Why Splitting Brand and Demand Gen Will Sink Your Marketing Team

0:00Drew Neisser: This is a weird thing to say, but I feel like AI makes me optimistic about humanity. Let's just assume everybody can create competent content right now, instantly. Competence is a commodity. So we say, okay, well, what is, if our goal is differentiation? Well, that's going to be about distinctiveness, humor, empathy, judgment, original thinking. And those things are human.

0:32Hello and welcome to the award-winning Health Tech Marketing Show. I'm your host, Adam Cherenis, CEO of Health Launchpad. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you haven't already done so, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening so you don't miss an episode. And we have over 140 episodes in the library covering everything from AI to ABM to brand strategy in health tech marketing. A big thank you, as always, to our sponsor, Healthcare Now Radio, the 24-7 healthcare-only radio network that syndicates this show. And a shout out to Roberta and Carol for making that partnership happen.

1:16Today's guest needs almost no introduction if you've spent any time in B2B marketing circles. Drew Neiser is the founder of CMO Huddles, which is one of the best, maybe the largest peer community built exclusively for B2B CMOs. Drew has interviewed hundreds of CMOs over the past decade and has built a community to over 800 members. And he'll explain why it's called the CMO huddle. In this conversation, Drew and I are going to get into how AI is reshaping the CMO's job, why he thinks the return of the big idea might be marketing's best answer to AI-generated sameness, why splitting brand and demand gen into separate budgets backfires.

2:18And he also is going to share some sobering data and maybe a little hope on CMO tenure, particularly at private equity and venture-backed companies. So with that, let's get into it and meet Drew. So Drew Neiser, welcome back to the show. I think you were on an episode many, many years ago. I think we were still in double digits. Now we're in, this is episode 140 something. It's just great to have you back. So for those people who don't know you, tell us about yourself and a bit about CMO Huddles.

2:55Drew Neisser: Well, first of all, thank you for having me back. I love that. It's an honor. I hope I have something new to say. That's part of it. In terms of Drew Neiser, I think my claim to fame over the last 10, 15 years is that I have focused almost exclusively on CMOs and B2B CMOs and interviewing hundreds of them and creating a community called CMO Huddles and helping these folks through a incredibly treacherous. I feel like I'm the guy on a rapid river trying to guide this unsteerable raft with, you know, a hundred passengers on it. I mean, we're actually 800 in the community now, but it's a treacherous moment.

3:38Drew Neisser: And so there's a lot that they need. And in terms of CMO Huddles, It is the only B2B community that is really focused on B2B CMOs. We started in 2020. And I guess probably the most important thing to note is that a group of penguins is a huddle. And it is why we have so embraced penguins. One, to help be the brand that we would hope our constituents, our members would want to be. And two, because it turns out that there's a lot in common between penguins and CMOs. I'm happy to go into that. And then sort of the last part of it is that we actually donate 1 % of revenue to the Global Penguin Society, which is the leading preservation and research organizations in the world with penguins.

4:25That's a wonderful story. I think you've met Equalities and good branding is certainly one of them. So 800 members. It's very impressive. I think the last time we talked, it was probably around 150. What's been the driver of the growth of it over the last two or three, four years, something like that?

4:51Drew Neisser: Well, probably one of them was that we opened up a free tier. We hadn't really wanted to do that, and we did. And that's been helpful in surprising ways. It certainly helped us in terms of the engagement with the Slack channel. And it's helped us, frankly, from a sponsorship standpoint. So our sponsorship revenue is significant. When you represent a group of 800, it's very different than when you represent a group of 150. And we're much more sophisticated in our ability to help our sponsors have the right conversations with the right members. So that's been that. And look, if you are a consistent voice in the marketplace advocating for the community or gets around.

5:33Absolutely. Yeah. I know several members of the health tech community. I know are members of your community as well and big advocates of it. So now in all these conversations that you're having, let's talk about the big shifts over the last couple of years. AI is obviously one of them. Before you come to AI, what are some of the other shifts?

5:57Drew Neisser: Well, I can't have this conversation with sort of out including AI because it's part of the story. I mean, and what's amazing to me, and I wonder if you're seeing this as well, it's like everything has changed and nothing has changed. And I say that because the core job of a marketing leader is to differentiate and build a moat around the business, as Warren Buffett would say, marketing builds a moat, to earn trust within the organization and obviously with employees and customers and prospects, and then understand the customer and, of course, create demand. So that job has not changed. So the what is the same.

