Welcome back everyone to the latest episode of Stacking Groves. This is Cassidy. Carl, how you doing? Doing good Cassidy.
It's Friday. We got Kate, pumped, splash. Let's do it. I'm ready.
Let's do it. Okay. I'm at CMO, splash. How you doing Kate?
I'm great. I'm great. So happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. Thanks for joining us on Friday. It's usually just Carl and I talking nonsense. So it's good to have somebody here who's an expert.
Nobody listens to those episodes Kate. So hopefully you'll, you know, you'll boost our engagement right here to somebody that knows what they're talking about finally has decided to meet with me and Cassidy. So we're excited. I love it.
I'm here to add to the nonsense. So what I thought would be great to get into as a topic. We talked about this offline is just we as a marketing professional going through a little bit of adversity. We had the great times the last few years and those times are changing.
And I can't think of a better example of what you do in the industry that you're in. They kind of talk about how you go through this period of change, whether, you know, we all know it's being in a startup is challenging, being in a competitive marketing market is really challenging what you're in. And then obviously ebbs and flows of the COVID boom versus the COVID bus versus we don't really know what the future holds for, you know, a lot of what we do in kind of the BV text aspect. So that's what I'd love to do.
But maybe first start with just a little bit about yourself and splash and we kind of level set with the audience from there. Awesome. Well, I'll start with splash and then jump into me and maybe we can go from there. But so CMO splash, we're an event marketing platform that helps people host and market and measure event programs and do it in a scaled designed beautifully branded way.
So a key part of the a martech stack and splash, you know, helps event marketers basically be more self-sufficient, whether it's, you know, our no code design tools that help you amplify your brand or, you know, the integrations that help measure performance and really understand the power of the event channel or in funnel data into the single source of truth and your CRM. So that's our core value really helping get more revenue in the room at events and then helping you prove that the event channel is a powerful pipeline generator. And what I noticed in your background is you're in the event space a while back and we won't mention the name. And now you're back in the space as if I think you started maybe 14 months ago or 12 months ago that splash like, why did you come back and why splash?
Yeah, so I've been in SAS for a long time and I've been in events for a very long time. My first my first job out of college was with was with the US Gulf Association and I was helping put on the US Open, the Women's Open senior Open all these cool big sporting events. So I've had events in my career since the beginning. And I always think back like events are like a game day and I was like a college athlete and I felt like it was a great transition, a little soft landing into marketing, sports marketing events.
And so I felt very comfortable kind of in the events world and it felt like, you know, it was the time to perform. And so I started doing field marketing way back when for a now competitive splash and was there for about nine years and grew different aspects of the marketing department. So got a lot of experience across the board in marketing, but really scaling an organization from pre-revenue to IPO, which was an amazing journey and a hard journey and lots of lessons learned and really fell in love with events events was the core business and I was also the ICP. So doing over 1000 field marketing events globally every year.
So I have definitely been time tested around the event industry and it was just something that really piqued my interest events. Our event industry is so large that there are a lot of players, it's very competitive. But when you really start to dig into the opportunities within events, you know, everyone kind of has their corner of the room. So when I first learned about splash, I thought, I couldn't possibly go to a competitor, you know, but was really intrigued by the value proposition that splash was presenting and the opportunity to carve a different area out for events and start to shine a little bit of a light on the event marketing side of it.
And what we do as everyday events, not always the big conferences that a lot of our competitors focus on, but the everyday events that you're doing to accelerate pipeline and within internal events, the town halls, the teams scrums, all those events that really bind your organization together, especially in like a remote world, that's becoming so much more important for the enterprise to do that from an employee perspective and get that return on emotion, just as much as they need to do that with key stakeholders, prospects, customers, and get that, you know, that ROI. So that was that was intriguing to me and sort of why I circled back around a splash and met all the people and felt like it was a good spot for me to land. One of the things we describe events that somebody kind of on the periphery of the event space being in marketing is I never really think about the end all the internal meetings as events, but it's a really great way to think about that because by and large, that's where you spend a lot of your time organizationally and in a remote setting, like it's never been more important. So it's interesting, I never really kind of associated those two things.
So that's helpful for me. So what's it like? So you came back to splash, you know, Q1-ish of last year, like what's the last 12 months been like? It's been easy, right?
Like a walk in the park, you know, no big deal. Oh my gosh, change upon change. I mean, change has been the norm as it is anytime you take the helm of a leadership position and make the team your own and make the function your own. So I knew that change would be a part of it, but I wasn't expecting a market downturn and all the twists and turns of the past year that we can just summarize that way.
