B2B Marketing Leadership: The higher you get in the organization, the more details you need to know (podcast episode #115)

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In this episode, Kruger discusses customer strategy. If you need help, try the CFO Builder app in MeclabsAI. It’s free to try, you don’t even have to register to get started (from MarketingSherpa’s parent organization, MeclabsAI).

Think branding and demand generation are separate functions? Jim Kruger, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Informatica, discusses why they shouldn’t be on this episode of How I Made It In Marketing.

Informatica is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. It reported total annual recurring revenue of $1.63 billion for 2023. And Kruger manages a team of 140 people.

Hear how combining branding and demand generation can boost your ROI. Tune in to the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

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Stories (with lessons) about what he made in marketing

Understand your customers' needs and build personalized strategies

Kruger refined Informatica’s cloud marketing strategy to bridge on-prem businesses’ unique challenges.

Most important thing is to understand your target customer. Most of the time, they are sold into the IT side of things, but it’s important to understand what they are struggling with and where they need the most help. From there, build use cases and really personalize your strategy. Creating a strong digital journey for prospects is often overlooked but critical. B2B customers make their way through 60% of the journey without a salesperson.

Making sure the team has the right content and messaging and presenting it in a consumable way is key to success. In addition, tandem alignment with sales and product is essential. Sales teams go after these kinds of opportunities and can promote the benefits of the software.

Combine your branding and demand generation

Marketing is about the integration of different tactics to build your go-to-market strategy and make sure it works in harmony. Rather than doing separate brand-building and demand gen, combine them into one and help them build off of each other. One of the things Kruger’s team has done internally is to develop an umbrella message for all content to align back to. This is the core message that helps drive consistency and is a simple way to articulate what they do.

This may take a few months to ideate but can be activated on a global scale.

Eliminate silos and cultivate trusting relationships

In Kruger’s career, he’s had the pleasure of working with people who went on to become successful CMOs. Like any good leader, Kruger loves to see people on his team succeed. Kruger genuinely enjoys cultivating people and providing career opportunities where he can. The key to setting your team members up for success is setting the stage for constant learning and being on the front end of what's happening within the organization.

While it’s good to always have top objectives and KPIs in mind, it’s important to give your team leeway and foster trust within the relationship so they can do their jobs without feeling like they’re under a microscope. In turn, they’ll be more vested and take more ownership in what they’re doing. He’s learned that as a CMO, you must surround yourself with smart people and exchange frameworks and thoughts with different functions such as sales, product and the whole ecosystem.

Be a good listener and get their ideas.

Lessons (with stories) from people he collaborated with

People want to feel part of a team and without empathy, that is very difficult to do

via Amit Walia – CEO, Informatica

Having empathy (the ability to understand and share the feelings of another) and caring about people is so important to retain talent and to motivate your teams. Being a good listener is a key part of having empathy. Getting to the core of understanding people, what motivates them and what irritates them, for example. People want to feel part of a team and without empathy, that is very difficult to do. For example, Walia fought for every employee to get options when the company went public.

Kruger started his career managing people from day one. His first job was managing a highly diverse team of eight people ranging in age from 18 to 56 years old. Over the years, Kruger has learned from good managers and bad managers that you have to think about the employee experience – and the journey is just as important as the result. Empathy plays a big role in this.

Being engaged with your team is important. Not always easy to do with global teams, but you have to find ways to connect across your teams and with key stakeholders. One-to-ones, one-to-few, one-to-many – communication plays a critical role here…written, in person, virtual…and having regular cadences.

Branding is much more than a campaign and it must be connected to your strategy and messaging hierarchy

via Kate Hutchinson, former CMO, Polycom

When Kruger worked for Hutchinson as the VP of Product Marketing, he really didn’t understand how branding worked. Hutchinson taught him some very critical elements about how to connect strategy to brand and how important messaging is. These are Hutchinson’s superpowers and Kruger would not be where he is today without Hutchinson’s guidance.

Kruger continues to use Hutchinson’s approach in his current CMO role at Informatica – messaging handbook guidelines such as consistency and longevity, being bold and aggressive, differentiated messaging, pulling key benefits out of the technical team so everyone can understand, etc. All of these things still make an impact on marketing strategies.

Test messaging and usability

via Joe Sipher, former manager at Palm

Kruger learned a tremendous amount from Sipher and the “Palm philosophy” about user experience while at Palm, which helped him shape his product marketing skills. Sipher taught him how to test messaging and how to build products with an amazing user experience. The Palm VII was the world’s first wireless-connected PDA.

Kruger was responsible for the wireless service and worked with BellSouth to enable the first over-the-air activation and he spec’d out and developed one of the first online billing systems and the concept of user testing and simplicity of UI, so there is no confusion about how to do something.

He remembers PalmPilot and Trio co-creator Jeff Hawkins would walk around with a block of wood as a rudimentary UX test – to try to determine what size it should be, and engage with co-workers on what it should do and how it should do it.

He still uses these concepts today, strategies such as modernization message testing, they just conducted at a customer summit in New York earlier this year.

The higher you get in the organization, the more details you need to know

via Peter Leav, former CEO, Polycom

Kruger has taken this to heart in every leadership position he has held since learning this from Leav. It’s counterintuitive for many, but as you move into leadership positions, the expectation of how much you know about the business and what your team is doing (without micro-managing) is critical to being successful. It is also critical to building credibility with the other executive staff leaders and the board. Kruger makes sure he knows the details of what is happening across the global team to help connect the dots on a daily basis. 

Another key takeaway from Leav is how important it is to be a “learner” – meaning, are you curious, are you in constant absorb mode, do you ask a lot of questions, do you not accept things at face value? Kruger always probes in interviews to see if the candidate is a learner. He sends out a CMO Friday Forward every Friday with something for his team to learn.

Kruger is constantly reading and listening to podcasts to make sure he’s up to speed on the latest marketing advancements. He started a group called the CMO Forward with three other Silicon Valley CMOs to help their teams learn from each other and it’s been a great learning experience.

Kruger also attends CMO roundtables, webinars and events to learn from others. The field of marketing is changing daily (AI as an example), so to be a high-performing CMO, you absolutely need to continue learning every day.

He also emphasizes to his team that transparency and honesty with each other is going to help us all perform better, concepts he revisited recently while reading the book ‘Radical Candor’ by Kim Scott.

