Building a framework for growth. A discussion with the Chief Growth Officer of UK-based marketing consultancy, Kurve.
TheNextCMO’s latest podcast is with Oren Greenberg the founder and CGO of Kurve. Oren has an impressive background in digital strategy and his commercial expertise has been instrumental in the growth of major brands. In this podcast we discuss a solid framework for growth marketing, how to equate retention to acquisition, setting unrealistic vs realistic goals, and how Oren helped create the Google trends for the Mar-Tech industry.
Oren Greenberg - https://www.linkedin.com/in/orengreen/
Kurve - https://kurve.co.uk
Interested in being on The Next CMO podcast? - https://info.plannuh.com/the-next-cmo-podcast
For more info about Plannuh, check out our website
Episode 28 - Oren Greenberg
Kelsey Krapf: Welcome to the official podcast of TheNextCMO, hosted by Plannuh, makers at the first AI marketing leadership platform for quickly and easily creating winning marketing plans, maximizing budget impact and improving ROI. TheNextCMO is a thought leadership podcast for those that are CMO's or want to become one.
My name is Kelsey Krapf and I'm the senior marketing manager
Peter Mahoney: and I'm Peter Mahoney, the founder and CEO of Plannuh. And welcome to TheNextCMO podcast.
This week, we're honored to have Orin Greenberg. Oren is the founder and Chief Growth Officer at Kurve. Oren's impressive, digital strategy, and commercial expertise has been instrumental in the growth of major brands. Thanks for joining us Oren
Oren Greenberg: . Thanks for having me.
Peter Mahoney: Yeah. And remember, it's curved with a K, right?
K U R V E.co.uk. And we'll put that in the show notes, so people know who you are, but I'm really excited to meet with you today, Oren, because I feel like we are kindred spirits on the other side of the ocean from, , getting a chance to read about your company a little bit in what you've done, but you can set the table by telling us a little bit , about yourself and a little bit about Kurve.
Oren Greenberg: Sure. So I work as a On Demand CMO or the Chief Growth Officer, and they help some corporate clients like Lenovo and Kennan with their growth initiatives. Then I...that's half of my client base and my other half a BC backing businesses usually A round B round plus they help build the teams, the tech stack , brand awareness, lead generation demand, gen, et cetera.
So it's go and attend and then I'm also a Non-Exec and Advisor. So I go all the way from strategy to tactics and I flux between the two extremes on a day-to-day basis. And I think it's very important to keep the skills sharp. So I do tend to get very hands on and everything and fix things when they break or do my best to.
Peter Mahoney: That's a pretty big diversity of clients from venture funded to Lenovo. That's a wild range and you find it two ends of the spectrum and there's nothing in the middle. and is there any commonality between those two audiences? Do they have common issues that you find?
Oren Greenberg: I think what's important to know is that the corporates that bring me in. wanting to adopt and adopt an intrepreneurial cutting edge growth mindset. And they're looking to disrupt the way that they do things, because what they're doing is just, sorry. That was my dog. not me breathing funny and sorry.
So they, , they bring me into, to transform the way that they do things because of conventional approaches that are sluggish. Or opaque or just not, they know from their network or their reading, that performance, isn't where it needs to be. So they want to, there w and when they look at the disruptors who are scanning and alarming rates, they see massive opportunity that, and they're very open.
So in a way, I think that the ambition that. Desire to be better is actually very common regardless of the business size, but the operational complexity, the bureaucracy and the structural differences between some of the corporates and the startups is probably where it's different. It's the cultural components and the attitudes to risk and the constraints that they have, but also the resources.
Yeah, it's an interesting mix.
Peter Mahoney: Yeah. that's fascinating. I'm sure that. You find that dealing with someone who's got a lot of, infrastructure let's say to deal with is quite different from people who can be more flexible and nimble along the way. But everyone, I think the common thing is everyone's looking for, everyone's looking for growth.
Every business is trying to ultimately find gross, whether it's growth in a top line or growth in profits. they want to find that opportunity to grow things. And it is interesting that I find that having spent. My career on both sides of the fence, too. So I spent most recently I was a CMO of a multi-billion dollar public company.
and now I'm the CEO of a less than multi-billion dollar, let's call it a early stage venture funded company. The glass is somehow the grass is greener on either side of the fence. For some things, you look at what you had in a very large company. I'm like God, a wealth of resources.
And in this brand awareness and this. All these great things, but then when you're a large company and a large brand, you look at the ability to execute quickly from a small company. And we feel this all the time, the ability to just adapt and change, we change week to week. It's just easy to do so you can see where people would really aspire to and look to early stage companies.