But it's, you know, I think an interesting time to be in events. Our industry itself has had such change through COVID just going, I think events used to be thought of as in-person, large flagship events, your annual trade shows, those sorts of things. And then you add in all these different modalities to connect and have an event that leads to so many other marketing opportunities from their hybrid events, obviously virtual events and the impact that they have. And then how do you factor that into your strategy and your marketing mix?
So obviously we're challenged by that as any other marketing organization is our customers are thinking about that and then, you know, the industry at large. So, but when I, since I've joined Splash, you know, really took a lot of last year to dig into who we are, what value we're bringing to events, you know, what's our corner of the room. And my first, you know, couple months was just discussion after discussion with customers and other event folks in the market because I was just getting back into, you know, being with event marketers after being in healthcare for a little bit. So, but just really understanding that voice of customer, the voice of market, what does that mean, you know, in relation to splash in the offering that we have?
And where can we really excel in helping enterprises accomplish what they need to accomplish with their in-person, you know, virtual and hybrid moments? Okay, question for you coming back into events after it sounds like a state of healthcare. What, like, what surprised you, I think, when talking to customers, what was new that happened, like, evolved in the event space or like with marketers needs? Was there anything that you uncovered in your customer research that was like, oh, wow, I didn't expect events, you know, throughout my my career, right, let's say last 10, 15 years to like go in this direction, was there anything that was surprising to you, I think, is a simple question that I'm trying to ask in your customer research?
Like, what did you learn that was interesting there that, again, surprised you potentially? Yeah, I think, you know, events have taken a long time to get to a measurement as, you know, what, what's managed gets measured? And I think we often think about event management as logistics, the menus and venues part of events. And so the progression or lack thereof, I think, for the average event marketer or just the marketing team that, you know, that runs events, their inability to easily measure their performance and the lag of the event channel as it compares to obviously digital advertising, you know, we really have a firm grasp of metrics there and performance there and are able to, you know, do that, that chess match all day long every day.
It's harder with events and it's still hard for a majority of folks that I spoke to in the market. We've done a ton of surveys and market research and it's, you know, still that struggle. So I think that, to me, was shocking just after being out of the mix for years is that this is still, you know, attendance being the end all be all KPI and as a metric of whether or not an event is successful. And the fact that the majority have not moved beyond attendance to the revenue in the room and all the ways that you can slice and dice the data and really understand the impact of your events.
I mean, of course, it's attendance, I fall into that trap all the time. I'm like, it's 700 people on this webinar isn't this amazing, but it's more than that. It's more than the attendance rate, even though that's a great, you know, early indicator, great vanity metric, you know, I still fall into the same traps, but it's been that was probably the biggest eye opener when I returned was that, you know, the struggles of that ROI piece were still there. And then the struggles of events in general that we still haven't necessarily mastered a really scalable way to do event logistics and to scale what works in events and that a lot of event marketers are really stuck in just trying to rinse and repeat and don't have that opportunity to do the strategic work that they all know that they need to do in order to scale the program.
And it just requires so much, and obviously technology is a really big factor of that and something that's actually trying to, you know, solve for and we are solving for with our customers, but it's interesting how the industry is still kind of stuck in some ways in that area. Yeah, that is interesting. I actually thought your answer would go the other way where you were surprised by maybe how quickly things had moved or how much they changed, but what I'm hearing you say is that you were surprised by how like still stuck in the past. A lot of the frameworks or the mental models for thinking of events and measurement around the success of events and even the tech in which the events were, you know, conducted was still kind of been lagging.
Yeah, that's awesome. I don't know if it's the right time to ask, Cassidy, but I wanted to hear more about maybe we'll get into this later, but okay, so it's not attendance. I mean, I feel like attendance is a big deal, right? So what is it?
What is splash? What do you believe that what what for any marketers listening? What how do you measure an event and its success and it may be at which times in the kind of an event life cycle? How do you think about that?
Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing. Events can take on so many different ROI components. You know, you could be having an event for brand awareness and in that in that case, attendance is really important to me. I want to know that I'm reaching far beyond my ICP that every event marketer in our community is listening in and the content is relevant and that they're getting more education and entertainment from that.
So that that can be a form of ROI when you think about the purpose of the event. But as you get into the flywheel, the funnel, the pipeline, whatever whatever you're calling it at your organization, the ROI changes. So from a customer perspective, we like to do customer events and get that engagement and get more of that kind of intimate setting. And so the the return on those events is different because we're really trying to connect and partner with our customer.