Discussed in this episode

Empathy Marketing: 3 examples of empathetic marketing in action (with results)

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Transcript

Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.

Jim Kruger: After analyzing the data, we found that we was too fragmented because we were spending like 5% of the budget on this vertical, 5% of the budget on this vertical. And it wasn't enough, to, to drive, significant business. And we found that a lot of the verticals were coming in through the horizontal use cases. And so we went to the head of our, vertical sales, and basically brought data to the table and said, hey, like, inherently where this is what we're seeing, we're seeing a much better ROI, relative to people coming through these horizontal use cases.

We're going to kill all these vertical campaigns for 2024. And, you know, in most cases, you know, that you would see the vertical salesperson, like, like, are you crazy? You can't do that. We need these dedicated campaigns. But since we brought data to the table and showed her she's like, that makes sense.

Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing. From marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz. Real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the senior director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Bernstein, to tell you about today's guest.

Daniel Burstein: Marketing conventional wisdom is to keep branding and demand generation somewhat separate. Separating these functions allows each team to specialize and become experts in their respective areas. At least that's the conventional wisdom I've heard. To use a military analogy, branding is the air cover and demand. Gen is the infantry. But I read a lesson in a podcast guest application that challenges that conventional wisdom.

Combine your branding and demand generation. Whoa. Bold statement here to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories. Is Jim Kruger, Executive Vice President and chief marketing officer at Informatica. Thanks for joining us, Jim.

Jim Kruger: Thank you, Daniel. Great to be with you. And thanks for having me on the show.

Daniel Burstein: Absolutely. Well, let's let me tell the audience a bit who I'm talking. Let's look at your background before we dive in here. Jim's been a manager of marketing planning and analysis at GTE wireless. Early in an illustrious career. That he's been director of product management at palm, CMO and EVP at Polycom. And for the past three years, he's been at Informatica.

Informatica is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. It reported total annual recurring revenue of $1.63 billion for 2023. And Jim leads a team of 140 people there. So, Jim, give us a sense. What is your day like as EVP and CMO?

Jim Kruger: Yeah, that's one of the great things about marketing is, your days are filled with, different things every single day. And, so, you know, I typically, wake up in the morning, and, you know, get, get on email, check, check email and, and look at my day. And one of the things I do that, really helps me is I set alarms for all of my meetings, because sometimes you just get so caught up in working on things.

So I'm always kind of connecting with the team. So I have a lot of a lot of internal meetings. But I also like to, you know, make sure that I'm, aware of what's happening in the markets, across the marketing, you know, function. And so I do a lot of external things as well. In fact, just yesterday I was at Dreamforce, for example.

Spent the day there in San Francisco and, just, you know, collecting information and, and talking to different people, sort of understanding what's happening in the marketing landscape. So, you know, on a lot of zoom calls, like many people, and, just going into the office two days a week. So three days a week.

I work at home Monday, Wednesday, Friday, which is great because my commute is terrible. It takes, takes about an hour and 15 minutes in the morning and up to two hours in the afternoon to get home. So the two days a week and three days, at home is super productive for me because I can get my, you know, my great meetings, in face to face with the team.

We have about only about, 20% of the team in Redwood City, which is where our headquarters is. And the rest of the team is global. So, you know, sometimes I have early morning meetings with the email team and evening meetings with the APJ team. So sometimes the day extends out, but, I always try to find time at the end of the day to go play tennis.

That's my passion. And or get some exercise in and just make sure you kind of refresh and stay balanced, which is really important.

Daniel Burstein: Well, this would be a good time for me to say if anyone else has a brutal commute like that. You know, what makes it shorter is listening to the how I Made It marketing podcast. But I'm glad that we have to do that at a couple days a week. When you talk about that external, looking at the internal, you're also looking externally.

I think it ties well into one of the first lessons from one of the things you made. They mentioned before. I've never really been in any other profession, but I don't think others get to make things like we do and make things for customers sometimes. So you said one of your first lessons is understand your customer's needs and build personalized strategies.

So that sounds good in theory, Jim, but can you tell us the story of how you done that?

Jim Kruger: Yeah. Well, I think personalization is becoming much, much more important. And, it's not a it's not a new concept that, when I go back to my, days, back in GTE, wireless, when I was a marketing manager, we actually started, thinking about personalization and 1 to 1 at that point in time, in fact, we had, I remember, we had an all day session, with, peppers and Rogers, on, you know, 1 to 1 marketing and, you know, dating myself a little bit.

But that concept was new at that point. And it really it's continued to evolve, but in some, some cases hasn't, hasn't changed that much. And, so that definitely plays into sort of ABM and AB strategies, which are, you know, a core part of what we do. And Informatica, we target mainly as a large enterprise. And so we have certainly as a set of accounts.

We have our CRO 100, that we work with our sales team on, and and really try to build, you know, strategies to target, those specific accounts. And one of the specific things that we're sort of in, in process of doing is really shifting from focusing on, you know, a marketing qualified lead into more of a surround account, perspective.

We, you know, and looking at some of the statistics and sales force and working again very closely with our sales team. You know, we find that if if you don't have at least 20 contacts, within an account, you know, ranging from, you know, the technical side all the way up to, you know, the chief data officer or the CIO.

Your likelihood of closing that deal goes way down. And and when we do engage at that level, we see our average selling prices almost double. Because it's a much more strategic sell. And, we have a kind of a full platform with, with with seven different categories in it. Kind of an end to end for data management.

And when we sell in at the lower end of the spectrum, we, we see, you know, sort of a, a satisfying sort of one you use case. And it's not a very strategic sell. So we're trying to really, work with our sales team and uplevel, and that's in process. And we're actually right in the middle of our 25 planning.

And that's a key initiative, for us, to, to really build on. So we're, we're building strategies around, around that, for sure. But we know that, and this is, an old adage that, you know, you know, when, when, when a prospect is searching for a solution, you know, they conduct at least 60% of that search and get that far down the line from a digital perspective.

And so we've, we've put a lot of focus on really improving our digital, journey, for customers in terms of, you know, from our website. We have a content council that we, that meets on a weekly basis. We do assessment of which content's working, which content's not working. And, and really build that content out from a journey perspective per campaign.

