IT Consultancy Marketing: A marketing and sales team divided cannot stand (podcast episode #155)

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Blandvertising.

It’s a word I coined 13 years ago to describe a wishy-washy marketing claim.

The type of words that fill a copy block. They look right. And it’s probably sprinkled with words like “scalable,’ ‘ecosystem,’ ‘user-centric,’ ‘best-in-class,’ ‘leading,’ and on and on. But after you read them or hear them you realize – they don’t really say anything at all.

So I loved this lesson I read in a podcast guest application, “A brand that says something is more important than saying everything perfectly.”

To hear the lesson behind that story, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Millie Hogue, CMO, Hakkoda.

Hakkoda is part of IBM. IBM reported total annual revenue of $62.8 billion in 2024. At Hakkoda, Hogue manages an internal team of nine along with an array of 20 vendors and freelancers.

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Lessons from the things she made

A marketing and sales team divided cannot stand

Hogue once joined a team where individual comp was tied to who received credit for "sourcing" pipeline. It led to heated arguments every couple of weeks about whether Marketing or Sales had done more to influence an opportunity.

Marketing paid for and coordinated their presence at this conference, but Sales talked to the lead on the conference floor. Who sourced that opportunity? It was a crash course in how to focus on all the wrong things and lose separately instead of win together.

A brand that says something is more important than saying everything perfectly

In the age of AI, nothing irritates us more than bland content that says nothing. Some of the biggest wins in her career have been with brands that take risks. You might say something controversial, people might want to challenge what you put out there, but they are reacting to it and engaging.

Not too long ago, their team put together a set of ads that used the old “when pigs can fly” analogy to talk about AI and how a lot of the claims people make are simply “too good to be true.” That content made an impact and started conversations across their ecosystem. Hogue is not saying everyone has to go and be Nutter Butter, but you can’t chicken out. Expectations around content polish are changing and people are being overwhelmed with volume.

You might as well save your ad dollars and say nothing at all if you’re just going to throw up the same tired LinkedIn copy everyone has seen a hundred times.

Expertise matters more than ever

The content Hogue sees performing best is either:

1. Provocative or

2. Incredibly well-sourced and laced with credibility.

The best content does both. Primary research, truly well-done thought leadership…these types of content still perform well because people are more eager than ever for concise and trustworthy information. We’re reaching this phase where a lot of average people have actually experienced an AI hallucination. It sticks with you as a bad experience.

Today – and Hogue would wager even more going forward – people will actually stop and read for content that immediately signals powerful credibility and an interesting perspective. Those are still two things that AI struggles to fake.

Lessons from the people she made it with

Build for your audience

via Michelle Sitton, CMO (former colleague at MedBridge)

Hogue has never worked with anyone better or more ruthlessly honest with herself about how the content she was putting together would hit for her audience. Often, that was internal stakeholders across the leadership team. At one point, they were going through a major strategy orientation and Hogue was asked to present the phases, goals, and progress of that shift to the entire organization on their all hands.

The audience included their CEO, several board members, and about 300 team members across the company. In short, it was a very differentiated audience to try to present to. Sitton went through bullet by bullet with her, thinking about how they were translating their marketing activity into meaningful content for the team.

Whenever Hogue is sharing a readout on a campaign or building a strategy plan or putting together a board deck, hers is still the voice Hogue hears in the back of her head asking “Is that really the best way to phrase that?”

The success of your team is YOUR success

via Clare Kirlin, another former colleague and CMO

Hogue has been fortunate throughout her career to have many people demonstrate what people-first leadership looks like, but Kirlin has always stood out as someone who does such a phenomenal job of lifting up the people around her and giving them an opportunity to shine.

The best leaders in their space know that the success of your team is YOUR success. You don’t always have to be the loudest person in the room.

Kirlin modelled what it means to understand how your team works best, meet them where they need you, and give clear and concrete goals that help them stay motivated and visible to other leaders throughout the organization.

Discussed in this episode

Marketing Experimentation Strategy: Define and differentiate between experimentation and execution in marketing activities (podcast episode #93)

Authentic Brand Transformation: To build a brand that lasts, consider rebranding a team sport (podcast episode #137)

Analytics: Driving business value matters more than perfect models (podcast episode #133)

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Full Transcript

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

Millie Hogue: Sales and marketing has to function as a singular unit. And it's part of this conversation that we watch play out where people are talking about, well, how much budget does marketing get? What percentage of the overall budget is going to marketing? And that gets trimmed when economic times get hard? Time and time again, I watch that not be the case when sales and marketing are actually integrated and functioning together.

