Navigating a Rebrand: Why SurveyMonkey Went Back to the Monkey (With Katie Miserany, CCO & Global Head of Marketing)

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

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1:32So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

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3:02Okay, we're live. Super excited to have Katie on the pod. She's CCO and head of marketing. Is it chief customer officer or commercial officer? Communications. Communications. Oh, that's right. A nod to your past life, which we'll talk about on this podcast. but Chief Communications Officer and Head of Marketing at SurveyMonkey, someone we've gotten to know over the last year or so, doing cool stuff at SurveyMonkey, one of the members in our executive community. I'm excited to have you on the pod. Before we get into your whole background, what's the last three months in your life been? Summer's done.

3:36We're getting back into September. What's been going on? How would you describe your last two or three months at work and life? Gosh, well, I've got kids. So it was a lot of camps. You know, all the parents understand the varying drop-off schedules. How old are your kids? That's kind of what I was trying to get at. How old are your children? Yeah. Well, I have a first grader now. She just started first grade. And then I have a three-year-old who had the blessed experience of staying in preschool all summer. So that was amazing. But we did the camp shuffle all summer long with the first grader.

4:07and in the meantime at work we were trying to be super interesting over the course of the summer and so we were able to pull off a lot of really cool stuff that's been a lot of fun to work on okay all right cool everybody's kind of commiserated over like the august marcy who's one of the cmos in our world was like i think camps could charge like double the price in august and that would be a good business strategy is like by then i know my kids were home for the like last three weeks of august yesterday was the first day of school and i feel like i have a superpower today oh yeah Yeah, so much focus, so much clarity.

4:37It's amazing. All right, so where I wanna start, we have this awesome prep doc and sometimes I go in and out of it, but you've been at SurveyMonkey for seven years, which is like, look, I interview CMOs and VPs of marketing for a living. That's a long time, especially a long time in tech. What keeps you there? What gets you excited? So I've been here for seven years, but it feels like it's been at least three different companies in that time. And we've been through so much, If you think about the last seven years as an industry, things are changing so frequently that the learning curve just never stopped.

5:11I was able to just keep learning and going through wild new experiences. When I started, we were publicly traded. After that, there were the pandemic years, the transition to remote work. Everybody was doing the digital transformation acceleration thing. And so that was a crazy time to be at SurveyMonkey. Then we rebranded and took on a new name, trying to move up market under a different company name. Then we had an activist investor. There was a failed acquisition by Zendesk. The activist gets put on our board. We go private through a private equity transaction. We return to SurveyMonkey. I mean, all of these chapters were so interesting and I feel like I got 20 years of experience in seven years at the same company.

5:58And I think the thing that really makes it easy to stay is the people. I think if you talk to anybody in the industry who knows folks who've been at SurveyMonkey, there is an incredible, really kind, really loving group of people behind this company. And that has always made it a really safe space to learn and a place that is worth fighting for through all of those changes. So I love that perspective because I think if you told me all those things on the surface, I would say, usually when I talk to someone, when someone lists out all those things, that that's six different reasons to leave. You know, usually, oh, well, I talked to someone, oh, yeah, I was at this company for a year, but then this thing happened and I left.

6:35What you're talking about is amazing. If I could try to like translate the career advice there, we talked to so many marketers in our community, right? You're not always going to be in the perfect job at the perfect time with the most amount of budget and the ability to attract top talent and the market is going in your direction. A mentor of mine once told me was like, your career is bigger than the current company that you're at, but you have to think of like, what are the things that I'm learning and adding like to my bucket right now? What do you think some of those things have been over that time?

7:04Yeah, I think about the phrase, smooth seas never made a skilled sailor. Is that true? Do you feel that? Yeah. Who wants smooth seas all the time? You're not learning anything. I have a good friend who's a recruiter and he took a job at BlackBerry during the iPhone era. And we were all like, what are you doing? Why are you going? And he's like, can you imagine how good I'm going to get? If I can recruit people into BlackBerry right now, can you imagine? I'm unstoppable. I love that perspective. I think that's such a growth mindset way to go about your career. And you're always going to find meaning and value if you can really be anchored on what you're learning and the skills that you're acquiring.

7:42and not necessarily like, what does this look like to the outside? Is there been a crew of other people that have a similar tenure? Do you have people you've worked with over this bumpy period? Yeah. Survey Monkey is kind of incredible like that. We had town hall this morning and celebrated a 10-year anniversary, and those are not uncommon. So the company has been around 27 years. I think our chief people officer might be the longest tenured employee. She's been there for like 14, I think, of those years. But it's not uncommon to have 10-year anniversaries. And those people usually, you know, maybe they start in support and then they move into a more technical role.

8:17They learn engineering skills. Now they're on the engineering team. They're building cool stuff. Like it's been a place with a lot of mobility for the workforce. And that has been really fun. What was the rebrand? I remember because at the time I was close with Lila, right? Love Lila. Lila Shrinivasan, our former CMO. Yeah. So this was the publicly traded years and there was some hesitation on the sales side of the business. The folks who were trying to sell SurveyMonkey Enterprise, they were saying, you know, people don't want to spend six figures with a company called SurveyMonkey. And so we created this brand.