And that that has really helped us significantly. And I'm a big believer in, and not going after volume of content, but really being focused. And when I joined Informatica three years ago, and I assess the content, sort of, player that they had about 60% of the content that they had created was not activated, was, you know, at the bottom of the the list relative to effectiveness.

And so we, we, we really honed in and sort of did an audit and cleared all that out. And I think we did, for the most part, cut our content production by about 50%. But we increased our effectiveness, by like 25 or 30%. And, and so that, that framework that we put into play, from a content perspective is working extremely well.

And, and that's, you know, again by persona, so we sell it, you know, from a technical perspective and then from an executive perspective, and we kind of do that bifurcation. And that's, that's definitely helped us. And then we built community around each one of those, and that's, that's been super successful for us as well.

Daniel Burstein: Well, can you maybe give us an example of how you build a quality piece of content? Because here, I mean, it's just I'm singing just just here. And you say that's a man after my own heart because the thing I've seen in being in this industry for so long is it just this movement towards quantity. And AI is not helping with that.

Right? Let's just throw up as much dreck as we can and we'll get some leads in. But I mean, we need to take specific steps to actually give quality, because ultimately what we're trying to do is build some trust with someone, get them to raise a hand. The one thing I don't know if you've noticed as much that I did with this podcast, because more Jim Jim is, you know, works at a big company dealing with his PR reps, more so people know on the back end.

But one thing I did when, doing this podcast is I specifically don't use a calendly link to book people. And the reason I don't do that, even though it's easier, it just feels like there's more of a human touch. And this isn't one of those podcasts where we're just churning out like 20 episodes a week. We're just doing that together.

So that's one small thing I did. But I wonder if you, Jim, like what? What does it what does it take to produce quality content? Is it hiring freelance reporters for B2B publications to actually write the content? You mentioned a content council, which I assume is your customers. I mean, what else do you do to actually make that quality?

Jim Kruger: Yeah. Well, the well, the council is is our internal teams. It's cross-functional. And so, again, one of the things that I was finding was that content was being created, but there was no activation plan. So we have a very, a very simple sort of one page form that anybody who wants to create content across the marketing team, for whatever reason, for, for a campaign or the website or whatever it might be.

They have to to fill out this one pager and they come to the council and they propose it. So the entire marketing team has visibility into any piece of content that's being created. And if it's a campaign manager that's creating it, they need to talk to the web team prior to coming to the council and making sure that, you know, they've mapped out how this piece of content is going to be activated.

So I think the first thing and first and most important thing is, is, is again, really understanding your audience. And who is that piece of content targeted to, and making sure that, you know, you're in lockstep with sales, who's in front of customers a lot, but also talking to customers directly and really understanding what is their journey, what are their needs?

And, and what type of information do they need to make a decision? And of course, at the top of the funnel, you know, and we we try to really simplify it by that journey in terms of, you know, how do we attract people, how do we engage with them, and then how do we move into the close and kind of organize our content simply, from that perspective and, and so at the top of the funnel, it's really helping customers to, you know, for them to map out their strategy to understand what direction they should take.

And, and not getting into the, you know, Informatica is great. At that point, it's really just helping them to sort of move down the path. And then as we engage with them, then we can start to serve up more, more, information around our solution and help how it helps them solve specific problems.

And we're really shifting, like many Silicon Valley companies, shifting from, you know, the, the, the product push and the features and capabilities, which, you know, the sales team is, has been used to, to more of a business value framework. And, and really focusing on use cases, and, and in fact, just, just yesterday I met with the team and we're trying to line those use cases up from product to marketing out to sales.

Not not an easy thing to do, but making sure that we we're all using the same language and all focused on the same use cases. So that from campaign, all the way down to the sales team and where the rubber hits the road, there's consistency and that, that will help us tremendously to, to just focus, and make sure that we're focused on the biggest use cases because, there could be literally probably 50 use cases that we can we could do, but we've honed it down to about 12 to 14, big ones that lead to discussions around product.

So it's just flipping, things so that we're not leading with product. We're leading with use cases. Which leads to here's how we solve that specific problem. So, and when we look at, content, one of the I would say more important things is what is the title of the content as well? So I think people are really interested in best practices.

What are other companies doing? And really, again, creating content that's going to resonate with your audience to help them solve their problems is what it's all about.

Daniel Burstein: And it's also the one thing about being a marketer, like, yes, it's nice to meet financial goals. Of course, we need to do that to get the paycheck. But actually thinking like, hey, the more I'm doing this, helping someone like you said, they're on a journey. Let's help them get down that journey and make the best decision for themselves.

And if it's our product, well, then let's help them make that decision, too. You mentioned something. You mentioned something. You're speaking the same language. And I think that ties into our next lesson here. Combine your branding and demand generation. And when I hear that, combine your branding and demand generation in a way it sounds obvious, but also I just never seen this kind of work smoothly sometimes because to me, branding, it was like the popular kids in high school ignoring me.

That's what branding is. And demand Gen is like. I don't know the chess club or academic team and and to be clear, I was on the academic team and not picking on them, but it just seems so culturally. And gold leaf that's a word different. So how did you get this idea and how did you actually make it work?

Jim Kruger: Yeah, yeah. So, when I, when I first joined Informatica, we, we had a sort of standalone, siloed brand campaign, and we had, when I joined, we had just gone public, a few months before, and the company had invested a significant amount into that branding campaign. But when I assessed it, it wasn't it wasn't connected.

It wasn't the same look and feel. It was sort of a separate silo thing that you could tell a different group within the company. The branding team had put together a branding campaign, and they hadn't, you know, thought about how can how can we build the synergies with other things that are going on across the marketing team?

And so when I, when I talk about, brand Jen, it's it's actually making sure that, that those teams are talking together, that there's a consistent look and feel, and, and that they're, they're building off of each other because I do marketing this as building blocks. And it's a system of all the different elements, things that you're doing that come together in an integrated way, to, to target your audience.

And they may see something on your website. They see it in a campaign. They see it in an email, they see the social post. All of that has to be consistent and same look and feel. And so when again, when I talk about brand again, it just means that you're, you're taking a look at that holistically.

And how does the message build off of each other? And one of the things that we did, shortly thereafter after I joined, and I'm a big believer in this, is that we, we created what I call an umbrella message. It's not it's not a tagline that gets attached to the brand, but it's more of an umbrella message.