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: Bland fertilizing. Bland advertising. It's a word I coined 13 years ago to describe a wishy washy marketing claim. The type of words that fill a copy block, they look right. It's probably sprinkled with words like scalable, ecosystem, user centric, best in class, leading, and on and on. But after your read, bland for fertilizing or you hear it, you realize it doesn't really say anything at all.

So I love this lesson. I read it in a podcast guest application. A brand that says something is more important than saying everything perfectly is so true. Here to share the lesson behind that story, along with many more lesson filled stories, is Emily Hogue, the CMO of Coda, an IBM company. Thanks for joining us, Emily.

Millie Hogue: Happy to be here.

Daniel Burstein: Okay, well, let's take a quick look at your background so people know who I'm talking to before we jump into all your lessons. Emily started her career as a content writer for company Dot politics. Woman. After my own heart. She was a lead demand as she led the demand generation marketing at Symphony II. She was director of Demand Gen and head of B2B marketing at Redbridge.

And for the past three years she has been at her coda. A coda is part of IBM. IBM reported total annual revenue of $62.8 billion in 2024. She manages an internal team of nine along with an array of 20 vendors and freelancers. So, Emily, give us a sense. What is your day like as CMO?

Millie Hogue: This is always one of my favorite questions. Because I think every single day looks different. But, there's, I would say like a total split. I am either at home in my office, and I'm waking up every morning, and you've got the litany of zoom calls, and you're jumping from conversation to conversation to check in on different statuses.

And then there's the CMO show that's on the road. So that's when I head over to the Denver airport and hop on the plane and go and get to do my favorite thing, which is meeting with clients, meeting with partners, starting to understand from the front lines what's happening in the marketplace. So two very different ways that my day can shake out.

Both. Wonderful.

Daniel Burstein: I've never heard have talked about the way I think of a baseball team. Like, here's here's a baseball game, like a home. Here's how we work Coors Field, here's how we handle things. And then on the road, we handle things differently, I like that. All right, well, let's take a look at some of the lessons from your career.

As I mentioned before, I've I've never really worked in another industry. I've never been a podiatrist or an actuary or whatever. But I feel like we get to make things. It's a really cool thing we get to do. And, so let's take a look at some the lessons from some of the things you made. You said a marketing and sales team divided cannot stand.

I vaguely remember this lesson from history class in high school. How did you learn it? And what did you mean by it when you were trying to build something along with your sales team?

Millie Hogue: Yeah, it's, a blatant rip off of Abraham Lincoln, but, true nonetheless. Which is to say that, man, I think more than ever in 2025 and certainly for the years to come, sales and marketing has to function as a singular unit. And it's part of this conversation that we watched play out where people are talking about, well, how much budget does marketing get?

What percentage of the overall budget is going to marketing? And that gets trimmed when economic times get hard time and time again, I watch that not be the case when sales and marketing are actually integrated and functioning together. So there's I like to think of it as two ways that this can really play out. One, you've got a marketing team who's like, I'm marketing, I'm not sales.

I'm totally over here in a different quarter. I'm doing my thing, and sales is over here on the other side of the house. And they're trying to prove their own value, to track their own deals. And that's when things fall apart. So I've had experiences in my career where I walked into a sales and a marketing team, and as you heard, my background is demand gen, so I am constantly being asked to kind of go through and prove out the value of the campaigns that we're playing.

Tie that into pipeline. If you've got a smart CEO in charge, they're also looking at how that pipeline turns into revenue and tracking that all the way through to the end. But I walked into this situation and we had some really fantastic sales leaders. Unfortunately, they had built this comp structure that was based around who ultimately sourced a deal.

And I mean, you can probably speak to this. You talk to marketers all day long, but who sources a deal in this day and age is such a tenuous question because we both know there are, you know, 17 to 30 plus touches along the way that influence that person before they get into a deal phase. If you're talking a really high AC, the opportunity probably even more than that.

Some of those are happening in the dark funnel. You can't track it at all. And so we got down to this. And what you're really asking is not who source the deal. Sales are marketing, but who sourced 51% of that. Right. Because, you know, somebody else had the other 49. And that was just an incredibly fraught question that, you know, having to sit there and answer every single week, whose source this deal and going through every single one of the engagements and asking that question because it was tied to an individual person's compensation.

Super important when some of these things come to that way. But absolutely the wrong question to be asking for sales and marketing leaders. It just put us in this totally combative position where I'm over here with my CMO, you know, the crows over there with our VP of sales, and we're both kind of sitting there arguing for who did more instead of asking the question, we should have been asking, which was, how do we do this together?

