Welcome, this is Cassidy Shield, Chief Growth Officer of Refined Labs, and your host of today's episode of Stacking Growth. Where I talk with Carl Ferrera, Director of Sales, about how to influence and direct change across your go-to-market organization. Welcome everybody to the Stacking Growth Podcast on your host Cassidy Shield. Today, I'm very excited.
We have the one and only, Carl Ferrera on the show. Carl's also a co-host of this podcast, and he runs sales here at Refined Labs. Carl, welcome to the show. Cassidy, great to see you.
Thanks for having me. And I might be the one and only, but we don't know. Maybe I had a point out there somewhere. So, somebody shaped their face, I don't know.
Well, definitely the inferior twin, if they don't have that beard that you have. Absolutely, thank you for noting that. So, I'm excited about this topic, this idea of influencing change in an organization. Because if you think about what a company does, when you're trying to sell to a customer, this is part and parcel of what we're trying to do, is we're trying to create change or a better world in our customers' lives.
This is something that marketing needs to be doing as part of a go-to-market strategy. But the reason I think it's great to be talking to you is because this is the sales job, day in and day out. How do you get customers to change? And so, I wanted to dig into that with you.
I know you have a lot to say on the topic, but first, I'm not gonna let you get off without telling us a little bit about yourself. Nice, of course. Yeah, so, Carl Ferreira had a sales here at Refine, actually an ex-hub spotter. So, I sold there for a couple of years.
Love HubSpot, shout out to them. And yeah, I've been in SAS sales for five, six years or so. Two little girls married, they love dancing gymnastics. And yeah, when I'm not closing deals or enabling my team to close deals now, gosh, I'm just hanging out with them, working out, helping them with their gymnastics activities and stretching and flipping and their tumbles.
So, I'm a hashtag dad life all the way. Are you a bounce bean guy, a floor exercise? Like what's your go-to gymnastics move on your end? Yeah, yeah, definitely a floor exercise guys.
So, my daughters will do it and I will just kind of like sit in the corner. So, I definitely enjoy the floor exercise portion of the routine the best. It allows me to sit, I pretend like I'm stretching and just cheer them on. So, I love that.
Why don't we just, I know the conversations about how others can influence change in an organization, but like change is gonna be synonymous in this conversation. HubSpot's a great company. Why are you fine labs? I was just talking about you and kind of how you think about change in your own personal life.
They kick this off. Yeah, that's a really good question. And one that I actually don't get a lot, which is surprising whenever someone's talking about my career, my career transition. But when I was first thinking about leaving HubSpot, it was actually, it was a tough decision.
As you can imagine, you know, feel like a crazy person for leaving a place like HubSpot. Even my wife was like, you're a crazy person. Like they send stuff, they send swag to your kids. Like they do a lot.
They go above and beyond for sure. Wonderful products, I mean, you know, especially the last two years, everything going on in the world. I mean, HubSpot was very much in a way, a beneficiary of a lot of the transformation that businesses had to go through. So it was a good few years.
I think for me, I was thinking a few steps ahead. I was like, where do I wanna go? Who do I wanna become? What's the kind of leader I wanna become?
Maybe even father or just individual, right? So I was kind of on this self-reflective journey of like, who am I becoming? And am I in the environment to become that person? And that's when I started to realize that maybe HubSpot wasn't a perfect fit.
However great of a company was. It wasn't a perfect fit for who I was, you know, wanting to or dreaming of or envisioning that I would become. And who I was trying to become was somebody who could build, you know, somebody who could build sales teams, builds processes, builds strategy, build a business, build a vertical, things like that. And HubSpot's wonderful, but a lot of the building is for the most part complete at HubSpot.
HubSpot is in a leader stage, like they need execution, right? A lot of like their machine as well, oil, the timing, it's going. There's not a lot of opportunity for just building new. So I realized if I was gonna move up the chain of command, which I had an opportunity to do, right?
Move up the sales management and then direct or BP and kind of go off the traditional sales growth career path. I wasn't gonna do a lot of building in those areas. I was gonna be doing a lot of adopting, right? Adopting a team that was already built, adopting a vertical that was already built, right?
And I just found myself like, I wanna be the builder, can I build? I don't know, I wanna try that though. And so that's when I kind of started to explore, have conversations and I don't know if Chris got some kind of intense signals somewhere from some kind of software that he uses, you know? But he happened to send me a DM on LinkedIn in like August of last year, which was kind of when I was beginning to think through this and he invited me to a conversation and it turned out to be a pure building role with Chris, that refined life.
So it was awesome, you know, a great opportunity and obviously here I am. So that was kind of my initial thinking and how I thought through that. Well, I'm glad you're here. I've enjoyed working with you.
And what I wanna do in this conversation with you is, it would be great by the end if we have a framework. So our audience can go away and say, these are the, let's call it five steps I need to go through in order to drive change in my organization. And what I love about your story is my bet is who you want to become is one of those steps. And that's what you did in your personal life.
My bet is this is what you try to do with your customers. But let me ask you, so every day you're talking to customer or prospect after prospect about what they need to do to change. What is that like? What is your process?
Your thought pattern? How do you do that as a salesperson? Yeah, yeah, it's a big question. I think the first thing you're dead on is I need to uncover who is it that this, well really, you know what?
Actually, the first question is not who are they wanting to become? The first question is who are they today? You know, what is their organization like today? What's their marketing team built like today, right?
So it's like, who am I today? And I did that in my own journey. I'm sure you've done that as well. Or it's like, this is who I am today.
It's what my, maybe you look at your resume as a barometer for that. Like, this is the thing that I have done. These are the things that people say about me. These are the outcomes I produce.