And I did this at at Polycom, and, and then did it at, at Informatic and a Polycom. It was, just a simple statement in terms of, of, what you do as a company. And it's got to be very simple language. And so that statement was fi distance. So we created collaboration tools to help you define distance.

And so we, we basically built a whole campaign around that. And, and that was our, a message that was integrated across everything that we did. So anytime anybody saw anything from Polycom, they, they saw whatever the key message was. But it was all about helping you to define distance. And for Informatica, we created an umbrella message, where data and AI come to life.

And so we help companies bring your data and AI to life. And that ultimately helps you to have one, one source of, data, one source of truth within your organization. You don't get sales and marketing showing up. And so, you know, with different data, it's it's all the same. So you stop all of those arguments, we help customers to make better decisions.

Right? So based on, the data that they have, it's, it's governed, it's in compliance. And we, we really focus on how do we how do we democratize data across an organization and give people access to the right type of data? So that's what we mean by when we bring data to life. And, and then all of our customer stories, and success stories, you know, basically are the proof points in terms of how do we help customers bring their data to life.

And so that's a moniker that we use if you go to our website, if you look at our campaigns, if you look anywhere, that's sort of the common thread that goes through everything. And that helps to, create, this consistency across demand gen and brand, that where they build off of each other.

Daniel Burstein: Well, then give us an idea of process wise how this would work because you mentioned the umbrella message. I like that some companies don't formalize a value proposition and make sure everyone in the company and every vendor has it. You know, some companies that you mentioned when it came to content, you had a specific process of how that's requested.

So is there anything process wise. And so again like this sounds good in theory. Let's let's get on the same page as speaking a single language. Was writing process wise you had to do to get this to work, to get everyone, you know using that umbrella message and then working together between all these different departments.

Jim Kruger: Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great question. So yeah, it and it really, has to be driven by by the overall company versus this is a marketing initiative. So, we started and we worked with an agency to help us come up with concepts. We, did a significant number of actually focus groups, and did some informal discussions with customers, and got some feedback specifically from them.

And we got sort of, you know, down the path and narrowed down to, about 3 to 5 different, different messages. And that's when we brought our CEO in, we brought our CPO in, head of sales, and got sort of all the key go to market functional groups, along with our CEO together, and had some discussion and got alignment.

Not easy to do because everyone has their own opinion, but got alignment across that and got buy in that this is the direction that we want to go. And then, I actually launched that in my keynote at our sales kickoff, that year and, and built assets around it, and so forth and so on.

So, and, and laid it out to the sales team and, and we knew, you know, it was, it was gonna, it was going to work because we did a lot of testing. We did a lot of bouncing off. So it wasn't like, oh gosh, I hope this works. We had done our homework prior to that. With, you know, one of the difficult things is to find something that works globally that will translate, well, and and so again, that the simplification of it, the words that you use is really important, for that.

And so that whole process, you know, a ton of work went into it. It's like a simple statement, but a ton of work went into it to make sure that when we launched it, we knew that it was going to get traction, and we knew that the sales team was going to like it because we tested it with many of them, and, and, you know, and, and tested it with customers as well.

And, it's, it's been wildly successful. So I'm super, super happy and pleased. And now it's like we need to continue to beat that drum, and, and proliferated across the market. And we might get tired of it. But, you know, as we all know in marketing, it takes 10 to 15, 20 times for people to see something before it starts to sink in.

So, we're far from that. And I view it as a, you know, probably, you know, up to a 2 to 3 year initiative, that, we'll continue to, to support and, and build on.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. You talk about that kind of working across the organization there, sales you mentioned, I think that ties in to Nexus and eliminate silos and cultivate trusting relationships. And we always talk about this, eliminate silos. But this the analogy I love to use to say how hard it is to do because Silicon Valley's been talking about this for a long time.

You mentioned your headquarters is in Redwood City, so there's also an other headquarters in Redwood City of Oracle. And if you've ever seen the Oracle headquarters, they are literally silos. That is a little bit, but the headquarters is I think that's a nice reminder that 20 years ago when I was, you know, work with companies out there, they're talking about this, we're still talking about this.

It's hard to do. They literally made that their silos. So how have you how have you broken down those silos. How are you how are you doing that.

Jim Kruger: Yeah, I think there's, there's there's different levels. And for me as CMO, it is absolutely critical that I build relationships, across, the executive team, and, and, and first and foremost, drive that, at a level where there is a significant amount of trust, and, and relationships across there, but it's also delivering and performing, because while you can build relationships and build trust, if you don't deliver and perform, it's only going to go so far.

So those go hand in hand, and are really important. So, you know, we have to make sure, that you're, you have strong alignment across, you know, the key functions and, and, and with the CEO, of course. So, so when I joined Informatica, that was one of my, you know, first things that, I wanted to do was build those relationships because I knew that I was going to be working closely across all those executives.

And that sets the tone, for the rest of the team. And, and so when I joined, there there were definitely silos. It was, it was, it was quite challenging because, the team had been managed by sales for a year, which I think can be challenging depending on who that sales leader is, because marketing can turn into sort of a tactical organization, under that in some cases, not all.

And then, actually our CEO, who admits that he is not a, a classical marketer, led the team for a year. So as two years of of, I would say, you know, sort of siloed, performance and, and, and the way that they went to market. So I had to break down a lot of barriers, and, not only across the company, but also within my own team, and set the example of how do you how do you collaborate?

And so, I'm a big believer in being open book, and, and building trust, and and having a high level of integrity right across, across those teams. Because if you don't, if you don't do that as a CMO, and, and people don't, you know, don't trust you and, or, they, they, you know, they don't believe that you're on the right track, with helping sales or, you know, working with the product team to bring new products to market.

And in line with the CEO, you're going to you're going to be in trouble here. You're probably not going to be very successful. So, over my career that that has been, you know, and and in some cases there's, there's people that are more difficult to work with than others. But you got to figure it out. And, and I think that's one of the things that and not to toot my own horn, but I think is, is one of the things that I do fairly well is to figure out how to work with all walks of life.

And it might be difficult, but you gotta figure it out because it's not changing. And, and so we have, you know, taking those barriers down. And I have great working relationships across all of our executive team, and, and, definitely high level of trust, and within my own team, in fact, we we just had a board meeting, a few weeks back, and the board commented on, you know, how how much the marketing team is transformed, in that, you know, we have integrated programs and the team is like, working together in the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

Versus when I first joined and I talked about that branding campaign that was sort of this separate silo thing, where we're just not doing those types of things. Everything that we're doing is fully integrated across the team, and that, you know, required also some change out of personnel and, and so forth to, to, to, you know, which is always difficult to do.

