Episode 36: Optimizing B2B Marketing Operations: AI, Automation & Building Customer Relationships | Charlie Riley

This episode of Interesting B2B Marketers Podcast features guest Charlie Riley,  Vice President of Marketing for North America at Send,  who has extensive experience working with franchise groups and building a local co-marketing co-op. 

Together, Steve and Charlie discuss various aspects of marketing such as operations optimization, leveraging AI and automation tools for efficiency, and the importance of internal education and communication. They explore topics like community-led sales and marketing, building relationships with customers, asynchronous methods for meetings, understanding product offerings, and balancing between automation tools and human touch in marketing. 

This episode provides useful advice for marketers on effective communication and operations optimization to maximize their efforts in the B2B space.

Connect with Charlie Riley and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Disclaimer: The transcription of our podcast episodes has been generated by a third-party AI tool. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee that all typos, errors, or misinterpretations have been corrected. So, if you come across any blunders, don't blame us. Blame the robots. (Just kidding, don't blame them either. They're doing their best.)

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Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody, it's Steve. Welcome back to interesting B2B marketers. I'm excited for yet another interesting. Hopefully if we do our jobs here, it'll be hopefully interesting. But I'm excited to have Charlie with me here. Charlie, welcome to the show.

Charlie Riley: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, so we're going to, as we always do, jump into case studies, but we do the obligatory 60-second intro about who you are.

So you can just give us some context first. So go ahead, take it away.

Charlie Riley: Yeah. I'm Charlie Riley. It's always fun to talk about yourself, but I am the the VP of marketing for North America for Send. We are an InsureTech that sells into the commercial insurance space. So I've kind of gotten back into insurance.

I've got about 20 some years of mostly B2B marketing experience. Kind of jumped across the aisle a little bit and gotten into some sales leadership over the last 10 or so years. But my, my career's mostly been in B2B marketing and being a first marketing hire for, for several organizations or joining mostly startups.

Or some non-traditional industries to really help them go to market and tell their stories better. So yeah, marketing's been my, my thing for, for a long time and I, I love talking about it.

Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. All right, well thanks for joining us today. So, case study number one. I'm looking forward to this one because so many times, especially in the, in the B2B world, we just focus on the external campaigns and we focus on the customer, but we also.

Neglect that the fact that you need a one-two punch, like there's the marketing effort externally, but then there's also things that are needed internally. So this first case studies, you're gonna talk about the importance of getting it right inside, not just

outside.

Charlie Riley: Yeah. I think one of the biggest topics that I've learned over my career is internal marketing is sometimes an if not more important than external marketing.

And what that means is, you know, everyone sees. The campaigns, they see the ads that are out there. But internally, there's a lot of times that other departments especially from a sales standpoint or even leadership, doesn't fully understand what marketing truly is. And I think, as we all know, the term marketing is evolved quite a bit to not just creating an ad campaign, but to being involved in research and being involved in data analytics and CRM and, and really being, A true partner to sales.

And so there's been a number of times where I've found that you have to create a mechanism to talk across the rest of the different departments. And, it's hard because sometimes it can seem self-serving, but there really is a need to help people understand what it is you're truly doing and vice versa, showing a genuine interest in.

What other departments are doing as well and, and how it all rolls up to what your North Star is and how you can, how each department and each function and each effort can really lead to a better result for that. And that doesn't necessarily mean. That you have to become an expert in what the dev team is doing, or, or, or really, you know, the, the nuance of, of, of a product team or even from the finance standpoint.

But you have to communicate and you have to talk back and forth, and you have to be proactive about it. I think that the one thing that I've found was people make a lot of assumptions and so one example around that was how we were, we were as a leadership team, We were struggling with maybe a divide between what we talked about cuz we met daily.

We kind of talked about the challenges and the opportunities within the business, but other people across the organization and, and you're talking a hundred, some people didn't really have a, an the insight at, at the level that maybe we did and. So doing some research, doing a little bit digging deeper internally discovered that it wasn't just maybe say a senior leadership versus everybody else thing.

It was also a functional thing of you know, I was brought in as a brand new kind of marketing and sales. What does that mean? What does this job do? How do they affect the rest of the business? And so what we created was a mechanism to, to communicate that and. A lot of this trial by, you know, trial by error.