I'm maybe I'm an underperformer, an average performer, an overperformer, like who am I right now? And I think that's a really important story. So that's honestly where a sales conversation starts is you've come to me, there's a need somewhere, but let's push the brakes before we just jump into that. Because that's like phase two.
Like buyers want to jump into that second phase of this is what I want. And they don't say this is what we want to become, but they're saying that in a way where they're highlighting problems. That's not the right place to start. The right place to start is who am I today?
Who are we today? And that allows me alongside the buyer or the customer to make sense of the outcomes that they're producing today. A lot of times there's not great outcomes being produced if they're coming inbound to us, or they're taking a conversation with us. So it's like, can we make sense of that?
Can we even point to what maybe the root cause of some of these? And a lot of times the root cause is found in a self-reflective even 10 or 15 minutes of who are we? What do we do today? And can we develop a hypothesis for why we think we're producing the outcomes that we're producing?
I really like this idea of who are they? And so let me kind of, if I put it in this other context, it's kind of like what is the current state? And so whether you're talking to a prospect, or you're talking to a CMO or CEO, and you're trying to figure out how to drive change, a lot of people don't want to talk about the current state because it's kind of emitting something doesn't work. They'd rather just say, this is what I need.
So how do you get, in this case, the prospect to open up and want to slow down and talk about that? I think it's selling them, I don't know if sale is the right word, but I think it's opening their eyes to the fact that we can't achieve what these needs, if we don't understand. So it's like, this is an important foundation to understand. If we're gonna go from A to B, we need to understand where A is, or we won't really have a clear, we'll be shooting in the dark getting to B.
And you get this a lot, you've gotten this, like being on sales calls and being a revenue leader, it's like we wanna grow this much, right? 30% this year, 50% 100%. We hear some wild goals in our line of work and it's like, where are we starting? How do you know where the finish line is?
If you don't know where the starting line is? And I think just talking through that, it typically makes sense. And honestly, it's a good, not to get salesy here, but it's a good barometer for if this opportunity is worth pursuing, right? If they really are resistant to kind of unpacking who they are today, you will lose this deal, right?
Because this is what's necessary to do all the stuff that has to come later. Not just closing a deal, not just understanding how do we solve our problems, but they're gonna get jammed up when they go to their CEO, their CFO, whoever's above them in the chain of command and they try to bring a bunch of solutions without really clearly identifying what the problem is. And oh, by the way, the solution is half a million dollars. That conversation's not gonna go anywhere, right?
So you can't affect change without understanding, you know, the starting line. And again, going back to the original point, like who you are today, it's fundamental. What if the person doesn't know? How do you help them figure that out?
And you know, I'm putting this in the context of the prospect, but think about, you know, you're a marketing manager and a company and you're trying to influence change and you're trying to get the other person to understand the current state or where they are today. But they can't, they don't know. And I think you probably get this a lot on sales calls, like this idea that I don't really know how we're doing today, but I just know we need to do better. I think that's awesome.
I actually, I love that. It's an opportunity for us to step in and help. Like that's the first, like we can start helping now. You don't have to pay me a dime and now we can start helping and you can get value.
Even if you don't hire us, you'll walk away with, I know exactly where we are today. So I think that's a really positive moment in a conversation. And for, you know, a marketer or anybody who comes inbound, anybody who's trying to affect change in their organization, like I think that's a sign of strong leadership and you're, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I don't know why we're doing this.
Like can you help me? That's an amazing foundation, I think. Cause like we can, cool. We can start there, you know?
And it's not just with a sales person that you want to be able to open up like that. A sales person needs to earn a measure of trust. But I think if you can, I think if you want to grow in your career and affect change in your organization, you also need to get to that kind of humble transparent point with your peers in an organization, whether it's your CEO or your CRO, CGO or whoever it is. I think that's a really, like admitting, you know, admitting that you don't know where to start.
You're not entirely sure why or the results that you're producing aren't great. That's a great starting point. So. Yeah, one technique I've used around this, in particularly internally when you're trying to drive changes, the idea of like, let's just start with what our goals and objectives are.
And to be know that as a company or a team or organization. And then from there, you know, collectively, are we meeting those goals or objectives or not? And if we don't know what they are, we don't know how what we do ties into the company's objectives. How do we figure that out first?
Cause I think the point you're making is, you know, who you are today and what is going on needs to be verbalized and crystallized in order for you to have any shot at changing an organization or a team moving forward. You agree with that? Yeah, 100%. I mean, you can't, you know, remodel your house without knowing that the drywall is rotting away, you know, or ripping up the floor and looking underneath and seeing, like that's what has to happen for us.
A little bit of demolition to use this analogy. I think needs to happen. You've got maybe some indicators on a dashboard and hub spot or wherever and CRM that's like, okay, there's maybe some unhealthy things happening. But until you get in there with a hammer, you know, a sledgehammer and really like get underneath it all and figure out where's the rock?
Where's the rust? You can't fix anything, right? So that's what a good seller does. But even before that, you don't need a sales person to do this, it's always amazing to me.
I think this is like a mistake that a lot of, you know, leaders make and I appreciate that they make this mistake cause they involve me in the conversation. But a lot of times I'm like, why? You don't need me to have this conversation. You're like, really, you should bring this to me.
They're already done, you know, like you should have already ripped out the drywall and kind of done an assessment of why are we producing the results we're producing if they're not on target, you know? So anyways, super important to go through that. And I think you're good on. So you have this idea of where you are today.
People probably, I'm gonna put words in your mouth, come to you with an idea of where they wanna go. How often do they understand how to get there? Oh, very rarely. I mean, if ever, you know, maybe it's a little hard.
I don't wanna say a hundred percent of the time they don't know how to get there. But most of the time they don't. And let me qualify that. Sometimes they do, let me give, let me give our buyers some credits, all the buyers on the planet, some credit.