But but I'm like, I love building teams, and, and making sure everybody is in the same boat together, have the same objectives. That that's a key thing. And one of our, our biggest ones was, was, was pipeline. So I own a pipeline to the company, not just for marketing, but across sales as well.

And so I have to report out on that every week in our executive meeting. And so I had to get my team aligned. So I hired wired, the, you know, the pipeline goals and to everybody's objectives, and, you know, and, and help people to understand how what you do is connected to driving that pipeline. And, and that was transformative for the team as well, to get everybody aligned, from that perspective.

And, and I talk about that, you know, first and foremost on every meeting that we've had and we've had a significant improvement in performance there, to where we're we're hitting all of our and exceeding all of our goals relative to, to to the pipeline build. We have a lot of work to do on the progression side of things.

But, that engine is, is running extremely well.

Daniel Burstein: So one of the biggest, I don't know, feedback, pushback, concerns I hear from marketers is that, like, everyone in the organization thinks they're a marketer. Right? So I wonder, like, what you do to kind of protect the marketing ideas, because I hear that from a lot of companies. But as you just mentioned, not only do you probably have that, but the CEO led marketing and the sales guy led marketing, and now you're leading marketing.

So they've literally been in your shoes before. So yeah, those are difficult relationships to manage. What do you do to make sure you kind of protect marketing's ideas and independence?

Jim Kruger: Yeah, it's it's, it's absolutely a challenge. No doubt about it. But but I think, I think building on that trust, and performance, really takes the magnifying glass off of marketing, in terms of delayed delivery and delivering on your numbers. But but also, you have to be data driven. And, I'll give you an example of, of one of the things that we did, this year, we have a, we have a vertical sales team, you know, health care and, you know, education, financial services.

And last year we had dedicated campaigns, for each one of those verticals, and we, we operate such that we have a campaign framework, and, and it's basically our blueprint in terms of how we're going to execute for the year. What are the key campaigns we're going to do? How much do we invest in each one?

And, after analyzing the data, we found that we're, we're just too fragmented because we were spending like 5% of the budget on this vertical, 5% of the budget on this vertical. And it wasn't enough, to, to drive, significant business. And we found that a lot of the verticals were coming in through the horizontal use cases.

And so we went to the head of our, vertical sales, and basically brought data to the table and said, hey, like, you know, where this is what we're seeing? We're seeing a much better ROI, relative to people coming through these horizontal use cases. We're going to kill all these vertical campaigns for 2024. And, you know, in most cases, you know, you would see the vertical salesperson, like, like we are you crazy?

You can't do that. We need these dedicated campaigns. But since we brought data to the table and showed her she's like, that makes sense. And then we just we, in our planning meeting just this week, I had the team. I wanted the team to do the analysis, and and we we've seen a 44% increase in lead generation, over last year for our vertical business, based on that decision.

And so if we would have gone to her and just said, hey, this is what we want to do, but we didn't have the data to support it, she would have been, no way. We're in no way we're getting rid of these campaigns. But we brought the data to the table. She understood it. She bought into it, and lo and behold, like it.

It just went off the charts, you know? Hi. And good, for her business. So this is a good a good example of, like, you got to bring data to the table. You got to do your homework. You got to make sure that you have a backup in terms of why you want to do something. And, and I think most people, again, if you if you build that credibility, most people are going to say, okay, got it.

You know, go for it. My idea was bad, so.

Daniel Burstein: Well, that collaboration is so key to marketing. That's what we talk about. That's a whole second half of the episode. But before we get into that part, I should mention that how I made it in marketing podcast is underwritten by MC labs. I the parent organization of marketing Sherpa. You can build a new artificial intelligence strategy or optimize your current AI strategy with an AI Quick Win Intensive from Mack Labs.

Learn more at intensives Dot labs ai.com. That's intensive dot MEC labs ai.com. All right. Well, you just gave a great example of the importance of collaboration marketing. Let's talk about some specific people. You called out that you learn from. You said people want to feel part of a team. And without empathy, that is very difficult to do.

You learn this from Ahmed, the CEO of Informatica. I assume your current boss. How did you learn this from, it.

Jim Kruger: Yeah. It, was was one of the key reasons why I joined Informatica. I think it's really important to, you know, in the CEO, position as a CMO, you have to make sure that, you have, I would say aligned, values and goals, and are thinking the same way about things and, it, definitely does that.

And he gave many examples of, of, things that he had done from an employee perspective, which I was super impressed with. When I joined the company. An example is when the company, went public, you wanted to make sure that everybody got a piece of the action. And when many companies go public, it's only the upper echelon that that, get the benefit of that.

And he went to bat and for all employees and made sure that everybody, was, was a part of that, and, and, and so he, he truly cares deeply about, the employees, and making sure that, you know, they understand the strategy, that, he, you know, is he's a great communicator out to them, but he is he's definitely an employee advocate.

And really believes that that's the, the foundational level of a successful company. And, and so I've, I've learned a lot from him, from that perspective, I, I have that same perspective in terms of truly caring about people. Because if you don't if your employees are not happy, if they're not excited every time they get up in the morning about what they're doing, it's like, geez, I got to do this again.

You're just not going to get the level of performance, the level of commitment, from your employees. So. So, I spend a lot of my time, focused on, making sure that the team feels connected, making sure that they're aligned to, where we're headed. As an organization, I, I send out a, a communication every Friday.

It's called the Friday Forward. And I, you know, give updates across the team in terms of key things that happen that week. What are some of the successes that we can celebrate? Calling out people for great work that they've done? And, and as a part of that, I also include a piece of learning something that I read that week, and I try to keep it to something that's like 5 or 10 minutes.

Sometimes I call it a book, but, most of the time it's just a short little, you know, could be a a, you know, a podcast that could be, you know, something that's written, could be a video, so forth and so on. So, so that helps the for for people to stay connected. And then I spent a lot of time on career development as well, because that's, that's really important, to, you know, to team members.

And so I've created a separate program from the, from what the company has done, and, and set aside, you know, a certain amount of budget every, every quarter for people to go out and attend conferences, attend classes, and bring that back into the company because it's going to help us in spades. Going forward, relative to new technologies, what are other companies doing?

