Customer Experience: Great experiences are invisible, but they require relentless alignment (podcast episode #145)

Action Box: Align your team with a well-defined value proposition

Relentless alignment is key to CX and business success. A well-defined value prop can help you get that alignment. This MeclabsAI Workflow makes it easier – Is your value prop strong enough? (from MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa’s parent company).

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

That is a famous quote from Anton Chekhov, and it has informed everything I personally do in writing and marketing.

And it’s why I was so excited to read a podcast guest application that referenced the famous writer’s maxim I’ve lived my career by – show, don’t tell.

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I sat down with Dave Anderson, Vice President of Product Marketing, Contentsquare.

Contentsquare has secured $1.4 billion in funding, including most recently a $600 million Series F, at which point it was valued at $5.6 billion.

Anderson manages a global distributed team of 10 across France, UK, Spain and the US, and currently manages 10 AI tools as well.

Hear the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Listen on Amazon Music

Lessons from the things he made

Great experiences are invisible, but they require relentless alignment

While leading a digital marketing team, Anderson’s team was constantly running into one issue: the checkout page broke after login.

Everyone had a different opinion. Devs were watching CPU metrics, Product was blaming design, Marketing cared only about MQLs. He pulled the team into a “Skunk Works” project, shielding 20% of their time to fix just this issue.

They mapped the full experience, identified pain points, and doubled conversion.

Lesson: simplicity, alignment, and user-first thinking can unlock massive gains but only when you carve out protected creative space.

One place Anderson goes to learn about the customer so he can help his team create great experiences is Reddit. He said Reddit is good for making connections as well. For example, he found that four-time Olympic gold medalist Libby Trickett wanted to know when Peloton’s treadmill would come out. So he connected Peloton with Trickett and helped her become a Peloton ambassador and get a sponsorship.

Telling stories with data creates internal momentum

At Contentsquare, Anderson pushed his teams to stop reporting metrics like bounce rate or error count in isolation. Instead, the team paired the data with user session replays and behavioral insights.

They didn't just say “conversion is down.” They showed how a mobile form’s zoom feature improved conversion by 11%. Suddenly, product and execs leaned in. Storytelling with data creates urgency and alignment.

He talked about the importance of storytelling in MarTech by discussing the marketing technology landscape supergrahics Scott Brinker creates with all the logos of all the different options. Anderson gave an example of how listening to Simon Sinek’s ‘Start With Why’ presentation helped him come up with just such a story for a software company, so the company wasn’t just another logo in a sea of sameness.

Experimentation wins, but only if it’s cultural

After COVID hit, Anderson began interviewing tech leaders for his podcast and repeatedly heard the same theme: culture drives innovation. Inspired by Marc Randolph (Netflix co-founder), Anderson helped a major retail brand implement A/B testing not just for UI tweaks, but for photography direction. They used behavioral data to brief their photo team. It boosted engagement and revenue -- all from a single A/B test.

Lesson: experimentation isn't just a tactic. it has to be embedded across every function.

Lessons from the people he made it with

Don’t make assumptions. Listen to customers.

via Magic Johnson, former NBA legend and Starbucks investor

Anderson met Johnson at an event and told Johnson he idolized the NBA legend’s work – not just on the court, but in business. Johnson once told Howard Schultz that for Starbucks to succeed in underserved communities, they had to swap Elton John for Lionel Richie and ditch the scones for donuts.

That story stuck with Anderson. It taught him the importance of listening to customers over assumptions, and he now applies that to every digital experience strategy he builds.

Show, don’t tell

via Luke Tucker, LinkedIn Relationship Manager

Tucker helped guide their team through the early stages of social selling. He didn’t just pitch a tool; he told a story.

He filtered LinkedIn for CX job titles right in front of their marketing team and Anderson’s team instantly saw their target market. That moment taught him the power of showing, not telling, and how the right advocate can change internal momentum.

Innovation isn’t about waiting for a perfect idea, its about moving fast, failing smart, and building a culture that learns at speed.

via Marc Randolph, Netflix co-founder

At the Dynatrace Go Event in July 2020, Anderson had the chance to speak with Randolph – and he didn’t deliver a keynote, he delivered a mindset. He walked through how Netflix wasn’t born from a bold vision, but from relentless testing of bad ideas until something clicked. The story that stuck with Anderson: mailing a CD in a pink envelope just to see if it would arrive intact.

That scrappy, no-slides-needed test sparked Netflix. Randolph reminded Anderson that innovation isn’t about waiting for a perfect idea but about moving fast, failing smart, and building a culture that learns at speed.

Discussed in this episode

Corporate Marketing: Feedback is respect (podcast episode #44)

Creating a Culture of Testing: How to defeat the tyranny of best practices

Show, Don’t Tell: 3 quick case studies where companies help customers reach their own conclusions

Get more episodes

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages free digital marketing course.

Full Transcript

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

Dave Anderson: I love having a conversation with customer like the customer. Conversations and stories to me are the bedrock of like why I do what I do and I learn nearly everything that we need to do. On positioning from talking to customers, not from talking to the product teams. So a conversation with a customer would be ideal. And then look, I'm using A.I. these days for at least an hour or two hours a day.

I think it's super important to to experiment with use user for writing, for positioning. So I'm always playing with that.

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 and.

Daniel Burstein: Don't tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass. That is a famous quote from Anton Chekhov, and it has informed everything I personally do in writing and marketing. And that's why I was so excited to create a podcast guest application that referenced a famous writer's maxim. I've lived my career by show.

Don't tell. You can share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories. Is Dave Anderson, the vice president of product marketing at Content Square. Thanks for joining us, Dave.

Dave Anderson: Hey, Daniel, it's great to be here.

Daniel Burstein: I'm going to tell the audience a bit about who I'm talking to right now. Dave has been a campaign and advertising manager for HP, who's been an SVP of marketing at Dynatrace. He's a social ambassador for peloton, so I'm sure he's in great shape. Just cherry picking there some from his LinkedIn. But for the past three years, he's been at Content Square.