Sometimes they have an idea, but it's like, it's not fleshed out, it's super vague, maybe, you know, like you'll get this a lot, I got this a hub spot a lot. We're not driving enough revenue and we need to start doing content marketing. It's like, okay, you have an idea of what you need to do, but you don't understand really the nuts and bolts of like what's involved. Same people, same thing happens at refined, right?
You hear these calls, they come inbound and they're like, we need more pipeline. Marketing isn't generating enough qualified pipeline or we're spending a bunch of money and we get a bunch of MQLs and none of them close. We need to create demand. So they'll say something very vague like that.
And it's like, can you help us do that? I mean, maybe, but we have to unpack this a lot because just to say, hey, we need to go create more demand. There's a lot involved in that. There's the other right people.
They're gonna have the right processes, tech stack, frameworks. You gotta think in the right way. So I think they come with an idea, but rarely is it buttoned up or fully fleshed out and I think that's- Yeah, this to me, what I often hear from people earlier in their career, whether internally or externally, is they have a sense that the status quo or the current state, who they are today isn't working. They have, they've heard where they need to go by some executive and they know what they're doing today is not gonna get them there.
And what happens though, in the disconnect, I think you're highlighting is it ends there. Like that's the complaint. Like nobody's stepping forward and saying, how do I get from point A to point B? And so you do this every day and you learn how to do it.
You've learned how to do that with the prospects. Like how do you advise somebody earlier in their career to figure that out? Yeah, I think it's one just getting vulnerable with those around you. Most organizations are pretty filled with smart people who have been there, done that, right?
And there's lots of moments as you know, and I don't know entirely what is going on or why we're producing this result, what do I do? I don't run to a sales person. I run to you, right? Or maybe trusted mentors and pavilions like that.
So I think that's the first thing, when you're early in your career, like be okay, I would say I'm still very early in my career. Like just be okay, like not knowing stuff. And put yourself in an environment where there are people that know stuff, a lot of stuff. That's what I love about what's fine, right?
It's like everybody here knows a lot more than me about things. So like lean on that. People are a lot more willing to help you. I think a lot of times than you're willing to admit.
A lot of times you're kind of nervous. Like, oh, I don't want to ask for help and be seen as not smart or should I know this as a part of my job function. So they hide and they just kind of fade away. They don't produce the results and then they have this very average career, whatever it is, like step out and be bold and say, hey, I'm great at these things.
I suck at these things. Who can help? I've never found a in my career, in my short career. And I'm going to post this question back to you.
Like I don't think I've read a situation where I was made to feel dumb for not knowing something or I was always numerous people stepped in and are like, I can help you with that. So I think that's, you know, it also helps with the other piece of effecting change in your organization, which is deepening the relationships, expanding the relationships around you. And I think, so there's a lot of symptoms that are happening here that we never really resolved because we're afraid to step out, especially a lot of early career folks to try to figure stuff out on their own. I remember when I was coaching a whole bunch of new sellers at HubSpot and they were like, Carl, how'd you have such a seller?
Like first year at HubSpot, I wanted a word called the Rising Star Award, which is essentially like a rookie of the year award. And they were like, how did you do that? You know, and that was like the magic question for all the ramping reps was how do I be like the rising star? How do I like overachieve?
How do I crush my ramp goals? And I always, like one of the points that I would make was be annoying, like ask questions to everyone. Like never stop asking questions. The reps that I found that succeeded, like me, were super annoying all the time in Slack.
Hey, can I meet with you, meeting with top performers, meeting with average performers, networking in other parts of the business to try to fully understand what's going on here. And then the reps that struggled, never heard from them. You never saw them in Slack asking questions. You never saw them stepping out.
They stayed quiet on Zoom calls or training calls with enablement. They're always afraid to ask quite. You never heard from them. And then eventually they weren't on the waterfall anymore.
And you go to their LinkedIn and they went and took some other role, right? And I'm just like, man, if you would have stepped up, you know, you would have been able to stand out in some way. So I don't want to ramble about this, but I think it's important not just for new sellers, but for anyone that's either early in their career or early in a role, like be that gong that is asking. So tell me, Cassie, like in your career, obviously, you know, longer than mine and much more successful than mine, plus far, what, I mean, how was it that you kind of were able to network within your organization's effect change, get the help you needed to become the leader that you are today?
Yeah, I mean, the tech, I'd agree with what you said. I mean, I think the key to a successful career is knowing what you don't know and being comfortable with it. I would say, maybe where you and I differ is, I feel like you're an extroverted person and you love going off and talking to people and I'm not. So like, how do you overcome this?
I know what I don't know and I need to figure out from those around me, like you said, those smarter than me and I'm more experienced. How do I learn from them? And the trick that I've done in my head is I just get curious. So if I don't know anything, I try to mentally say to myself, I'm just curious about what Carl knows and I want to go ask him a bunch of questions.
I'm curious about how this thing works in our company. I mean, you'll ask. So I don't know if that's a hack or what, but as an introverted person, when I'm even still today and a room full of people, I really have to turn the knob up to be like, I'm curious to hear what somebody else has to say and it helps me kind of get over the hump of, you know, kind of the inability to get out of my shell and seek education and understanding from others. But I absolutely agree with you.
It's like you're reframing. Exactly. Yeah, you're reframing it in your mind of what you're doing for me. I don't need the reframe.
I'm just like, go slack people. But you, you're like, go slack people. No, I'm not comfortable with that. Let me reframe this in my mind.
You know what? I'm just interested in curious. So that's what you're doing. Binsing or selling yourself on something different that's really, the outcome is the same.
Exactly. So I think it's important to understand no matter who you are and your personality, what is the mechanism you need to go through or the mindset you need to have in order to kind of seek out knowledge from others. And I think what we've uncovered here is there's two ways to do it between you and I and there's many others that depending who you are, but I think the key to your success is the ability to do that. Yeah.