We're sitting here with a list of opportunities. Phenomenal. Good stuff. What's creating those? What are the different touches along that life cycle and how do we do more of that? So I think there are just, you know, wrong moves that can be made often very early in a company's growth. This was a startup that was, you know, they were ten years down the line at this point.

But they had matured from this tiny little baby company when maybe that question made sense, I don't know, I wasn't there for it. But certainly at this stage of maturity it didn't. And not being able to focus as a sales and marketing team on the togetherness of how you're bringing a lead into that opportunity phase and then into revenue for your business was just cataclysmic to our operations and certainly to our day to day relationships, which is another really important thing.

You've got to be palce at the end of the day, you're a team.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. What a way to build a collaborative team culture. Okay. So that's negative. But now that you are CMO, what? Com structure or process or something else do you use? Because for example, when I interviewed Tom Amity, co co-founder and chief Executive officer entail, one of his lessons was streamline processes to enable efficiencies, smooth operations and get rapid results.

And he told the story of how he saw this happen at one of the largest Google advertisers globally. So presumably, okay, he told us about a hard process. Now that you're in the C-suite, what processes, what comm structure, what has worked for you? How have you helped to implement and foster marketing, sales, collaboration?

Millie Hogue: Man. So one of the most important things I do when I look at a new job is always try to meet the sales leader, and vet out if they're going to be someone who's going to come along for that. Because I think that's part of it. You have to have people who want to make this work together.

So I'm lucky to be sitting in a spot where I have a really phenomenal Chro, whom I respect and admire and who's all in on this process. But one of the things that we do together is, really keep even beyond sales and marketing, all of the C-suite connected. So we have both a quarterly meeting where we get together and kind of look at these numbers and really take time out of the list of zoom meetings to actually sit down and talk through this and build those human relationships as well.

But beyond that, we share the same reports and dashboards. Sometimes it's really simple. It's down to looking at the same numbers together and tracking the same data. And so what you'll find at the code in IBM company is that all of our sales and marketing reporting is happening in the same venue. We're in on these. We're talking about it.

We're both accountable for it. And that's true when we're presenting to the board, and that's true when we're presenting to, you know, the 500 person company, all hands. So there's just a lot of that kind of transparency and joint accountability. That's a really simple answer. I think it does come down to those kind of day to day practices, which is they stay attuned.

They care about what I'm doing on the sales side. I care about what they're doing and the obstacles. I would say the other concrete process that's been really great for us is we have a director of demand management internally. He actually has one on ones with members of our sales team. Now, eventually you get into a skill issue for that, and we're already starting to kind of come up there and figure out, okay, what's the next way to run this as you keep growing?

But that act of having each of our sellers have a direct line to marketing has been a really important. It's a way to feed information, talk about their top accounts, get a look at the resources that we have. I think that's the other thing that sales and marketing sometimes fails to do is like, marketing's got all these great resources and campaigns.

Doesn't matter too much at all if your sellers have no idea that the one pager exists, or that you're advertising to this company, and they might want to follow up. And then I would say the last piece is really kind of smart triggers and reporting. So we try to bring our kind of prospects, especially when we're in the services business.

In consulting, we try to bring them to a pretty mature stage of engagement before there's a handoff to sales. But we create triggers along the way that send them notifications via slack or HubSpot. So that when it contact that they flag, hey, this is a priority company. We can see the contact is the right buyer title. They're getting little notifications about that person's activity.

Hey, Jim went and looked at this page and then they downloaded this book right. Those kinds of little details we found have really been great. For one, keeping sales engaged with what's happening on the marketing side and to feeding them the kind of insights and information that if they are ready to act on it, allow them to proactively reach out with and actually tailored message.

Daniel Burstein: That's nice because they always get harassed. Update the CRM for their touch points. So I think you're kind of showing being a team player. And hey, we're going to tell you also about the touch points we're seeing. So of course that's a nice place to be deeper in the funnel. We're getting all these leads flowing in there, having all these activities.

But to get there, we usually have to get some sort of message out to the marketplace. And as you said, as I mentioned in the opening, a brand that says something is more important than saying everything perfectly. I say something. So how did you learn this lesson, man?

Millie Hogue: I think, everyone who is still employed as a marketer has been learning this lesson for the last five years, and it's been absolutely fascinating to watch the maturation of content, even just if you take a platform like LinkedIn, if I go back five years, seven years, the types of video content that you saw on LinkedIn were incredibly polished.