6:43Drew Neisser: And I emphasize that because I think you could forget those things really quickly and you could just get so darn excited about all the things that AI could do that you would just start doing that stuff. So the reason why I say I can't separate it is that AI is radically changing the speed and economics of execution. And it doesn't matter what area we're talking about. research, production, product marketing, personalization, and all these things that used to take forever, you can now do instantly, which is great and terrible at the same time, right? And then the underlying thing, if you said, what's the biggest problem with the job is that AI has even, there was always pressure to do more with less, with fewer people, with less money and expectations were never, were always outsized.

7:35Drew Neisser: But now because of AI, it's like you just have CEOs saying, hey, cut your budget by 30%, increase your output by 30%, huge delta. And they're just saying, well, everybody's talking about Sam Allman said, you're going to have billion dollar companies with one person. So go do it. So anyway, there's a lot and I don't mean to paint. So you have this gap of efficiency over effectiveness of expectations versus the reality today. And so it's making the job more challenging than it's ever been. I think when I talk to members of our community, we run a kind of a similar thing to CMO Huddles, but on a different, it's not the same thing, called the Health Tech Marketing Network.

8:15And we have these sort of conversations and AI is always, the way we've structured it is that every, at least once a quarter, one of the sessions is only on AI. And the other two sessions are not about AI, but always, but AI is always part of it. Sure. And I think what you've described is absolutely the case. I can certainly see over the five years or so that we've been doing this, that the pressure has never been greater. And the distressing thing of this is that there's turnover. And it's just, it feels, it's tough. It's like, it feels like, you know, there's not a month that goes by without two or three people in the community losing their job.

8:56And we'll come on to that a bit later on because I don't really want to, it's a grim subject to get into, but we'll try and get into it in a positive way about what people can do about it. But yeah, I think you're right. It's funny. I think, as you were talking, what sort of came to me is that horrible analogy about frogs and boiling water. You chuck a frog into boiling water, it jumps out, but a frog sits in cold water and you turn out the temperature. It just feels like the temperature's just got turned up. And it's true. And I think that it is about pace of change. So, all right, let's go about something maybe a bit more positive.

9:34What are you most optimistic about?

9:36Drew Neisser: So this is a weird thing to say, but I feel like AI makes me optimistic about humanity. Let's just assume everybody can create competent content right now, instantly. Competence is a commodity. So we say, okay, well, what is, if our goal is differentiation, well, that's going to be about distinctiveness, humor, empathy, judgment, original thinking. And those things are human. And so you can chain together as many agents as you want. But if there isn't a human that is actually driving those things that I just thought, so you are creating original thinking. And so I feel like all of that comes together was maybe the return of the big idea, because we're deaf by a thousand paper cuts right now, even more than we were before, because everybody can create more stuff, so they're just creating more stuff.

10:33Drew Neisser: But if we had brands with big ideas, and I've seen this in a few cases, the ability to create around that remarkable, distinctive, humorous content at scale and put it not only just in the hands of the consumer, but also the salespeople. It's phenomenal. And so again, this is why I say everything that's old is new again. If we can get to a big idea, if we're thinking about differentiation as a priority and that differentiation is the path to revenue, life is really exciting right now. It's only when you just get bogged down with the mechanics of this that it gets annoying. So I love that perspective.

11:14Yeah.

11:14Drew Neisser: Let's just say, this is the thing that I think marketers need to ask right now is what can only we say and what can only we do? And then how do we build AI around that to help us reinforce it at scale? Any examples that you've got? Because the reason why I'm asking you is this, is that you and I a similar generation and kind of grew up from in the agency business when you it was all about the ideas it was all about the big ideas and sort of like the the creative department was where the magic happened right and everything was in service of that and now it's much more rational and much more sort of driven by data and so it means that you can be running a marketing campaign with lots and lots of ads with no idea or no theme tying them together.

12:05And nobody even thinks that you need it. Where we've seen, we've worked with a few clients that have a bit more of that kind of traditional, so it's crazy to think of an idea being a traditional, but that sort of traditional idea or mindset. And boy, can we see the power of it when we hit it right. And so I'm kind of curious, in your community, have you seen any examples of that where people are starting to go, you know, with a change, maybe the way that they approach marketing.

12:33Drew Neisser: Yeah. I don't know if they're changing the way, I mean, I, it's funny, I'm going back to penguins for a moment, but I feel like what we're, everybody is a flock of pigeons and you want to be that penguin right in the flock of penguins. So if you could get there, you know, you're in good shape. So in truth, even in our community, I think they're struggling to stick with the big idea, infuse the big idea. I mean, I do, we talk a lot about pathways to that. And, you know, I think as long as you have, and this is the case for, I'm going to say 80 % of it, as long as you have demand gen or growth marketing and you have brands separate, you are not going to see what you and I are talking about.

13:16Huh. Double click on that. Explain that a bit more.