And so kind of staying on the forefront of what's happening across marketing, and that, you know, from, from an empathy perspective and from an engagement employee engagement perspective, is, it has has really helped, you know, people to, you know, advance their careers relative to getting position them ready for the next step, which I think is, is a is a really important thing.

So, you know, it's approach, you know, 100% bought in, in terms of, you know, I think thinking about employees making sure that they're happy, and that, they're engaged, we do engage in surveys every year. And, and in fact, the last one, we just did, we were just finalizing we put three Tiger teams together, and they've come up with some really, you know, excellent recommendations that were in process of implementing, so, so that cultural piece, the empathy, is, is cornerstone and really important to our success.

Daniel Burstein: So that's a great example of empathy for your team. Let's go one level deeper. How do you instill in your team empathy for the customer. Right. So to give you a quick example, I wrote a case study, Bank of America, how during the Covid pandemic, right. They had to shift. They had all these in-person banks and locations, and then all of a sudden they had everyone calling in and not going to these locations.

So there was some empathy for their team of like, okay, let's let you work from home. You don't need to be in these locations, be near anyone where it's dangerous. But then that they were trying to instill in their team empathy for the customer, who now is going through all the stuff, couldn't go in person, had to call.

They were actually really excited because during that difficult time, their client satisfaction actually increased to 85.6%. So they were they they did something right there. But so were you, Jim. How do you, you talked about empathy for your team. How do you instill empathy for the customer into your team?

Jim Kruger: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it really starts with, understanding what are their challenges and what their, what they're trying to accomplish. And, and what's, what's important to them. So, I think, I mean, I don't know, I don't know that it's, it's 100% empathy. I think it's more just just understanding, what their what their needs are and really making sure that we as a marketing team are catering to those needs.

Of course, there's a whole different aspect of, you know, customer lifecycle management. And making sure that, you know, we're we're paying attention and we're making this shift as a, as a company, from, you know, from the point that we engage with the customer, through the full lifecycle of the customer when they deploy the solution, the next best product, and things of that sort, and making sure that we're helping them along their, their journey, helping them to go at their own pace, and, and, you know, I think one of the things that, you know, the way that I met brings empathy, to it is, is he

he really, you know, we have a lot of customers that are still on prem, and and they're in the process of thinking about modernizing, modernizing to the cloud. A lot of companies basically just cut it off and say, we're going to end of life, that you got to move at this point. And Ahmed has basically said to our customers that, we're not going to cut you off.

We're going to let you go at your own pace. We know that you have your own objectives, and we're not going to force fit, that to happen. And, and so and our customers really appreciate that. And that builds a lot of loyalty within our customer base, which I think is really important. I think there's different ways to go about helping to provide incentives, sort of carrots and sticks along the way to help people to, to do that migration.

And, and I think, you know, getting your data ready for AI is really the fire that's burning under them now, because if your data is not ready, then you're not going to be ready to implement AI across your organization. And that's kind of one of our key value propositions. So, we're definitely seeing some tailwinds, from that perspective.

And in order to implement AI, you got to move to the cloud. So, so I think we're seeing a lot more customers interested from that perspective. But, but but I encourage my team to, you know, constantly engage with customers. Great example was, we have a big summit in New York at the beginning of the year.

It's called our our it's, master data management, which is, one of our key categories, from a product perspective that, that, that we have and, and we have about, I think it was about 400 to 500 customers that came in to New York, for that event. It's a full day event. And, we were developing some messaging about the migration to the cloud.

And, I tasked our, our lead on that from who's on the product marketing side to, you know, set up a bunch of meetings with customers while they're there at the conference, and test the messaging and get some feedback. And, I think he had he had like, eight different meetings with customers. And, and it was night and day.

From where he started, what he thought was the right messaging to at the end of that day, he's like, oh my God. Like, this is like, this is crazy. And you, you pick up keywords and the customers use. And so, you know, I'm trying to instill that, across the team that we do testing as much as we possibly can.

Of course, we want to talk to the sales team, but a lot of a lot of things get filtered sometimes from the sales team. So you got to go direct to customers here from the horse's mouth, and engage with them and find different points, events, you know, customer advisory boards. There's many times when we engage with customers, to, to get, specific feedback and, and so that's, that's a key part of what I try to instill in the team.

Daniel Burstein: Okay. You mentioned that mastering. I love that actually talking to the customers about it beforehand. Right. And, here's another lesson. You said branding is much more than a campaign, and it must be connected to your strategy and messaging hierarchy. This was from Kate Hutchinson, the former CMO at Polycom. How did you learn? Kate?

Jim Kruger: Yeah, yeah. So so, Kate is, what I would consider is, is a branding and messaging expert. That's her superpower. She she has a process that she follows. She's done a lot of work across many, many companies as as a CMO, as a consultant, and been hugely successful and, and, and so, I learned from Kate because I came up from the product side, and product manager, product marketing, I was a GM for a little while.

And so, you know, when I was under her, I learned a lot about branding and messaging and the whole mark on which really helped around me out, as, as a marketeer. And she really starts with, you know, what is what is the vision and strategy of the company and really hardwiring the brand into, where that strategy is aligned, you know, specifically with what the CEO is, vision is of where the company is going.

And one of the things that that Kate did exceptionally well, which I learned from is, is really working closely with the, the technical team, understanding, you know, what what the, what the solution is and and pulling out the simplification of how do you articulate, what the value proposition is, what the outcomes are, and how do you message, complex technology?

And so getting in the room, spending, you know, a day workshopping with the technical team, whiteboarding, and and bouncing ideas off them was something that I learned from her. And I still use to this day. And one of the things that, she really taught me was just the simplification. Like, you have to bring it down to a level where everybody understands you can't be too clever.

You can't be super technical. Of course, many of the the things that we sell in Silicon Valley, there's a technical audience, but there's also a business outcome, that you have to really focus on because at the end of the day, you know, technology and innovation is going to is going to fuel business outcomes, and help people's lives, you know, be better.

So, and I think a lot of companies get really too caught up on the, the knits and that's in the details of the technology. And they lose a lot of people. So that was that was a big thing that I learned from Kate, in terms of branding and, and that helped me, you know, and, you know, as I took over as CMO, at, at, Polycom and then in my other engagements as CMO, definitely leveraged a lot of the things that she taught me from that perspective.