Somehow. 100%. Yeah, I think that's been a huge key to my success. It's been soak it all up, learn everything.
And when you have everyone's different perspective, I've found it informs a lot of the things that you're thinking of and then they like, you discover new things, right? Because you think of it as like data or maybe mining or something, I don't know what a good analogy would be here, but it opens up the room for discovering of making new discoveries in your strategy, which I'm always seeking to do, you know? And I know like Chris is like, we have a culture of fine of discovery. Like what's new that we haven't thought about?
Is there a different way to think about this? And when you're only getting the inputs from your own brain and you're only thinking of things and what you think of things and you don't get new data from other channels, other peers, whatever it is, whether you're a big reader, a podcast, it like you really choke the opportunity to make those new discoveries and that's gonna harm you, you know? And that's enough fun, it's so fun to make discoveries, you know? So I think there's something there as well that's pretty powerful, you know?
It's something I look for and look to try to do, you know? Let me pivot this a little bit. So we have, you know, understanding the current state and who you are. There's kind of where the company wants to go.
There's your discovery process to figure out how we do that. But I've never seen change happen without somebody putting their ass on the line. Yeah. And so you now have the information.
How do you go about building the courage and kind of the point of view that you need to have to enforce the change and putting it out there? Yeah, good question. I think there's different degrees of the person, right? Sometimes they come in and they're already ready to put their neck out there and sometimes they're not.
And so I think that when you are, when you've got a buyer or someone that is not open yet to putting their neck out there, I think it's making it personal is a really, I think it's the road that I try to take, right? I'm like, especially at Refine Labs. Refine Labs is really interesting because like, if we are successful with you on your marketing team or your sales team or whoever we're working with, this is gonna change your trajectory of your career. This isn't just like, oh, more demand, you're gonna get morning bounds, it'll be so great.
And you'll go to President's Club or whatever. It's like, no, you're gonna be able to own this, own this success. I mean, so the trust that you're gonna build, if you can accomplish the goals that we're doing, because we're sticking our neck out there as well, right? We make promises and pipeline promises to our customers.
So it's, there's a combination there. And then I think creates a comfort and trust with the buyer. But at the end of the day, if we win, the stakes are pretty high. Now, on the other side, if we lose, the stakes are high there as well.
And so anyways, to answer your question, I think that the reframe there happens to get people, you know, kind of into this empowered state of courage where I wanna go pitch this and stick my neck out there. So this one is bringing clarity to what it is that we're doing, how we're gonna get there, which goes back to the first two points we made, understanding who we are and who we need to become to achieve the goals that we want to achieve. And then the next is, what does this mean for me personally? And then I'll tell you, if you can drive 100, 150% uplift and marketing source qualified pipeline in a couple of quarters, reduce sales cycles, increase ACVs, things like that, that's gonna change your career.
And it's gonna change the way your peers perceive you. It's gonna be very compelling catalyst for wherever you're trying to take your career, your company. So connecting those dots is really important. Making it about them is, it's not about their fine labs anymore, their company, whether it's a communism or a mural or whoever, it's like, this is about me as a marketer.
And really leveling with them on that level, it's very kind, it's a powerful moment. How as an individual do you get, how as an individual do you deal with the risk in that equation? So I like how you outline that. And I think it's easier to imagine what success looks like, but it's daunting when you think about what if it doesn't work and what's that mean to me.
So as an individual, which absolutely agree, you think about it, what it means to you individually or the person you're talking to. How do you mentally manage that risk? And maybe put yourself in your own personal situation when you think about the times you've made a leap or a step in a new direction? How do you come to grips with the pros and the cons here?
Yeah, the risk can be large. And I'm very empathetic to this. I tell our sales team, we're not cheap. And so there is an enormous amount of risk that's involved, whether we believe it or not, we know that we'll crush it, but the customer at the end of the day is signing before they see results.
And so I think the first step is really being really on the sales side, being really empathetic to that, because it can be easy to dismiss that level of risk and push the sale forward and be more aggressive, et cetera. And I think there's space to step back and say, this is a really big decision, Cassidy. And I think where we can, there's two ways that we can minimize this risk in the mind of the buyer. And not just in their mind, the reality, right?
We're not trying to do a magic trick here and fake anything, right? But there's two things in my mind. And the first thing is being absolutely clear about how we're gonna get there. So like this makes sense, like this is logical.
This is not pie in the sky. And a combination of this first step is customer stories, right? Like we've done this before. Not only do we know how to get from it to be, we've done it before.
And here's how we did it. And being honest about where we maybe fell short and where we succeeded and where we unexpectedly succeeded and where we may be unexpectedly fell short and some things. That's the first piece, understanding clarity. The second piece is don't make this decision alone.
I tell my sales team this all the time. You don't like, you don't lose a loan. Same thing that advice I would give to buyers is do not try to do this alone. You don't want only your ink on this contract.
And that kind of goes into the part of the sale where it's like, are you any good at building this consensus and bringing change internally? The sale happens in internal conversations. Whether we like it or not, it happens apart from the sales person, which is an external conversation. This happens in board meetings.
It happens in QBRs. That's where the sale really happens. So enlisting your peers in this as well mitigates risk. And when you're trying to do this loan wolf and bring somebody like we're fine labs or even like a hub spot or a piece of tech all alone, lot of risk there.
Don't do that, you know? Enlist your peers and make it y'all's decision and not your decision, if that makes sense. So. Yeah, I love that makes complete sense.
So how do you do that? How do you influence your peers to get them on board? And what I've found in my career, especially early on, is you can get so sucked into like, this is what we need to do. It's so obvious.