Content square has secured $1.4 billion in funding, including most recently, a $600 million series F, at which point was valued at $5.6 billion. Anderson manages a global distributed team of ten across France, U.K., Spain, the US, and he calls himself a software junkie, so he also currently manages at least ten AI tools as well. So, Dave, give us a sense.

What is your day like as vice president of product marketing?

Dave Anderson: Depends if it's a good day or a bad day. I think a good day of anyone that's a product marketer knows that being either in product or in marketing, you kind of stuck in this world where you have everything and everyone coming at you. And so it's a wonderful position to be because you're really the glue that keeps the company together.

But you also it's really challenging, because there's limited resources and you want to do so much. So great day for me. If I were to summarize, is to connect with my team. I love to look at the analytics. So I will look at some statistics and I'll play with some of our software. I love having a conversation with customer like the customer conversations and stories to me are the bedrock of like why I do what I do, and I learn nearly everything that we need to do on positioning from talking to customers, not from talking to the product teams.

So a conversation with a customer would be ideal. And then look, I'm using AI these days for at least an hour or two hours a day. I think is super important to to experiment with the user for writing, for positioning. So I'm always playing with that. And a great day to finish is a peloton workout. I even start with a peloton workout or I finish with a peloton workout.

Obviously, sometimes it's both in the same day and then hang out with my kids and I work from home, so I love spending time with my family, and I've recently relocated from Australia to Boston. So just at, learning how the kids are going through their life in a new environment and a new city is, is really special for me.

I just, I love learning, I have a thirst for learning new things and experiencing it. So a great day for me is when I learn from people.

Daniel Burstein: Welcome to the U.S and I don't want to dredge up the negative too much, but give us a sense what happens in a bad day.

Dave Anderson: The bad day starts with, you know, that launch that we had planned for next week or the month after? And and I'm living through some of this now and we're going to delay that a little while now. And, and that other thing that we thought that we were going to, to price and do this way, we're not going to do that this way.

We think we've changed our minds. We're going to do this, we're going to do that. So there's a lot of I don't know if it's the European side of the company. I work for content Square. Working for a French company is incredible. They have amazing off sites there. So passionate about what they do. So they bring this they bring this energy that I think is missing sometimes.

And other times they bring like this. They bring their whole selves and they feel so passionate about it, but it means they also don't agree all the time. So we have to fight over the decisions that we want to get over the line. So a bad day is where we make decisions that change from what we did before, and things get thrown into a bit of chaos.

And I say that's bad. I also, I love a little bit of chaos because it makes you react, it makes life less boring. So you get to do different things and you have to you have to solve some challenges that have been really difficult. So, I'd say that that's that's, that's a, that's a bad day. I don't have that many bad days.

Daniel Burstein: Well, let's take a walk through Dave's career so we can learn some lessons from the things you mean. As I said before, I've never been in any other industry. I've never been, like, a podiatrist or an accurate. But we get to make things. I think that's all different. And sometimes we learn more from the bad days in a good day.

So let's see what we can learn from from all those days you've had in your career so far, Dave? The first lesson you mentioned is great experiences are invisible, but they require relentless alignment. How did you learn this lesson?

Dave Anderson: I've, Like, I'm, I don't know, I'm mid-forties now. I've grown up in. And we've grown up in this world where we were like pre digital. We saw digital come in more, you know, I had conversations with people about others run fax campaigns and it just blew my mind. I couldn't believe the world before the internet. And and then we have like direct mail and, and so there's just this been an evolution of channels.

And I was one of the first people to bring social media to, to HP. And, at the time we had Compaq iPAC phones and everyone was getting iPhones. And I was like, how do I manage the social media account at HP with an iPad? I can't download the app. And they said if it's revenue generating, you can justify getting an app.

And I said, okay, but I set up the Twitter account and I started monitoring for people that was searching for HP, and I found a customer, a large financial services customer that was searching for an IBM competitive product. And I replied to that person on this new social media account, and we got into a dialog together, brand new to Twitter at the time, which is not even called Twitter anymore.

Of course it's called X. I'll get to the point why this is so important. What what happened was that the customer said, I don't get customer experience from HP. I never get replies from the sales reps. They ignore me because I'm like, apparently too small of an account. And I'm like, this is one of the largest financial services organizations in Australia.

It's not too small. This must be an oversight that they haven't replied. And in the end, we were able to get a proposal on the desk and the person replied back to me, said, thank you so much, this is brilliant. Unfortunately, we're going to go with the competitive offer because we have a relationship with them. But I'll tell you what was good about it.

It allowed me to pay for my iPhone. So a justification of my iPhone was it was nearly revenue generating. But the thing that's interesting, the story about that is I think there's there's so many channels in which we communicate today. So if we fast forward to where we are today, we're communicating on the planet. The way I was communicating with, Holla Live, I, WhatsApp message and I get communications via emails and I get Instagram ads, and I'm on websites and I'm on apps and I talk to people, and there are so many channels in which you get customer experience from brands, and there's not a very good way yet to really measure

how all of that experience overlays to a great experience for someone. And I think sometimes we can do this with analytics, but sometimes we also miss the fundamentals of actually just delivering a great experience to someone. And it's a personal experience. So it's just taking that next step and you'll find that disruptive small brands are the ones that do a really good job at it.

So I just think the the invisibility behind it is not yeah, there's two parts to it. One is it can be measured, but we're too stuck in our ways or it's too hard to learn how to measure it. So we don't. So a lot of people in marketing will use vanity metrics. They'll justify it when they get question on why is the bounce rate this?

They connect to the question because they don't truly know, and they're not able to dig down because they're not inquisitive enough to really dive into what could have happened. And then the second one is it's just some of it is like it's qualitative feedback that's really hard to measure. And so I think we're in this world where the single biggest differentiator of every company is the experience that they deliver.