Daniel Burstein: So I like that flow of, having, you know, meeting with the technical teams and understanding the product better so you can have that value proposition communicated to the brand. But what about anything flowing the opposite direction, like you and marketing, we talked about being close to the customer. Do you ever like, you know, work with your product team, especially with your product marketing background, say, hey, here's here's also things that we should be adding to the roadmap, right?

It's not just like, okay, the things you guys have created, we're going to put out there, brand it well, value prop it well. We're ultimately serving customer. And kind of here's what we're learning from the customer. We're testing messages. We're talking to them. And so how do we get these actual features and functions into the product. So we're not just communicating a value.

We're actually building that value. So do you ever kind of work in that direction have the river flow in the opposite direction.

Jim Kruger: Yeah I think I think it depends on where that line is drawn between product marketing and product management. In some cases, product market, the product marketing line, is, is over into sort of the product management side. And in some cases it's more towards the, an engineering side. In some cases it's more towards the go to market side.

And so, you know, the product marketers in that case don't get as involved, relative to you know, the features and capabilities and really trying to get, you know, that input from, from customers. And Informatica, it's that the team is much more go to market oriented. So my team doesn't have the responsibility of going out and, and, and assessing that.

But that doesn't mean that we don't, you know, bring information back into the fold relative to, the product management team, and really, you know, helping, them to, you know, again, to articulate the, the overall, positioning of what we're trying to accomplish because, you know, sometimes in some of the presentations that we have from, from, you know, the product user leaders, it's a laundry list of stuff, that we've done a lot of capabilities and it gets lost.

And so I think we're the product marketing team really helps is to uplevel, some of those messages working with them and, and, and, and helping to articulate sort of the overarching theme of what we're doing and then calling out some of the key things that we're that, that we're delivering to support that, in addition to the long list of laundry stuff, because there's always 1 or 2 things that a customer really wants, and, and from a engineering perspective, you know, you have to make sure that you communicate that as well.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. Another lesson you mentioned test messaging and usability. You said you learned this from Joe Cipher, your former manager at palm. You gave a great example of how you use this, recently at that customer event. But how did you originally learn this from Joe?

Jim Kruger: Yeah. Palm was was a great, learning opportunity for me because, I come from GTE wireless, and, had had been running, you know, a lot of analytics. There wasn't part of my job, but overall kind of product marketing and product management, but, really stepped up when I joined palm and, you know, one of the, the founders, Jeff Hawkins, who, you know, invented the, the Palm Pilot, you know, he he walked around with, with a block of wood, in his hand to try to determine, like, what size should it be?

He would engage with people, talk with with people like, what would you want this thing to do? And and what are the capabilities you'd like to have? And so he did a ton of, of research, and, and kind of set the tone for that. And, and Joe was, wasn't, you know, just a, a really talented, product marketer and product manager, in terms of, you know, really assessing what the market needs were, and, and, and everything that we did, we tested with, with customers, you know, when we, and when I was on his team, we worked on the, the world's first wireless device.

It was called the palm seven. And, it was a really, really fun, project and product that we worked on, and I was responsible for the services side of that. So, you know, and, and one of the key things I learned at, at palm was just from a user interface perspective, as we built out the user interface to interact with your billing.

It was the first over-the-air wireless activation that we worked with BellSouth on. It was one of the first, online billing systems, that we had. So you could actually, you know, engage with your bill, online again, dating myself a little bit here, but, but, you know, building that whole user interface, working with engineering, was grounded in, you know, talking with customers, and everything we did, we talked with customers, the, the box that the product shipped in, all of the key elements of that was all tested with customers.

And so that was my, you know, a great training ground, learning from Joe in terms of how he approached things, how we thought about things, and really helped me to think about, you know, from a user perspective and, and a and a big theme there was, is simplification. How do you simplify things, and make sure that, again, you're clearly articulating things in simple language.

Don't get too cute. Don't try to use big words. Don't try to show people how smart you are. Bring it down to the level of a ten year old so that a ten year old understands it. And, you know, if that happens, then everybody in your audience is going to understand it as well.

Daniel Burstein: Right, love. At one point we I wrote a children's book about conversion rate optimization and just try to again bring it down to understand, you know, explain what it is. I think you mentioned testing what has been some of the most interesting test results you've seen in your career? Because I love with talking to marketers who test. And it's always sometimes like some surprising things that come out.

One of my favorite cases we did was with, the Obama campaign back several years ago. Nothing political on our side. It's just, you know, they did a lot of testing, and one of their great test results was that the subject line, hey, you know, they didn't think it would work, but that was like their killer subject. They never would have guessed it.

That was a great subject line. It turned into a meme with like, Ryan Reynolds or something like that. But, even for you, I mean, that's what the fun of testing is. You go and you have a hypothesis, you think you know it's going to work. Hopefully a lot of times it does, but sometimes, you know, really surprises you.

So any test results come to mind where you're like, wow, I didn't think it would go that way.

Jim Kruger: Yeah. I can't think of anything specifically off offhand. That was like, we we thought this and it was dramatically different than what we were. We thought I gave you the example, you know, of the, of the summit that we had, and that messaging changed dramatically, based on customer feedback. We I'm a big believer in testing, and we do testing all the time.

A great example is, we we just, made a change to our contact us button on our website. And we changed the location of it. We change the color of it, and we saw, like, a 30% increase, in, and click on that. Contact me. So just based on the positioning, the color and so forth.

So there's things like that that certainly, you know, we're, we're doing, you know, than, you know, hourly testing on our website, to, see what works better, and, and look at those results, and from a content perspective, again, we do, you know, a lot of testing beforehand, bouncing off of, sales team, bouncing off of customers when, when we can.

We can't do it for every piece, of course, but, for some of the larger hero pieces that we're going to invest a significant amount of time and dollars into, we definitely test that. We, we bounce things off industry analysts, to, you know, get their input, which I think is a great source as well, because they talk to a lot of customers, and have a lot of knowledge around the market.

So, yeah, it it is, as a modern marketer, you have to be testing across everything that you're doing, making sure that you're pulling in the right audiences. But then there comes a time where you you have to you have to make the decision, and, and you're not going to, you know, as you as we talked about earlier, you have you have many people, and different audiences, across the company that have different opinions.