They were highly professional. They were basically commercial style videos. If you open up, which of course, LinkedIn's got their own version of TikTok. Now, if you open, videos on that platform today, you're going to get a lot of people very, very casually talking. So it's this complete kind of downgrade in what we expect in terms of like the polish of content and then tie that with AI and just absolute saturation of messaging, like people can create 50 videos out of almost nothing.

They may not be 50 good videos, but the number of pieces of content that are out there and the polish that we expect for them has dramatically changed in the last five years. I expect that to continue. And what that means for us as marketers is we cannot sit around on our hands waiting for every single video to be perfect.

As much as we might like to. And it also means that we are competing against more noise than there has ever been in advertising history. This is not, you know, you watch Mad Men and you think to yourself, I'm just going to come up with a phenomenal idea and it'll be perfect and we'll get it out there.

The idea still matters, but how you get it out there has changed. And so that's, I think, being a totally different way of coaching, design and creative teams. And depending on kind of, you know, the age of how long someone's been in the market, they may have a totally different perspective on that creative side. But as CMO, your responsibility is to get out there and say, hey, this is the message we need to tell, and we've got to come up with a unique way to say that, but then we've got to just push it out as fast as we can, because the mind sure is going to be gone.

The market is saturated with messaging. Nobody needs it to be perfect. You just have to get the message to the right people. And so I think it becomes so much more of a yes, your message needs to be good and unique. And then the other critical piece is actually more your data has to be great. The people you're pushing that through should be informed by really, really phenomenal marketing data because we have more access to that than ever before as well.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Let's get into that piece of the ad CMO making sure that message right. How do you engage key stakeholders to make sure your brand is saying the right thing? Right. For example, when I interviewed Rebecca Eastman, the CMO of Gild, one of her lessons was to build a brand that last consider rebranding a team sport she told stories from throughout her career how she engage CEOs, other key stakeholders right to make that brand right.

So I love this story. I'll say something and stuff, but really like the other thing that's going on other than I is I think I could hear other marketers CMO is hear what you're saying and say, yeah, but if I say the wrong thing, watch out. Like, this is going to date this. But Cracker Barrel just put out a logo that looked fairly simple and was the biggest firestorm you know, of the month until the next firestorm.

So yes, I, I couldn't agree more. As I mentioned for rising, there's so many brands. Just don't say anything. But part of the reason they don't is they don't want to say the wrong thing. And it seems like such a minefield. So as CMO Emily, how do you engage the key stakeholders within your ecosystem, your company, whatever to make sure that you're saying something, but you know, you don't trip on a landmine?

Millie Hogue: That's a phenomenal question. And and it is so funny to me because I think the counter to like, the Cracker Barrel story is not our butter. Have you seen their advertising? It is absolutely insane. You would never believe that was a cookie brand out there advertising. And so I almost feel like what you're up against is if you're too careful and then you make one misstep.

Yes. You're in a firestorm. And at the same time, if you lean all the way in, you can do almost anything. And so it's that expectation that you build for your audience. I think is a big piece of that. Now, brand safety is incredibly important. Yes. I think there is a huge minefield out there. There's more people than ever spending their time on the internet just waiting to comment and be angry about something that you said.

So I think there's a huge level of I CMO, you have to be plugged into the market. When I talk about those days, when I go hop on the plane and get out in person, that's a huge piece of it for me. I do not think there is a replacement for face time with your customers in the marketplace.

The other thing that we do at Coda and with IBM is, we lean really deeply into industries. And that too, I think is really important. It's a there's going to be corollaries for other businesses. It may not be industry for you. It may be, but you have to find the specific niche and talk to your audience on that particular playing field.

So financial services, for example, is a really big, market for Coda and for IBM. And so when we go into this, we have had our entire marketing team meeting on a regular cadence with that entire industry team for the entire existence of our company. It doesn't matter if I'm talking to my junior designer or if I'm talking to my content lead.

Both of them understand the way that a financial services audience differs from healthcare audience, different types of titles that they're going to be speaking to, and they can line that message up. So I think it is creating that culture of really, really being attuned to your audience. The most important thing that we do as marketers now, that doesn't guarantee you'll never make a misstep.

I think that's going to happen when you have to push content out fast. I think that we've watched plenty of brands do that. Some have done it really well. If you make a misstep, you pivot quickly, respond to that public commentary and you get in front of it. So there are ways to adapt to that. But it's a risk.