And we are not doing a good enough job to solve it.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, a good that. So there's a customer experience element. But there's also you know, I like how you talked about going around the world and being with customers. There's also the learning from customers element. And I wonder if there's anything you do to use the social channels of today to learn from the customers and then improve the product.

Obviously, Content Square is a company well known for making products that help others learn from customers, improve their product when you get to the website, but when they're out in the wild, when they're possibly using a competitor. Is there anything you figured out, too? Yes, there's a metrics, but just to get that wisdom and then to improve your product with that wisdom.

Dave Anderson: I think the hard thing is, yeah, there are software like Content Square and the experience analytics and web analytics software that can give marketers insights into what's happening. And I think that's like one data point and that's great. It gets increasingly complex when you're trying to monitor or analyze like a million different users. And you want to get to this.

Everyone is talking about the the personalization website of one or app of one where you get this personalized experience. Just for me, that is beyond human capability. That's not you're not capable to segment a website down to all the different variations and permutations of 1 million to 1. And so I think what happens and what I'm recognizing is there's a maturity level of people out there.

There is like the smaller teams that go, it's just too hard. Don't bother will go and gut reaction and we'll just do what we've always done. There are teams that are striving that are like, I think we know. I think we know how we're going to do this. And they start using experience analytics tools and product analytics tools or web analytics with whatever analytics tools, right to try and understand.

And then that informs the product roadmaps and the decisions that they make. So they make decisions with data, the kind of insight driven organizations, and they're the ones that are typically more successful because they actually deliver what customers want. And then there are the unicorns, which always feels unfair. There are the spotifys and the apples and the and the Netflix of the world that are leveraging AI to an extreme that is untouchable for most other organizations.

But what these organizations often do, and they've done this for a decade now, is they impart their wisdom on other teams. And if you're willing to listen and to hear what they're doing, this has happened through developer movements forever. This is where, like microservices came from a long time ago. And I'm talking more like on an engineering standpoint now, not marketing per se, but people that are really, really good at what they do will impart the wisdom on to others.

And if you listen to what they're doing, you too can learn what they're doing and you can pick up on some of the things so you can leverage AI to start automating your reporting. You can use AI to start personalizing experiences, and you two can start to learn, because this world's going to be fundamentally different in five, ten years.

I have extreme optimism, and at the same time, I have this paranoid fear that AI will be super, super disruptive and it's up to us to make it a positive thing, a non negative thing. And so I sort of preach for the positive side. But I think there's no one piece of advice. My piece of advice is to continue to learn and to continue to listen and continue to pay attention and then try and make decisions with the data that you have and automate as much as you can.

Daniel Burstein: So I agree that automation personalization are great. Do you make any time in your personal day to day, or make your team time your personal day to day just for that kind of human outreach and monitoring that you mentioned you did many years ago? And I ask this because when I interviewed the chief commercial officer of Mint Mobile on how I mean, marketing, one thing he told me is he's on Reddit all the time, especially when they launch a new promotion.

And this was this was even before they sold. And it just shocked me that I'm like, how do you take the time to to be on the other end? He's like, it's just too valuable. You've got to figure it out. You've got to get on there. He's like, it's amazing seeing the customers talk about us. So just what technology is great.

Like how do you set up the human element of that?

Dave Anderson: The internet is it's it's two elements to that one. It's like the physical conversation you can have with someone. And so I always make time, and I've always made time to really listen to customers and their stories and how they're using products and what are their challenges and what do they want to do, like hearing from a power user and going to the events.

And I always find time to walk around and just talk to random people randomly. If they've not using a product, they are using it. They've been using it for a while from different countries. I gather all of those stories and and yeah, I 100% encourage my team to conduct at least one customer interview per week so that we're having conversations and we feed those conversations back and we feed them to sales.

I have one like late last night, I'm at an offsite. It's 9 p.m. in France, and there's cocktails and happy hour going on. And I took the time to to meet with a really important customer in New York. And we're going to present together on stage next week and really understand the challenges. What are they doing? So there's that element of storytelling that I think is, is super important.

And then there's the other one, which is what you said, the internet is the biggest focus group. It's like, it's incredible what people share. You can learn anything you want from for and Reddit is incredible. From all of the different forums, from social media, like I was saying with Twitter in the past, like Reddit's the new Twitter, it's incredible for learning stuff on that.

That's how I became a social media ambassador for peloton, which is a passion for loving it. Wondered why they hadn't come out in Australia. I started going through the forums, found Libby Trickett, who's a four time Olympic gold medalist who happened to be a peloton advocate, loved the product and wanted to know why the treadmill hadn't come out.

And I connected Peloton to Libby Trickett and got her an ambassador and a sponsorship. And so I just think the world is it is, I just, you know, you go back to stories like it's all of these are what people are posting online of stories, what we do in conversations, the stories that we do on this podcast, the stories.

It's just about opening your ears and listening and being part of the conversation. And you just learn so much. It can be addictive though. But but it's but it's incredible.

Daniel Burstein: In a good way. Well, let's talk about stories that you said one of your lessons is telling stories with data creates internal momentum. So how do you learn this? Have you done this?

Dave Anderson: There's lots of ways in which I've told this one. I laugh at this story because, I long not a long time ago, 2 or 3 years ago, I worked for a team of. I hired some incredible, conversion optimization marketers. They were exceptional, understanding user journeys and then designing journeys. I also worked for a CEO that was in had incredible business acumen and thought he was a marketer.

And I know that there are so many maybe marketers listening to this now that have worked for a CEO or a business leader, and they get frustrated that it's like, why do they think they know more than me when I have the data points and the experience? But they're the CEO, and so sometimes you have to listen to them.

And anyway, this one particular time, the CEO told me that the home pages, his and the product pages his. And I said, that's fine. But the way people consume a journey when they're going to take a trial for the software is they don't just go home. Page, product page, I'm going to contact someone or I'm going to take the trial.