But what we were able to kind of come up with was a, a consistent cadence of communication that told the right stories internally, helped educate without people feeling like they couldn't ask questions. Cuz you know, people don't wanna look uneducated. So if you, you use some terminology or if you talk about a campaign internally, sometimes people don't wanna raise their hand and say, I don't know what that is.

Can you, can you explain more, more about that? So proactively, Helping people understand or how this, like, the steps within a campaign goes to, to the end result. We saw some really great results from that. So what we created was, what I, what I helped create with this, this leadership team was a daily email, which we called what we know Now, and that was to be as, as transparent and as clear as possible about exactly what it was, what we knew now or what we knew, what we knew at that point to use proper English.

But. What that did was it was, it was time consuming, but what it allowed us to do was truly pull  the most concise bullet points from each of the different departments, the department heads, and put that into one succinct email. So we let off with  the entire company daily, had access to what was important, what were some gaps, what were some barriers, what were some things we learned what were some opportunities for us, both positively and negatively. This evolved over time. But when we put out customers employee satisfaction surveys that like, I think it was 96%, the result was do you find this as a positive impact on, on what you do and how you understand what, what the company does? And, and, and knowing the day-to-day of, of where the company is, and it evolved.

Like I said, over time we started to include things. It wasn't just really being serious, it was. Adding in some jokes or adding in some, you know, personal anecdotes from different leaders day by day. So they saw the personal element there. Just like we try to do in B2B campaigns externally, you wanna, people like to deal with people.

They don't wanna see robots, they don't buy from businesses. And so we put a human element into it and we consistently did that every day. And it was spending time with all the leaders. Basically interviewing them, helping to kind of build storytelling for, for them as well. Some of this was internal education of here's how to take what you're trying to, to say in this big giant eight paragraph thing.

And  we're gonna narrow this down to a couple bullet points. So some of this was internal education for them to understand, here's how to tell story better, and here's, here's the end result for what the, for the rest of the people and what you're trying to get across to them. Not so much as you know, and again, this, these are the things  we do externally as marketers, but it, it was making sure we weren't using terminology that other people weren't aware of.

It was making sure that we were reducing acronyms or explaining acronyms and, and talking like they talk. And so it was a fun exercise. It was time consuming exercise, but it was a fun exercise to build a mechanism to help educate internally.

Steve Goldhaber:  Let me jump you in a for a second. I gotta ask a question. So  I love these initiatives. I've seen a lot of these that work really well. What was the reaction of the leadership team? And I'm sure it's some reaction of like, some loved it, others were like groaning, like, I don't want to be a part of this. This is different, it's new. Walk us through. The change management side of the idea.

Charlie Riley: Yeah, I think you, you hit on a great point because it has to come from the top down. It cannot be, it cannot seem forced. It cannot seem like, oh, we have to do this for, because people are asking for it. There truly has to be investment into that, and I think over time everyone got on board with the idea of.

Other, other departments, other individuals, they don't know what we do every day. And here's my opportunity to champion my teams. Here's my opportunity to tell positive stories about how we're impacting the overall business. And so there was buy-in and, but it took some time to help understand the cadence.

It took some time to help understand. Here's what I'm gonna ask you to do. I'm gonna boil that down. I'm gonna na, I'm gonna maybe revise some, some terminology or some words here. Is this the way you're trying to think about it? And so there was a lot of ying and yang and back and forth and, but there was buy-in and that was the ultimate way it was successful is because everyone knew every day we had to contribute to it.

You had to, you had to think about it. And so I have seen examples though, where you try to do this and if there's not buy-in or if there's not. An understanding of why it's important to help people like get into the details of what an ad campaign looks like internally, or helping a sales team understand here are the marketing emails that are going out, here's the people that are opening them.

Here's let's prioritize who to follow up with with lead scoring, for example. If there's not a sales leadership buy-in for that, then it's, it's gonna be an, it's, it's not gonna be successful. But thankfully in this example, we did have the buy-in for it.

Steve Goldhaber: All right. And you said it started out as daily, right?

Charlie Riley:  It did, yes.

Steve Goldhaber: How is it, is it still a daily thing? Because I hear that and I go, man, that's a lot. I've seen 'em done maybe every week. How, how about the frequency? How did that discussion go?