8:50It was called Momentive. And that was kind of the, so SurveyMonkey stuck around as the name of the flagship product. But all of our enterprise solutions were under this Momentive name. And it was designed to give the sales side of the business some tailwinds in those conversations. But like I said, we went private in 2023 and our new CEO, Eric Johnson, it was his first act as CEO was to unbrand, re-rebrand back to SurveyMcCase. What was your reaction to that? How did you feel? It was so well-received inside the company. I remember I was sitting with Eric in the conference room because it was the comms person and I was doing the town hall with him where he announced this.

9:30And down the hall, I could hear the cheers from the people watching. It's like the scene out of a movie and like, we're bringing it back. And everyone. Yeah. And I was like, like losing their minds. It's just such a beloved brand and a brand that sticks out and stands out. It's interesting how much things have changed. It's almost like better to be the brand with the monkey in it now because of AI and everything, you know? Yeah. We talk about that all the time. So when I took over marketing around this time last year, I set the goal. our number one priority was to be relentlessly helpful and relentlessly us.

10:03And it took a lot of work to define what does it mean to be relentlessly us in this market where you have AI and all the sea of sameness and the great flattening of affect and tone. And we are in the middle of launching this big, we're calling it today's survey monkey, but this big unveiling of what it means to be relentlessly us. And I'm so proud of it and so excited about it because it really is what you're saying. Like, let's lean into the fact that there's monkey in our name. Let's be different. Let's do the things that we have earned the right to do as this 27 year old brand that is different from a lot of the other momentives of the universe.

10:39Like we don't need that sheen and that shine anymore because I think it makes us stand out more to just be us in this market. As a storyteller, like, have you gone back into the OG? Is there a lot of like OG ingredients in the survey monkey story that you're kind of like pulling at and like retelling now with the scale and size that you're at? Yeah. One of those is curiosity. So when you think about monkeys, there may be some unpleasant associations with them, but the thing that everybody latches on to that is... I think of that scene in Jumanji when they're all in the kitchen. And the guy has to get his little tail out of his feet.

11:17Yes, yes. Yeah. So, I mean, like monkeys, you know, the best thing about them is also an almost universal human trait, which is curiosity. And we did this report the outset of the summer when I was talking about just doing really fun, really interesting stuff. It was called the State of Curiosity Report. And it found that 95 % of people still describe themselves as curious. Only 30 % of workplaces strongly reward that curiosity. We thought that was so interesting because this is like nearly universal human trait to be curious at work and our workplaces are squashing it. And when you dug into the reasons behind it, it was like people think it slows you down to ask questions or be curious.

11:57But in the end, it makes it more expensive when you have to rework or do the work again because we didn't ask the right questions up front. Or the more senior you are, the more likely you were to just ask AI. You didn't ask your peers or the experts on your team. You're just like chatting with Claude and taking that first answer that came back. And so leaning into curiosity, I think that's a core of our business and something that is just inherently related to us because of our name and the space that we occupy that we can make a lot out of. We actually took the findings of that report and we hosted something called the world's most uncurious meeting.

12:31It was 90 minutes because like, it was the worst time. If you see a meeting that's 90 minutes long, that like hurts already. If I get an hour meeting, it's like, what are we doing here? Yes. And so it was this improv troupe in LA and they found this like hellscape of a conference room to have this live streamed meeting. And it was live streamed on LinkedIn. It literally took 90 minutes and they decided nothing. It was the world's most uncurious meeting. And it was so fun. And like we saw reporters chiming in on the chat, like it got this attention, like I said, over the course of the summer when people aren't generally thinking about buying our software that we were able to capitalize on.

13:07And it just was so fun and different and unique in a way that I feel like all brands need to be thinking about right now. Okay. So that's the big rock for your work today at SurveyMonkey, this kind of reintroduction campaign. Can you just talk to the campaign? Let's just geek out on some of the marketing because I think a lot of people listening, it's our peers, right? Wow, this is cool. That's a cool opportunity. This 20-year-old company, whatever it is, rebranding, going back to the OG brand. How do you think about this? How will you I'm not asking this question because I want you to explain it, but just, you know, how will you measure this?

13:42How does this get rolled out across the business? How does this become more than just like change the website and then like, hooray? How do you actually put this thing into action? What's going on across the marketing team and the company? Well, I mean, it started with laying down the gauntlet of we need to be relentlessly asked. What does that mean? And we had to do all the work to define like who we are in our customers' minds, who we want to be. did our visual identity and every touchpoint that we were putting in front of customers reflect that. And so did the hard work, decided on this redesign.