If you're a large company to find some of those secret nuggets of growth.
Oren Greenberg: No. So the corporates they have of them, they're very skilled individuals, then a very long in the tooth. And a lot of the start-ups. They have a lot of generalists who are quite young and ambitious, but don't have the skills or experience.
So it makes in many ways that makes it easier when you have not only the brand recognition and the resources. But also you have strong team members who are more mature and seasoned and ambitious and you can. Yeah. but once again, I work with quite a few different corporates and quite a few different startups, and there's a lot of variability between.
What I see. And, it varies also from team to team inside that corporate, you're in the growth, you can have a retention team. You can have your programmatic team, you can have your search team. And some of the teams can be really strong with substance can be quite weak. And it really depends on.
every once in a country level. So like some, the same team in a different country has very variable in quantity. So it's very hard to have an aggregate some view and it's, because products are unique markets, unique and brands are unique. It's very difficult to do, like for like comparison and I'm not sure it's effective.
Peter Mahoney: Yeah. I think that's right. And, and I definitely can attest to the fact that there was a lot of varying depths among resources within large companies and some of it, where I came from most recently, we were highly acquisitive. We acquired a hundred companies during the time I was there. So you'd often get people in some cases who were super deep experts in an area,
and then in other areas, because you acquired a small company in a country, as an example, they might have to be a generalist in support, a little bit of everything. We weren't quite at the point where we were acquiring countries. Maybe if we can just go and
Oren Greenberg: I was about to say, I'd like to work for this and it worked and it was acquiring company.
That sounds like a good strategic mirror. I know we're not going to compete. We're just going to buy out the whole GDP, the whole country and all the competitors. And then we don't have to worry about them so much. Yeah, we weren't quite that big, but there certainly are some large tech companies these days who were approaching that.
Peter Mahoney: You can get there pretty soon. Yeah. But I found that there was a w one of the things that was amazing at a large company is to have, as an example, I had an amazing brand team who deeply understood the ability to execute and realize your brand strategy, which is a very specific set of skills. and typically in a smaller company, you'd have to bring in agency resources to augment that.
Yeah, but in other areas we had huge gaps. we had gaps in areas, in divisions of the company around things like digital, which seems like, Oh my god, why would anyone have a gap in digital right now? It's certainly an area where universally people need a fair amount of depth. so it's interesting.
So if you pop back up a little bit Oren and say, what do you think the top issues are across? CMOs these days. if there was such a thing, what's the broad theme of issue you're seeing from the CMA community.
Oren Greenberg: Yeah, I'd say by far on the top one, which is on everyone's mind, is this COVID and how do you, cope with a global pandemic this year?
Really? I've seen some businesses, I'm like no accelerated growth and growing, like growing 300, 400% growth I've businesses have a 95% revenue drop. So I'm seeing across the board, the incredible variability in the challenges that CMOs are facing. but I think income, it is an interesting one.
But I think I was just summer out because I think people are probably saturated from listening and talking about it. So I guess to get my two sentence summary go into kind of the more, the other issues and I think maybe less spoken about, or have more of a unique view on something with COVID people are more risk averse and it shows a customers.
So that's focused on growth strategies and more focused on how to help people save money. It's probably sensical. And I think more focusing on retention and less focusing on acquisition is probably sensical from a CMS perspective. I think in sense, what's the are having a hard time is. If that B2B in a very heavy focus, heavily focused on offline and defense, this is obviously been catastrophic and very difficult, where I think those are more digital first and more, less reliant on that there probably have, have had less of a difficult transition.
but I think both are probably facing complexity and ambiguity over budget setting and what to expect and budget allocation. In the foreseeable future, especially because COVID has not gone in that linear decline, it's gone down and gone up, in Europe, we're in the second wave, but obviously in the U S still riding that first wave.
And,
Peter Mahoney: yeah,
We're in the third bump of the first wave, I think is what we're doing right now. a couple of points to follow up on that. Oren, I think that certainly. COVID is a top of mind issue, but in a couple of ways, one, I think it's exposing some underlying issues and problems that companies probably had around. growth as an example. perfect example that you just brought up is this over-reliance on a particular approach to marketing where people had a very physical world, event centric kind of model, and that represents one, a fair amount of risk. And two, just if you're fully dependent on that, it's, certainly you're missing.
a large chunk of your potential audience, because some people just are never physically going to. Go to some event in you're by definition, gonna miss a lot of people who aren't going to get out of their office and get to a specific location. so that's one thing. And then two, I think you see a lot of people who have just some fundamental issues, underlying issues that have Been papered over because of the fact that they had been growing, but they don't really understand that they may have strategic or competitive issues that are underlying things. , Do you agree with that? Does that make sense? Feel free to disagree if you do.