There are many different ways in which they flow, and if you analyze the journeys, you can start to improve the path. And that's exactly what I did with our team, where I was stuck in a scenario that the CEO wanted to achieve. Home page in a platform page and nothing else. And he was a scary guy, so I didn't want to.

I didn't want to tell him otherwise. But what I did is I told the team, knowing full well that if I said to the team, sorry guys, I know you are experts and I know you know that this is wrong, but the CEO said this, so you have to do it instead. I said go do it. Go build me what you think this should look like.

Please implement what he's saying today and let's compare. And we're going to run. Please don't do this in the US. Make sure you know he's IP address. But we're going to run a trial which a lot of companies do. They'll run it in Australia in New Zealand. So we ran a trial of the new version of this journey path in Australia, in New Zealand.

And we ran the rest in the rest of the world. Lo and behold, the experts in my team that have been doing this for years and know how to optimize journeys absolutely smashed the conversions. So we had the highest conversion rate, the highest activation right we've ever had. Probably double what was there originally. And the next week, when the CEO asked me how did the new home page and platform page perform, I said it performed marginally better than it did previously, but let me tell you, we ran an experiment in Australia and New Zealand and we've doubled the numbers and he went silent and he looked at me and he has a glare and he

went, brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And I went great. And so we were able to roll that out across. And that story is great for two reasons. One is experimentation is critical because you're making decisions with the data that you say. And we're often wrong when we make assumptions, but also the morale that that generated from the team, knowing that they were allowed to experiment and they were proven to be right.

And I feel now trust in my leadership, but they also feel confidence. And they feel like making a difference means that they turn up to the next meeting with more ideas to go the next step further. If I had to shut them down, you're back to like, you know, it was the start here the other day. 16% of people are actually engaged at work.

Oh, wow. 16%. And that's like if my if what I had have done, which is said the CEO makes the decision on the home page, on the platform page, I'm back to having that 16% again of what? Just people that don't give us stuff about the job that they do, but these people care. And they kept going and they they just and we got the confidence from the CEO to keep going.

So so that's just a good example of like use data, experiment, give, empower people to make decisions. Without you I think it's super important.

Daniel Burstein: So I love that. That's a great example. But sometimes with the internal examples too, we're able to use data to tell a story, have that personal relationship. We can talk back and forth like you said. Do you have any examples of using data to tell a story, a story externally to a customer? So, for example, when I interviewed Lucas Welch, the vice president of corporate marketing at High Spot, one of his lessons was PR and storytelling come first, and he told the story of, you know, that's how you build a brand.

When I see so many companies today, especially tech companies like I see, I see two things I see sometimes just data, right? They just putting the data out there. Sometimes they have stories are not backed up. But I think sometimes we have a hard time mixing the two. Right. There is a story, but it's backed up by data.

So do you have any examples of marrying the data in the storytelling for external messaging to a customer, maybe in a more mass fashion?

Dave Anderson: Yeah, I think, so again, like, I've worked in the industry for a few decades and I, I remember, remember Scott to bring it used to do I think it was Scott to bring did this software slide. And he was like the state of SAS and each year it was like a hundred logos. Then it was 500 logos.

There was a thousand logos. It was like 5000 logos. And you're like, how are you going to stand out in a world where there is like a hundred competitors all doing exactly the same thing? And I'm a big fan of listening to Simon Sinek. And I was walking one day and I was listening to what he had to say, and it was that famous presentation of like, ask why?

Like keep asking why? And, and I it was funny because for me, sometimes things have to happen twice or three times before they really drop and I go, oh my God. And it was the same thing that happened to me when I was doing an MBA, and I was getting terrible results in my results in my papers. And a Danish guy said to me, you're not asking why you're not getting to the bottom.

You're not getting to the very bottom of why this exists and what you should do about it. And we have a, a at Dynatrace we had it as well, which is a Japanese, saying, I've asked five times what. So you've got to get to the very bottom. Long story short, I listen to this podcast, I came in and I go, why does Dynatrace even exist?

Well, why why is this company here for? And it was like. Like what you're saying data points on, like, faster development, less errors. And I just, like, gives a shit. These people are they bet careers on making a difference. And these people work here and the people that work in legal and that that's not what they're here for.

They here because this company has a mission and a purpose, and the mission and purpose in so many companies can sound super wishy washy. And it can come from H.R. And at Dynatrace, it came from me. One day I was sitting there with a coffee for an hour going, but why is this company really here? What I wanted, I wanted the community of Dynatrace, the people that were advocates that sign up to get certified, that bet their career on the company.

I want them to feel proud of the cause that they to in parking in parting. And that's part of the story. And the story was when I got to the very bottom of it, it's like this entire world is digital. Everything that we need to do is run by software. So whether it's this communication medium that we're doing right now, whether it's learning, whether it's calling your loved ones, whether it's transacting, whether it's e-commerce, driving in Ubers, whatever the whole world runs on software, airplanes, you name it.

And that software has to work perfectly. There are billions of lines of code, and one line of code goes wrong and everything stops. And that was at that point that I was attaching Dynatrace to a much bigger story, which is we help buy the software in the world run perfectly, and when we did that, we came back from that high level.

And it meant when I would do presentations to customers, it would be, you have the most important job in, in. And I always say this, so whether it's digital experience or someone else, but I say to the advocates in that room, the people that are doing development and operations that are writing the code for the applications that run their business, I say you have the most important job in the world, because if your code fails, the whole bank stops.

And and so the people, it's one of those like, you're right, my job means something, I mean something. And so it meant something to our developers at Dynatrace and the engineers that were developing the software that was developing it for everybody else. And so I'm I'm immensely proud of the work that I did for that, because it meant that was what we hung on the stock exchange when we IPO.