Charlie Riley:  Yeah, it was I think. At the time, there was a need for, for Daley because things were changing so rapidly. And I think that's, that's a case by case basis.

And I think every organization really needs to figure out what that cadence looks like. Is that I'm a big fan of things like a loom video, for example. So for asynchronous communication it doesn't, you know, that was the other thing we had to think about as well, is you have to think about everyone's individual learning styles.

People can be a much more visual learner. So creating the same content, and this is again the same thing you do externally. You don't just create a super long blog post. You might take that long blog post, which is great for seo, but you take this, a couple snippets for it for the too long didn't read version as maybe the C-suite or you take a video of that for, for the visual learners.

And so we, we thought that that a daily process with that was, was the best use of, of how we could communicate that. Now we got really, we got a lot better at doing it and shortening the time that it took, but it was a commitment. But I think that's every company needs to figure out is this weekly, is this monthly?

But I think the more frequent you do it, and again, it is a big commitment to do it daily, but even if it's weekly, That shows your commitment by your leadership team. It shows a commitment by we're trying to, we're trying to help everybody understand what's going on. And so I think it's, it's case by case, but for us, it was a lot of time, but we, we saw a really good value out of that.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, cool. I like it. Let's jump into case study number two, and this is a, a topic that is near and dear to every B2B marketer. So this is the, call it the two-headed monster. Call it peanut butter and jelly, depending on how good it is. It's the relationship between sales and marketing. So I'm excited to jump into this one.

Go ahead.

Charlie Riley: Yeah, I think you, you, you hit it spot on. I think everyone depending on the organization, I. It's gonna be smooth, like peanut butter, or it's gonna be chunky like peanut butter. I've been very fortunate to step into leadership roles in marketing in the past, which have been the, the first marketing hire, and that's been in very traditional organizations and that's been in sass or, or, or, or startups.

And in most of those instances, there's been a sales function already there or already present to differing degrees of maturity. So there's already an established understanding, like people get what, what sales is for the most part, especially a leadership team. They, they understand like it's pretty cut and dry, what sales is.

There's some nebulous, you know, thought process sometimes around what marketing truly does. And in one example in the path I joined a little bit more of a traditional company as their first head of marketing and very large established sales team. We're talking a hundred plus salespeople versus one marketer.

And there was some traditional thought processes around here's how we do sales. And I think what I found was asking a lot of intentional questions with a true intent to show I'm here to help. And it's not to be combative. It's not to question things of how, why are you doing it this way? It's with, if you start with a true intention of how am I, how, how can you help me understand what you're doing or what's been successful, and I am, I wanna take that back, absorb that, and then find ways to, to maybe add on to that.

I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but I'm trying to help you find another way that you might not have known about. And so in this example, in this previous organization, there was, there was not a lot of data. Driven decision making when it came to sales. It was a numbers game, but we didn't have a lot of the resources that were there that you think about what, what we now consider a b m.

But back then it really, there really wasn't a, a terminology for it. And so looking at the opportunities, Rebuilt a website that we could start to bring some analytics into play, put lead scoring into place to really help salespeople understand there's, there's prioritization that you can look at.

You've got a, you know, a giant prospect list. Let's focus on the ones that actually might show some intent. Building custom landing pages for, for your top prospects and having that repeatable so that it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a manual, it didn't take a lot of work, but we could show a really personal, personal effort and help close deals faster.

Putting in a, a an a system to be able to help them build their own thought leadership through social, you know, through social stuff and teaching that. So it wasn't so much as. I'm telling you what to do. I'm giving you a few tools and here's some suggestions on how to do it, but you're the expert.

Let's take that information and put that into a place to, to, to show that. And it wasn't an easy buy-in. I mean, over time there were some people that they were successful already and they were gonna do it their way, and that's fine. But I think the one thing that I found as a marketer was you find the, you find your champions and you find the ones that are inquisitive.

You find salespeople that say, Tell me more about that, or how does that work? Or how can this help me? And if you're completely intentional around, I'm here to help you I wanna get excited, I wanna ring the bell when we, when we land a deal, just as much as you do. And I'm gonna be here to support you, but I'm not taking away from your success.

I'm here to provide you all the tools from sales enablement to the data analytics. So it took some time to build that infrastructure, but. For some of the, for some of the salespeople, it was like, I remember specifically one of the sales leaders, he's, I, I showed a whole demo of how we could do lead scoring and, and, and some some insight.