13:19Drew Neisser: So it's fascinating to me because first of all, you're setting up this weird thing. Isn't all marketing supposed to be growth marketing and drive revenue? And the answer is, of course it is. So if you create that artificial separation, you're saying, oh, you guys, brand people, go play. You could just be, do the cool occasional video and, you know, make sure that our everything is aligned color-wise and thematically. And then the demand gen people say, optimize, optimize, optimize, optimize. And you will have people working at cross-purposes. They're not going to work together, they're getting measured on different scales.

13:55Drew Neisser: And so you have to be able to set up an organization that has one goal, which is, yeah, help the company grow. But again, that's an objective. But the way you do that is by we are going to be different. We're going to be clearly differentiated. And it doesn't matter whether it's a sales presentation or a thought leadership piece or a video or the website. If we're not carrying that differentiation all the way through it, we're going to lose because you know this and we know this. Marketing is a battle for mind space. That's it, period. And you're either in somebody's mind and it doesn't matter whether they're searching an LLM or shopping in a grocery store.

14:37Drew Neisser: Now my world is all B2B, but it's the same thing. If I haven't heard of you, if I don't have an impression of you, I am very unlikely to give you consideration. So anyway, I was a lot of different talking. I know you're going to agree. And what the challenge is, how do we get others to like a CEO and a CFO to actually realize that? Well, that's the issue is that the sort of the B word is like, don't bring up the B word, the brand. And so how have you seen folks, what's the advice that you give people and how to handle that conversation? Right. Well, first of all, we actually got to the point where we're So we're not going to use the word brand here anymore.

15:15Drew Neisser: We're going to use the word reputation because everybody totally understands the word reputation. If I say, so what's Adam's reputation? They come, you know, well, he's a very nice guy and he's concerned about his thing. And he has a, they all inherently know, hey, if I ask your peers or your friends at your country club, Mr. Executive, what are you, what are they going to say about you? That's reputation. And if it's bad, guess what? Life is going to suck for you. And so reputation makes it easier, I think, as a word. And it doesn't have the baggage that brand does. It's not as comprehensive for those who really understand what brand does, but it's an easier word to have a business because CFO can realize if we have a bad reputation with our customers, we're not going to close as many deals.

15:59Drew Neisser: They're going to get that. They just don't get brand. So why bother? Yeah. I think it manages to sort of, it mitigates the board conversation where everybody says, oh, we don't do brand brand. We don't want to do all that fluffy stuff. You just sort of, it changes the conversation. But to your point, reputation doesn't really cover that a really strong brand and a really strong idea connected to that brand is motivating. Reputation is really motivating. It's more a sort of a state of. It's true, but let's just deal with the reality. we know that and hopefully we can do that, but nobody cares at the C-level.

16:35Drew Neisser: So give them language that they understand and that they could care about. I think the other thing I was going to say that you deal with this by, the last thing that a CMO wants is that their budget is looked at on a line item by line item, not just by how they're separating by people and programs and technology, but within the programs they're looking at that. And within the people they're saying, well, how come you have three people on brand and 10 people on demand or whatever? You don't want that. What you want as a conversation is, I have a marketing budget, and ideally, I have a marketing and sales budget, and we're working together to achieve these business directions.

17:13Drew Neisser: Don't let me, I'm not going to show you how the sausage is made. I'm going to have a certain amount of money where we're experimenting to try to get better results. So next year, I can say, hey, we tried this this year. We're going to have a span there. but the worst thing you can do is have a brand budget and a quote growth budget or a you know a revenue growth budget or what are the growth marketing whatever they what a euphemism yeah because all that's going to happen is they're going to cut the brand budget you're going to lose and now you're really screwed adam here i just want to tell you a little bit about health Launchpad, the pipeline growth and go-to-market agency behind this show.

17:52If this episode has you thinking about new ways to solve the various challenges that you face in healthcare technology, that is exactly the reason why we built Health Launchpad. We serve our clients in four different ways. We specialize in account-based marketing for B2B healthcare. We specialize also in messaging, brand strategy, and helping turn that into content that converts buyers into customers. The third area we help our clients in is helping you get found in the LLMs. So we're helping clients optimize their websites and their content to be found by chat gpt and claude if any of that sounds like a conversation happening in your leadership meetings right now head over to healthlaunchpad.com and let's talk now let's get back to what drew has to say you mentioned sales and marketing together in the same sentence yes and so one of the changes that i think is happening in a lot of organizations, particularly sort of SaaS organizations and maybe some of the more venture-backed B2B companies, is the notion of a sort of a single team, a GTM team, where the head of GTM may come from sales, most likely comes from sales.