14:12It's a visual redesign done with a ton of intention. And to the team's credit, it didn't just stop at marketing. The product design team was deeply involved and they were thinking about the entire onboarding journey and how can we make that more personalized to represent this kind of more human-centric, very curious, relentlessly survey monkey type of experience that we're trying to create. But we also were looking at the data and realizing that we had this real seasonality to the business where I mentioned, you know, we see this drop off in interest over the course of the summer. Maybe people are just not thinking about their goals for the year as much, or they're not at their desk.

14:52We don't care as much about customer research in the summer. You know, it's like they're watching the World Cup. I don't know. Yeah. Wait, that's a real thing, by the way. I don't know if you saw this in our in our group, But like there was a couple of CEOs were like convinced that the summer slowdown was due in part to like the whole office watching the World Cup. I know. Don't you think that's like they're watching the World Cup? Like everybody must be. Of course. The executives are certainly not. But the people, you know, people are. It's those people. Yeah. So summer's slow for us. And so what we decided to do this year was really lean in to the seasonality of the business with a ton of intention.

15:27So over the course of the summer, we let our earned and owned channels be the hero. So we create this report. We put it out across, you know, podcasts and we're featuring it in all of our content. We had it on the homepage next to the sign up. You know, it's like, check this out. We're remarketing to people who interact with that report. We're showing them the Uncurious Meeting. That's all going out over social. So it was this like hero moment over the course of summer. We called it organic summer to try to make as much noise and be as interesting as possible so that when September comes and our selling season begins where we see this really heightened demand, we can capture as much of it as possible.

16:05and we wanted to have all channels firing. So what started as the visual redesign quickly became a real lightning rod for the entire company to be ready for selling season. And so we've got all of our influencers lit up in September, like all the paid placements we're doing, in-flight ads with a lot of the same content. So it's not just the site or even just the site and the product experience that's getting a refresh. It's every single channel we have in marketing, full bore, pedal to the metal, capture as much demand as possible while we are top of mind. And there's really high interest in what we are offering, the feedback loops, the continuous listening programs that you want to set up in the fall heading into the new year.

16:48I think that's a really cool example of just you did it because you're using the seasonality to your advantage. It's almost like, you know, spring cleaner. I think so much in marketing, it can be so easy to just like straight line the plan and you're just going to keep growing and And that's just not reality. And then so many people that we talk to, you never have time to go and like do the rebrand or seed the market or build up the organic stuff. And so now you've kind of done that intentionally. Is that because you don't have the pressure of being like, is there anything about being a private company that feels like you can kind of do that?

17:22Or am I making that up? I'm just getting at like, you almost need to step back to like grow some stuff, invest in it. Then you can do marketing and reap the benefits of it. versus if you're expecting these all to pay off overnight, it just doesn't work that way. Yeah. Well, we, I mean, we didn't start there embracing seasonality. We tried first what we call the defibrillator strategy. So we're like, can we beat it? Can we change the seasonality? Could we actually like, okay, so it's Easter and demand starts to weaken. Could we be out in market with like a big push and just change it? And so we had this out of home, we were in Boston, we were in Chicago, we had a whole digital national campaign.

18:02And it like worked in Boston, Chicago. But it didn't like change the trajectory of the business. And so I think it comes back to looking at the data on a very regular basis and trying to say like, what's working here? And what's not? Is this the next best place to park a dollar or a bit of effort, knowing what we're seeing? And so we swung pretty wildly from like, okay, that defibrillator, like we didn't beat the curve. We didn't change the slope of that line. Let's embrace it and see what we can do in the fall when we know demand is high to just be on max demand capture moment. But I actually think back to your original question, is it a private company thing or not?

18:39I think it actually comes down to the marketing challenge that SurveyMonkey has, which is that almost everyone knows SurveyMonkey. We do not have a brand awareness problem. We have very high saturation of awareness for SurveyMonkey. The problem is people are kind of anchored on what SurveyMonkey was in like 2009. And so how do we update their point of view and share a glimpse into how the platform has evolved and all the different ways it can help you if you're anchored on the 2009 version? So it's a little bit like, you know, the challenges that Kim at Zoom has shared with this community in the past are like, people are anchored on what they know of Zoom from like the free era when they were all working remotely.

19:23Zoom is so much more than that. And we have the same story to tell at SurveyMonkey now. So I think that gives us the luxury of sitting back and like we aren't out there with a blank slate trying to make SurveyMonkey mean something to people. We can kind of do these lightning strike moments where we're trying to disrupt a pattern of thinking about us instead of trying to like get that baseline established. That's something that an earlier stage or a less well-known company has to do. Yeah. Okay. That's a super interesting way to transition this because I'm glad you brought up the Kim thing and the brand awareness thing, because you have this interesting challenge where, I don't know if you called it this or our generative AI briefing doc, but the Swiss army knife problem, which is moving to persona based marketing, which is like a really interesting thing that a lot of people that listen to this podcast have to deal with was like, Hey, we don't want people to think of us this way.