He's like, this is like cheating. How, how can we get this information? This is, how can we haven't had this before? And that's very powerful. And when you can show you're a true aligned partner to sales and marketing's here to support that as much as possible, and we're gonna build all these resources to help you with your feedback, and it's a continual loop.

We saw great results from that. We saw three years of the, the, the best sales results in the company after we put a lot of those steps into place.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's, so I wanna focus on one area, cuz what you're talking about here. If, if anyone listening is looking to build that relationship with sales faster, Lead scoring is such a great way to start, because usually that's the riff with sales, with marketing, right?

Like you're generating these things that you're calling leads. They're not really leads. And my own philosophy is like we shouldn't have the marketing version and the sales version of what a lead is. It's just a lead. And the scoring is a great dialogue because they still see value in the leads. But now you're getting into their heads and, and they're prioritizing what's important or indicators for someone who is more inclined to buy.

And it's just always been such a wonderful discussion to have because it's, it's, it's good intent. It's helping them. You're getting help from their insight. So I always encourage people to talk about lead scoring cuz it's just within, within a two second, like, you, you talk about it in two seconds.

You're hitting the ground running. It's just  they wanna share, they want to tell you how to give better leads. So I've always found it a, a great place to start.

Charlie Riley: It is, and I, I think there's a couple things to think about as a marketer, especially when you're working with a, a sales team who's not used to lead scoring.

It's one, I think you have to be very transparent is. This is, this is gonna be an evolving process. It's never done. I think the, the one thing you, you have to help them, like you brought up, is they want better leads. Marketing wants better leads. Like over time, by communicating back and forth, you can get to a better point of getting better and better at, at the quality of those leads.

But if they're not giving feedback about this isn't a good lead and why? It can't just be that one's, you know, this lead was terrible. It has to be this, this lead wasn't, this didn't hit the persona mark and here's why. Or it's gotta be, mark, we found this lead. Is this gonna work for you guys or you girls that are, or whoever you're, you know, you're, you're sending that to and they need to give the feedback to say no, that that's really not the right buyer persona.

That's one part of it. I think it's gotta, it, you have to set the expectation of it's gotta be a continual loop. But the other thing is, I think you need to go a layer deeper. And it, you can't just say, well, this, this prospect hit a lead score of a hundred. Call 'em up right away, because you need to understand what they're actually taking a look at.

And your, your mechanism for how you're building a lead score might be it might be skewed a little bit more on the, on the, the Like the persona side. So based on their industry, based on their, their company size, they might get an inflated score. But what you really wanna look at with the salesperson and help them understand this is we're giving them extra points because they've done this activity, they've looked at this, they've looked at this product.

And so what I did with a lot of those sales people in that instance is in that instance, was. You've been talking to 'em about this specific product for a long time, and we really haven't made so much inroad there. However, they've spent, look at, they've downloaded this, this case study about this other product.

They've spent five minutes on this video, or they've looked at these four different product pages. You, you weren't aware of that before, but use that information. You can't be creepy about it and tell 'em, you know, Hey, I saw you did this for 14 seconds. But use that information. And that's, that's a great way for a follow up.

Like, hey, you know, have you thought about this product? And subtly introduce that to them cuz they're showing intent and interest in that. So I think it's, if you continually help them understand that it's a, it's an iterative process. Iterative process that you're gonna work back and forth with. But if you can go a layer deeper and help them understand.

Here's what they're actually maybe interested in. It's not a guarantee, but we're gonna help you narrow in on the better prospects and we're gonna help you narrow in on what they might be interested in. You get success with that?

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I, I think the sales intelligence as a result of content consumption on, you know, social web channels, that's very powerful.

Especially if you're, you know, you take a really easy to understand platform like HubSpot and you just, you just have your salesperson say, Hey, come over here. I wanna show you something. And, you know, if the customer has declared information right, it's all fair game to say this is what this one customer has done.

Over time, their their eyes light up. They look at this as like, holy cow, like this is, this is like great information and thank you for sharing. So it's, it's one of those like bridge building activities that you can do as someone in marketing is share that information with the sales team. And that's where they, you know, I think lead scoring and sales intelligence are.