We also have events where we want event marketers to come be together. It's not a splash commercial or product demonstration. We're bringing in the community. We call the magic spark events and we want people to take away connections, ideas, you know, opportunities to grow their business and you know, it's a community build.
So a different set of obviously KPIs coming out of those events. And then, you know, of course, when we're thinking about events where we are trying to talk about splash or, you know, we want the revenue in the room, we want our ICP in the room, we want the, you know, the conditions to be right for sales conversations to happen. But we're doing events at all different, for all different purposes. So it's really important, I think, to take that into, you know, take that strategy and take those KPIs into your mind and make sure that you craft the event around around that purpose.
It feels like, Cassie, I'll let you go. I see you on you to keep interrupting you. But this is fascinating. I mean, just to hear you talking about your events framework is already different than how I would think of events.
And so I'm definitely like a knuckle-dragger when it comes to this type of stuff. I'm like, okay, you do a webinar, we invite people to sales conversations. And like, that's the point, like, did we get revenue or not or pipeline, maybe potentially or not? But you and the splash team are really trying to educate the market that actually you should have a system of different types of events that serve customers or your ICP for different reasons.
I mean, that sounds like, that's a ton of work, you know, and I think, I feel like most event teams are, I don't know, just don't think like that. Is that, is that true? Like, do you find that that's a big, like, you should have a brand awareness event, something like more bottom funnel types of events, maybe sort of events for customers to upsell or just awareness around new things or just education or, you know, entertainment, et cetera. Like, you've got some different categories there for events.
Is that, like, what is the process, I guess, of like, is that part of your process not to educate the market that you're just not thinking big enough around events in general? Definitely. I think, you know, we have customers that are very sophisticated and are running 800 events a month doing a lot of these, you know, strategies far better than we are because they really, you know, have honed their craft and have resourced it and have the performance. But, you know, that's how I think the modern event marketer is thinking and we certainly embody that at Slash and then also crowdsource from, you know, our incredible customers and being a part of the community.
Again, it's the benefit of being a marketer, marketing to marketers. It's gold. Everything that, you know, that our customers are doing, I can, you know, take a look and see how that I could apply that to my Slash team and also to the benefit of other customers, which is cool. One of the things that pick up on that is that when you started at Slash, you come in as having a background in the space and being the ICP.
How did you manage that in terms of regulating kind of the speed of what you would be moved? So for example, what I mean is there's probably a big tendency to be like, I know what I know what we need to do. I have all this experience. You're selling to me.
This is what we need to do as a company. Let's get going. Obviously, you don't want to do that as you step into a new role in a new company, you're building relationships and, you know, you know, your capabilities of your team yet and so forth and so on. So was that a struggle?
Like, how did you manage that? Maybe it wasn't a struggle for you. But how unconscious or unconscious was that when you started? Yeah, I think that was originally a draw because I was excited to, hopefully my healthcare friends don't listen to this podcast, but I was excited to not talk to the healthcare ICP anymore and get back to where I felt more comfortable.
So I think there was a purposeful, you know, move for me to be in this space again. And then, you know, in every situation, you're an end of one. And I've definitely been in that conversation where someone is the ICP and their opinion leads the way and that necessarily isn't the way everybody does things. I'm sure we all manage our inbox differently, you know, we're all looking at email and doing that.
But everyone's got their own way of working. So you can't just make kind of sweeping changes based on an end of one. But it did give me a leg up in the sense that I immediately started a voice of customer and voice of market program within our product marketing team. And I was able to do that myself in partnership with my team.
But I could also join them in one, you know, learning the business, meeting our customers, doing all that. And I have the language and the background, you know, to automatically have street cred and carry on those conversations. So that was easy from that standpoint. So it's like these are all the things that I want to know.
And this is what I'm going to talk to our customers about and other event marketers and event practitioners. So it was an easy kick off because my team at that point had not done a voice of customer exercise before. So it was a great, you know, immediate lift to our organization and what came out of it in terms of positioning, you know, a larger messaging map and, you know, a website redesign. So we did all of that before the end of the year.
I started last March and we were done by December, which was which was great to be able to. Humblebrag. It's a humble brag right there. That's impressive.
Speed. I mean, that is a violent pace for all that massive change. So kudos to you and the team for pulling that off. Yeah, the team pulling that off.
I would love to take all the credit, but violent speeds. Yeah, they would probably say the same. But yeah, it was, it was amazing being able to join an organization and then have a team that didn't just keep up but kept pace and set pace there and was game for it because it's a tough market and a challenging, challenging time. So team was key there.