19:20And marketing reports up to sales, but it's not the old model where the head of sales is basically saying, where are my leads? It is actually a much more sort of buyer journey led approach to marketing. Do you think that in those organizations, the GTM leader, whatever their title is, gets that notion of the importance of brand?

19:42Drew Neisser: Well, so here's the thing. I would love for you to show me companies that are doing better because they have the CMO reporting to the CRO. I would love to show companies that are doing better because the CRO has never spent a day in marketing. I don't think it works. I did talk to a CMO just yesterday who has become the CRO. And so sales and marketing. It's unusual, but that's the way. If this is going that way where you have a go-to-market lead, the only person who can do that job right is the, in my opinion, is the CMO. No, and the reason is they're the only person who understands the customer and how all the pieces that work there are used to bridging more gaps.

20:28Drew Neisser: Like sales, like a salesperson thinks about quota on a quarterly basis, end of story. Yeah. A marketing person thinks about a very broad range of things that are technically all go-to-market. So this is a battle. It's funny. Sangram Badre, who runs the go-to-market, I should know the exact name of it, but he's been commenting on my post recently and saying, CMO role will be gone in three years. And I love that. I'm so grateful that he said that because that same thing has been said every five years for the last 25. And we know it's this, and we're in that moment where, yeah, there was a 2 % drop in CMOs among Fortune 500 companies.

21:09Drew Neisser: We just did a study that we found 13 ,000 active CMOs in the US. That's a lot. Wow. That's a lot. No way that, you know, you're going to next year, that number will be 6 ,000. It's just not going to happen because the role is way too important. So, and why is the role so important? Because again, good CMOs think about differentiation. They put the customer at the very center of the business. Their motivation is not just an acquisition, but it's acquisition or retention and employees and that they know those three things work together, employees, customers, and prospects, right? And then you add partners in it too.

21:51Drew Neisser: And again, most CMOs, salespeople, and even CROs are compensated based solely on net new acquisition. That's a problem. Yeah, yeah. And so again, you put that person in charge of marketing. What was interesting with this CMO who is in charge, a CMO who became a CRO, is they're thinking about it. He's thinking about it as a growth engine, a growth marketing engine. And he knows that marketing needs to sort of help fill the pipeline. And, you know, ideally that number gets up to like 80%. And then, and sales needs to get better and better and better at closing. So it's fascinating. It is fascinating.

22:37Just sort of playing that out a bit, you know, in our market, in health tech, The average sales deal size is about 13 months. Let's call it a year because it's an easy number to deal with. And of that period, they're going to spend, the average buyer is going to spend about nine months not talking to anyone and then three months talking to somebody and becoming, and that's essentially the sales process actually happens in that last three months. The marketing process is what happens in the first nine months. And AI is just making it easier for them to stay below the surface. So they are doing their own research.

23:13And marketing's job is to make sure that when that buyer comes up for air and says, okay, I'm ready to talk to one of your salespeople, that you're a top of the list or at least two or three. And so that way you're describing the CMO who's become a CRO makes an awful lot of sense.

23:33Drew Neisser: Well, what you just described there is the point that I made about Mindspace. So over that nine months, did you get in the Mindspace or not? When they started to look and they made their list from the LLM, did you show up? But by the way, I did want to make this one point. Marketing does not stop at the nine month point. The notion of a handoff is so done. It's so over because marketing can continue to play a phenomenal role in the closing of the deal. Yeah, absolutely. And then once they become a customer, making sure that when they're ready to buy the next thing, it's that you're top of mind again, you're in the mind space.

24:10You said an interesting thing, I think, in one of your podcasts about AI being a leadership choice, not a tools choice. Explain that a little bit.

24:19Drew Neisser: Yeah. The philosophy for the last, I'm going to say up until maybe six months ago was here, a bunch of tools, go play. And the result of it, and there's still, I had a CMO who talked about, hey, they were very excited that they had a hackathon and they came up with 18 different agents that were built right then and there by the teammates. And everybody was like, yay. And so you have this moment where you have this thing called agent sprawl. Like, right. And just like you have MarTech debt, now you have agent debt. And it's really bad because these agents don't talk to each other. They're not coded necessarily efficiently.

25:00Drew Neisser: I've done this myself. I built eight agents over a course of a weekend and I used up not just my own credits, but a bunch of other credits because I wrote them poorly. And so you have, and then if you said to me, well, can you connect that agent to this agent? Maybe, I don't know. It's starting to get into an area where it's beyond because there's some APIs involved and other things. My point is that it is great that this sort of organic thing has happened and people have sort of gotten to know the tools, and that is the advantage of the go play. The problem is there is no strategy involved there.