Two of those things to quickly build relationships. I've, I've also worked with clients who have modeled content consumption as an indicator for churn. So they have essentially said, Hey, Salesforce, we have a hundred clients that we know are going that we know about through declared information.

We're gonna score them based upon who's highly engaged. We're then gonna correlate that to towards renewal or churn. And that's been a great sense of relationship building too, because now you're arming the sales team with, Hey, here's your client base, these, these 30%. We think there's an engagement issue, which is related to them not renewing.

What do you think about that? Like, what's going on with this customer? And that's just a, they're somewhat alarmed at first cuz obviously like, wait, you're telling me my customer's about to leave? But then it's just a conversation of like, what can we do to reengage them? Maybe they're just not engaging.

Or no, they actually are gonna defect and we have to win them back. Awesome. So thank you for sharing case study number two. We're gonna jump into q and a Now. Tell us about your first job in marketing.

Charlie Riley: Yeah, so it, it was interesting. I found and I, it's, it's one of those things where you sort of, you find your way into something and you always bring it back to marketing.

At least that's where, you know, that's what I've, I've found a way to do. I found this company that was a master franchise They, they bought the master franchise rights to a, a, a fairly well known quick service restaurant, which was trying to penetrate a new market. I live in Buffalo, New York.

They were trying to penetrate in the East Coast. And my job was to. Really, I was an ops specialist, so kind of getting into the ops side and I had to do everything from going to get food safety certified to working with architects. So if you looked at it, marketing wasn't a part of that, but I.

I saw a really big opportunity because we were, we were entering a new market and we were selling franchises. We were actually selling these, you know, pretty big investment franchises to helping sell a whole market on why to, why to look at a brand new entrant into the market when there's a lot of established players there.

And so I actually built a local co marketing co-op for this. This ownership group, and there was, I wanna say 14 or so of these franchise owners that I not only helped them build their franchises out, which was a great experience to learn about buildings and permits and all these, all these things that I didn't know about, but more, where I was excited about was how do we build, how do we build awareness and excitement around this brand?

And that's where the co-op piece was. And I had to convince these owners. Hey, contribute dollars to this and we're gonna, we can go to market better as a group than as you individually. And so they did that. And then I took my expertise and, and negotiated media deals. I negotiated sponsorships. I worked with the corporate marketing team to help get a little bit more awareness in this market and.

We had four of the top 10 national grand opening in terms of sales revenue, four of the top 10 across the nation within our market in that first year. And I think a lot of it had to do with, with the marketing. We had, you know, we had ground cover support from the corporate marketing, but we weren't able to kind of dictate that and being on the ground.

It was sort of a mix of field marketing and sponsorship and media buying. But being on the ground, I knew which channels made a lot more sense than what maybe corporate was suggesting. And so, like I said, we did some fun, fun experiments and fun promotions with local, you know, AAA baseball teams. And it was a lot of fun and it was exciting to help Ed.

Again, it was internal education with these franchisees that. You know, it was, it was getting them to buy into the idea of let's do this as a group, let's learn from it. But we had a lot of fun with it. So I did that for a couple years and it was, it was a really interesting experience, not only on the marketing side, but learning a bunch of other things too.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I think that's a great environment I've worked with, with similar franchise groups before, and it's a good first gig for you, I think, because they are, they tend to be very demanding and very skeptical of the power of marketing because it's all about, Look, I'm trying to make money. I'm trying to sell.

So if you can't do that today, then I don't know why we're talking. And then, you know, the, they'll come around to like, okay, I understand there's some longer term things we need to do, but I've always enjoyed that because it's, it's a group that typically doesn't know a lot about marketing yet, when you bridge that gap to say, here's how marketing can enable you to sell, whether it's this month or in a year.

Then they start to view it as a, as a partnership. But it, it, it's also, you know, it's like you're managing to a board of directors cuz they're, it's not just one-on-one interaction. Like you've gotta sell your ideas to to a group of people. Sometimes that's in person. Other times there's 10 one-off conversations that have to happen before you get to the big conversation. But that I, I like that first gig. 

Charlie Riley: It was a good, it was a good experience to learn. When I get the experience I talked about before when I was a marketing leader, dealing with a hundred salespeople, those are a hundred people that expected you to be like to work directly for them. And so it helped lead to that sort of management of who's a priority?