20:14We're actually really, you know, we have this use case for this persona and this use case from this persona. Can you talk about how you've kind of realigned marketing around this persona based approach? Yeah, it's all related, right? So the Swiss Army knife is like, you know, SurveyMonkey makes great surveys and forms. And then you leave it up to people what they need to use surveys and forms for. So like you're kind of counting on people to be like, I need a survey. I'll go to SurveyMonkey. And I think that we've kind of maxed out in this era on that horizontal type of marketing. Again, the brand awareness is critical.

20:48We are going to continue to count on our earned and owned channels to drive that. But when we think about paid acquisition and the higher value customers that we're going after, they are specific personas. It's HR, it's marketing, it's CX professionals. Sometimes it's like a small business owner who needs all of that and wants to buy one platform that can do it all. And they have very specific jobs to be done that we need to be connecting our product to. So instead of talking about surveys or even employee surveys, which is something that an HR leader might care about, we need to talk about the employee experience program that you're setting up and the cadence in which you're sending these surveys and how our expertise and our benchmarks inside the product are going to help you understand where you are and where you need to go next.

21:33So it has to get, I think in this day and age, a lot more specific, a lot more personalized. We're kind of like mid transition on this, but the early stats that we're seeing are really impressive. So if you go from kind of a generic like surveys are powerful type of ad message to something that is targeted at HR leaders or managers who care about employee experience, we saw a 73 % increase in our click through rate on those ads. I think people are hungry for this. They don't want generic marketing, especially if they think they know you. They want to understand how you're going to solve their specific problem in a modern way.

22:13It's like life, right? Like if the content, it's so dumb, this content that I watch, but like I, my whole Instagram content is like other 40 year old dads, like working out early in the morning, like before their kid. Okay. That's what you are. You're a golfer, you're a CrossFitter or whatever. And it's like the same is true when you're selling them products for work, it has to speak to me in some way. And I have to believe that you get it. This is only on top of mind because I'm working on my keynote for Drive and I was referencing this, but there's this great old school copywriter called Dan Kennedy.

22:44And he always used to say like, you need to like pass the sniff test. Basically you need to, if you're selling to HR, you have to sound like an HR person. You have to get inside their head and know these things. How do you enable that on the team? Is it like a product marketing thing? Do you split people up by persona? Does someone go get really smart about HR? Does someone go get really smart about marketing? Any lessons on like how you've split up the team to do this? Yeah, we have a great shorthand for this. So I used to work with this guy, Ephraim Joseph. He's at Depp. He's a creative director there now.

23:14And he came into, we host this internal learning series called the Marco Masterclass. And he was like, you need to know their secret handshake. What is their secret handshake? because that is you extending to them their language, their vibe, like what they care about. So yes, as we like get really specific on HR, it's HR season right now. Like, you know, you're going into open enrollment and like all the benefit surveys and heading into the end of the year stuff. So how are the HR people talking about this? We have a PMM who's dedicated to this. We're also lucky to have this incredible chief people officer and her team.

23:49And so we're like mining the expertise around us. Right. Yeah. You have somebody internally. I used to do this all the time at Drift with like our CFO, we were trying to sell to CFOs and we just sit down with him and like, you know, he would just try to crush every objection that he had. Yeah. I mean, we do that too. So we like have the CFO and the chief people officer and we're like, okay, what could she say to convince you? So yeah, I think it's like, if you're going to move from horizontal to persona based marketing, you have to move from a shallow customer understanding to a very deep one to extend that secret handshake.

24:20Okay. How do you, this is such a silly question, but it comes up all the time and I can hear someone asking it. How do you handle like the website then? Because people always argue like then everyone inside the company wants to fight over like, no, we need more ads for this persona. Or like when I go to the website, I used to always argue with the VP of sales like this persona is not on the website. Like, how do you show all that? How do you show like we're SurveyMonkey the brand. Here's what we do as a company. But then we also have these individual use cases. You know, I'm trying to ask you.

24:48I do. Yeah. So our newly redesigned website, which is out now. You should go check it out. It's part of this big launch that we're celebrating. So to back up a little bit, one of the benefits of having been here seven years is that a couple of years ago, we went to this model that we called pillars. And there were like pillared focuses on different personas. So the product and engineering orgs were pillarized. PMM was pillarized, but marketing stayed a center of excellence. And everybody listening who's been in a team that's organized like that knows what that means, which is like you become the battleground on which these skirmishes play out.

25:26Who is more important? How do we allocate the resources? Who's getting what? So I have fought very hard against that as we're becoming a multi-product brand. We have products for market research. We have products for more CX use cases, like embedded listening on websites, things like that. And so we've had to hold the line on like, what are our priorities and making those really clear. The way we solved it on the website is the top hero section is a glimpse at the product because we have a product awareness problem. People know who we are, but they haven't seen inside the product in so long. And so we wanted to give people a glimpse of like, you think you know SurveyMonkey, but you don't.