So it's one of the things that Carl and I talked quite a bit about is if you go through this journey in your career, I often find is that you tend to kind of go back to the things that you love or passionate about. So for example, at this point, like you're going back to events, you went back to where like you're the ICP and you can have these conversations and do all the things that you know a marketer should do like starting a waste of customer program, like moving with violent speed, so forth and so on. Do you think that's just kind of a, is that kind of a general way people should think about the evolution of their career or is just something that kind of you stumbled into and Carl and I are talking nonsense or is this kind of, there's some merit here of like finding the thing that you do well kind of cross with the thing that you love to do if that makes sense. Yeah, I believe so.
I in sharing with others just like career guidance, I say, you know, whatever whatever role you take as a marketer, do you want to have dinner with your ICP? And if you don't, that should give you a hard pause, you know, because you're going to be having dinner with them, you're going to be breakfast, lunch and dinner with them most likely and have to know their inner workings. And I feel like if that doesn't, you know, fire you up in some way or, you know, get you to think in the way that you want to be thinking, then you should probably you know, find that ICP that really, that really, you know, you enjoy spending time with as a marketer, in particular. Yeah, that's critical.
I mean, you're validating a lot of the stuff I tell the Cassidy K. So I appreciate you. But I say, the sales folks that I mentor as well, like if you don't like, you can learn anything, and you can learn anything. But if you don't like enjoy talking about the problems that you're going to talk about and solving those and they don't, you don't pace your office like thinking about creative ways to solve problems.
Like that's why I like me personally, we never go into like cybersecurity, IT like, man, this stuff just makes me want to go to sleep, you know, like I just would not enjoy having dinner with, you know, executive like CISOs and etc. And so that's super valuable. People miss that. And they jump into something and are fired up and you just burn out, I think quickly, when you don't have like just some kind of intrinsic desire or passion for whatever it is that the subject, the subject matter that you're talking about all day long, where's you out if it's not like a, you know, a part of your passion.
So I resonate with that. See Cassidy, I say smart stuff sometimes. You do. But just for all of our cybersecurity listeners out there, they want to talk to us, I will take your inbound request.
Carl may ignore you not. Well, taking inbound for sure. I'm just not going to go sell for you anytime soon. So yes.
You do sometimes say smart stuff, Carl. I agree. I agree. I agree.
I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree.
I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree.
I agree. I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you.
I agree with you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Kate validated me.
So I'm good. Yeah. There's a lot of credibility to what you have to say. All right.
Let's pivot a little bit. You know, I'd say every tech market is competitive, but your market's really competitive. So I go and I looked this up on G2. There's like 103 companies listed in events management software space.
If you look at their little grid, there's like 40 companies on this grid. How do you how do you develop others ask a really broad question to get into this? How do you think about developing a marketing strategy when you're in this type of hyper competitive market? Yeah.
It's when I first joined, joined back with splash, I was just looking at our competitors. And it was like everyone is saying the exact same thing across the board. So your eyes, I'm sure as a buyer kind of glaze over of like, I don't know the difference between any of them. But I think again, that positioning exercise was really important to us and important to me in terms of our corner of the room and where we specialize and what we can really provide the enterprise within events.
So I think in these crowded markets, trying to find really articulating that differentiation is mission critical because otherwise you're just going to get lost in the shuffle and you're not really going to be targeting the right buyer and be able to compete in the brand awareness play because you're just going to get lost in the noise. So would you mind walking us through like, how did you go about doing that? So there's probably a level of, I mean, voice the customer probably was the start of this. What were kind of the steps you went through and did you get to a point where there's, here's what, who were for and here's what we're not for.
And then how did you have to figure that out and have that conversation internally? If you do. Yes. So first started with voice of the business.
Like, what does the, do the people on the ground at your organization? What do they think you do? Very insightful. Start there.
And you will also see where there's alignment, where there's misalignment. And that's talking with product, sales, of course, you know, leadership, marketing, but really kind of pulling key stakeholders across the business to get that voice of the business. Because I think that helps in going back to get the positioning and everybody aligned to really understand the misalignment or where the goal is, you know, product might be saying something really incredible that hasn't made its way to the mouths of the sales team. So started with voice of business.
Also a great way to just get yourself indoctrinated into the group and meet the right people who you need to connect with to build and grow the organization. Then I started with basically, it was about 30 customers who are part of the first phase of the voice of customer exercise. Pretty much listed out in priority a bunch of questions that I wanted to ask them that didn't relate to our product. It was, you know, very similar to jobs to be done challenges, what trends they're seeing, obviously in the events industry, we've had a lot going on with COVID with, you know, now three ways of delivering events to an audience.