It's what's written on the walls in Linux in Australia and the development, R&D, and it's a cause. And I think it's not a cause that someone like the other thing that's super important. I said, I wrote it, it came from me understanding what others do. It also came from me then working with the rest of the team to to workshop with them and say, please tell me how this isn't right.

Please tell me how. Like I want everyone to feel like they own this. And we did a cross-functional group. We didn't bring an agency in. We didn't do feelings and values and all those things. We did it core to us over a coffee. And we went and we had a feeling and we walked out of that meeting, and I had Austrian engineers that are very non-emotional come up to me and go, I love this, I love this so much.

And the next they had stickers and they and the rest is history. It worked. These things work and a purpose will work when it's used and people believe in it and it doesn't need explaining anymore. And I think that's that's the key to it. And that's was was part of the messaging. And I think it it worked really nicely.

Daniel Burstein: What you just said, that story told is why I love being in marketing. Right? I think marketing sometimes kind of misunderstood is like, well, I'm selling a bunch of junk or hitting a bunch of number of people in the buying stuff. But in my career, the way I've loved it is getting in the room with value creators, creating types of value that I can't possibly create.

But they can't communicate, right? Yeah, and they'll just throw a bunch of numbers out sometimes and helping them. Right. Like you said, it's not creating it. It's helping get out of them. What is the value here? And then communicating the value. So that is a beautiful thing that we do in this world. Software engineers are there.

Dave Anderson: To do 100%. And it's down to the storytelling like we were doing it today with Content Square. And it's like it gets down to like, you know, how I was telling the story about the 5000 logos that are on the slide? It's like when someone when someone tries to remember you is that company. The brand is what they remember us.

It's not what you told them, it's what they remember you as they go. Like you're that visual on an analytics company that does that super interesting visualization over a slide or something, and you go, so everyone knows this is that you either change it or you lean into it and then you go, okay, you also want to be known.

Of course, everyone wants to be known for AI or something. So then you weave in like, okay, it's AI, but it's this. And so I think good product marketing and good brand market isn't just good marketers for that matter, will lean into themes, they'll stay consistent to a story, and they'll make it believable. So it's memorable. Let's see other true test that I'll always do.

And I just did a workshop with the team here, and I changed our messaging pillars that they had for for the next launch coming up. And I go, no one remembers. Four people only remember three and five. Four is a weird number and you can't have two. You have to have three. I don't know why it's a rule of three.

So I changed it to three. And then I said, these are the pillars. And I gave them the pillars. And then I was talked about something else. And then I said, can anyone remember what those three pillars were? And then when they started reciting back to me what the pillars were, I went, they get it. This is believable.

This is this is my own focus group and it's memorable and it's going to work. And you do the same thing the next day and then, you know, it sticks. So it's it's leaving it. It's like, you're right. Like this is why we love what we're doing because it leaves an impression. It lays a print on people, and if they recite it after the fact without even you prompting, you know, it's working.

Daniel Burstein: And so we do that internal work. We've got these great stories. That's all fantastic. But sometimes, you know, we fall in love with it a little too much internally. And that's why I like your next lesson. We got to actually see how it works with the customer. You said experimentation wins, but only if it's cultural. So you mentioned how this helped you with the SEO, I think later in your career perhaps.

Yeah. But how did you originally learn this?

Dave Anderson: My dad is a contrarian, so he does everything the opposite of what you're supposed to do. And it's like, I think I inherited that. So it's things like when you go to Ikea, you drive in the exit and then you walk in via the marketplace. You don't walk in the front door. And I actually Ikea learned a valuable lesson about how their stores don't work in the US, but that's a whole completely separate case study.

But I think the key to experimentation is you don't really ever know anything until you test it. And and I've been wrong so many times. Like you can have a gut reaction to things, but and sometimes also you can test the wrong way. So so you got to be careful not to stuff your tests up as well of who you're experimenting with or who you're asking.

Just if I take a perfect example of that, of what not to do, we at our work, we have we're working on a lot of AI content, and we're asking our core AI customers what they think about pricing and packaging and things like that. And I said to the AI leader, I said, that's basically like asking someone that ate ice cream whether they'll pay for ice cream.

What about all the other people that are using our platform that don't want to pay and don't necessarily need the AI? Like you need a broad spectrum of people. So that, off tangent a little bit, I just saying experimentation is critical in everything that you do. And it could be as simple as user testing, asking people, doing conversations like this, throwing a line out, talking to advocates, talking to analysts, talking to AI will always run ideas past analysts as well.

And it might just be another an opinion. And it also might be, you know, and this is what's interesting about leaders as well. You can also ask everyone and they'll tell you you're wrong. But if you have enough of, of enough clout and enough vision, eventually it can come around. And they're the people that completely disrupt the industry's like the conversation, I think I do a lot of podcasts, and I had a conversation with, with Magic Johnson, the basketball, who is a huge, a huge fan of mine.

Sorry. Oh, not just a very nice way. Well, he is now is we had such a good conversation the other day. Courtside tickets. This was during the night. You might want to stuff up. I'm a huge fan of his because I liked him more than Michael Jordan. Because he made his team better and always big into teams.

Anyway, the point about Magic Johnson that probably no one knows is that he's responsible for spreading Starbucks through the underprivileged, low socio economic areas of the US. I don't think anyone realizes that that's actually one of the people that did that. And in the story that he told, he said he went to Starbucks, he went to Schultz, the CEO knocked on his door.

And this is the exact story of what he said. And he went in and he said, I think Starbucks will work in Harlem and these other places. But I think the models wrong. And I went, no, we know what the model is, right? Starbucks does this. We do this coffee, we play this music, we sit like this. And he goes, no, this is what you need to do.

You need to get rid of the scones and you need to put donuts in. And you can't just serve regular coffee. You need to serve coffee with flavoring. And you need to get rid of Elton John. And you need to play Lionel Richie and I'm willing to back that I'm right because I'll fund I want to buy franchises.