26:01And then as you scroll down, there's like, we call them a bento. And there's this bento where you can click through and see like, okay, so for HR leaders and managers, what's the offering and how is it merchandised there? And then you can click on like, okay, but I'm a market researcher. why I'm a marketer or a product person who wants to understand the market. And so we have this great, really elegant way of merchandising the whole offering just to give people a sense of the breadth and they can kind of self-select into where they go from there. And obviously, like the journey gets more and more and more personalized as you move through the site.

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28:49How will you look to talk about this? You know, a year from now, this is, all this work is successful. What are the things you're talking to, you know, with the executive team, the board, whoever, when you're talking about this kind of reintroduction campaign? That's a good question. I think if we're wildly successful, we will have understood a couple of things. One, this brand is resonating. with people. We're breaking out of the sea of sameness. We need to enrich and continue building on what we have here. I think the next thing would be confirming the seasonality of the business and how we are going to lead into that in the future.

29:27It makes me think about if our season is September to Easter, call it April, how quickly can we come back from the holidays? What can we have in market on January 2nd so that we are maximizing every single day of that journey. And then I think on the persona-based side of things, it starts to become how are we enriching the entire company's understanding of these different personas and what we need to build for them and how we're going to make sure that the content and the marketing and the products that we put out in the world are really resonating with them and solving their problems. Because I do think that shift from like the horizontal kind of shallow understanding of the customer to a very, very deep one is critical to pull this off.

30:12And so, I mean, hopefully it's like a maturation of all the things that we're trying right now and that were proven right. Okay. I want to pivot into talking about your career path because my job talked to VPs of marketing and CMOs. And I think there's a belief that there's one perfect little path and you must come up through this way. And I love talking to people about all the different paths you came up with came through. We talk about your path from comms. I mean, obviously, it's still a big part of your job today. You're a very easy person to talk to. You're a very polished comms person. So like that comes off.

30:46But there's a story from earlier in your career when you were working with Sheryl Sandberg. And I've used this example because the LinkedIn CMO was Shannon Brayton. She's not there anymore, I don't think. And I would always say she was the first CMO that I saw that was like, yeah, I came from a PR background and here's how this influence seems like you had a relationship with her. Can you tell that story? Yeah, I did. It was actually, I got connected to her through Lila when Lila was the CMO at SurveyMonkey and she saw something in me and she was like, you need to talk to Shannon because Lila came from LinkedIn.

31:20She was there earlier in her career and Shannon was nice enough to hop on the phone with me. And she told the story about when Jeff Wiener tapped her to take over marketing. And she was like, I don't, I don't want to take over marketing. I don't even like marketers. Like, why would I have no interest in this? I'm not doing anything. She didn't think of herself, even though she's a company, she didn't think of herself as a marketer. It's interesting. Oh, no, we don't. We don't think of ourselves. Oh, you have had a marketing. You're sorry. You are one of us now. You have had a marketing. I know.

31:46Like this hybrid crossover. I mean, people are having a real resurgence into C-suites in a way that, like, I find really exciting in the age of AI. Oh, well, I mean, once the CEOs found out that, like getting mentioned, you know, it's like mentions are back, you know, like PR coverage and backlinks and press releases crawled by the LLMs. Like PR is definitely having a moment. It's back big time. And I think like if there's parallels with me and Shannon where she was trusted by the CEO, she was in the C-suite. So she's very close to finance and the board and understanding the strategy of the company overall.

32:23And I think when you give comms people that kind of access, what it unlocks is this ability to help shape the strategy from a communication standpoint. So it's not so reactive. You're not just like, whoops, we made a mistake. Now PR has to come in and clean it up. PR can help steer by being like, this is what public perception is going to be of this. This is what is going to happen to our reputation if you go down this path and here's an alternate, slightly different path that might have a better outcome for us. And so that was the experience I had as well, sitting on the C-suite, being able to help steer the reputation of the company very, very close to, you know, our CFO and the sales team and like understanding those parts of the business that comms people used to kind of be left out of.

33:06And so Shannon said that Jeff was like, you have no choice. You're doing this. And that she ended up loving it. And that's been my experience as well, where, you know, I was asked to take it on and I was just very upfront about like, well, here's all the things I'm going to have to learn. But learning it has been incredible. And it's been so fun to work with this team and this brand and these customers that we have. We have customers all over the world, some of the biggest, coolest brands and some of the smallest, like fastest growing ones. So it's been quite the opportunity and something that I would totally encourage other comms people to think about.

33:40Let's talk about that part, like the learning part of it, because I think there's some things that when you come up from a certain path, there's things that make you great as a marketing leader, which is like your biases, your zone of excellence is going to be comms, positioning, messaging, communication strategy, which I think grass is always greener, but like a CMO or head of marketing who came up through demand gen, they could learn a lot from you about how comms actually drives demand. We get so obsessed over channels, but there's so much you could be doing. Were there like blind spots or areas?