I don't disagree with that. I just think it's one that we all have to learn how to live with.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, she's another, great quote. And sometimes the greatest risk is not taking one. Right. So let's get a little deeper into the content you see working. Now, you mentioned that expertise matters more than ever. So you kind of touched on that a bit by talking about financial service and health care. What do you mean by expertise matters more than ever.

What do you see working now in content?

Millie Hogue: Yeah, man, I like comes back again to AI, which I'm sure we're all tired of hearing about and talking about, but it's really right. When there are dozens and dozens of pieces out there that are written by ChatGPT or by perplexity, whatever you want to use, there is just a kind of that blending down of perspective. And you talked about bland retirement, which I love and care.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah.

Millie Hogue: I think also a place of thought leadership. Right. I cannot tell you how many. It might have the right headline. And in a way that's even worse. You click on it and you're like, oh, maybe that's going to be interesting. And you scroll and you scrolling and scroll and it says nothing at all. So digging in and having a perspective, even if you might think, hey, that's a little bit of a hot take, you know, I know there's more nuance to this.

I would rather have a strong perspective than a bland take that try to encompass literally everything is the other thing that's happening with content. And what I see not working is people are tired of reading. They don't want to go through and read your 5000 word essay on a new piece of technology. Consequently, they're turning to podcasts. They're turning to other forms of media that might mix in a little bit of entertainment, and they're going to give them something they can sink their teeth into.

And so what I see working on the content side is actually content that I think trust the audience. If I am writing for a CIO, as my team often is, that CIO is going to bring their own nuance. They've been around the block. They're not five days into the job. They don't need me to give them all 50 of the like milk kind of toast commentary that I could give them.

They want me to give them a fresh take, a hot take that's going to actually give them something to react to and chew on for the next day or so. That's perspective. That's expertise. I can't do that for you.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. That's important. I will say this was true in the era before I earlier in my career, work with IBM and some other big software companies. And there was this I guess CIOs and others would always want to get out and be thought leaders. And I always would say writing 80% of writing is having something to say, only 20% and saying it well, because sometimes, even then, you know, these very experienced people, they didn't feel comfortable with content.

I mean, it was newer back then, but still, that's not their expertise. And so they would just, you know, say, okay, you know, write something up or whatever. It's like, no, you really got to probe them when you're working with those thought leaders to really be thought leaders. And like you said, get something out of that. Then the other 20%, okay, a writer can craft it well, but other than that, but anyone listening, if they're C-level in any other position or high level, in any other position, don't just go to a writer and say, hey, create that blog post or white paper or whatever it is.

And on the flip side, I've seen, and I don't know if you've seen this too, is there's just a straight up feeds and speeds. So it says a whole bunch of stuff with zero meaning. Right? So there's a balance there. But you've talked a lot about I want to delve into a bit more of a personal level with the AI.

How are you navigating your personal brand amongst all this? Right. So, for example, when I interviewed Prateek Shrivastava, the advanced analytics manager, Cummins, one of his lessons came from the CEO of cardinality AI who told him, be your own brand, right? So now every working person after LinkedIn came about, and even before that, we all, like every working person, knows they should have a brand.

But we as marketers even more so. I've seen so many disruptive changes in our industry. I mean, going online, all these things, but nothing like this. Like where like the technology could possibly replace our roles as writers, as CMO or whatever it is. And so this brings up this big question where I think people are trying to figure it out.

Okay, we know we got to do the right thing for our company brands for sure. But now what do we do for our personal brands in this era of AI? Have you figured out anything here? Millie?

Millie Hogue: I don't know that I have all the secrets that know, but I think that asking that question is the right place to start. I think most people who have reached that CMO level are already out there somewhat actively managing their brand, managing their kind of perspective in the marketplace. So I think all the things that we just walks through, and I'm sure many other great lessons that have been shared by other CMO is on this podcast, applied to, you know, how we should be managing our personal brand.

So having a perspective, a take on what's coming next, I think is really important. Making sure that you put that out there really matters. And I, I do come back to a, I really think, yes, AI is out there. There's a million things. It's still going to come down to personal relationships a lot of the time. And so I think that's the fun counterbalance to AI for me is we are still human beings.

I am still here sitting, talking to you. We're all listening to this together. It's going to be about how we are meeting people in the marketplace and the natural next fit. And so that personal brand can be a benefit to your company. You can be out here kind of sharing a perspective that resonates in the industry and elevates the kind of power and clout of your business that's phenomenal.

