. But I don't know, we live in a world where you can find anything.

35:26you can get all the answers now even easier than before. And it's like, what does that mean for product marketing? What does that mean for demand gen? You have to... And it's like, it's also in enterprise, I mean, not even enterprise security, but in enterprise, because of the size of the deal and the relationship you're gonna have with the customer, it's also a big way to build trust. There are a lot of AI companies that have probably come out and they're really just dressed up, nice looking agents. But you actually wanna give something to somebody that they can use and try and see. that's a big part of that early stage trust building with a prospect.

36:00And I think like think small, act big. I mean, the annual plan, the quarterly plan. I did that when I first got to Blue Voyant because I wanted to show people how I thought. I wanted to be like, I don't think that the executive team at Blue Voyant had a lot of exposure to marketing planning and marketing thinking and why it's valuable. So I did annual planning really for like the dressage of it. I wanted people to see themes and areas and metrics and behaviors that I expected. But we've got the marketing team running on two-week sprints. We've got weekly team meetings. It's really about what can we get out the door against a major area that we want to make progress on.

36:42What about killing long-term planning? It's an interesting thought because we get locked into these things by the, you know, we're recording this at the end of July. before you know it, it's going to be the fall before you know it. Everyone's talking about budgets and planning for next year. And I love this idea, like operating like a startup being small marketing is Tom Wentworth. I would talk about this all the time. It's like things just change so quickly. And I want to be able to operate where like, dude, if we have a good idea tomorrow, I want to be able to like blow up the plan and go do that.

37:15Totally. But there's also some level of like having to lock into a plan to finance and the company, like maybe you have a better way of explaining it than I do. I'll leave like where I've had a lot of success is basically having areas or themes that I'm just going to bang on all year. Like I can't tell you the specific things I'm going to do. I think specifics kill marketing. I just think like the more specific you try to be about things that are coming or the way things are going to be, like inherently that's all going to kind of blow up on us a little bit because you don't know the product launch that's coming next quarter.

37:49Maybe you know about the product launch that's coming next year, but something's coming next quarter. You don't even know about it. So how do you create space and how do you create like a mindset on marketing that allows people to jump right into that? So like, I've got something that's on our like annual marketing plan for the year is like a statement that's act bigger than we are. And anything can fall into that. I love that. Like anything can fall into that. I might be talking about how I want to run a research report. Or I might be talking about how we need to buy one of those tools that allows everybody to post on LinkedIn really easily.

38:23But the tactics and the specifics melt away and people start thinking about, oh, Pat, hey, this is one of those things that will help us act bigger. So you get people who are thinking creatively about marketing, taking ideas that they're passionate about, putting it into a system for you if you're confident in what that direction should be. Yeah, I think people are going to get a lot out of this because just the how you think about operating finance, how you think about seeing the bigger picture, seeing the field, being able to push back on some of these things, especially in the enterprise. I really like that.

38:56Okay. I can finally get to the number one question. I have two things here. We're going to use them both to wrap up. There's a line in our prep doc that says in bold letters, I am responsible for your career, want kind of tell story, good segue into HubSpot. And then I have a HubSpot thing I want to talk to you about after. Tell me, what's the story about this? So that was a typo. I'm not responsible for your career. I'm responsible for all your success. Okay. What a typo. Sorry, Claude, don't make that mistake again if you're listening. It's fine. Mistakes happen. Okay. So I was at HubSpot from 2010 to 2000, I think like end of 2017.

39:33I think you showed up around 2014. Do I have that right? Yes, that's great. Because there's 27 ,000 people that have worked at that company and I had hair at the time. So yep, 2014. Right. So I started in 2010. I did my first year. I was basically on the customer success team. And then I pitched a job to Mike Fultby and Kip for a partner marketing role. And I got onto the marketing team. And I did a couple of years, as my grandmother would call it. I was a one-armed paper hanger for a couple of years. where I just tried to do everything myself, you know, stayed up way too late, but really just tried to do anything that that partner marketing team needed.

40:11Different time of your life, no kids, nothing but free time. Nothing but free time, late nights and free time. So around 2013-ish, that's when we started building a partner marketing team and like a field marketing team to align with all the new sellers and all the new like playbooks that were in place at HubSpot. So I got two people to join the team right off the bat, but I recruited them directly from the customer success team. And that was kind of like, that was a core value at HubSpot. People were just flying around left and right. Like, I'm going to go from that team to that team. Like people on support would be on product like six months later.