34:10I have a much smaller example. I wasn't leading marketing at a company as big of SurveyMonkey, but I was the CMO of a small startup and I got to build a team of 10 people. And my background is very much product marketing, brand, comms. And I wasn't a strong demand gen person. And the first person I hired was a very good demand gen person. And I got that experience because at my past company, my peer was awesome at demand gen. And I saw her and I saw what good looks like. Like, how have you kind of navigated building out your team that way? Yeah, I'm a big believer in just asking around. So when I got this opportunity, I was connecting with CMOs, you know, from the Exit 5 community or just from my network.

34:50And I remember talking to this one woman and she was like, mission number one for you is to get as close as possible to the growth team. You need to look at everything they're looking at. You need to understand everything about their strategy. You need to ask all your dumb questions right now so that you can get really good at this really fast. And that has been a really great strategy for us. I think I wouldn't have had the confidence to do things like, you know, shut down that out of home campaign or pull off the organic summer move to save all the budget for the fall if I didn't have that better understanding of how that organization worked and all the levers we could pull and what we were seeing in the data and what was missing.

35:31But if you're overcome by imposter syndrome, when you step into something new and that prevents you from asking people wiser than you for advice, then you're just like writing your obituary ahead of time. Like you got to embrace what you don't know and go in there and turn over all the rocks and ask all the questions and just really seek out some knowledge from people who have more experience. What's the role of comms today? So segue into like, it's an interesting, where does comms fit? you know, you see so many people asking about PR in our group right now. Is it more important than ever? Am I overrating that?

36:08I want this as not survey monkey lessons, but like I got a tier one comms person on the line and I want your advice about like what matters for, you know, other senior marketing leaders that are listening. I think it's more important than ever. Maybe I'm biased, but I think it's again like, okay, AI has changed everything for everybody. Search doesn't work how it used to. You're facing traffic losses. You're facing just like easier than ever, faster than ever content creation that just is all garbage and sounds the same and is super boring. So who are the people who can break out of these ruts for you?

36:44It's both PR and like if you think about PR is like pitching media, building relationships with journalists. Journalists also operate differently. All of my favorite journalists write their own Substack now. Okay, this is what I was going to say. The media landscape is so different. My very first job out of college was at a PR agency, and I was literally cold calling reporters. And I was like, please don't answer. Please don't answer. I didn't know what to say. But today, the media has been democratized. So are there publications that still matter to people? I work. One of my clients was like a legal tech company and there was like 60 law publications.

37:24Now, I don't know who matters to survey. Is it all like micro is PR now like this kind of like micro influencer thing with like sub stack? Is that the play or am I missing something? There are bigger publications that still matter. Yes. And it all depends on your story. And again, if you go back to this, like not a Swiss army knife, but a very specific tool for a very specific buyer, you can find the micro-influencers who are important to you. We still want to speak to small and medium-sized businesses in general. And so we'll often, you know, work our relationships with Fast Company and Inc., outlets that have really great newsletter, thinking like the Morning Brew type folks.

38:06So yes, it is like a micro-influencer push, but also trying to get the bigger publications to think of you in that way. And then leveraging your own internal experts to tell stories on their own channels. Our CEO, Eric Johnson is an avid runner. He's like this, one of these crazy people who was just like, I was talking to him last night and I was like, I got invited to run a 50 K who runs a 50 K. He's like, it's not that hard. So anyway, he has, they're all crazy. There's not a normal, there's not a normal CEO or founder. And I say that with love and I've worked for them, you know, it's like, and he's awesome.

38:40So we were like looking for an organic angle for him to be posting online. And we're like, what are your running thoughts that you say that's either the most productive or least productive time of your day. Like just share your running thoughts with the community. And it's been so well received. And so a comms person can build that persona right now. Yeah. Eric Johnson, Terrible Monkey, follow running thoughts. Great. And sometimes they're just like, you know, posts about kindness and his daughters. And sometimes it's about pizza, but it's often about business strategy and how he's thinking about the hard problems.

39:09Good. I'd rather see you do this than like what a lot of people do is they just kind of like start all these CEOs are just posting like slop generated from, you know, it's just like they got a ghostwriter or they're just slop clawed. Like this is much better. Yeah. Much more authentic. Okay. This is great. He's sweaty standing in front of the Peloton, right? Yes. And a comms person can find a really good comms person can find what is authentic and interesting about you or your person, your principle that you're supporting and tell stories about it. And like, what else is there in this day and age that's going to help you break through or be a brand that's memorable?

39:47Do you have any insight as a comms person, your peers? I'm guessing you still talk about this stuff a lot. It comes up a lot. You're probably doing it at SurveyMonkey. Are there any lessons about mentions and stuff influencing search and LLMs like LinkedIn and getting included in a sub stack and going on a podcast or even writing press releases and having that bump up on your website? Any insights and all that kind of mumbo jumbo? I just rattled a lot. It's just changing every minute of every day. So we, like a lot of people, started participating on Reddit. Yeah, how? How do you do that in a way that doesn't get like the pitchforks coming at you?