Why doesn't everybody just get on board? And oftentimes you have way more context than they do. So how do you take a step back and do that? Yeah, I think buyers should be more understanding.
There's a lot more going on in a business than what's going on in a department. And a lot of initiatives like hiring refine labs or buying hub spot, it's not like this is not just affecting marketing. So I think the first thing is like, even though I'm trying to solve my problems here, this is going to cause ripples in other places. Let's surface the exciting ripples and float those to other departments, right?
So it may be like, hey, you know what? The sales team isn't going to be involved in this refined lives purchase, but they're going to be major beneficiaries of this. How can I go to Carl, the VP of sales over there and get him excited about what I'm working on? It's so powerful Cassidy, you know, in our sales processes here, when you see marketing and sales leadership come together in our sales process, super powerful because there's like cross functional trust being built, marketers are empowered because they're like, shoot, Carl, the VP of sales pass my back on this.
Like that's very empowering, you know? And vice versa. And then now when you take this up to the CEO or the CFO and they have two of their revenue leaders that are highly paid that they trust to make moves in an organization, collaborate it and excited about something, this process gets a lot easier. So float things, sell things to other departments, a mistake that I see buyers make is they try to, again, make these decisions in a little silo.
No, I don't want to loop in these people. It's because they don't know how to loop in others. It's not like, hey, can I get your feedback on this? It's more of like, hey, I want to share this with you because it might be exciting to you.
Like get them enrolled in the emotions of who you're trying to become. Like this is a company we're becoming. Can we get excited about this as a team and things get a lot smoother from there and change in influences achieved much more easily which goes back to our first point of de-risking this purchase or this initiative massively. So how have you seen it in kind of your own organizations when you're trying to sell something internally?
Is that your approach or do you take a different approach? It is definitely an approach I've taken. I think what's interesting is, what if you don't have those relationships? What do you do?
What if the relationships antagonistic? You hear this a lot between marketing and sales. So I love the theory of being able to get the other person and excited. But what if the making of that relationship don't even exist?
How do you go about doing it? Yeah, that's tough. I mean, that's something that I would say you, that's a very first point on this conversation was, do we fully understand who we are today? And I think that's a very important item to uncover probably before you involve a sales person.
Super happy you came inbound, I can help you with this. But that's, I think a part of that first step is understanding who are we today? Okay, we're not achieving the results in my specific vertical or department and on the marketing team, we're not producing results we need. Also alignment and cross-functional relationships are damaged, harmed, never been built, non-existent, great, et cetera.
That's a part of it. That harms us as an organization. So to your question, how do we handle that once we know that it's to be reality? I think it is probably not necessarily floating, hey, get excited about this, right?
Nobody gets excited if they don't like that other person or like there's animosity there. And so I think the approach I would take there is clarity and understanding. It'd be more of a, instead of, hey, Carl, come get excited about this, this is what we're working on, your thoughts, that's a great tactic or strategy. I think there's a positive established relationship.
If there's not, I think the strategy is, hey, I'm working on something. I wanted to potentially align with you and get your feedback and see if there's something that I can help you with or better understanding them and trying to give. Instead of taking like, hey, come see this and bring me your energy. Maybe it's more of, hey, I'm doing something.
I wanna make sure I'm thinking about your team and fully understanding what your goals are and see if this can help you too. If I don't have a great relationship with the VP marketing, I would be a lot more open, I think, to them coming to me and saying, hey, let me better understand you. And I think that could open up and produce fruit and a more positive relationship there at a foundational level. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I like that approach. I'm gonna give one other. And maybe we'll talk a little bit and talk, what not what you think of this. So we've walked through this framework.
It's, where are we today? Where do you wanna get to? Here's my vision and plan to get there. Where's the kind of way of outline.
How do I get others on board? You talked to a great way of getting your colleagues on board. You don't wanna be doing this yourself, absolutely. This needs to be a joint recommendation with the people who are tied into the outcome.
Another way to do this is to outline, what are the alternatives? And this is to me, it's the secret sauce that I've actually seen clench a lot of change programs. And really what you outline are three things. One is we do nothing what happens because there's an inherent risk in that plan that hasn't been verbalized or communicated clearly and you need to do that.
Then there's like your plan, option two. We go all in, we do X, Y, and Z. Here's what that could look like, pros and cons. And then the third could either be somewhere in between, call that a stepwise move to the future to your plan or it could be the person who's the antagonist plan and you put them on the spot.
And you bring that to the decision makers in charge. So. That's powerful. What's your reaction to that?
Is that bullshit? No, no, no, no, I think yours is, I think my approach was a little bit more relational and I think your approach is a little bit more tactical where you're just laying out what the scenarios are, right? My approach again, a little bit maybe more political. How do we win their hearts and you're more taking an approach of first like, hey, how do we win their minds?
How do we remove options to where there really is only a clear path? Because to say, hey, scenario one is we do nothing. That's really to say that's not an option, right? So it's like we're moving optionality here and kind of removing emotions.
So I definitely like your approach. I still think, here's my challenge to that though. I still think that there's a level of relationship there needed to, you know, why am I gonna list it like your plan, like we don't have a relationship, right? And why am I gonna spend time giving you my plan?
This is your problem to solve. So I still think that there's a level of enrollment necessary there to be able to come to, into the war room, into the, and we're at the war table, right? We've got the map of the territory that we wanna conquer. There's still a level of collaboration that has to happen there in order for us to align on, okay, what are our options here?
And, you know, as we are trying to accomplish whatever it is that we're trying to accomplish. So maybe we've settled on a hybrid here, but again, there's a relationship piece there. I think that's missing. You come to me and you're just like, hey, what's your plan?
Here's my plan or we do nothing. And we've got some animosity. I don't know. I think there may be still some hurdles there.