Oren Greenberg: Yeah. I'm been a digital first guy for 17 years, so I'm Germany.
I've been just believing the principles of what human wants and human beings. They want more freedom, more flexibility. And if they can move out of big cities and more remote and cheaper and have a bigger home with their kids in the family, that's what they're going to want. Especially when you get to your forties in your fifties.
And as a result, digital adoption always seemed like an obvious one. To me, I'm actually surprised it's been this slower than it has, but it hasn't benefits us so clear. So I took a pun on that very early on, which has obviously paid off, quite well from the pandemic. I'm seeing an influx of inbound leads because more businesses need to go digital.
So I think, yeah, I'm an over-reliance on any channel is tricky. It's really hard. And there's a lot of monopolization and the digital sort of channels as well between the Facebook and Google 66% of media spend, It's hard for businesses to not be overly reliant, but I agree that when the COVID comes and shakes things off, It definitely will.
Will show some of the gaping holes in a strategy of some of the challenges that businesses have that they have in K to two.
Yeah. and interestingly, what you just brought up, around the, concentration of the digital into Facebook and Google, but more than that, there's been a huge competition for the, for that media.
And there are a lot of people coming into digital for the first time. It's probably not performing that well. Because one they're being, outflanked and outbid for the right, eyeballs, and, two, they're just not experienced enough to figure out how to take advantage of the platform.
And we know that we started to see our conversion, It's, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, our cost per outcome. Got much higher, all of a sudden, because a lot of people were just shoveling money into digital. So all of a sudden the, the algorithms kick in and the prices went up and that's settled down over time, but we've seen that phenomenon
Kelsey Krapf: Giving your client portfolio lean developed, a nice framework for growth marketing. Can you walk me through your model? The growth framework that we have.
Peter Mahoney: Yeah.
Oren Greenberg: Yeah. I guess the framework has been developed because I just kept seeing the same problems that businesses have. What we needed is I guess an architect requires a clear plan to build a building, to make sure your toilet seat doesn't end up in your living room, which is not ideal.
We developed our own methodology and framework for a step-by-step process and effectively it starts with the, it's different between B2C and B2B because we have two frameworks, but B to B, we start with the ICP ideal customer profile. So this is a firmographic profile. Like what is the industry kind of employees, et cetera.
But then look at the personas, the job titles we go through. It's pretty rigorous research to understand who those people are and how to identify them. And then we try and figure out where they live, like where, how do we reach them or what the channels, the best then messaging. We tie that into the pain points of the product or service that we're offering.
And then we go through a, an experimental framework around the funnel. So we try rapid iterative testing. To see which channel is going to get the most amount of volume at the lowest possible cost. And that's a relatively structured approach that we go through. We use different scoring and then specification.
and then we get all the data and measurement infrastructure in place. And we just run this circular, sprint based methodology on it, ongoing basis to deploy rapid experimentation. And some of the growth is going to come from. those are some of the structural pillars of the framework as it was nuance to it.
And when the BBC, the main different, it says it's not firmographic and persona, it's just persona because we don't have that company association or record level. And I think there's a few key strategies that we implement. And how B to B and B to C is different, B2B we tend to use for, When the average client value is high enough, we'll use our account-based marketing strategy.
So more tailored and sniper, personable quality focus and be the, you don't have any of that. So it's more focused on automation and scale and running things more volume. And I think B2B is more qualitative and M B to is more quantitative in terms of as a, as an aggregate summary. have a seasonal variability, cause some suspicious misses we support.
Have very high customer value and very few customers. Then we have SAS businesses. We support, we should the opposite, like a buffer or a MailChimp where they have large volume, low value. So sometimes I have B2C customers that the cost, the value of the customer is higher than the B2B time, which is unusual.
But then that happens. So it's not really a, it's hard to summarize it because we work with so many different businesses with different sizes and different industries and different geographies. i
Peter Mahoney: It's great
that you have the experience across B2B and B2C Oren, because I see a lot of this where there are B2B marketers who could learn a ton from B2C, just because understanding.