So much change and event marketers are always the tip of the spear in so many ways, just given the nature of what we do. But starting speaking to customers, you refine your question list over time. We recorded all of them. So we're able to go back to them, share them within the organization, pull out pieces for sales enablement, pull out pieces for product.
When you're talking to customers in particular, they're going to lean into what your product does. So there's always going to be things that you want to escalate in different areas or, you know, handle, but recorded them. Then did a similar round with voice of market, you know, your ICP talking to non-product users, non-customers, and getting their take on the jobs to be done, the challenges, the trends, you know, their winning moments, if they had a magic wand, what would they do to really deeply understand who you are marketing to and cultivate that with real data and anecdotes. And then me and my product marketing team basically analyzed all of these conversations.
Automatically, we're noticing, you know, key themes that bubbled up the marketer, particularly event marketers have so many bottlenecks. They're, they need to rely on so many different, you know, technologies and then so many different pieces of the marketing team, marketing ops to get, you know, performance, design, you know, all these different, you know, sales leaders, the collaboration around events is so necessary, but so arduous in a lot of organizations. And so you realize where those people bottlenecks are, where those process bottlenecks are, technology, understanding how, you know, our platform can mitigate a lot of this and simplify the process and make collaboration easier and make the marketer self-sufficient so they can run their program and keep that channel coming. So that developed into one pillar of our core value, simplify the process.
And then, you know, we unearthed a lot of ways people were speaking about our tool was helping them in their brand presentation, their brand equity, their brand integrity. So that's where we really zer it in and said we're helping marketers amplify the brand, that became another pillar. And then the core of the conversations that people are sharing about the benefits of event marketing through our platform, you know, being able to measure, being able to grow their channel really pushing everything up to their leaders and saying this is working, let's do more of this and like every marketing leader, they're like, yes, let's do more of that, more more budget, more headcount, you know, more business coming through. And of course, as a marketer, we all want to, you know, have that winning channel and that winning bet.
So that's what we hear from customers. And then, you know, from the market, we would hear that this is also a pain point, they can't do this, they can't measure, they can't prove they're stuck in this, you know, hamster wheel. And so we were able to really articulate our value and understand, you know, the pains, the promises, the value that we were bringing, pull that into a, you know, positioning circulated that amongst first executive leadership, got a really big thumbs up as they saw the depth of data and the customer quotes and the market quotes validated that certainly with analysts, the foresters, gardeners, you know, all the, all the folks that are talking, you know, to the market at large, and then started to deploy that in a messaging document and, you know, push it out in all the ways that sales is speaking to prospects and then also making sure that, you know, our customer success team was doing, was doing the same. So we spent the last quarter really getting everybody to speak the same language that is on our website and ultimately, you know, the topics that we're talking about, top of funnel, how we're educating the market, how we're showing up for the event marketing community are also based on the challenges and the trends and the things that we heard in those conversations.
And I should, you know, you need to be, keep doing these things. Of course, so we've got, I try to do at least five a month, talk to the five customers in depth for an hour, you know, or folks in the market to just understand, you know, what's, what's top of mind, the event, the event industry, who's super fast, I mean, obviously the change from 2019, hopefully we don't have anything as explosive as a pandemic and all these different modalities to come around. We might have a little bit of a pause, but when you think about all the, you know, whether it's web three or AI, you know, marketing event marketing is the tip of the sphere. There's so many ways that we can, you know, ride these waves that are impacting, you know, markets and then also, you know, our functional area and event marketing.
That process is so good. How, how long did that take? Like, I mean, when from the standpoint of kind of all your, you're starting to talk about internally to the business and how everybody's a company perceives what you do, all the way to kind of rubber hitting the road in the market with like the pillars that you talked about, it'd be great to kind of get a little bit more detail because one of the things that Carl and I often see is the opposite of this, which is kind of like the most senior person in the room kind of says, here's our messaging, put on the website and the rest of the company is not aligned or behind it and they may or may not be what the market actually needs or wants or so forth and so on. So I love the structure of what you walked through.
It was at three months, four months, six months, like I know it's iterative, but kind of roll them. Yeah, it was, I would say we started in May and we had pillars by October at the end of September, early October, we shared the pillars with the executive team. How do you like roll it out? Where do you test somebody?
Okay, we've got these hypotheses that we're now validating through voice of business, voice of customer, voice of market, like we, these are our pillars. It still feels like really high level. Like where do you test like some of the output now of this messaging and positioning work where you test it first? It's like you need to give the sales team first to be like, hey, test this on sales calls.