So what do you think? You've done it way more than me. So. Yeah, I definitely always start with the first move that you made and really what you're trying to do, you're trying to draw out in those conversations that can be difficult.
You need to put yourself in issues of empathy for the other person. What is this person? What are they trying to achieve? What do they want?
And what can I do to help them out? Even if that conversation's painful and they don't wanna open up to you. Yeah. But what you're trying to get to is that person or that team has to be able to articulate their vision and an alternative.
And ideally you do this behind closed doors. As you've talked about, like how do you come to share ground and move this thing forward together, which I agree is like the best way to do it. However, if you can't do that, you need to be able to create a situation where they have to have an alternative. And their alternative can't be, I'm just shitting on your idea, but I don't have an alternative.
And so, you know, plan B is like, how do you draw that out into the battlefield in order to have that conversation and kind of flush it out? So ideally you don't need to get that situation in front of a room full of senior leaders because the path that you took will work effectively. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree.
I wanted to ask you a question that I essentially just lost as you were talking there, but I wanted to ask you about like past experiences. I mean, when do you feel like this has gone south for you when you've tried to affect change internally and it hasn't worked out? I mean, I'd love to hear Cassidy, like if you have any war stories or situations where you tried to deploy Tacticade versus Tactic B and how did that work out? Yeah, the very clear when I failed, it's been the following scenario.
And that is paying it a clear current state, future state path to get there, likely had buy in at the senior level, let's call out the CEO or wherever you are in the company, you know your boss is boss or something. And then just started marching forward without getting everybody else on board. Like the idea that like just because somebody said we should do this at a senior level, like it is there, therefore anointed and everybody's gonna line up and participate and do their part and think you're a genius. And completely ship a bad multiple times when I've gone down that route.
And so what I think is important along that way is part of your plan to get there is like, great, we're philosophically aligned with the right folks. Now we need to go make sure I have buy in for all the people it's going to impact. And they actually may have feedback that makes the plan better. Yeah.
And every time I've kind of gone that route, I've got the buy in first and I went to senior leadership or got the philosophy bought in and then went and built consensus in terms of like prioritization execution, things go great. When I don't have that kind of top to bottom, inevitably I failed. So for me, like I'm an ideas guy, you know that. I'm like, I have a new idea.
There's a new Google Doc every day of like some grand thing that I want to accomplish in the organization. So how do you, what advice, and I think there's a lot of marketers that are like that because they come inbound and I talk to them, right? They're like boom big idea, we're gonna change the company. Here's the plan.
How do you temper? Like I guess what I'm asking is advice for those types of people that are like, I don't want to say type A, but are like just get excited, very emotionally invested in an idea and start to run with it before they've stepped back and maybe built a hypothesis and gotten feedback from, especially if the plan involves a bunch of other stakeholders. So for that type of persona, I guess you could say, what would your advice be to them in like, not swelching that energy, but managing it in a way that's gonna probably create a more successful outcome? So here's an idea.
I would decouple these two things. There is immense value in being an idea generator and you always want to be able to, in your own way, create ideas and have a backlog and foster those and talk to people and kind of get feedback. And that's kind of your idea generator. But then you also, you need to be able to think in the context of like what the company can do and absorb it any single time.
So you need to figure out which ideas in my backlog and my list deserve or require some type of experimentation or plan around that we can actually get executed as a company. And what I find often is the idea generators go from one idea to another. Like you'll be like, Cassie, how does it create an idea today? Boom, we should do that.
I get another one the next day, another one the next day. And all the ideas are great. But as a. They're telling people, they're telling people who are listening what our private slack it looks like.
It looks like. Just using you as a hypothetical. And I think it's important to be able to understand what is, which of these ideas can we execute and how we execute it. So it's kind of this notion of ideas are great, but execution makes a difference.
And so how, as an individual, you kind of recognize my value as an idea generator, but I also need to, I can't throw it over the wall and expect somebody else to figure it out. I need to be able to carry my idea through to execution and get mine along the way. And that requires you to pick and choose which of those ideas that you want to kind of put forth at the rate and speed that a company can absorb and every company is going to be different and how they can absorb and execute on ideas. Yeah.
So next question, I guess for like the idea generator. So we have this backlog now, right? And it sounds like you have kind of, I don't want to put you in a spot to articulate a framework or anything, but how would you go about thinking, about prioritization of these ideas? Do you have a framework?
Are you, are you, are there a couple of things? How would you organize them this list to start to think, right, I'm gonna prioritize these top three and then start to invest more time in talking with my peers, gathering more information, uncovering if this is something that realistically that the organization can execute on and absorb. A few ways that would come to mind to think about this list. One is you hit on it.
How do other people react in the organization to these ideas? Do people get excited about them? Do others kind of look at you like you're crazy, et cetera, et cetera. So that's kind of one way is to really kind of gut check your ideas based on the people you trust in their feedback.
Number two, what I look at this list, I would say, which ones can we experiment with and try? With very little cost. And cost can be not just outlay money, but resources and time. And I think this is, I actually see marketing teams fail at this quite often.
They want all or nothing. I have this idea, we have to go spend a ton of money and go do it. It's like a zero or one outcome versus. I wanna launch this ABM campaign, gotta go buy a platform now for it.
Exactly, I'm gonna run a six month campaign, I'm going all in versus great idea and vision. What is like a one thing I could do to like test this out in a very cheap experimental way? And so I think another way to think about your list of ideas which ones can I test easily? Which versus like some are, require more resources and time and effort to even test.
And so what are the ones that are easy kind of versus hard on a ranking like that? What this then allows a team to do, and every team should have this, is they should be thinking of the task and the activities they do in terms of like sand, pebbles and rocks. And I love this analogy, product teams use this. I didn't create it, but I love the idea of applying it to go to market function.