Some of the nuances of the fact that they're actually people making decisions as an example, and the emotional buy-in as well as just some of the precision of the consumer marketing, approaches that can be applied in the same thing for B to C people. Because you mentioned that some B to C products can be, we have a higher, higher value.
but also they can have a very complex decision process. and, long consideration, if you're going to buy a car as an example, or even if you're going to buy, a, high-end computer, that's something that people just don't run out and click and buy.
They're going to do some research. They're going to go through a process and understanding that the notion of a funnel and conversion and getting people through stages in a consumer purchase, I think is also important. So learning from both sides is super valuable. and yeah. And one of the things I was going to also ask you is that, in some of your content, by the way, I'll, we'll put a link to your site in your blog, which is really fantastic.
You've got some really great content there. but one of the things I was looking at and you make a really nice argument that equates customer retention to acquisition. and, and obviously this is the kind of thing for 20 years, people have been talking about this. th the value of, keeping a customer, and the relative low cost of keeping one versus acquiring a customer.
and so why do you think people are struggling with this concept still in, what do companies need to do to change the mindset, to make sure that they're really focused on retention?
Oren Greenberg: Yeah. Got it. I think there's a few issues here to tie into your original question around the challenges CMOs have.
And I think the main challenges I think, seem to struggle with is the tech stack and getting the different infrastructure, talking to each other, the customer data platform with the CRM, with your marketing automation. And then deploying that on the different channels and tracking measurement and attribution.
It's really complex. It's difficult. And the proliferation of additional solutions in the market landscape growing from 150 in 2011 to 7,182 and 2019 and 2020, doesn't help that you got more and more solutions. It's really hard to know what's good. I think the second big issue other than the tech stacks is the data.
Those are companies that data is not maintained, cleaned and of good quality. So it's very hard to actually understand. What the behavior patterns are of the customers. And as an extension, how do we engage them through either omni-channel or multi-channel order or however, or whatever new buzz term you want to call that, but engage them in a cohesive, coherent, personalized strategy.
It's, it's very hard to do when you have multiple paths with multiple products, multiple behaviors, and let them know multiple geographies, multiple languages. And that complexity is usually, It's reduced in its complexity and that reduction, that reductive conclusion, my expectation is if the technology is not a key barrier was if I'm understanding that data is not, it's not really difficult, but it is there's a lot of research, from marketeers that show that they're really struggling with data.
They're really just struggling with the tech stack. I think that's part of it. I think another part of it is cultural. It's where if you think about the skills of marketeers, both academically and traditionally a little bit is in paid ads or advertising, right? Marketing effectively, even though it's not really advertising as a subset of marketing, primarily most of marketeers, a lot of the skills lends towards.
That area. And that's an acquisition mindset and also hitting numbers, hitting traffic unit conversion rate. And these were the KPIs that the businesses are setting. It is where the attention is going. And I think it's there the idea about where growth is going to come from. So I think retention is complex and difficult, and I think it's a cultural component.
And, I just, I think, yeah, I don't know if people really care, like they can't, you go, careful retention is, it's, you're retaining customers five X cheaper than acquiring a new customer of people together. Conceptually. But what does that mean to you with your massive sales team? what do you do with your sales team?
You're just going to tell them, okay, I'm not going to get you new leads because I'm focusing on retaining. And then I think it's like a juggling act. It's very difficult to hit consistently growing KPIs, especially in the scale up when you have fixed resources that you're trying to feed and you have technological complexities and you have data complexities and you have.
Cultural challenges. So I think there's just some of the key variables that I've identified as the reason for why retention is secondary to acquisition.
Peter Mahoney: Yeah. It's interesting. And you brought up the concept of the cultural issues in a company, and you talked about some of the marketing organization, cultural things, but they're also.
Sales related cultural things. Of course, that you touched on a little bit here. and one, one piece of it of course, is that, all the cool kids. acquire new customers and you tend to take your best salespeople. You pay them more in a lot of cases for bringing in new customers versus maintaining customers.
and that may be part of the problem, right? Is that we've just defined that the most important thing to do in a lot of businesses is from a sales perspective, is to bring in new customers. And as you said, it's a juggling act. And if you're a scaling up kind of company, obviously you got to get far more customers all the time and retain them obviously.
But the focus tends to be completely on customer acquisition, and it's difficult to switch that culture and get to the point where you really are putting expert. Sales resources on customer retention and expansion capability, because it tends to be a big opportunities, but in B2B it's a big opportunity to not to expand those customers.
But it's, it certainly is a little bit tricky.
Oren Greenberg: I think it's also in business time specific. if you look at SAS, businesses are more, there's more awareness around retention, or if you took it out, the B2B types of businesses is probably a bit less of a priority. Just the nature of the business model.