You tested in like advertising. Copy. Where do you really start to validate that? Okay, what we heard now is impactful in these different channels and formats like a final product.
What's that? What's your process for now integrating, I guess, all that research into tangible actionable channels and copy and, you know, creative and decks, all that? Yeah, you can definitely add layers to this. And there's sometimes, you know, where I would have wanted to had more testing prior to like rolling it out on the website.
And of course, we're testing messages on website through email, through, you know, digital ads. And this is an iterative process too, particularly around like how the pillars translate to a message map and what that core messaging is. You know, I told my team upfront, I'm like, this is going to be the most dynamic document we have. And we're going to archive this every every quarter just to say this is where it's going.
Because the how the pillars translate to a message in the market, I mean, you know, just when you think about SBB, what I might have said in the market the week before is definitely not what I'm saying the week after, you know, so so you're constantly changing that. But we were really trying, you know, speed is so important in growth companies and obviously, you know, startups. So in Lut and there are a ton of tools that you can take that messaging, take it for a spin. We did a lot of internal buy-in, certainly with our customer success team and our sales team.
And I think the response from between, you know, the customer and prospect facing teams, team revenue, and our exec team was so strong that we felt like we could speed up, get this on the website. We all felt really confident that it was the corner of the room that we should be in. And we should start to dominate. So we accelerated the timeline.
But there are ways of, you know, pushing that out into the market. And you could pair that certainly with like a blinded survey and figure out kind of where it lands with the market related to your brand, not related to your brand, and do it kind of in that proper business format. But, you know, I guess I'm going to start to adopt the violent speed as a label of how I do things. We did violent speed and got it out there.
And now we're validating it along the way. And that, I mean, you know, K-Kudos to you. It's so difficult. I mean, I talked to a lot of marketers all the time every week.
And it's like really difficult. So let's pivot a tiny bit here, Cassidy, if you're down for it. Like you obviously have enormous amount of trust, and they brought you on to splash for this reason. But you have been given, it sounds like like whatever Kate says, we do.
I mean, the amount of transformation that you brought in a very short amount of time, like politically in your organization for marketers that maybe don't have the clout and like the political acumen that you have, like how do you keep everyone else on board to allow you to continue to move at like this violent pace and change things that are really impactful to the business. I mean, if any of one of these initiatives fails, like it will harm the business. These are major changes. How did you sell yourself and like these ideas internally?
How did you think about that? Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I think I have gained a lot of trust within the organization with transparency and communication from the beginning, shared that this is what I was going to do. This is how I was going to do it, making all the information, you know, available, bringing up as I'm having these conversations.
Hey, this is a really interesting thing that our customers said, or I'm seeing this sort of trend. You know, we have all these ways of communicating. So even just like a slack that like, hey, this is a cool trend that I'm noticing with our customers or the market is telling me that this is absolutely so painful. What do you think?
So it was, you know, it was a really collaborative process that I didn't necessarily just do on on my own. I did it, you know, with other I invited, you know, someone from product to like listen in. So I also got stakeholders from each of the different departments. So they felt like they had a stake in, you know, the questions that I was asking, they could they could say, hey, pause on, you know, on a interview and ask something or have have them follow on what we did with the information and how we democratize that throughout the organization, I think was really helpful.
And, you know, I think it really came down to just running a good project and being open. It was it was meant for all of us to succeed. And, you know, we have a very, you know, involved and passionate founder. And so speaking with him, you know, first and foremost around my marketing methodology, how I was going to kind of tackle this problem, not knowing not just saying, well, you know, field marketers are ICP and this is what this is what they want, this is what they do because I've done this for 20 years.
You know, that's that's not the way to go about a rapidly changing market and really dig in and do this right. So so that's where it started. And I would like to think that that was one of the keys to success. I think it also helps that I had run some of these programs before and how to track record that that backed it up, but also, you know, just the basic bringing everybody in and making sure everybody's on board with the plan and, you know, taking them along for the ride, I think went a long way.
Yeah, I think you nailed it there with that summary there at the end. I mean, you obviously have just an uncanny ability to like bring others along and make them help them to you're not making them feel like they are they are involved in the way that you think in the transformation, it's a collaborative effort as opposed to maybe a less experienced marketer or even I mean, this is for any business professional might come in and be like, I'm going to kind of lone wolf this right and I'm the one that's going to like bring this transformation is what I was hired to do a lot of eyes and knees and not a lot of, you know, like we us is right. So yeah, I mean, obviously I can hear that just in your story. And then I love that bit about transparency.