You know, worst case scenario, you're doing something that hurts your brand. But I think that being silent is not really an option for CMAs anymore. You have to be out there kind of commenting on what's happening. And I think that's valuable for your broader team as well. I think that's something not to forget, is that I know that our marketing team is looking at this.

I'm speaking to other leaders and partners, and we're all learning from how we're approaching the same problems. And so it's about that human discussion that's happening. AI is a fun augment that is going to help us push that. Our message is going to help inform how we adapt to the marketplace. But having conversations with real people at the end of the day is what it comes down to.

For me.

Daniel Burstein: Well, in the second half of this episode, we're going to talk about some lessons that Millie learned from those relationships with real people. But first I should mention something about AI, how I made it in marketing podcast is brought to you by Meek Labs AI, the parent company of Marketing Sherpa. Transform your intellectual property into a revenue engine in just days, and just 21 days, you can pilot your first AI powered product.

Learn more at MC labs ai.com. That's NC labs ai.com from the parent company of marketing. Sharp up. All right. Let's talk about some of these people that you learn some of these human relationships that you learn from. Millie. You mentioned Michelle sitting in the CMO and your former colleague at Med Bridge, and you said for Michelle, you learned to build a for your audience.

How did you learn this from Michelle?

Millie Hogue: Oh, man. Michelle is a phenomenal marketing leader, and I think that everybody has one person in their career who really drives home what it is ultimately a fairly simple truth. So building for your audience is not unusual. And yet to this day, I think it is something that I still see. Even C-suite leaders sometimes struggle with. It's not unique to marketing.

Obviously. Everyone needs to be building for their audience, and that's something I spend a fair bit of time coaching my team on is thinking about, okay, yes, someone is asking you a question of marketing. If you were presenting that to me, you throw in a whole bunch of jargon and you can tell me all of our stats and our nitty gritty reporting.

Fantastic. I'm excited to see it. If I am reporting that to the board of investors, and not a single person on there comes from a marketing background, I need to bridge the gap. And certainly if I'm reporting to, you know, a 1000 person all hands company call, it changes again. And so really, really getting down to that question every single time I create a piece of reporting was something that Michelle really worked with me on.

And I think it is just a universal principle that applies to all of marketing. I said this before, but it is our job to know our audience. That is really what marketing is here to do in the business. Sales is here to get in front of them and advocate for our services. Marketing is here to understand them, to feed them content that responds to their thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams.

But to do that, we have to be the advocate for the customer. That's who we are at the end of the day as a department. And so that principle that Michelle kind of drove home with me of sitting down and thinking every time I'm creating a read out, every time I'm writing a piece of content, every time I'm making a piece of creative, starting with who is going to use this at the end of the day and why?

And what do I want it to trigger for them emotionally? That's super important. And she was such a phenomenal coach and mentor in that arena.

Daniel Burstein: Well, part of that, as we talked about in some of her previous lessons, is that internal communication making sure you're getting the right messaging across your organization. So I wonder, since Coda has been acquired by IBM, have you learned anything or have any specific examples of how you figured out how to navigate IBM to help build for your audience?

So as I mentioned earlier in my career, I was a contractor in IBM doing sales enablement, IBM rational, and it's a big organization or complex. I mean, IBM was this way. I'm sure others were. Even when you talk about sales, there's not one sales organization. There's multiple sales organizations of different overlapping, you know, ways, and there's so many organizations.

So when you come from a smaller company and you go into such a major enterprise, I think part of success is not just the things we typically talk about. CMO is getting the branding right. Like we said, the messaging, the demand generation funnel, it's learning. Okay, how do I now navigate this much larger organization to one, get the resources I need to do the right things to be a team player, but also to make sure they understand what we're doing, how they can help, how we can help.

So I don't know if there's any specific stories you can share. So exciting. I'm sure. Hokkaido getting acquired by IBM, a lot of wonderful things with that, but also comes with that, like how do you navigate that so you can build for your audience?

Millie Hogue: Yeah, no, that's a huge change, right. Yeah, I referenced before, we're sitting around 500 people that are just to IBM is 300,000.

Daniel Burstein: All over.

Millie Hogue: The world. You want me to that little change every single day. But somewhere around that number, they're huge. And they're a fantastic organization. They have over 100 years of, you know, legacy in this industry and just this huge, powerful brand. But no, that's a huge piece. And so there are a few things that we do that I think have been really successful.

We actually use them with other partners as well. So it wasn't a totally new motion for us. As soon as I kind of knew this was coming down the pipeline. This is one of the very first questions that I started asking was, how do we, as a marketing team, take everything we do in great and now go show it to 300,000 more people?