Peter Mahoney: That's absolutely right. And some of that is driven by, boards and company leadership and management in general. Totally get the fact that, your churn number is one of the most important things to focus on as a SAS business. because if you have a, if you have a leaky bucket, your economics just don't work the same way and it.
It can be a huge issue and a huge red flag for a business and in your business can be less investible over time, which is a strategic issue, obviously. so I think, especially around SAS and I love the concept of SAS just because yeah, you are aligning your interests with the customer's interest. And you deliver value and if you continue delivering value, the customer is going to continue to part with their money and when you stop, they stop and, and which is great, but it's also scary and an important mindset for, for the customers.
I wanted to just switch gears a little bit because we're at a really important time of year for most marketers, if you're focused on an annual plan and you wrote another great piece in your blog that I wanted to ask you about, around goal setting and specifically around the philosophy of setting.
Realistic goals versus unrealistic goals. And I found that to be just a really important and timely topic right now. And so can you just summarize your thoughts on the difference between the two and which one is the right approach if there is such a thing?
Oren Greenberg: Sure. I think it's interesting to understand why people set unrealistic goals.
And I think part of it is. Entropy. So if you think about physics and the way the universe is constructed, energy dissipates into lots of different directions. And the same thing happens in a business is people get into a malaise or stagnation, and this is the leadership's role to instill urgency and rigor and excellence.
And to produce a result in value for the customer. And as a result, part of it is a belief that culturally, we need to be really ambitious. It's if you really ambitious, people would get excited. And I think the there's a fine line between excited and anxious. And if that goes too ambitious and.
Then you're going to present and create a lot of anxiety and stress because people have too little time to plan and to effectively execute. I think some of it is done. Like when you think about the big, hairy, audacious goal. And I think there's proliferation in the business for all the business professors, where they talk about setting up these ambitious goals of how you're going to have an impact and change your world.
You think a lot of entrepreneurs and C-suite execs, that's where they wake up in the morning though, and have a big impact. And. They set these goals. I think the problem is how do you reconcile? And there's this like funny gift that goes around and LinkedIn, which is the client's budget and the client's brief and the client's budget is like no kids with a broom.
And the brief is like a, a Hollywood movie, but they only have the budget for a homemade movie, but they want a Hollywood production quality. And the problem is how do you reconcile that gap between the budget not being sufficient to get a Hollywood production movie? When it comes to market strategy.
And I think the answer to that is when you ask people, it's just be more creative and more Carter. It's yeah. But that, for some reason, when I go to LinkedIn and try to spend more money and I say, hey, I need to get a result for my boss. They just don't give me free money. That doesn't seem to work.
That attitude thing. It's really weird. It's almost like they just don't care about our business and they're just enough to make money for themselves. And that's strange. So I think the thing with having unrealistic expectation is. I think it's jades the employees at jades, the jades, the, it just becomes a bit of a joke internally.
It's are we going to set another goal? We're going to fail out and that's not a good precedent. You don't want to have people it's really put out for our self worth. And self esteem is a research that shows when a basketball team wins that four and a half X times more motivated to gain, play and then perform.
But when they lose, like the it's devastating, like the impact of failure on our. psychology is really significant. So it's very important psychologically to empower, to have smart goals, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based time-bound. And I think that key planning, like when you're building a building, you don't want to run out of money before you finish the roof, which is if you don't have a roof, you're not going to be able to run to the house and then never going to yield the return after all of these massive costs that you've incurred because you fell just before the end and people don't think about marketing strategy in the same way.
They don't think about it. , an intricate long standing marathon of brand building and excellence and execution and quality focus. They're thinking very momentarily. Like we can week a month or immediacy or immediate KPIs, and they lose sight of the overarching long term.
purpose of marketing, which is to build a brand of recognizable brands it's differentiated. And that doesn't take days a week. Some, it takes three, 10 years, Coca-Cola and vintage father Christmas back in the early century. And and then that budgets that they have is huge.
So people go, why can't we just become that Coca-Cola has been around for like a hundred years longer than you have. So they've had a hundred years and several billions of pounds of advertising over 80 years, more than you have. You're not going to be able to do that. It's what about Google and Facebook and unicorns.
It's like, how many freaking unicorns are there in the world? It's 84 unicorns. And how many businesses are there in the countries? And millions, do the maths, like the probability of this unrealistic expectation and achieving it is just unhealthy and it's not helpful. yeah, that was my explanation rationalization for why unrealistic expectations exist and that the costs for them are heavy.