40:22So we have some internal folks who have like zillions of karma points. They're just like obsessed with Reddit. They're very active on the platform. Again, ask for help, right? So we're like, hey, if we want to have a brand presence here and we don't want to be gross, like, how do we do it? What do we do? And they were like, you know, you need to respect anonymity. You need to be helpful. So again, our number one priority was to be relentlessly helpful and relentlessly us. And so that first part, I think, is really important on Reddit. What we've heard from customers on the platform is they thought they didn't like our free plan because we were offering, you know, a limited number of responses and then you have to pay for the rest.

40:58And they felt like that was like holding the responses hostage. so we did our first post and we worked so hard on this post was just to explain it was a flow chart and it was like when should you use SurveyMonkey and when should you use a free tool like Google Forms that you could just get unlimited responses from but you don't need the bells and whistles that come with SurveyMonkey the security the like additional AI features the ease of use all of the things that make us a good platform and so that kind of approach where you're not just like, hey, Reddit, come by SurveyMonkey, but you're like, here's something useful for you to help navigate when you're choosing a platform.

41:34Don't pick us if you need 100 responses for free. We're not the platform for that. And that kind of honesty and hopefulness, I think, was really well received there. But all the news now is that the LLMs aren't citing Reddit anymore. But I'm still proud of our community participation there because there's a big audience and we can be helpful to the people there. But I think if you're just chasing LLM mentions, you got to come back to who's your buyer? What do they care about? Are you being helpful to them? That content will find them if you are listening and doing the feedback loops that you need to be doing.

42:09But to chase the LLM mentions, it's like, this is going to change every day. It's too much. Can you give me an overview of how you structured the team and how you run the weekly? What does Katie running the marketing team look like? What are your just kind of operating rhythms and cadences? And people love that type of stuff. Can you tell me some of that? I know it's so helpful just to hear how other people do it. And now I want to know what other people do. Then you have the opposite, which is like everyone learned that Jensen at NVIDIA has like a hundred direct reports. So everyone's like, I'm having, and he doesn't have any one-on-ones and everyone's like, I'm doing that.

42:45And it's like, okay, great. What are you doing, Katie? So we've structured our week. There's a meeting that I call the weekly health check. And everybody who's a director and above comes to this meeting and chimes in on what they did last week. So it's like your key metrics for the moment. And then what happened last week that influenced those metrics and what's happening this week. And then there's also a section for issues and blockers and a section for it's a big spreadsheet. And it's like, do you have anything that we should meet about this week, especially if that issue or blocker needs to get escalated?

43:16So this started as a weekly meeting and it would be like about an hour. We'd spend the first five to seven minutes reading the thing and then we'd go and we'd talk about it. But what we found recently is that we can do it async every other week for the most part. And then I'll call a meeting on any blockers or anything that's flagged in there. So now it's become an every other week meeting, which I think is helpful because I'm a big fan of giving people heads down time and like, let's not meet if it's just a readout of what's on this document. Like we don't need a meeting for that. Oh, gosh. Especially now when it's like, if you just send me a freaking three page PDF from Claude and I get me on a call like I'm not going to that meeting.

43:53Absolutely not. Did you see what Sophie from Clay wrote? She's like an engineering manager and she wrote these rules for writing with AI and they're so simple. I posted about it because it resonated with me so much because that day I had gotten a 17 page Claude PDF and I was like, no, no, I want to know what you think. Like somebody told me the term for this. If you just pass Claude's work on, you're a meat proxy. I saw this. This is going around. Let's put a production. Marissa, when you listen to this later, let's link to Sophie's thing from Clay. And then we got to put that. Was it meat vehicle?

44:28Meat proxy. Don't be a meat proxy. Mean what you send around. Like if you need to stand. Her basic premise was like you need to stand behind every word and how it is presented. And if you cannot do that, you're not doing this right. Like you really have to engage with it to make sure it's communicating what you want to communicate. Yeah. Okay. I distracted you on. I have a side tangent there, but we don't need to get there. Okay. So I like that. God, you're such a comms pro, by the way. I love the name. Naming it a health check as opposed to like Katie's management sink is like, you know, that seems intentional.

45:00Yeah. And then later in the week, we have time reserved for any meetings that we need to have or like strategy discussions. And that is an accordion meeting. So it's like add people if they need to come, shrink it if they don't. I just don't like recurring meetings. Is it a known industry term, an accordion meeting? An accordion meeting? Did I invent it? I don't know. And you had the motion too. Like, yes, possibly. It can get bigger or smaller based on what it is. I do love a one-on-one. I do them biweekly. I think I have seven direct reports, which is probably a lot. But I really get a lot of value out of staying close to all of them.

45:34And so I haven't moved to change that at all. But I love one-on-ones. What does your one-on-one look like? Is it structured, unstructured? How do you do it? I ask for docs. And so my EA will go through and say, like, if the doc isn't filled out, do you really need to meet with Katie? Or are we releasing this time? So it puts some pressure on people to put some thought into what we're going to talk about. I always start with blockers. Does a doc have like some type of format or something? Or is it just like, what notes do you want to talk about? It's blockers. It's wins that you want me to know about.