And they're like, we don't do franchises. And he wouldn't take no for an answer because he's magic Johnson, one of the greatest basketball is ever. And there's like ridiculous amounts of money. And he bet him he backed himself despite what the data points told him. And he was right. And he, like, changed a company that was set on a McDonald's model to customize for that local demographic that worked and helped scale Starbucks.

But, I wouldn't say where it is today, but helped scale Starbucks at the time. And I just think that's an example of like, he probably had enough clout to know that he could experiment. He knew what the customer wanted, and he backed himself. So I think experiment is easy. We've covered that and I've said that. And I think everyone in marketing knows you've got to experiment.

I think picking the right experiments is probably the lesson. And don't don't get your experiments wrong. And the other one is sometimes you've got to back yourself. Sometimes you got to do something that everyone tells you not to do because you just have this gut feeling it's going to work well.

Daniel Burstein: I think the other lesson is, and it's a leadership question for you, how do you make it cultural? Right. Because I've written about this topic before. I've talked about how to defeat the tyranny of best practices, right? That there is a tyranny of best practices in every company. That's just human nature. We want to do it works. You experiment.

Sometimes you do what doesn't work. So how do you make this cultural celebrate?

Dave Anderson: So you have to celebrate making mistakes and learning from it and owning up. You just have to make it culturally okay for someone to go. You know, I tried this and I it didn't work. And you go, great, what's the lesson? And we we then our team made it okay to run experiments that we just made some horrific mistakes.

But the horrific that was small and incremental enough mistakes to know that that wasn't good enough. And we should adapt and we should change. And then we run other experiment and we do something else. And it's like all that you're doing all of like the stuff in life is just a series of like lots of decisions that we make.

And sometimes it's fun to make decisions that I like, take you out of the norm, or step out of your cubicle, as you used to say, and just do something a little bit innovative and radical and get excited by it. And yeah, you might miss, but you also might land on something that's incredible. Like so many of the innovations, I think if you go back through time, I know you're talking about culture.

I think I should stay on that topic. But all the innovations through time, like three and post-it notes, were a result of trying to make glue that, like, was supposed to be permanently stick, and they uncovered a post-it note sticky that kept sticking. And I've saved three in a business through a failed experiment. I think culturally, if those leaders never allowed them to experiment and try and then take something to market despite the failure, it would never have been successful.

And I think you should always have. But even with my work today, we are making mistakes, but we own them. We say it's okay, we can experiment. It's part of the cultural norms, it's part of development. It's part of what we need to do for AI because no one's going to get this. No one knows what's happening with AI.

If you say, you know, you don't, you really don't know what's going to happen. So we have to experiment. And so you have to make that cultural. You have to allow people to have the free bandwidth, the trust from leadership that they're not going to get criticized at. They're not going to be stood up in front of everyone and told that they're they're doing the wrong thing, and they themselves can accept that what they did, it didn't work, and we all learn from it.

It's continuous learning. When you continuously learn, it becomes fun and then you go, so what do we do now? What what's different? What do we change? That's the fun part.

Daniel Burstein: Well, that's what we're all about here. How we make our marketing is lessons. We just talked about some lessons from some of the things that they've made. In just a moment, we'll talk about some lessons from some of the people he learned from himself. But first I should mention that the How I Made It a marketing podcast is underwritten by Mack Labs.

I the parent company marketing Sherpa. You can get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry in our AI Guild and a community to collaborate with. Grab your free three month scholarship to the AI Guild at Joint Mic Labs. Ai.com that's join not McLeod's ai.com. Speaking of artificial intelligence, okay. One of the lessons you mentioned here, and I read this at the open.

As I said, I'm a writer. I mean, this is the most transformative lesson I've ever learned in writing or marketing or anything. And it's three simple words show, don't tell. You said you learned this from Luke Tucker, who is a LinkedIn relationship manager. So how did you learn this from Luke?

Dave Anderson: I'm a believer that and this is the most important thing for marketing that you should be a builder. You should really learn how this product works. Don't just sit there and read the manual and pretend you know what you're doing. Like, really get in there and play with it. And marketers have an awesome opportunity to do things that glue the company together.

And I think at the time I learned this from from, it was LinkedIn, very early days, and we had LinkedIn Sales Navigator when it first came out. Like, this is such a long time ago, and the LinkedIn Sales Navigator is called Sales Navigator. It's not called LinkedIn Marketing Navigator. They're a marketing tools for marketing people. But the most important lesson that I imparted and worked with Luke on, we were having a conversation about it and I said, I don't think sales are going to buy this thing.

I just don't think they believe that you can get leads through sales, through through LinkedIn. I just don't think they know they're not on social. And he's like, well, you're on LinkedIn a lot. Why don't you do it? And I'm like, yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. And so I encourage me and two people in my team, very lean time to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to recruit people for an event.

And it was simple as like, we've got this amazing event, we got this amazing customer, would you like to come to the event? The first time we've ever done it this way? And the success rates were off the charts like we had people that sales would always tell you, oh, we can't get an audience with the CTO or the CEO or the CMO or the CXO.

And you're like, really? Like like I watch this. And so I like again, this is contrarian in me that just can't help myself. It would just go, well, I'm going to prove that you can and I'll just find a way to do it. And if you are persistent and you find the right method, you can do it.

And so we did this with LinkedIn. And Luke taught me this. And we did this trial. And it was a super success. And we continued on that path. We continued. Not only did we get the CTO of major retail brands to come to this event, the retail brand then insisted that the people that sent the LinkedIn messages that we developed the relationship with come to the meeting that we were going to have.

So this is usually at that point, marketing guys job done over to the stars and the account team. But no, not only that, in this particular story, which now I remember and this is ridiculous, I drove the sales rep to Geelong, which is 2.5 hours south of Melbourne, to have the meeting with the CTO and pitched the product, and in the end we started talking about other things.