25:37Drew Neisser: It's just, oh, we can do it, so let's do it. But if you said, hey, I'm running a business, and I have a goal, which is in our case, we want to help CMOs win. That's our business plan, help CMOs win, right? So now I think about, okay, what can I do with AI that will get them there? And that's sort of why we built certain tools that we have. That's like, you know, maybe we'll talk about RepuTracker at some point in time. We've built an AI maturity model that they can use. We're thinking about all of these challenges that they're facing, and that drives our AI usage. So again, it's much easier for us to make a choice, which is what you do as a leader, right?

26:20Drew Neisser: You decide the priorities because you have to. and because AI has infinite possibilities, you could just do anything. And it's funny, again, one last point and then I'll shut up for this moment. Another CMO was talking to, I asked him, so are the people who've really embraced this working less hours because they're so efficient? He goes, it's the opposite, which of course is true for me as well. It's because I can do it. I'm going to work all weekend because it's just so cool. It's like a video game, but it's building things. That's what's happened is that there's, you know, and now we're at AI burnout.

26:54Drew Neisser: So anyway, I went a long way of saying it's a leadership choice because the tools can do an infinite amount of things. And basically what leadership is, is finding leverage points, assigning, setting the priorities, getting the right people behind those priorities and, you know, allocating resources. That's what leaders do. So you mentioned RepuTrack. I have to ask you, what is that? So this is a tool. We didn't actually build it in-house. We build it with our partners, Growth Natives. And the reason we did it was because for this issue that you talked about, the B word, we knew that CMOs have struggled to demonstrate the value of brand and reputation and honestly had very little way other than looking at Google search without spending a lot of money to figure out what their reputation was.

27:44Drew Neisser: And so we built a tool that evaluates where brands are on sort of five different dimensions. And we're using a lot of public APIs, probably about 18 different APIs. And it looks like, so website traffic is part of it. Digital reputation is part of it. And it's not a hundred percent accurate. It is free to our members of our leader program, but it is consistent in the sense that I know when I see a dip, and And this is an example. We put in some big brands so that we could see it. We put Cisco in. And we've been tracking it since, gosh, I don't know, last October or September. And they had a big drop in employee sentiment, which we think is an important measure.

28:30Drew Neisser: And so we looked and said, oh, they had a RIF that month. And so that would make total sense. So we've seen correlation to give us a sense. And so anyway, it's a tool. It's not the tool. we don't even recommend that they necessarily, but it is something that, for example, if you suddenly had your PR budget cut, like suddenly you have no PR agency and you're not, you should see a dip three months later in your digital footprint. And then this would be a way of saying, so then you could show that and you can say, look, here's where we were. Here's where we went. This is the problem of cutting PR, right?

29:07Drew Neisser: As you lose that. And so anyway, that's why we built it. That's very helpful. It's great that you provide it to the leadership level of your members. It actually reminds me too of an application, a tool that I looked at for a client about six months ago called Blue Ocean. And it does some similar things. It also looks at things like customer service. And so it's able to kind of take the focus on brand, but reputation is obviously part of that. And all of the different aspects of the business. And it's been embraced by companies like Microsoft and I think SAP and companies like that. No, and there are a lot of tools out there like reputation.com, I think is another one.

29:53Drew Neisser: And they're just expensive. Yes. And a lot of CMOs can't get that budget. So that's why we develop it. Yeah, and we do track things like G2 shows up. So you do see that. But that's the challenge with some of these tools is they're only good for SaaS. And so we had to do the best we could with the available tools for things like that. But if you're not in SaaS, you're not going to show up in G2. Right. And it's a challenge in health tech because so many of the clients that companies are not SaaS. And G2 may not always be that relevant. So we touched on this earlier. I feel like in our community that there is a high turnover.

30:34Don't benchmark it. So I don't know whether it's going up, going down, but it really feels like it's going up. I'm curious, what are you seeing in your bigger community and how do you help the members to deal with it?

30:49Drew Neisser: So it's interesting. We just partnered with Findem to do the largest 10-year study ever done. Because Findem has a massive database of going back years. And so we took a period of 2000 to 2006 to sort of get our minds around CMO tenure. And so the first cut was looking at CMOs who are currently in position. That was the 13 ,000 number. And figure out how long were they currently in position. And here's where the numbers were somewhat surprising. It was about 34 months. That's at least a year better than I would have expected. Yeah, exactly. And whereas the CEO was like 51 months. And so, but there was another interesting distinction that, and I'm telling you this all before it gets announced.