And I think it's better to have better planning, more effective planning, high quality talent, and do less, but do it better. And then focusing accidents and differentiation because the key is too many businesses are doing too much, rather than doing what's important. And there's like a, an attitude that volume compensates, but we don't live in a volume world.
We're not, there is this interesting idea where. Time and quantity. If you can exclude quality as a measure if more quantity helps, but it's more quantity. Doesn't help. You have to focus in quantitative. It's a very basic kind of strategic and onset. But if you think about blog content, like if you produce lots and lots of local bananas that you did, you went from one a day to 20, a day, 30 a day.
Would you have a better impact? And the answer is no, because if that's the same budget and your prospect is a savvy buyer and they read the low quality, but higher volumes again, normal trafficking, but it doesn't convert. What was the benefit of this strategy was completely ineffective. And I think it's really about effectiveness.
Needs to be the focus, efficiency and effectiveness, not volume. I think the volume is a symptom of overwhelm. People are overwhelmed and too many founders like literally not a week goes by where someone says we need to be everywhere. Everywhere. Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, like everywhere.
You forgot TikTok. Cause we need to, sorry. You forgot. TikTok. Oh, yeah, TikTok, Snapchat, et cetera. And it's like, why do we need to be there? Then you're a B2B business. But because we need to get the brand that way, I'm like, you think you're going to get customers from Pinterest? Like, how does that work?
show me this board that you have in mind that we're going to be on. That's going to generate and unlock growth. And if you under, if you're going to go with why and the reason is they understand the principle. That you need awareness to generate demand and you need awareness to generate leads.
But the way that principle is applied is not a private than not applied effectively. And I think it's the lack it's really comes down to marketing education. I think every CMO I speak to. The main thing that frustrated about is that they need to educate the other stakeholders in the business because they don't get what marketing is.
But that's a good thing because if they didn't know what marketing was, we wouldn't have CMOs. It's like they wouldn't need CMOs because they already know how to do marketing. So in a way, That's your job is you have to educate. And, the hard thing is how do you educate and get a result at the same time?
And that's why it's a tough, it's a very tough role.
Peter Mahoney: So there's a lot to
Oren Greenberg: unpack there Oren , that's great.
Peter Mahoney: you went in a lot of places and I want to explore a couple of them. so we started on the idea of. goals in their relative, realism and achievability. And I think that the key point that you started to tease out there that I think is really central to the issue is timeframe.
And the idea that you can have a Beehag, a big, hairy, audacious goal. If it's long. far enough off into the future. You can have your put the man on the moon kind of thing. As long as you understand, within my fiscal period, I may not be achieving that. And the key is building the plan that says, what does it look like?
What are the. The incremental steps that need to be achieved to get there from point a to point B. And it's an area that is a struggle for a lot of companies, by the way, because most companies tend to think very short term You think a lot of. Japanese companies who famously think in 50 year kind of increments in us companies who think, monthly or quarterly.
so it's a very different kind of, dynamic in getting companies to think out strategically and say, I want, the five or 10 year plan, what are we trying to achieve? Then backing into that and say, what does success look like in the, in the leading, in the interim period, which brings me to another great piece of content you had, by the way that talked about the importance of leading indicators versus lagging indicators, which I liked a lot, because of course, lagging is a great rear view mirror.
Did I get there? leading is, am I going to get there, in what can I do? And, and I think that's an area that people struggle with a lot. they want to achieve the, they want to achieve the number, but they don't understand, they don't understand what the, the forward-looking leading indicators might look like.
So how have you helped your clients try and reconcile that and build out their plan and think in a framework of leading indicators?
Oren Greenberg: I always think about, When people bring me in, they bring me into create a transformation and take them from a to B when Sandy, from where they are to where they want to go.
And the question is, how do you know that we're getting to the destination? And if you're halfway through this donation and you don't have the evidence that you're going in the right direction, people lose faith very quickly. So I think the key is to instill the KPIs to deliver. Material commercial results as soon as possible.
So I'm always focused on getting as many success, success, quick wins to drive value and showcase that the expertise. Isn't just words because when you're talking in acronyms CPA KPIs, and the marketing jargon that we have other people's eyes glaze over because they're like, what is the goal of speaking in this marketing speak?
And I guess the problem is when you're deep into marketing, you need to develop a language to drive more efficiency and effectiveness because there's so much, there's so much complexity to it. And part of this language is sometimes just detracting from the reality of what a marketeer is. And then when the marketeer and traffic terms and the businesses, Turkey turning in revenue terms, the gap between traffic and revenues is huge.