It's like, I'm Kate, this is what you're hiring me for. This is what I'm going to do, like, so don't hire me if this isn't like what you're looking for. So you really sold not only yourself, but like your vision and what you believe should be done and required the executive team to purchase all of that, right, in the hiring transaction here. So yeah, that's fascinating.
Yeah, because I mean, as a marketer, if you if you have a MQL mentality, then you know, you need to make sure that that aligns with the organization that you're joining. You know, if you're if you're an ABM marketer, you need to make sure that that aligns. I have my methodology that I think works and so that was a really important part of all of my discussions, especially with executive leadership and then going down layers and meeting other stakeholders and doers within the company and making sure that they're aligned with that philosophy too. What I like about this is it feels like this is marketing with a capital M.
This is kind of like what real marketers do. We do have a lot of folks in our community who get our challenge with wanting to do this, but then also getting the pressure of I need leads or any pipeline or any revenue. And I'd love to hear, you know, kind of speaking to that audience, like, how did you how do you manage that? I'm sure there's also this pressure you had, which is I love this approach.
Okay, it's a great strategy. Let's go do it. And oh, by the way, we need to also hit pipeline targets or revenue targets and so forth and so on. So, you know, what are you doing for me there as well as we kind of get this off the ground?
How do you how do you bounce out in the first year? Yeah, I, it's been hard. I mean, it's always we're always challenged with, you know, feeding feeding team revenue and making sure that we're providing the right support. To be honest, it's just something that my team felt like was important to put on their desk and make it a part of the way we evolve.
And that's been really the focus of this year is laying a marketing foundation. In some ways, one could view it as, you know, going going slow to go fast. But with all the with all the change and all the rearchitecting that I that I have done, you know, since joining splash, it was it was a part of how we were going to build this strong foundation so we can get the efficiency. So we can have the visibility into all of our programs.
You know, splash was doing really well when I when I joined running, you know, an MQL model. And so in some ways, we were, you know, well versed in in running that play. And so we kept a lot of the mass marketing mechanisms going while we thought through our strategy and then ultimately like our project plans to build splash marketing in a different way. So it required more of the team, bringing them into the process, the leaders that I had into the process, making sure they deeply understood, not just my vision, but our benefit and the vision that it needed to be for all of us to evolve from, you know, what to them felt like a hamster wheel that they wanted to get off of, you know, and also doing interviews with all of the team when I first joined, you know, that was similar to how I would do it with with the product and with voice a customer, I really sat down with my team and and parsed through their feedback to grab the themes and they they all wanted off this hamster wheel and needed that transition to happen.
So I think it's interesting to understand the challenges on the ground and be able to, you know, help resolve some some efficiency issues there to give people the little bit of extra space or re prioritize people to give more to this foundational work. It's so important and will allow for speed. I mean, now that we have a master messaging map and pillars and this, you know, strong positioning document to grow from, it makes, you know, creating campaigns, advertising, you know, sales enablement, every single thing that we do has been accelerated. You know, however, X, many acts by this work.
And so making sure that the team understands that they've got to forward invest a bit is really the only way to do it that I know of. I would love to say there's some silver bullet where you can, you know, pause what you're doing, but you know, the best must do more. And if you want to be the best, you got to figure out a way to get this core work done while doing the juggling acts, you know, on so marketing and sales can continue to thrive. Yeah, what's really interesting about this foundation is not only just the speed of which you can move across enablement and all the different things you mentioned, I also find it's a multiplier effect as well because in a competitive market, every touch point you want consistent.
And so if they're hearing the same thing from marketing as they hear in sales that you're delivering on the product and the customer success team, I mean, that's kind of how you, I think, create the leverage in terms of investment you're putting into this in order to position to differentiate your company. And it's, it makes sense to say this logically, it's just perhaps off because it's really difficult to do, I've found, and especially in a such a competitive market where the incentive structure is kind of short term in nature. Yeah, there's a lot of buy in that I think would need to occur to do this in the mid, you know, without coming in to a new role, it's easiest to do it that way. So I recommend if anyone's gearing up for a new position that they think through, you know, doing something like this, because it's, you know, strike while the iron's hot, much harder to do when you've been in an organization for a while, every, you know, your core team is kind of set in their ways.
But I do feel it's worth it when we look at how many touch points a B2B buyer goes through, independent of, you know, your prescribed buyer's journey, you know, what they see and what they ingest is so critical. It could be the first impression, you know, it could be, it could be the last touch before you, you know, you start a true buying conversation, you never know. So that consistency is more critical than it's ever been. I think marketers can use that to their advantage and unify that buyer's journey.