31:41Drew Neisser: So hopefully that we're announcing all of this data in end of September. But this will be about that. This is when this episode's coming. Perfect. Thank you. So the biggest, probably interesting thing was the lowest tenure was at VC-backed companies and the highest tenure was at public companies. And the gap was pretty significant. Like a VC was 54 % less than a public company. Yeah. And so, but here's the thing. So that would be like 18 months versus, well, actually, no, it's probably like a year versus four years, right? Something like that. It was a little higher than that, but yeah, close.

32:21Drew Neisser: Yes. And so the VC number was scary. So I reached out to a friend and one of a longtime member of the community and on the board of advisors, Dan Loudon. And Dan said, well, you know, I've been at 12 VC-backed companies and I, yeah, the data is right, but here's why it's made sense for me. He said, well, I've had a lot of exits and it's exciting, but it's not for the faint of heart. you need to know that when you enter a VC-backed company, that's the deal. And so I thought it was really interesting because he's someone who's played the game the way it needs to be played. I don't think everybody who takes a job at a VC company as a CMO realize what they're doing.

33:04I think that's a great observation. And when I think about folks in our community, there are a few who are like, they get the game. And you can see that they're kind of getting ahead of the bullet. They're kind of like, yeah, don't get too attached. Just get in. You've got your playbook of like, fang, you hit the ground running, you make an impact really quickly and you get out before you need to. I also think Alan Gonsenhauer. Yeah, I know Alan a little bit too. He's sort of doing a lot around the notion of being a PE backed. Exactly. I think I'm hoping that PE backed CMOs have a bit of a longer tenure.

33:41Drew Neisser: Not much. They're right in the middle. So right between the public and the private, and still it's lower than I would like to see. And so I did get a quote from a PEV company guy. And, you know, he talks about how, look, it depends on the stage when you arrive. If you get there when the acquisition just happened and you have a three to five year window and you understand where you are, you might have a longer run. But if you're at the three, four-year thing and they're going to sell, you may or may not be the right CMO for that moment. And so you really have to understand what stage you're going into.

34:21Drew Neisser: And I will also say that these are artificial constraints that require the CMO to think about business and not that pure, I want to build a great business. Like, I want to build a company where employees are really happy and customers are really happy. That's not what's on the minds of these investors. They're looking to flip a business in a very short period of time. And so these constraints, which I would argue are artificial, they're not market, they're artificial investor constraints, force CMOs to make decisions that aren't necessarily in the long-term interest of the company. It's a shame, but it's a reality.

34:58Drew Neisser: So you just have to, you cannot bring a altruistic, altruistic is the wrong word, a fully rational best for the business mindset to those two areas. Whereas at a public company, you have to. Yeah. Yes. Because what you do and how you do it is so much more public. Exactly. For people in our community who are, there's a lot of private equity-backed companies in our community. And that's probably the growing area, less so than VCs and certainly a lot less than public companies. What's the playbook for the folks who've mastered this? Well, you mentioned Alan. He would certainly be a better expert on that than I am.

35:41Drew Neisser: You need to have, and so one of the things that we've created, speaking of wins, so we have something called the Quick Wins Playbook that we update regularly. and it is about what are the things that you can do in the first 90 days that will buy you time to do the heavy lifting, right? And I think this is true whether you're going to any one of those companies because there are big decisions that you could make that I think would be horrible. Like you could say, we need to change the brand, which I've seen happen over and over again, and you use all your capital, all the political capital to do something that nobody in the executive suite cares about.

36:18Drew Neisser: And you're using language that nobody cares about. So you need to show and build trust in a very short period of time. And again, this is hard, but we've listed a number of things that you can do that will help them do it. Because when you get a quick win and they go, oh, that was a good call. Yeah, we could have just make that little tweak made a big difference, right? Like, oh, I went to a trade show the other day Man, every single salesperson was looking at their phone the entire time. That's a problem. Phone's in the pocket, right? Little thing like that can suddenly make a trade show 20 % more effective.

36:55Drew Neisser: And so, you know, those, but there's obviously more concrete things that CMOs can do. In terms of specifically to PE firm, the only thing I can point to is you have to know what the acquisition thesis was. Like, why did they buy that company? because they have a growth lever in mind. And if you don't understand the thesis and believe in the thesis, because generally they'll say, this company was targeting these group of people. I believe if we pivot, fix a product a little bit, we can target these people and a giant expand the TAM. That's their total addressable market. That's their mindset. You need to understand that.

37:33Drew Neisser: That's part one. You need two to understand what are they thinking are the key metrics and have a conversation with the CFO. They're always going to come at you with CAC. They're always going to come after you with LTV. Those are lagging metrics. It's a real problem for a new CMO. So you have to be able to get at those and get to a point where can we look at something else like win rates? And are we winning three out of 10 deals? And how many deals are we in relative to the number of deals? And can we win bigger? because those, as a CMO, you might be able to go in and solve those problems. You figure out, oh, we're targeting the wrong people or our sales people are spending a lot of time on that bottom 20 % that never closes.