So that's the other important part where you, you know, it's really important to build relationships. And I think anyway, long story, and we sold him the product and I basically took the sales rep along the right for the ride, and he basically got to sign the deal. And I, as a marketer, of course, I got nothing. Was that like a closed one opportunity or something like Mql check?

Actually, no, I closed this one. And as a result of so we did this, we continue to do that program through LinkedIn and we just showed sales how to do it. And then we became a model case for how to use LinkedIn navigator. And then LinkedIn had us presenting at all of their conference around of presenting in Asia in San Francisco, in London, to various teams.

And we became basically one of their early case studies for using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. And the key to that is just like, just do it like the night thing, like just so I it and figure it out and, and learn how to use it and then show people then the success that you can make out of it.

Daniel Burstein: And that's it. First of all, you sure you got part of that commission? But that's,

Dave Anderson: That's a get anything. Yeah. Not even pitch or money.

Daniel Burstein: That's a great example internally. But again, like do you have an example of how you use that show don't tell approach externally because oh. Get going. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Anderson: It's like like all of the customers that we work with, it's always critical to like this is again, back to the experimentation. So it's like, don't tell everyone about the metrics that you're going to do. Don't look at it after the fact. Like and it's an important and I don't want a product pitch. But it's I'm trying not to but it's like visualization of helping people understand the outcome of what they're going to do as part of an experiment.

So you give them the full side of this is what's going to happen, and then you implement it. So you just go and do it and then you get the results. It's the same example that I gave earlier with the CEO. And then results don't lie. And so I do this with customers all the time. I encourage them to say what will it take for you to implement this?

How can you take risks? How can you go and be an advocate? And I think everyone that's working in software will feel the same. Or it's like allow people to step out of their comfort zone for all of the champions that you have, and let them tell your story and give them the tools that they need to be able to show everyone.

This is what I do, and I think it's it's and it's it's built into practice of like key metrics that they succeed on. So I just yeah, I think, I think it's like, just to just do it like just do these things. Don't just talk about them, actually put them into practice.

Daniel Burstein: And you mentioned, someone who really inspired you to kind of take this innovative approach is Mark Randolph, the Netflix co-founder. You said from Mark, you learn that innovation isn't about waiting for a perfect idea. It's about moving fast, failing smart, and building a culture that learns at speed. So from what you're saying now, it sounds like that was a transformative lesson for you about five years ago.

How did you learn this from Mark?

Dave Anderson: Yeah, I did a podcast with Mark during Covid as part of an event series, and I've always everyone I think has studied Netflix kind of understands that they are a culture of experimentation and best practices from all the developers of like, how they're able to get latency speeds to the extreme, levels, how they optimize UX, etc.. So for me, the most interesting thing and the what I wanted to ask Mark is, did that culture of innovation start at day one with him when they were first starting the company between him and Reed?

Or was it built later when they learned lessons and, and Marcus is an incredible, entrepreneur. It's not just Netflix that he's worked on, but he had ten different ideas and he wanted to implement all of them. And too many times great ideas die on a vine and he implements them. And his encouragement is exactly what I was saying earlier, which is just hyper experimentation.

Just get these things in the market, just suck it. And say. And they started Netflix started as a DVD direct mail business, and the first experiment that they ran was they grabbed a DVD, they stuck it in the mail, and they mailed it another suburb away to see if it got crushed because they knew that it was foot got crushed there.

David, a business is going to have a distribution problem. So that was experiment one. And then from there they just they continued to experiment. They digitized of course everyone knows what Netflix is today. So I think it's that element of like if you have a hunch about something and you're going to experiment with it, get the data and do it, just go do it.

Just test it out, try something, see if it works, adjust and keep going. I was also there's a saying like, you can steer a ship. You can you can steer a sailboat that's sailing, but you can't when it's sitting in the harbor. So just get moving in any direction and that momentum will lead you to something else that will skip you to something else.

And like I was saying before, you are going to make mistakes. That is totally fine. Just readjust the course and keep going. And so he was an incredible, incredible person to interview. And really inspiring stuff. And one of his original ideas was, colored shampoo for dogs. So, I'm kind of glad that Netflix won because it was during Covid.

So if we if we had colored Netflix for dogs, it would have been far less entertaining than the unlimited streaming that we all able to. So, enjoy during Covid. So I'm glad Marc eventually stumbled on the right experiment to run.

Daniel Burstein: Color dogs might have been good on social media there. Yeah, but, okay. Your contrarian I'm going to be contrarian here. Right. So you keep saying just go do it. Go do it. Start experimenting. But earlier you said, I think it's really good lesson, like there's a right and wrong way to test. And so I wonder if you can get into that a bit because I've definitely seen that before.

We publish a lot of a B testing. I mean we're kind of known for that. And I've had, you know, done interviews where people are excited. Oh my gosh, I saw something you published about and I, I ran this test and it works so well. I'm like, let me take a look. And it was like, okay, you sent like 150 emails and, you know, the difference was like 52% to 40% or something.

I'm like, well, there's statistical validity and that can just be random. And so again, there's there's a lot of these different elements when it comes to sometimes we it's good to run an experiment. But sometimes if we're not running it in the right way, we get this false confidence where it could just be random chance that we're seeing, for example, sort of you could expand a bit on kind that right and wrong way to test before we kind of, send a teenager out there with khakis and just go right.

Dave Anderson: Oh, I think, like if I go back to, like, the work I do now, we run experiments all the time or the advice that we give to customers. And if you take a website or an app as an example, you can test anything, you can test everything and anything and nothing. You can do whatever you want. Where should you focus?

And I do have a fundamental belief that you do have to come back to the core elements of what are you in business for? What are you doing? Are you generating revenue? Most of the time, everyone, unless you're a government or a charity, even charity. So they are trying to generate revenue. What is the most important business cause and how do you optimize for that?

Whatever that path is, whatever that thing is that you're trying to do. So if it's a bank and you're selling mortgages, how successful is the journey to sign up for a mortgage? And can you optimize that in a way? And what part of that journey is the part that needs the optimization? And a lot of people run the tests wrong because they just go, well, everyone lands on the home page, so we should just optimize the home page.