That's a big ask for a team of nine internally. So when we kind of sat down, we had a few tools that we highlighted that were like, yes, this is absolutely going to be part of it. I think there's some old tries and truths, you know, email newsletters, always good. You may get high open rates.

You may not. Depends on the person. But what we've really liked was 1 to 1 advertising. So we have a tool that we use that can push our messaging across media. So that's Instagram and Facebook, across search, across LinkedIn, across, you know, being all of the different things, all the different platforms where people are consuming information.

It just spams us one message. And you can do it to specific individuals. So we sat down and we segmented and we said, hey, okay, we've got these specific industry messages, we've got these specific campaign messages. We can learn who's kind of owning which accounts and which is going to be relevant for these. And then we can segment it, divide it and send it to these 30 people.

Get this message, these 60 people get this message. So that's been really fun. But outside of that, working with IBM just opens up a whole new world of resources. So we kind of started talking about audiences and content. IBM has something called the Institute for Business Value, where all they do is research their audience and put out these really phenomenal reports.

And so some of the journey for me is just getting plugged in with the right, really incredible marketers at IBM and figuring out, okay, how do we play with this? How do we get access to this data and make it something that we get to use to? So there's a whole big task out in front of us, which is to educate, you know, a few hundred thousand more people.

And then there's this great big opportunity, which is we've got a brand that's over 100 years old and has such positive recognition, and we've got all these big new resources that we never would have had before.

Daniel Burstein: So there's a lot of great examples that we need to have and want to make sure I understand, because it sounds fascinating to me. I hadn't heard this back in day. IBM, you're using external platforms to communicate to IBM like to, which would normally be an internal communication strategy. Is that is that right.

Millie Hogue: So for example yeah. Are we we are using a tool that let's say you work at IBM. I'm going to say, I know that you own several accounts that are doing SAP analytics work, and I want to get in front of that. I can send you a message on your Instagram and your Facebook and your Google search, and it's, hey, hacker is now a part of IBM and we have this SAP expertise.

Here's a few client case studies. Let's talk about who this might be relevant for, because that's a huge opportunity source for us.

Daniel Burstein: Now that's fascinating. Using external platforms for internal communications. Yeah. To stay creative in this business. Right.

Millie Hogue: You do all right.

Daniel Burstein: Well we talk about that that bigger team, the bigger IBM team. But you have a specific team as well. And you said that you learned that the success of your team is your success. And you said you learned this from Claire Kurland, former colleague who's also a CMO. So how do you learn this from Claire Mann?

Millie Hogue: I think if you're lucky, you will have a few leaders like this in your career kind of show you to their core what it means to elevate the people around you. But Claire was a really phenomenal example of this for me. So I think that especially as you kind of get into the sea level, there are a lot of different approaches to leadership.

And some of them are really and it probably depends on the company culture too, but some of them can get focused on, hey, here's all the things I did me, me, me personally, the leaders that I always admire the most are the people who talk about what their team accomplish. And yes, they're they're singing in the background, you know, that leader is responsible for that function of the business, but what they spend their time talking about and highlighting is the individuals on their team and their success.

Claire is really, really great at that. And she kind of goes through very concrete. So when she has air time with a board of investors, when she has air time with other sea leaders, that's what I saw her doing so consistently. It was talking about what the team was working on. So each kind of sea level leader understood.

Here's the value. This person, this is bringing on the marketing team. Here's what they're responsible for, and then tying it right back to the business value. And that's something that a leader can do really, really well. And one, I think it's just a brilliant strategy for indicating why you need people on your team and argument that you, you know, sometimes have to have in business is why are we funding this?

What's the value this role in particular is bringing, so that when you go and say, hey, I need additional headcount, everyone is already kind of indoctrinated into this conversation of, yeah, okay, I know what content does because, you know, Zachary runs that for us right now. And here's all the incredible things I know he's been doing because I've heard it often.

The marketing leader. And yeah, if we need another person who's going to do more of that, it just makes it way more easy for folks to get invested. And then on the level of the individual, of course, you're helping to accelerate their career. They feel seen and valued. And when they have a conversation with the CEO in the break room, the CEO has something to talk to them about because they know what they've been doing.

Daniel Burstein: Absolutely. And I wonder, so that's a great internal lesson. And I wonder if an external version of that is the success of your customer is your success. And you mentioned many times you drive way out to that Denver airport you have on a plane. You're talking to customers personally. How do you use those conversations? Because I've talked to some marketers who are like, you know, they're helping build a product.