I think that's the future of where, you know, where we're going as marketers to think about, you know, that independent, that anonymous buyer, that fragmented buyer's journey. How do you bring that all together and make that, you know, so well branded, so cohesive, so clear, to really just simplify how that buyer learns about you and how they go through, you know, the process in evaluating, you know, your platform. And we think about that with events, because events are used in so many of those different touch points and talk about that a lot. So that's top of mind.
And I think, you know, we're definitely walking the walk to make sure that that's a really consistent journey, no matter where you started as a buyer. So you've had a great for here. What are you not satisfied with so far and kind of like looking to the rest of 2023? Like what's on your docket to be like, all right, we've done great.
We're not patting ourselves on the back. We have more work to do. These are the things we can do better. If you don't mind sharing.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, never finished, never finished. So what I'm looking forward to is, you know, really, really embracing that consistency that that buyer's journey thinking that through.
We have a tremendous amount of large enterprises as customers. How do we get better at our expansion motion? You know, how do we really embrace all of those opportunities within within a larger enterprise? So an account based mindset really starting with that and growing.
We still have some foundational work to do to be to be honest. I think there are a lot of ways my team has identified how we can really get the our marketing machine humming. We spent a greater part of the year getting the people in the right seats on the bus. I had a lot of amazing marketers that, you know, I just needed to kind of vet out skills and figure out their best purpose and marry that with their, you know, career aspirations.
And I think we're there. So I feel like this is the first year that we'll be able to take the marketing machine out for a spin and start tweaking and experimenting. We've done experiments, but not on a large scale. So diversifying our channels and trying to see how we can really meet the moment with marketers.
I mean, it's a really, it's a rough time for everybody. So we're still testing and iterating and figuring out how to give more to our community. It's also a great part of my role as that event marketing community. We have one as a part of a splash and it's a great place for me.
It's a great place for other event marketers to just, you know, come and understand what's working, what's not, and how we can help each other. So really leaning into community as well would be a goal of mine. And then I guess, finally, there's so much related to AI and machine learning. And we're starting to dabble more than dabble.
So I've got some fun stuff cooking on that burner, but maybe that's another podcast in the future. But I feel like that's a really fun new tool set for marketers. Yeah, we might have to bring you back on for that when Carl is a budding mid-journey. I'm a professional.
It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. And just I'm a prompt specialist, you know, right now when it comes to the mid-journey. So I think the team needs help with prompts.
That's all we do. We actually have a channel in a refined lives slack. It's like AI playground or something like that. And we just share all these stupid images and stuff that we generate on all these tools.
It's pretty fun. But yeah, let's do it. I mean, call number two would love to, or podcast number two, part two would love to unpack. Where are you experimenting?
What experiments you most excited about? And how are you weaving like AI and some of this cool new tech into a lot of those? So a lot of folks are trying to figure out what they're going to do next. But I think what's fascinating about your story, Kate, and just your leadership style is that you really hammer the basics.
Like the boring stuff, you're like, we're going to be mastered of like, of all this, like this foundational stuff. And it's just awesome. And I think a lot of marketers, any other business is just for marketing, it's for sales, anybody. Like the knee jerk reaction to jump to new stuff is so powerful.
But you are like, no, we're going to master the basics, lay the foundation. We're going to wait for it to dry, no cracks, make sure everyone's in the right spot on the bus. And it's just admirable. And I definitely take away from this conversation.
I know a lot of our audience will as well. So thank you for inspiring us. Awesome. So I'm happy to be here for the Friday nonsense anytime.
It's really fun. So thank you. Appreciate it, Kate. Anything else you want to kind of add?
I mean, there's many things I could continue asking you about your time. Anything else you want to say, party shots, like the future of events industry, marketing, anything? Yeah, I'm excited for the future. We've got, like I said, marketing event marketers are the tip of the sphere in so many ways and an incredible community.
And there's so much opportunity with events and, you know, where we take them, how we incorporate wellness, that's a passion project of mine that I'm working on, how do we make events healthier and kind of more in line with, you know, lifestyle that I think we all are embracing more post-COVID. So lots of opportunity with events and just happy to be happy to be back in the community and would love to connect with any fellow marketer and a jam on what's working. It's just a great time to be in marketing and always sharpening the sword. So that's awesome.
We'll make sure that the community listen to this podcast and it's how to find you in the show notes. Kate, appreciate the time. It's been an awesome conversation. I've learned a lot.
I definitely know Carl's learned a lot. So always, always learn from Kate. Thank you, Kate, for joining us. Yeah, thanks.
Have a good one. All right, thanks guys.