40:44But I became the poster child for the internal mobility policy, which just sounds severe, right? So I got a corporate, yeah. After I hired, I think you know this guy, but Al Badrecki. Sure. After I hired Al into my second role, I ended up meeting with the guy that was running customer success. And he's like, look, we're psyched that you're hiring Al into the team. You're going to kill me, dude. You can't just keep grabbing people off of customer success. And I was like, oh yeah, I understand. And I honestly had like no idea. Right. And then like the next day on the company wiki message board, there was a page that was called internal mobility policy.

41:21So I really felt like I was like, oh man, I was the straw that broke the camel's back on this one. So my name came up in an executive meeting, now they're in policy. Then fast forward maybe 18 months, you show up at HubSpot, you're running podcasts, things like that. We had a job that was going to be a marketing manager for the enterprise sales team. And you came and asked me about it. And by letter of the law, the internal mobility policy, you hadn't been at HubSpot for a year, so you didn't qualify. And because we didn't want people to be surprised, I needed to go tell your manager that you were interested.

41:59So I did all those things. I think three months later, you left for drift. That's crazy. This is not what I thought you were going to say. Wow. It's valid. It's a reasonable... Totally valid. This is not a bullshit story. There's maybe the only other two people, maybe a handful of people know the story here. But yes, basically, like I had always wanted to work at HubSpot because I found out that like, I don't know, I didn't know what my purpose. You become a grownup and you have to have a job. Sure. And I wasn't good at anything except like I liked sports and working out. And then it's like, oh, dude, you got to get a job.

42:39And so I tried to go into sales like everyone who doesn't know what they want to do goes into sales. And I was terrible at it. Eventually, I got a job in marketing. I got a PR agency internship. They're only people that could hire me. and I found out that like there's this company called HubSpot and they like made it cool to be a marketing person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys were like putting out cool content. You had these events. You were like, here's how to justify your spend. Here's how to make people love marketing. And I always wanted to work there. And I was at this company called Privy and this was the V1 of it.

43:09I worked there twice. I came back as a CMO and they got acquired later, but they ran out of money the first time. I had this podcast on the side called Tech in Boston. Mike Volpe and Joe Chernov and Kip and them, they wanted to start a podcast. They said, Hey, why don't you go get Dave? Let's go do the podcast in here. Well, finally got into HubSpot, which to me felt like I got on the Patriots, right? And I felt like I'm on the Patriots. I can be a five tool player and I'm holding the, I'm the holder is how I felt. Right. And so I'm like, let me find another job. This is great. And they're like, no, you can't.

43:42And now as a owner operator, you know, former marketing, I understand why you can't just let people do whatever they want inside the company. But then, you know, some stuff happened that summer and a bunch of the execs like ended up leaving and I didn't get the job inside of the company anyway. And I was like, oh, I don't want to do this anymore. And I walked across the street and I interviewed for the job at Drift. And, you know, in my head, I followed the rules of the internal mobility policy. Sure. And it just pushed you over the edge and you just just left. I didn't even know that. That's crazy.

44:11Imagine an alternate reality, though. What if I had gotten that job? I would have generated so much, even more pipeline for you and you would even have a bigger house. That's right. I would have all the success. I would be running into six. Is it six? Oh my God. That's a good joke. What type of six? I'm sitting in, it's a hundred degrees in this little booth that I'm in. Well, dude, this was awesome. Patrick Shade, thank you, man. Thank you for doing this podcast. I appreciate it. Look, if you listen to this podcast and you're listening to Pat right now, I want you to go find him on LinkedIn because there's going to be a whole plethora of people that listen to this, that can relate to what you're saying about being in this type of partner, Microsoft ecosystem type of company, being at an enterprise cybersecurity company.

44:50And I love how you talked about thinking through finance and talking through marketing that way. So I can't wait for a couple of weeks from now when you send me a screenshot and be like, dude, people actually listen to your podcast and I got a bunch of messages. So it's good to see you. Thank you for coming on the show and I'll see you soon. My question. All right.

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