They're helping make sure their customer is successful. They're kind of tearing down any internal walls coming up with, you know, product features and ideas, making sure individual, you know, customer's work and, you know, other marketers are more they're kind of more focused on maybe their marketing lane, but are getting case studies or, you know, they're really just understanding usage or specific wording or titles they should focus on or any of that stuff.

So, I love this. The success of your team is your success. I'm sure the success of your customers is your success as well. So can you give us any specific examples of when you're actually hopping on that plane, actually meeting with customers, what you're doing with that information, how you're using it?

Millie Hogue: Yeah, man, that is the most important thing. And I love that as like the internal external external version of that lesson, it is the same. So when I'm out with customers, I usually I'm trying to bring on at least one person from my team, to also attend that in here. So sometimes that's where I did an executive event and my director of events gets to be there, and she's going to hear everything that's happening.

She's going to watch what resonates, what lights up their eyes and what doesn't. So there's all these soft things that, you know, I would never say I could just sit down and, like, write this into an email. They would get it. So more than ever, I am trying to get my team in the room with customers as well.

It's not just me, but when it is me, by myself. If we're having a closed door conversation, my biggest focus is on those kind of human emotions. What are they excited about? Where are they afraid of? What are their hopes? What are they like? Really, really wishing what happened next? And if I can take those kind of big three things and funnel that back to my team and all of these soft conversations that we have every single week, then I have done my job well and it's not, you know, yes, I could sit down and talk to you about the deal size and whether it's, you know, growing or shrinking and all of that

is a piece of it. But they can also go look at that in the CRM where they can't pick out without me sitting there and kind of relaying that information back is the emotional soft responses. And so that's what I focus on when I'm with customers in that room. And that's what I try to feedback to the team.

And then beyond that, there is nothing better than getting a customer to sit down for a client story. You actually and you have this free rein license to ask them about what went well, what went poorly, what they're excited about, and to craft this story together. So all of that is really useful and every single member of the team watches.

So, you know, that's important. If someone is taking the time to sit down and record this with you, I want my entire marketing team spending the five minutes to watch what comes out of it. That's really important, too.

Daniel Burstein: You know, the reason that so great that human element is I always hear that term business to business, right. It's not really business is human beings who work in businesses to other human beings who work in businesses. So hats off to you for, you know, knowing their humanity and trying to learn more about it.

Millie Hogue: I think we'll all just keep moving more in that direction as technology advances. That's the value we bring. It's our relationships. It's an understanding of emotion. We're just going to have to lean further and further into it. I think as the years progressed.

Daniel Burstein: You know, that's one thing I agree with. I, too, that there's always a pendulum swing and sometimes it's doing kind of the counterbalance. That pendulum is what's the really successful thing versus going all in on it. Well, we talked about so many different elements of what it means to be a marketer from your stories that, you know, teamwork with sales, that learning about your customers, if you had to break it down for us, really, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Millie Hogue: Man, I would say the most important quality of an effective marketer in this day and age is really someone who can adapt quickly and who cares about the client. It's those two things, and that's going to show up in a million different ways as they go through their day to day, depending on their role. But technology is changing so quickly.

We've said that a million times, but it means there are incredible new tools coming out. I've looked at tools in the last month that I'm like, yes, green light, let's go. Let's use it. That four months ago I was saying that wasn't right. Technology is changing at a pace that I think we've never seen. So people who are curious and ready to adapt quickly and can help surface that new tack and bring it to your team with kind of enthusiasm and a lot of legitimate kind of concern for how it's going to impact the business value.

Absolutely incredible. Those are qualities that I look for in marketers. I like to say you can learn a lot that that quality of being curious, of wanting to find new things that you can adapt, that's in built on some level. You just need somebody who lives and breathes that. And then the other piece is you got to have somebody who has a strong sense of empathy.

Because that's what you're asking them to do. You don't care as you're going through, you know, maybe marketing ops will be what you think is most divorced from, that empathy with the client. At the end of the day, we're actually still telling a story with that marketing operations data to our clients, to our internal customers, all of those different groups.

So there's nobody who shouldn't be invested in the empathy of that client and user experience. And that's two key traits that I think you just cannot operate without.

Daniel Burstein: Well, I love hearing you say empathy and enthusiasm, because I think that very much sums up the conversation we had and that you brought to us today. Melissa, thank you very much for sharing your career journey, all the lessons and stories from it.

Millie Hogue: Thank you so much. It's been wonderful to be on it.

Daniel Burstein: And 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 RPA ecom.