It's like a step gap. That's like a large gap. And if the person doesn't understand the eight step process, then you've lost them already because they're not speaking the same language that they are. The leading indicators just need to be. KPIs that are translating and agreed in the C-suite and then measure it effectively to make sure that we're in the right way to go from a, to B, because it's very hard.
They're like when you go from a to B in a car it's really easy nowadays, because you either have a map or you have a Google map or you have, some sort of something telling you, but with businesses there, A to B is actually going to the unknown. They don't know what's going to happen. And it actually means that the clarity, the visibility is really limited.
So it's very easy. And what I see very often is they start on a journey that takes six months and two months in, they go, we're not getting, we're not at the destination yet. Yeah. it's six months journey , but we can't even see our destination. Germany with a car, if you're in like a bottom of the Hill and you're none of the top of the Hill.
Yeah. You're not going to see what's beyond the top of the Hill until you guys are top of the Hill. So it becomes very difficult for stakeholders. to just have faith to have belief. And if you, if they haven't worked with you before and you haven't proven that you're smashed in and got a result, then it's very hard to convince them, those have little faith.
And I think that's why a lot of people buy, the McKinseys and the Bains and this stuff is CMOs have been around and worked for very large brands. because they're trying to mitigate risk and some say that some of those people aren't gray, that's just to say maybe it's to understand the Psychology of the people we're working with.
And the other, the people need to drive and be accountable to the board for the investors, for the results that we're driving commercially and the leading and lagging indicator, just that it's I guess seeing mills and the road to say, yeah, we're going in the right direction where we're going to get to be soon.
And this is a healthy, it's looking good. It's healthy where we're doing the right things because people need the reassurance when they don't have blind faith.
Peter Mahoney: Yeah. And the important thing that you added , to the discussion here or in is the idea of connecting the leading indicators to what the ultimate result should be.
we advocate that people continue to ask the, to what end question, right? I want to generate leads to what ends so I can create pipeline to what end, so they can convert to customers to what end so that they can, Deliver profit to the company. That's the end, right? You need to figure out what are the steps that people need to go through to actually deliver incremental business value?
And you can do that with a lead. You can do that with a brand campaign. and if you can't do it with what you're doing, maybe you should not do it. it's the thing. But under understanding those, the, as you said, you may not see. The, you may not see the destination, in your horizon, but you should understand over the horizon.
where's the general area you're going to, and just your GPS, you should be able to figure out and recalculate, if all of a sudden the conditions changed. So if there's a storm, if there's a virus, if there's a competitive dynamic that's happening in the market, you need to be able to recalculate your route.
And then go figure out how to do something different and you can't do that without leading indicators in a plan and a goal. Otherwise you're just, you're just trending toward, entropy, which is
Oren Greenberg: because just driving in multiple different directions rather than getting committed to be right.
You're like driving, you got towards a good wind speed from a, then you stop and then you go towards C and then you stop and then you go towards D and then you stop. And I see that a lot. I see people Very low of course frequently. And just because they. They just don't have faith yet. They don't have charity.
Some of the CMOs responsibility is to make it clear that, the captain of that specific ship, the whole ship, like the CEO, et cetera. But the captain of who owns that department needs to make it clear and explicit. So how we're achieving. And I think in many ways, it's when we get an Ikea table, like imagine assembling an Ikea table without instructions so that you can't do it's just going to take you five X as well.
So having a plan, like having an architectural plan. Just guarantees a higher probability of success than if you didn't have the plan to begin with when you're constructing you, if they will.
Peter Mahoney: Yeah, absolutely. I think we're going to start to get toward a wrap here and I think we're going to try and get maybe a couple of quick, more, short-term tangible tactical kind of questions in and, and go from there.
Kelsey, I think you had one, you were going to ask.
Kelsey Krapf: Yes. I know you mentioned before, there were 7,182, MarTech softwares in the space. And I saw that you created the Google trends for the MarTech, and I believe the results are really fascinating. would love for you to just share that with our listeners and how you were able to come up with what you found.
Oren Greenberg: Sure. Sure. And we'll actually got a couple of projects. One of them is a kind of Google trends is looking at the top 100 marketing blogs in the world and trying to classify the topics and trying to understand the relationships between the marketing blogs and. Search topics because, searches, you don't know if that's a consumer typing that in like that data in Google and Google search console or Google trends, you're looking at marketing blogs, it's specific around marketing.