38:17Drew Neisser: And you would think sales would have that covered, but they don't. And a marketer can come in with a fresh... So, and then I do think that pricing is another sort of interesting, like, do you have to discount in every deal? And if so, you have a bad reputation. You don't have a strength of reputation. organization that's a conversation you can have with a cfo because you can show them how that costs the lack of brand strength costs your organization millions of dollars every year so yeah that's the thing and then the last thing and the pe thing and is the you have to know where you are on the cycle where you know are you in year one or year five and when are they planning to sell and when you understand that your playbook will change that's very very helpful we can't not talk about you guys, your superpower, which is peer community.

39:06So it seems like an obvious question, but the answer may not be that obvious, which is why should marketers get involved with a peer community like CMO Huddles or Health Tech Marketing Network? There are other communities out there, right? Yeah.

39:23Drew Neisser: Well, here's a funny thing. So we've been supporting CMOs in transition, brilliantly called the transition team for six years. And I'll have a conversation with a CMO who just lost their job for whatever reason. Who knows? Often it's, oh, the company was bought, new CEO, new CMO. And they'll have two regrets every single time. One, I wish I spent more time building my network and engaging my network. And two, I wish I spent more time on my personal brand. So those two things, our community at least, solves because you can't join the CMO. And that's why we make a big deal about our PR opportunities where they can go on CMO Huddle Studio.

40:02Drew Neisser: They get to be on our Tuesday takeaway videos. They get recognized in all sorts of ways. Those things end up showing up in the LLMs about the brand, about that individual. But you can't be in our community in a year without enhancing your personal brand. And then the network part of this is they know they should do it, but I've got so much to do. So their head's down. And so, again, it's kind of forced upon them, but in an opportunistic way. So what we tell, and this comes back to the question you had, why should they? So nobody can know everything, period, end of story. So you are about to make a decision to bring on a new vendor, and it could be any kind of thing.

40:48Drew Neisser: We guarantee that our members, before they do that, we can set up a call with another one who has actually worked with that vendor or picked another one. And they'll save them for making a$50 ,000,$100 ,000 bad decision with a half an hour call. And again, you just don't know what you don't know so often. So being able to talk to a peer one-on-one or maybe talk to me as many of the CMOs do once a quarter to make sure that you don't have blind spots and you solve them. And then, of course, there's just the peer opportunities to come together both virtually and in person. And those are invaluable because those relationships are going to be the network that you're going to rely on when you're between opportunities.

41:33Drew Neisser: And if I were a CMO, I would think about, God, I know I'm going to have this job two years, three years. maybe four years at the most, how can I not build my network? If they're between jobs and have sort of, you know, financially the least ability to pay to be part of a network, can they join? I mean, we definitely let folks in into the health tech marketing network because it's free. It's right. We're always trying to looking for people looking great, but I'm still a little bit unclear. I know you have a free tier, but. Right, right, right. So if you're between jobs, can you join? So the answer is yes.

42:07Drew Neisser: We have something, the transition team, you get a free month on that. And then it's a very modest cost for a high value. We have a whole process, the Huddle Buddies playbook and that built, that worked. And it's funny, I was looking at the numbers this morning. We, our transition team had about 30 a year and a half ago, and now it's down to, I don't know, 17, which is great, right? Which means that 30 plus people at least found jobs in the last 12 months through the thing. And I know the number is higher than that. So they can then pay a modest amount for that. And if they don't, if they just sign up for the trial and they don't end up joining the paid program, then they get switched back to the free program, what we call the starter program.

42:51Drew Neisser: So it's just very different. I mean, I think that if you were in your last role for five years or four years, the conversation that you need to have right now is very different. I'm going to give one tip to any CMO who is in transition. You have an incredible opportunity right now to learn more about AI than any CMO in position. And it's counterintuitive, but it's really important. And several of our community have taken a course that Harvard has some online course that evidently is really good. You get certified in it. You absolutely have to do that. And number two, you have to be prepared because five out of 10 questions that you're going to be asked on the first interview is, you know, where are you with AI?

43:31Drew Neisser: What do you, and they'll ask a very broad question. And what they're really saying is, show me the dashboard that you built or show me the application that that did not happen a year ago. Yeah. Fascinating. So on that advice, just more broadly, particularly for health tech CMOs, whether you're in the position or not, what's the one piece of advice you'd give members of our community? And so are they in seed or are they just starting or is this an ongoing? This is for ongoing. This is for CMOs. It's sort of like based on sort of the key learnings that you've got with your community. Like what's the most important thing to focus on right now?