And that is, there are gonna be big rock things that we're going to do that require a lot of time, effort, money, product launch examples, maybe an event, et cetera. And then there's kind of the pebbles. Those are the things that are medium in size, but we're gonna do them. Maybe they're ongoing programs that you're running, kind of the always on.
And then there's the sand. And you really want the sand to be like, how do we maximize our experiments that we can run where they're cheap and easy to do? But they're going to become, the outcome of those experiments will lead to future pebbles and future rocks if you can think of like small, medium and large. And so that's how I would think about these ideas that kind of sit outside the day to day tactics.
Where are they going to insert into the framework of execution? Can they insert in a small way? Sand or do they have to come in as pebbles? Or do they have to come in as rock?
And when you think about that way, it kind of gives you an idea of how much work you need to do behind the scenes in terms of planning, consensus, sell in, so forth and so on. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's an awesome framework. I mean, to recap that, you have kind of a gut feel as like kind of a baseline, like, I talk to people, do they freak out, do they love it?
One additional bullet point I would add to that one that I found is awesome is like, when you, again, when you involve other people just to get their gut feel, they bring new ideas. And they help you develop the idea. And so it actually becomes a lot better, like tests, it kind of pressure tests the idea, and it actually improves it in my experience. So that's a separate topic.
But so you've got the gut feel, and then you've got like, yeah, finding cheap experiments, cheap experiments. What can I experiment quickly with little to no resources? And what does success look like? And then we can move from an experimentation phase into like an operationalizer scale phase, where maybe we're experimenting at the sand at the pebble level, and then hey, we've uncovered a stone here, a rock, and this is why we should move on this rock.
You have a lot better data there. And then your final criteria there was just larger categories of prioritization. When it comes to impact, right? I think of like throwing sand, not a lot of impact.
You throw it with stone. There's a lot more impact to the organization, both upside and downside, potentially. So yeah, I think that was a super powerful framework. I wanted to ask you, because I think it's related.
You talk a lot on LinkedIn about not, like you know how it's really popular sometimes for like marketing influencers to be like, find a new CEO that gets marketing. And I think, and then you kind of have like a more controversial take on it, where you're like, hey, more often than not, it's actually probably the other way around. And the marketer needs to figure out how to get the CEO. Like that's the directional misalignment that's more important than focusing on the inverse of that scenario.
And I feel like these topics sort of overlap. So I wanted to ask you, and I guess pivot towards maybe talking a little bit more about this idea of, as you're running experiments, how do you begin to figure out which ones in kind of your framework here, like how do I better understand the CEO? And people may be above me in the chain of commands so I can make sure that what it is that I'm working on is aligned with them. And not just aligned with them, but like I'm speaking their language.
I get a lot of my in sales conversations where marketers, one of the mistakes they make is they have these great ideas. They have great initiatives, they're tested, they've done all this great work, but when they go to pitch it or translate it, or they fail to translate it at all, right? And they don't speak CEO's language, they don't speak the CFO's language. That could be really frustrating moment when you're trying to push an initiative forward.
So do you see these topics as related at all? And maybe talk a little bit about how you see kind of those types of interpersonal relationships as we're driving change in an organization. Yeah, I think they're very related. And let me kind of, I'll try to think, I'll try to apply what we discussed in the context of talking to what's called the CEO.
Yeah. I do agree, I think most CEOs understand marketing at some level, but you gotta remember the CEO is talking to marketers, sales team, product teams, finance, legal, employees. And so they're not going to be the expert, they've hired you to be the expert. I think where marketers fall down is they just assume that the CEO understands marketing to the point of like, this is obvious, it kind of goes back to where if I make mistakes in the past, it's just assuming that my idea is obvious and everybody's on board.
The way I've been successful playing this out, I mean, it's taking our framework and I'll walk through it and putting on steroids. Current state, brutal honesty. You have to be, you can't leave any wiggle room. This is the situation we're in today to this is where we want to go.
These are objectives. We aren't going to get there. And you have to put your ass out there and be able to make that statement and back it up. If you leave any wiggle room, the CEO's gonna be like, all right, you'll figure it out, I'm gonna go on, 10 other fires to fight, I'm gonna go fight them.
It doesn't sound like there's a big issue or you know, just do marketing better and they leave. You can't leave that wiggle room. You need to be current state, future state, we're not gonna get there. The way we're doing it today, I have a plan, here's how we're gonna get there and it needs to be in detail.
As you've talked about already, you need to have a plan. Ideally you've had this plan bought in and you've sold it into the company at various levels. So the CEO goes to the head of sales and says if you're at this plan, they're like, yeah, I like it, let's go do it. But if not, it needs to be a strong vision of how you get from current state to future state.
You need to be able to sell it, just like you need to be able to drive change and influence your customers or your own marketing organization. You need to be able to do that at the CEO level in the language that person understands. It's no different. Just the states are higher.
In the position you need to take, oftentimes it's more strong. And then from there, what you need to do is we talked about, if you've tried to build a consensus, which I think is a great point you've made, and you need to lay out the options and those options need to be crystal clear. Do nothing, get say. Do what I recommend, get to be.
Do something in between or alternative C, get to D. You gotta be able to put that out there. So it can't be enough. You can't just sell vision.
You have to sell plan. You have to give options and you have to give consequences. And it needs to be very clearly communicated in a way that the CEO and the senior leadership understand. And when you do that effectively, what I find often is they make the right decision.
When you don't do that, well, they send you back to the drawing board, they don't listen. But kind of like a customer, like our biggest competitor, any company's biggest competitor is a status quo. It's not another vendor. Because you didn't make your case strong enough for them to change, so then they don't change.
And that's what happens oftentimes between marketers and CEOs. And so what do we hear on LinkedIn? The CEO doesn't get marketing. I call bullshit on that.