How do you manage time, how do you manage expectations? But you're right, I think you give a great example. There are high expectations and there's sometimes a lack of education. So, I think my career of helping internal teams understand what marketing is. It started way back then to say, I need to help them understand why a, a tactic like this makes sense, why they should invest in this.

And it does, it takes some time and you're gonna get some skeptics, but over time, I think you can win 'em over by throwing results or being transparent and saying, Not everything's gonna be a home run, but we're gonna learn from that and we're gonna, we're gonna experiment and, and, and try something different the next time.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. What do you, as a marketer, what if you had a blank schedule next week and you just said, oh, I get to choose what I work on. What gets you most excited?

Charlie Riley: That's a great question. I think I think you can never spend enough time on, you know, when you look at the operations and the, and the, the, the, I guess, The explosion of rev ops and marketing ops and sales op roles, I think you can never feel confident enough that every, everything below the iceberg.

I like to use the iceberg analogy for a lot of things, but there's a lot of the guts to make sure that campaigns are working correctly and so. I would wanna spend some time to look at that and especially as you're trying to build up a function. You know, right now we have a very small marketing team.

It's our cmo, myself and, and one other. And we have a handful of agencies. And so in that instance, you're working with you're working with multiple parties and you're trying to get all the, like the, the guts Correct. And that's, Data cleanliness, that's making sure your sequences are, are built out correctly.

That's making sure your lead scoring is, is up to date. That's making sure you're aligning what you're seeing from an SEO standpoint with the content that you're creating. And so I think you can never spend enough time doing that. And I think you can never spend enough time understanding your product.

And so, you know, when you're, when you're selling to enterprise level organizations or even lower level, I think you just, you have to, you really know the product. Talk to the customers more because they're gonna tell you how they use it or they're gonna tell you the terminology to use versus what you might, what you internally might think that they wanna hear or how they wanna hear that.

So I'd probably spend more time on the app side and then also spending more time talking to customers.  

Steve Goldhaber: All right, so this next one is the opposite. Tell us about what you would love to not do. If you could just say, all right, next week I'm canceling this meeting.

What kind of meeting would it be?

Charlie Riley: I don't know if I'd necessarily cancel a meeting. I think. Being smarter about how you communicate and not to say we have a lot of status meetings. But sometimes those can be just those are an easy way to take up time where that could be shared asynchronously. So I think it's always good to take a look at your status meetings and updates.

And can you share that again via Loom video? Can you share that in bullets? We've been trying to do that more as a team of, here's what I'm working on, here's some barriers I have in putting that into a bullet format. And that's helped us reduce some meetings. So it's not like I have too many more to probably get rid of in that sense.

But if it's done asynchronously in the format that someone learns from, I think you can bring, you can gain some of your time back. And so that would probably be the one area that we've actually been making progress with. But you can always kind of look at that or I like to. You know, I think a nice trick that people, you know, don't always take advantage of is make a meeting an hour meeting 45 minutes, and you usually get, you usually get the same amount done in that 45.

Yeah. And you save some time for people. So that's always a trick that I like to kind of take a look at.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I love the asynchronous stuff. I'm a huge user of Loom. I've been using that for a couple years. It's amazing when I've had to onboard people on my team I, I started creating this onboarding curriculum that is Loom based and.

I did it for the first person and then another person came on board and I'm like, oh my God, it's already done. And then, you know, my onboarding from my time spent, it really is, it can be relationship driven and getting to know that person as opposed to like all the ops stuff that I, I've given that talk over and over again.

So I believe in that is such a better way to efficiency, but also more meaningful relationships because, you know, your new, your new employee or a new partner doesn't. That's not your role, it's is to give the same training over and over again. So anyway, I'm a huge believer in that. What do you think is, is kind of like on the forefront for marketers out there specific to the B2B space?

And you're, it sounds like you're operating a really, you're a, you can be very high level, you can be very tactical because you don't have a lot of people in your marketing team. What are some things that you're trying to take advantage and what do you, what do you see coming next?

Charlie Riley: Yeah, I think you have to be, I, I think we're all being asked to do more with less sometimes even in more prosperous times.

I think it's, it's always a, a balance there. So a lot of people are talking about, you know, AI and, and reducing reducing manual work, and that's actually, it's part of the product that we sell to insurance. So it's, it's kind of, it's relatable there. I think there's a balance of that. I think. You know, there's, there's some crutches you can use to, to maybe reduce some things, but you can see through that and I think you can see through when a human isn't a part of that.