44:12Drew Neisser: So to the extent that you can, every conversation that you have with a fellow executive that you can start with, I was talking to a customer the other day, is a winning formula. So and funny, you found I did that today. It's like I was talking to a CMO yesterday, right? And it's suddenly credible because, and in fact, I was. The core strength of being a CMO can come down to you know more about the customer than anybody else. Salespeople are selling. They're not thinking necessarily, but they should know more, but they don't because you have a broader perspective of it. And that's been true. As I said, this has been true forever, going back to your earliest days.

44:54Drew Neisser: So what does that mean? I was talking to the customer. So what it means is you could be the one who says, you know what, we need an executive sponsor program where every member of the executive team gets two or three of our largest customers and they're the neck to choke. They are the number one person on that. But you want that. It's a great way to do it. Two, you need a customer advisory board. Marketing should organize it, drive it so that you have customers. And then sort of the third that you can talk to and resource. Third, you should be listening in on the gone calls or those or having filters on that because suddenly, whether it's a customer service call, but now you can synthesize those at scale, right?

45:38Drew Neisser: So there is no excuse for a CMO not to know more about the customer, but it's those one-on-one things where you spend time. Beth Comstack, who is a longtime CMO of GE, talked about how she spent 25 % of her time out of the office talking to customers, partners, and startups. And I just don't see that happening as much. And it's still true to this day that if you know more about the customer, you can make better decisions. You could create a customer brain using AI. You could do really, really cool things. And your strategy will be stronger for it in kind of now in real time. And your value to the company and your value to the next job as well.

46:23So I think...

46:24Drew Neisser: By the way, yeah, you're right, a value to your CEO. So here's what success looks like. The CEO calls you for strategic advice. Because I know you're talking to the customer. What do you think about this? That's when you're winning. And there are very few. I think back in my own career, the few CMOs, one of the CMOs I've seen do that outside of our industries, Anne Finucane, who was the CMO and became the chief strategy officer of Bank of America. Yes. This is somebody who started in the TV production department at an agency, and she became the chief strategy officer of a multi-billion dollar global bank.

47:04Drew Neisser: Yep. Yeah. And I think that's probably how. Drew, how can people find out about you and the CMO huddles? Where should they go? Sure. CMOhuddles.com. And follow me on LinkedIn. It's Drew Neiser on LinkedIn, at any ISSER. I'm active. You certainly are. You're well worth following. I've been following you for a while and you always have good things to say and your posts are fun too. It's like you can tell you're not using AI to do it. They're fun and they're authentic. Drew, it's been a real pleasure having you on the show and I've learned a lot from listening to you and I'm sure members of our community are so thank you.

47:42Drew Neisser: Well, thank you and I really appreciate again, getting a couple, more than a hundred podcasts out the door is I know a big ordeal. So I appreciate you and all that you do for your community. I so enjoy talking with Drew and there's a lot to unpack in what he said. So I've got a few key takeaways. Number one, AI has made competent content a commodity. Differentiation now comes from human judgment, humor, empathy, and original thinking. The things AI can't manufacture on its own, well at least not yet. Number two, splitting brand and demand gen into separate budgets and teams sets up to work against each other.

48:29The fix is one marketing and sales budget aimed at one growth outcome, not a brand line item that gets cut first. Takeaway three, CMO tenure varies sharply by ownership structure. Public company CMOs last the longest, venture-backed CMOs the shortest, and PE-backed CMOs fall in between. Knowing your company's stage and the investor thesis change what winning looks like in your first 90 days. Takeaway four. Peer communities matter because no single CMO can keep up with everything alone. Network and personal brand are the two things CMOs most regret neglecting once they're between jobs. And communities like CMO Huddles and the Health Tech Marketing Network can help you with that.

49:23Takeaway five, the strongest CMOs win by knowing the customer better than anyone else in the building. through things like executive sponsor programs, customer advisory boards, and listening to sales and services calls at scale help CMOs become known as the masters of understanding the customer. If you've enjoyed the show, follow or subscribe to the Health Tech Marketing Show and leave a rating if you can. It really helps expand the reach of this show. And by the way, you can check out CMO Huddles at cmohuddles.com. There's a link down below. And do follow Drew Neiser on LinkedIn for more of his thinking on CMO leadership.

50:06He does some of the best posts on LinkedIn as far as I'm concerned. And lastly, if you want to learn more about us, visit healthlaunchpad.com if you need help with ABM demand generation, brand and messaging, or anything related to AI and marketing. Thank you for listening and see you on the next episode of the Health Debt Marketing Show. Bye.