And, and you have to make a call at some point, in terms of what direction you're going to go. And some people are not going to agree with it. But and and you might make a mistake, but you but you gotta you gotta make a decision and move on. I think there's sometimes you can get caught up in, you know, analysis paralysis and just, you know, not move fast enough.

And with testing, especially, from a digital perspective, you gotta move fast on that and you gotta make decisions. And some are going to be good and you have to, you know, have an a thick skin to, to understand that someone we're going to fail. And that's part of the process. And if you're not failing, you're probably not pushing the envelope enough.

Daniel Burstein: That's right. You're not learning. One more lesson here. The higher you get in the organization, the more details you need to learn. You need to know. And you learn this from Peter leave the former CEO of Polycom. So I assume you learned this maybe when you were when you first jump in a role, in your career, when you when you moved into management, maybe it was at it or.

Jim Kruger: Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's kind of counterintuitive. And, you know, you think as you, as you go up in an organization and you move into, you know, higher level positions that you have this you move from, knowing all the details to just this more broader perspective. But it's actually the opposite. And Peter was, was, you know, a big believer in this and, and I, I, I am as well, I think it's really important that, you know, you know, as, as a CMO, and or a marketing leader, you know, all the things that are happening across your team, you're close to it.

Because I think one of the most important things of my job is, is making the connections and connecting the dots, in terms of, oh, we're doing that. Did you talk to so-and-so? Because, you know, the the things that they're doing, I think can connect in really well and or, you know, the message you're using there isn't isn't the same message we're using over here.

So, so I'm hoping that that overall purview, and and then just being, you know, as you, as you report out on things into the executive team, into the CEO, into the board, you have to have your arms around, what the organization is doing. And so you have to know the details, in order to, in my opinion, drive, drive.

Better performance. So, Peter was definitely a stickler on that, and he expected us to know, you know, the details of our organization. And I've kind of taken that to heart as I move forward, in my career. So that was that was a great learning from him. That, that I've definitely applied, to, you know, the same roles, CMO roles that, that I had.

Daniel Burstein: We talked about how you communicate to your team. I think Ford Friday was one of the things. How do you want your team to communicate to you? So you make sure you know the details. Right. So, for example, I did a great case study with, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. At one point they reached out to me and they said we used to publish benchmark data, and they said, it's really, marketed to this really great report how it took our benchmark data.

They took all their performance data and should send it out regularly to the team. So they knew they knew those details of how they were performing. So I think sometimes it with the CMO, it's always like, well, how much do we tell about I'm not tell them you're like, I want to be in the weeds. Maybe not those words.

I put those in your mouth, but how do you want your team to communicate up to you? So you do know those details?

Jim Kruger: Yeah, I, I so, it comes back to building trust, and, and having transparency and I, emphasize to my team on a constant basis that my virtual door is always open, and, and I, I am accessible whenever you need me. I'm here for you, and, and so I think that the team definitely takes that to heart.

They know that they can speak their mind, to me and be honest and be transparent, because that's that's the only way we're going to get better. And I try to emphasize, to my team, as well, and just, just, read a book on this, which was really good around radical candor and being being candid, to each other is going to help us to perform better.

So whether it's, you know, an HR issue, whether it's something that you don't believe that we should be doing, it's something that you think we should stop doing or you have a specific idea. I absolutely want to hear about it. So, I engage with my team with I do skip level meetings. We do all hands.

I do, you know, the, every Friday, the communication, and I and I invite in that communication, I invite their opinion back, and I typically get 10 to 15 responses every week from people in terms of their thoughts and their ideas around, you know, you know, the content that I send out, and I really appreciate that and encourage that.

So that's, that's a really important part of having a high performance team, is having that level of transparency and trust, with each other, and not only to me, but with their peers as well, which I think of, you know, really worked hard to build that culture within the team. And I think that's a key part of our success.

Daniel Burstein: Well, we talked about so many different things, Jim, that you've done your career that you've learned in your career. If you had to break it down, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Jim Kruger: Yeah. So I think I think being, you know, the, as a, as a CMO, I think it's really important to be a well-rounded marketer. So as people are coming up in their career, I highly encourage people to take lateral moves, and to, you know, get get the broader perspective of marketing because it's really challenging as you get into a senior role, if you haven't had that, that sort of, visibility into the different functions of, of marketing functions, marketing, because they are, are all very different.

And so, so that's one piece is just being well-rounded and making sure that, your, having exposure to, to those because sometimes you're either a product person or you're a branding person or you're a demand gen person. And if you move into a CMO role, then you have a lot of learning to do across those other areas.

I would say, building the relationships, and, and having alignment, again, as a marketing leader with sales and product. And now customer success, as we do, you know, full cycle customer management, having that alignment, the relationships, the trust, with those teams meeting with them regularly, collaborating with them, having interlock meetings with them, is is critically important because, you know, as if marketing is a silo.

It's it's not going to work. And, you know, the whoever your CEO is, they're they're going to have the expectation that you're collaborating across the team and you're marketing this sandwiched in between those and I believe, is the one of the most important functions to pull people in and bring things together, because typically the product teams and the sales teams sometimes are not on the same page, and marketing helps them to get on that same page.

So that collaboration, I think, is really important. Having a deep understanding of of the business. What are the what are the, the, the levers that you can pull, and that gets into, you know, understanding the products, the customers, at a detailed level, because whenever, you know, if you're if you're a really good marketer, whenever you come to the table, you're going to be an expert on customers, market, and, and you understand the business if you don't have those things in your toolbelt, so to speak, you're not going to have the credibility and you're going to be a tactical function.

So you have to work to become a really strategic function, within the organization, in order for to to have that credibility and trust that others across the organization. So I would say, you know, those are some of the key things. And, and from a, from a leadership perspective, again, really caring deeply about your employees, getting them engaged and making sure that every day they wake up, they're excited about coming, to work.

So the inspirational piece of leadership, I think, is really important to the success of of being, you know, a great marketeer and a great leader within a marketing organization. So I would say those are probably, top of mind, most important things.

Daniel Burstein: Well, I was excited to get to learn from you today, Jim. So thanks for letting me, pick your brain for an hour here. I really appreciate it.

Jim Kruger: Now. It's been great. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. It's been been fantastic.

Daniel Burstein: Thanks to everyone for listening.

Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it and marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing e rpa.com and.