And so that's always a fine balance of how do you maximize your time with tools and efficient products that can help you reduce some efforts there. But there always need to be a human element to it. I, I feel I feel that that comes across in writing. I feel that that comes across in your messaging.

I think that that's gonna stand out and still win. So that's one of the things that is, is, is probably on every marketer's mind right now. I think there's, there's been a change of how you. You know, like the lead gen, demand gen, and there's been this shift to community led sales and marketing to you know, people led sales and marketing to content creators and, and how that's sort of led to, to different opportunities.

I think these are all things to be aware of because people buy from people. I think the community thing is, is gonna be here to stay. It's, it's not a new thing. I think it's just. Formulated differently, but I personally see, I see a problem that I have myself of not, it's too much choice and I'm, I'm kind of struggling with all these different communities that are, that get really broad.

And then there's some really niche focused ones that are maybe like B2B marketers in an industry or, you know, a certain role. And there's just, there's a lot of noise in those, and there's a lot of noise to the market that you're, you're, you're trying to talk to. So I think it's just, it's always a fine balance to ying and yang of stepping back, but also you gotta be aware of what's going on.

But I, I do see the community thing that's, that's an area that I think marketers need to spend some more time. I think it's also very difficult cuz I think people think, oh, we'll just create our own community. And it's not that easy. And I think it's how do you, how do you tap into the right ones? Or do you really put the effort into into building a community or building your own podcast?

I think that's where a lot of brands look at things as. If you're not educating internally of how much effort and how much commitment there really needs to be with that, that's one of those things that could, you could fall flat on to say, oh yeah, let's just build our own media company. Well, it's, it's easier said than done.

So those are things that I'm aware of right now because it's, it's time consuming, but the benefits do pay off. It just might not be instantaneously. So those are kind of some of the things that I'm, I'm looking at right now.

Steve Goldhaber:  All right,cool. Final question for you. You said you've been doing marketing.

For, you know, just over 20 years, take a look back at yourself and what are some of those marketing lessons that you've learned to say, oh, you know what, I would've totally done this different based upon what you know now. So what, what's some advice that you could pass along to the listeners?

Charlie Riley: I, I think you should always, always be learning, and it, it doesn't necessarily mean just reading marketing books, reading, you know, sitting in a marketing podcast.

I've spent more of my professional development over the last probably five, 10 years, r reading salespeople reading their blogs, like spending time in sales communities because, Marketing is sales. And as much as we don't like early on, I probably, I probably said this, where like, oh, I'm not in sales, or I would never do that.

And it's funny how my career has shifted to being directly involved in sales and business development and partnerships and leading sales teams now. So, you know, it's, it's kind of careful what you wish for and it's, it's, it's, it's revenue. We're all drive, especially in b2b, you're driving for revenue. So the more time you could spend learning about.

Psychology, which is what marketing really is and helping people to like, there's some really great book, like The Power Habit was a great book that I loved, nudged by Richard Thaler was a, a great book to kind of help people think about their psychology of how they buy it. Reading things that are not just marketing is, is one area that I found from a leadership standpoint.

I think I talked about this earlier, like that internal education and the communication and proactively helping share what you're working on. Is, is very important for marketers because you can assume that someone doesn't, maybe your leadership or your C-Suite or whoever, like, oh, they don't need to know about that.

Or they, they know, they already know I'm doing this and I wouldn't assume that. And I think there's a fine balance of not being too self-serving and like, oh, hey, look at what we're working on because. Usually marketing has a ma, they have a probably the largest budget. There's a lot of eyes on marketing.

Other departments might not understand that, so you have to help them understand what you're working on and what it does. And I think the earlier you can understand that and the earlier that you can communicate up. Is, is a, is a, is a vital skill for a marketer. I think those are probably the two biggest things that I've learned over my career.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Awesome. All right. Well, Charlie, thanks for joining us today. I really enjoyed the conversation. And for everyone out there, if you aren't already subscribed to interesting B2B marketers, you can do that via Apple Podcast. You can do it on Spotify as well as our YouTube channel. So, Charlie, once again, thanks for joining and we look forward to catching up with everyone on the next episode.

Have a wonderful day, everyone. Take care. 

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