You didn't make your case strong enough for change. Bottom one. It's kind of like blaming the buyer for losing a deal. It's kind of what it's like, right?
You lose a deal and you're like, the buyer just didn't get it. You know, like, gotta find new buyers. You know, and it's just like, that's the wrong mentality to take. Sometimes you whatever you lose deals, but that's the wrong mentality to take because it's not like a self-reflective ownership, like an extreme ownership type of mindset where it's like, okay, there may be external factors here at play and maybe this is what's gonna fit.
But what did I contribute to this? What can I change? Right? It's like taking that self-reflective view.
And that's to your point, I call bullshit too, on the CEO doesn't get marketing. And I think the more negative trait or whatever, like underneath it all is, I'm not thinking enough about my role in responsibility. I'm not taking ownership over this outcome, the outcome being fail to bring change in this way. And I think that more often is the case than a CEO that doesn't get marketing.
Another thing that I think is interesting is like, the CEO is hired you to get marketing. So there should also be a level of like, where do we get to a point where we expected the CEO to get marketing, if that makes sense? You know, like how do we even get there? I wouldn't expect a CEO that maybe comes from like a product background, that's maybe a developer earlier in their career and that's how they became CEO.
I wouldn't expect them to get sales. I would expect that I have to educate, right? And say, hey, this is how sales works. This is what we're seeing.
These are the reports, qualitative, quantitative. And get them on the same page to make a decision. But anyways, I think it's fascinating too, that just that mindset that it sets you up for failure. And you're gonna do a lot of job hopping if you're trying to find this unicorn of a CEO who happens to get marketing.
You know? So. Yeah, absolutely. You know what?
You never hear? I never hear CFOs, CPOs, heads of engineering, heads of sales, heads of HR talent saying their CEO doesn't understand their function. Yeah. I think you said it perfectly.
It's your job to understand the function. Right. It'd be effective. Yeah.
Yeah, maybe there's one out of 20 CEOs out there that don't understand marketing, but oftentimes, even when I reflect back on my failures, I wasn't the CEO. It was my ineffectiveness in that relationship. And I think most marketers don't want to admit that. I mean, too.
That's how you get better. Yeah, 100%. That's the only way you're gonna get better at effect and change, you know, not only getting better as a marketer, but just honing this skill of, that's something I'm learning, right? It's like a new, a newly minted sales leader here.
It's there's a lot more going on than just being an individual contributor, which I think a lot of marketers see themselves as that. They're individual contributors, even, even like a VP of marketing, I think sometimes I get the vibe that they have this individual contributor mindset. They haven't transitioned into being a marketing leader. And that when you change your mind about what you're supposed to be doing, it's like it's not tactical and really anymore.
It's not button pushing. It's not being in ad platforms and watching, you know, frequency caps and all these little things. It's like, it's really is political. It's interpersonal.
It's understanding the business as a whole. It's developing your business acumen in a whole new way. What are questions that CFOs ask, the boards ask, things like that, that I need to get up to speed on. I think that's exciting.
I'll give one mental model for a new VP or CMO. And this will probably be another podcast episode. It's the understanding of who your first team is as a senior most leader of a function. Your first team, the team that you belong to first and foremost in an organization is the rest of the senior leadership team.
That's how you need to be thinking. That's good. Chris says this often, think like the CEO, everybody in the company can do that. But if you're the CMO and the VP, your first team is your peer group, not the marketing organization.
You just happen to be a senior leader running marketing. You're not a marketer, who's a senior leader. I think if you create that mindset, you'll see your business different, you'll see your relationships different and you'll be more successful as a senior marketer. Yeah.
Yeah, that's super powerful. I'm gonna write that down here. I mean, that's thinking through any leadership function. It's like, yeah, it's like, I still think of myself as honestly as a team and not necessarily as a part of a more senior leadership team across the organization where I'm actually aligned with my peer group being maybe director of marketing, director of customer success, director of services, whatever it is, director of growth.
So yeah, it's a really powerful shift. And I think that's a part of that transition away from what my function is on, like tactically, maybe even for customers or whatnot, but what is my function within how this organization grows holistically. So it's totally different mindset. Yeah, that was powerful.
Well, this has been fun Carl. All right, we should probably wrap it up, but I'd like to work. Let's do it. I'll leave you with the parting thought, anything that you'd like to say to kind of put a bow on what we talked about today.
Oh my gosh, that's a lot of pressure. We talked about like four different frameworks today. I think the parting thought is get help, like loop in others, you know, don't do this alone. It's the same thing I shared with new reps at HubSpot, same thing I share with reps today.
I share with other peers in my group. It's get help, find that community where you can build kind of that trust, reach out to people, ask questions. It's the only way to grow and learn your career. So yeah, that's my parting thought, find others.
I love that. That is good. Where do, yeah, I'll get one parting thought to. It's got to take away.
And that is, I think there's never been a better time to be a marketer, but your job within your first team, within your marketing organization, and you in the market is to always be driving change. This needs to be the mental model that you need to have, the mindset that you have when you get up every day. And so hopefully what we've been able to do is kind of outline a few ways for marketers and any other senior leader or individual company to figure out how to drive change and influence others. So, appreciate that.
This conversation, Carl, where's the best way to reach out? How do people engage with you? Get more of your words of wisdom. LinkedIn, I think you and I both will be probably breaking down a lot of this podcast on LinkedIn posts.
So definitely follow us there. And yeah, if there's any questions or anything, we're happy to reach out. If you're trying to drive change your organization with or without a partner like Refine Labs, we're happy to have a conversation with you and guide you on that. Yeah, LinkedIn, reach out.
That's perfect. All right, thanks Carl again. I really enjoyed the conversation for everyone else out there. This is a wrap, snacking growth podcast.
We're out.