46:03It's like things you've accomplished and it's discussion items. Where'd you get this? You know, I think it's originally from Francis Fry and Morris. I think this is what they recommend. And I just love it. They're also very anti-recurring meetings like meet when you need to talk about something. Do not meet just because it's on the calendar. And I like to live by that. So yeah, we start with blockers. I always read the wins and the things they've accomplished, but we don't necessarily need to talk about it. I comment on it or send a little emojis and stuff. But then we talk about if they have questions about strategy, if they're dealing with something hard on the team, if there's a blocker, an issue that we need to unblock, that's really where we dig in the meat of it.

46:45Is there ever any surprises? Does someone write in the doc, I'm thinking about quitting? How do the personal things come up? Because I feel like a one-on-one is a lot of like, I don't want to put it on the dock. I'm waiting. I'm waiting until my one-on-one with Katie and I'm finally going to like talk to her about this thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, anything urgent, that's what Slack is for. And the beauty of like not filling your calendar with recurring meetings is you're available. So someone's like, do you have a minute? I'm like, actually, yes, because I do not have a thousand recurring meetings on my calendar.

47:15I have time to talk to you about this. And they'll usually put something in there as a discussion topic that's like people matters. And it doesn't say more than that. But I know then that we, you know, it needs to be a serious conversation. And sometimes I'll even ping them if I see it ahead of time and be like, is this urgent? Should we talk now? So yeah. And I do like to know people personally too. So like I always save time for just those little conversations. How's the family? All that good stuff. Yeah, that's a good reframe there is like you need to, as the team leader, you need to have time to be available to chat where a lot of team leaders are constantly in meetings.

47:52You know, have you ever seen that? There's like a meme and it's like, you're basically in meetings from nine to five, but then you're supposed to fit. When do you actually do the work? You know, it's like the work of the managers to lead the team and to be there for them. It's like that. It's refreshing to hear you say that. Well, and I think it's easy to just go where your calendar tells you to go, but that's not what you need to be doing. That's not driving your own priorities or dictating, you know, what you need to be focused on. That's just, that's somebody else's agenda. Okay. Do you ever bring the whole team together?

48:21Like everybody, like hang out, town hall type of thing? Yes, we have an all hands once a month where we, it's the marketing and communications team, we call it Marco, where we all get together and we had it this morning. We talked about the campaign, some of the stuff we did over the summer, how things are tracking, some celebrations, like, you know, somebody got married and other people had big anniversaries that we got to celebrate. And then once a year, we have a summit where from all over the world, all of the team comes together. We're doing it Toronto this year. It's gonna be super fun in October.

48:52And that timing lends itself really well to 2027 planning and getting the team all aligned on the strategy. And that is such a fun week that we get to have all together because we've got offices in seven countries around the world and then a bunch of remote people too. So it's just absolutely vital for, you know, that team cohesion and making sure everybody knows each other and has a good relationship. Okay, last question. Shout out someone who has had a meaningful impact on your career as a marketing leader and why? Definitely Leela Srinivasan. She, way back when, when I was like a director of CorpComs, saw something in me and really worked to nurture that and kind of planted the seed that this could be my job one day.

49:33And she's also the type of leader that I really look up to. She would be the first person to volunteer for like a lip sync battle or to like film a silly video where she did hundreds of takes trying to just throw a basketball over her shoulder you know like she's that kind of cmo who brought the fun and at our cko this last year was my first one as marketing leader and i wore this like head-to-toe serving monkey green suit and the sales leader and i because it was ski themed had like a 1980s apres ski like outfit for dinner that night and all of that is because of leela because of the person she was and the way she tried to bring the fun to everything.

50:10I really aspire to be a marketing leader like that. I love that. I've gotten to know her a little bit and I always kind of vibed with her. And I love when I find out that someone actually is awesome from someone else, like who actually worked with them. It's like, oh, okay, good. She is who we thought she was. She's actually awesome. That's true. All right, Katie, thanks for hanging on the pod. I'm pumped for you. I think this is a great story given all of the like AI and slop. And I always love a story when like the company wanted to go enterprise and we needed to be more serious and we had to have this brand.

50:43It's like, actually, no, because the things that I love about marketing is like the story about like why it was SurveyMonkey, the curiosity of a monkey, like leaning into that brand and showing people that you can sell to the enterprise even with a monkey in your brand. You know, it's like that's the whole point. Yeah, we got to lean into the monkey now. It's what makes us different, makes us special. Lean into the monkey. Yeah. All right, Katie, thanks for coming on the pod. I appreciate you. Go check out SurveyMonkey. Follow Katie on LinkedIn. I already got Eric. I'm into the running stuff. Eric added one new follower as a result of you coming on the pod today.

51:13Amazing. Yeah.

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