So that's the first project. And then the second is we took a scope Brinker's MarTech landscape, and then the collaboration with some of the web, we enriched it with three years worth of traffic data. And, some interesting, yeah, cause at the moment it's like a 26 slide deck. and I'm still refining and working with the data scientists, but I can give you some immediate insights just to give you a glimpse of it.
And obviously, if it's okay in the show notes, we can put a link to the, when it's ready and, happily share. And, but I'll give you some, like a peak or a sneak peak. if you think about of the setup. 1,182. And I asked you, what do you think the traffic distribution looks like?
Most people would probably guess Pareto, that's say 20% of the websites generate 80% of the traffic. And unfortunately it's a lot more stark than that. just three websites, which is Google, YouTube, and Facebook have 72% of all the traffic, which is pretty mad. And then the other, the top 71. So those three included is 98% of those traffic.
It's the 71 websites of the 7,182. I have 98% of the traffic, which is pretty M mindblowing. So effectively the remaining 7,111. Are competing for 2% off of the traffic that's left. And then in that second layer, there's actually or leader. So there's 48 categories in the MarTech landscape.
And the top ones vary from having anywhere between an average of 30% to 60% of all the traffic in those categories. Which is pretty nuts. yeah, it's a very monopolized world in terms of traffic out there. so that's like a glimpse of some of the insights that we've garnered from realizing that data.
Great. and, so when's the report going to be available? Oren ,
it's probably going to be available towards January publicly. But then there are a few. invited seclusive insight invites the, I do for groups to get feedback on it. And then I've been iterating and improving that already shown it to quite a few interesting people, including Scott Brinker and round Tishcon.
I got some fantastic feedback from them and trying to just tweak it and improve it for people in my network. And then I'll release it. I'll probably do the rounds with it, and then I'll release it into the world for free, for people to engage in analyze and gain insight. But then, people want to sign up to be updated and I get updates and then I'll probably do a six monthly update on it because I think it's enriches the existing MarTech landscapes and gives people time to build insight.
There's a lot of other really cool things that I've uncovered that are very interesting.
Peter Mahoney: That's great. So we'll, we'll include in, in the show notes here, along with the podcast, links to not only, Kurve and a little bit of background on, on the company, but also specifically for how they might get a raise their hand with, for interest for that particular report.
which will be great. I, it sounds really fascinating. Or, and, and this has been a. Broad ranging a really great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. And, and I'm, I'm excited to, to continue to, take a look at your blog and, so I can help increase your share of the, small of the remaining 2% of the things that are out there.
I thought, I think you should get your unfair share from that. I think we may have. Oh, Kelsey's one wrap question before we, we call it a day. So go ahead, Kelsey. Sure.
And
Kelsey Krapf: our most famous question of the podcast, what advice would you give to CMOs or those aspiring to be one? he can double down in network.
Oren Greenberg: I think all of my growth in my profession and my personal success today has come from a buoyant network. And I think it's, it's like gut floor. the more golf floor you have, the healthier, your gut is like up to a thousand species of gut floor. And I think what happens with CMOs is we tend to spend a lot of time with other CMOs I support CMOs.
I'm an on-demand CMO for smaller businesses and I support CMOs of large businesses. And, I think it's very important to have a, like with the gut flora, the CXO network, the CMO has a city, very diversified, not just in the business that they're in, but beyond the business that they're currently supporting.
And yeah, for me, a lot of the benefit I experienced commercially and what I don't know. Comes from my network. So just not forgetting to invest in that and not just get absorbed and sucked into much the existing role. And if you, as a result of the current business,
Peter Mahoney: I've never heard, I've never heard, people compare to gut flora, but I think it's a great analogy.
I'm not sure which, biological component I, represent, but, I won't ask any further. It's a great image. And, and I think great advice, Oren obviously expanding your network. and as he said, beyond CMOs and really understanding CXOs, and I think the one area that, that, CMOs need to focus on is really.
Getting a better relationship with the CFO. I think they've created a great relationship with the CIO these days and the CTO, but financially connecting with the CFO I think is increasingly important. again, thank you very much. and I think, Kelsey, we'll take it out from here.
Kelsey Krapf: Yes. Thanks so much for your time today, Oren. Fantastic content, really looking forward to that report of yours and make sure to follow the next CMO and plan on Twitter and LinkedIn.
And if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can visit our website and fill out our new podcast form under our resources section or email them to the next CMO@plannuh.com Stay tuned for the next community launching soon. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks everyone. Thanks. .