I don't know how many market is there, just continually thinking about home pages. They're not looking at statistics and realizing the home page doesn't make any difference. Look at what the drop off right is because I take a great example of, decathlon is a really great sporting brand and a customer, and they recognized that it wasn't about the product listing pages, it wasn't their home pages.

It was the really confusing shipping calculator that they had on their checkout page. And they realized that's where everyone was dropping off. And so they went, right, we will focus there, and that's where we'll run our tests. And they ran experiments on those. They saw an uplift and they went fantastic. Or, a mattress company. This one's kind of funny, actually a mattress company that that really the business problem that they were solving wasn't they didn't even look at the metrics.

They went to the call center and they said, how do we reduce the number of people calling? And then the people were calling, believe it or not, to try and find out what the dimensions of a king size bed was or a queen size bed. So they went well, it's obviously not visible enough on the website. What should we do?

Well, actually, it's not even listed on the website. Well, we should listed on the website. So they listed on the website, run an experiment and they realized call center volumes go down by half for that particular thing. Like it's it's 5% of total call centers. But it's still it went down by half. So it's 2.5%. They go, well it's awesome.

Most companies stop. They go job done, market. It's go tick, job done. Let's go to the pub. Everyone celebrate. Where? Amazing. Look at us. Mql tick. Whatever. But what they did is they went. What if we visualize it? What if we make the mattresses look like a mattress and we really make it a little bit bigger and we show this is a king size.

This is a queen size, this is a double. This is what it looks like. People are visual. So they go, well okay, awesome. Call center volume drops by half again. So it's now gone from 5 to 2.5% to 1.2% of people calling now. And the increase in conversions was up by like 15% because people didn't get distracted. Go.

I can't remember what size a king is. I don't know if I need a king or a queen. They get friction, they don't go to conversion and they forget about it, or they make a call and they completely forget to purchase. So making that journey seamless through the checkout before you know it. Damn, I just bought a mattress.

I didn't even realize I was in that process. I really did need one. I didn't get to do my second guessing, but there you go. So it's experimenting in a way that really matters to a business, like picking the really, really important parts that have the friction that make will make the difference. And that's where you should start.

And then from there, you end up in a scenario where you might be a Netflix or an ice source, and you're running hundreds of thousands of experiments all the time. And the problem that you have then is how is everyone going to learn? And it's a new problem to have, but it's, it's yeah, I would say focus on the most important thing, the thing that really drives your business and work backwards from that.

Daniel Burstein: On. Sounds like really understand the customer journey and where the drop offs are happening as well.

Dave Anderson: Exactly. Yeah. And just test for it. You can test for it in any number of different ways. And if the test isn't deeming results that are significantly variant, like you said, then it doesn't matter. And then then just let AI run the experimentation for you. It's not that far off.

Daniel Burstein: All right. We talked about so many different things about what it means to be a marketer. That curiosity, getting out there and doing it, if you had to break it down for me. Dave, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Dave Anderson: We'll always hire for someone that is inquisitive and is passionate. I think marketing today is not the same as it used to be. And it's changing very, very rapidly. Like there is. That's like 80% of the jobs that exist in 2030 don't exist today. So it's like what you're doing today as a marketer is going to be fundamentally different to what you're doing in five years.

So if you're going to be a good marketer, you have to learn, you've got to experiment. You've got to be inquisitive, you've got to be self-motivated. You've got to solve problems yourself. You've got to come with ideas. But the amount of times I really dislike working in a team, when the team comes to me and goes, I don't know, what should I do?

Like, I don't know, you tell me you're into my next book. You know what? I don't have to make all the decisions, do I? And I know, I think that's like, that's a super important lesson for people. It's just to own you to my own experiment. So I don't annoy people in the process. Because you can do that, like I, I've experimented that much or been I can sound like I'm a really opinionated type person, right.

And it probably people could be listening like he would be. So annoying to work with. I'm actually really not. I'm actually got a lot of empathy for people in my team, and I want everyone to experiment, and I want everyone to fail and succeed, and I want everyone to be successful, and that they're the people that you want to hire for and that I want to learn, and I want people to come to me and go, hey, I need Friday afternoon off to go to this conference because I'm learning about this, or I have tried this new software.

Can I buy it? And I just want continuous learning. And I think then when you get the group together to get the success that you need, you just need it to scale, you need to remove bottlenecks, and you need people to not make decisions from a hierarchy above. You need them to own their own domain, have context into the decisions they're making, and let them go and let them just do it.

And you know, I used the example earlier of a company that I worked for, but I was modeling my behavior on a CEO that was very dictator ish. He would make every decision and that was his power thing. And he was usually right. That's probably why he did it. But so I was modeling that behavior and my team didn't scale.

And at the time I had some coaching. And the coach said to me, stop making decisions. And I went, And so I went, right. And I worked with our CTO at the time, and he did the same thing. Like, you have to be able to make autonomy. Your team needs to make autonomous decisions without you and then justify the decisions that they made.

And so for two months, I didn't make a decision and my life had never been better. I wasn't stressed anymore. They owned what they did. They were accountable for what they did. And all we did was track progress of what we're doing. And I just think that's how people want to work. They don't want to be micromanaged, they want to own their own domain.

And that's what help will bring engaged people that can experiment and can can really get behind what they do. And I think that's that's essential to being marketing, making so much fun. And it's just so like this, there's never been a better time to be mucking around in marketing with all the tech, with all this stuff that's going on.

It's incredible with so much fun. And so I just have people that want to be part of that ride and are excited by it.

Daniel Burstein: Help understand the customer, help understand your team and empower them both. Sounds like kind of a summation of the conversation. Dave. So thanks so much for sharing your career journey with us today and what you learned.

Dave Anderson: Thanks, Daniel. It's been great.

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 rpa.com.