Search
FRANK•LY
ecommerce
Workshops
Archive
Subscribe
FRANKLY ECOMMERCE
Sep 28, 2026
Marketing leadership through story, data, and growth bets
Marketing leadership through story, data, and growth bets
00:00
1:06:13
1×
Transcript
0:00
Why does anyone want to be a CMO? What with the stress and the lack of all the certainty, who's taking this job? I actually think it's gonna be a dead role in the next three to five years. The CMO lives in the, um,
0:14
their fault, your problem world. What kind of person is attracted to this role? Marketing's the highest risk org in a company. Full stop. The, the marketing's an unverifiable domain.
0:26
Marketing is as much art as it is science. Like, AI is really good at verifiable domains, but not great at unverifiable domains. They'll never see a statute for a committee.
0:36
You're listening to the Frankly Ecommerce show, candid conversations about business with host Patrick Scott Pattman.
0:43
In the ecommerce ecosystem, one of the most challenging positions is that chief marketing officer role in the C-suite. It's probably the one that is the shortest tenure, and why is that?
0:53
The proposition of how we're gonna predict results. Are we gonna deliver on the big Black Friday promise?
0:59
There's so much anticipation and need to sort of forecast that the CMO gets put in difficult situations, and I think this is a chance for us to talk, how does that kind of role of someone responsible for growth, you know, whether it's a brand or an, an app or a vendor, manage the pressure of those kinds of forecasts and accountability, and do so with a sense of optimism and ability to lead a team, which is as much as what the work is as well.
1:27
So there's no better person here to talk about that kind of challenge than Rabah. He is someone that I'm looking forward to talking with, a fellow Austin, um, person here. I'm looking forward to meeting.
1:38
Rabah, welcome to our show. Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me, Patrick.
1:42
Yeah, this is, uh, something that's near and dear to my heart that, uh, hopefully we can illuminate a lot of the, uh, intricacies, challenges, and opportunities that a CMO gig gives people.
1:54
Well, today you're the chief marketing officer of Thai. Yeah. And you've been chief marketing officer of Fermat- Yep... before that, and then Triple Whale before that.
2:05
And so you have this perspective of how the ecommerce industry is evolving with respect to software and how it's helping people make decisions. I wanna kind of get your perspective on that as well.
2:14
But I wonder if we could begin with an important observation that I saw you make on LinkedIn the other day with respect to making sense of the pressure for results.
2:26
Here we're getting ready for Black Friday, and there's a need to promise an outcome. And one of the things the way you framed it, I thought was interesting for us to talk about, was making bets. Yeah. And bets that are
2:41
not of the same significance, but there are, there are smaller bets, there are larger bets. There are bets that are short-term, there are longer term. And would...
2:50
Maybe you could help me by understand how you came to that framing, which you called sort of a poker's hand- Yeah...
2:55
way of looking at what it is you're doing and making choices with how you allocate your resources, your budget. Tell me more about how that framing came to be. Yeah.
3:04
I mean, a lot of failure [laughs] to be honest with you. But ultimately, um, the realization just came from when... So usually when you're in a...
3:14
It's a little different for D2C because D2C usually sees the world in shorter timelines. Usually, uh, a lot of D2C operators, CMOs, VPs of marketing, so forth, think of kind of the world in months.
3:26
Whereas us in the SaaS world, we usually think of the world in quarters. Um, so normally what happens as a CMO, you'll talk to your VP of finance. Usually CMO rolls into the CEO.
3:37
Um, so you'll kind of talk about this, and then you, you put your marketing plan together and you say, "Okay, cool. Here's, here's... Okay," you're just making numbers up.
3:44
"Here's a million dollars for the quarter, Rabah. How are you gonna spend it? You need to back into..." Usually you're either given a pipeline number or a budget number.
3:53
Um, uh, I've been at two hyper-growth startups, so a lot of times it was just a budget number of like, "Hey, let's just grow as fast as possible. Here's the number you have. Let's make it work and back into pipeline."
4:03
Another way you can do it is somebody will say, "Hey, here's the amount of pipeline we need to hit for our goals. What kind of number do you need?" So with that being said, ultimately, it's like, okay, cool.
4:16
A marketing, chief marketing officer, in my opinion, has two, two jobs. You have the get momentum or keep momentum if you have momentum, and then essentially be a steward of capital.
4:26
Can you deploy capital efficiently and effectively? And then that rolls into your plans. And so going back to the poker bet thing, you don't want... Y- there's essentially like oversimplifying, but it kind of lands.
4:38
You have kind of three time horizons. You have short-term bets, mid-term bets, and long-term bets.
4:43
And what happens is if you have too many short-term bets, you're gonna get a bunch of quick wins, but then there's, there's no more alpha left in the system. You, you didn't have anything cooked.
4:53
So essentially you just planted all the crops and then harvested all those crops right off the rip and then, okay, cool, we got all this yield, but now there's no more crops in the field growing.
5:03
And so ultimately you need to have a... It, it's poker strategy, portfolio strategy.
5:10
You need to have cascading bets because these longer term or mid-term bets are gonna need time to cook, whether you're doing some big moonshot event or whether you're doing some s- maybe you're doing really cool merch that's gonna take three to six months and you don't know.
5:24
And so ultimately you need to have wins kind of stacking up and cascading, and that's ultimately the whole goal is can you get these short-term wins? They're gonna be usually less financially, uh, big in terms of bets.
5:37
The magnitudes are gonna be smaller, but you need those quick wins. The, the best thing you can do as a CMO is have a quick win, early win. The best thing you can do as an employee, uh, i- is have quick wins.
5:47
You wanna win early, but then you wanna start to say, "Okay, cool. I can have these bigger bets that I can make that'll actually have more impact because they have a longer time horizon."
5:57
But the scary part is you don't know when they're gonna hit, and that's where I think the CMO gets really challenged is,
6:05
uh, you- Anybody that says they know if a campaign's gonna do well or not, it, it, it's ju- they're just lying.
6:12
And then when you get into high ticket SaaS, it gets even more complex because there's really not effective attribution.
6:19
You have just a absolute pinball machine of touches throughout your marketing ecosystem, and every investor, every CEO wants to say, "Hey, Patrick, pull on this lever, pull on this lever more."
6:33
And it's just a really hard thing to do.
6:34
So my thesis has been, "Hey, let's just win, and then we can figure out how we are winning," versus I've been at some companies in the past that weren't very successful, but they knew why they weren't very successful.
6:47
So I actually prefer the former than the latter, but, um, we can go into more intricacies there. But that's ultimately how you wanna think of kind of cascading the portfolio of bets because you, you wanna be able to...
6:59
Momentum is a hell of a drug, man, and being able to keep that momentum, and so you have these short-term wins, and then you stack these midterm wins, and then you have this big long-term win come in, and then you can kind of keep rolling it forward.
7:10
So ultimately, that was the genesis of the idea. Yeah, you've used a couple different analogies, one with respect to the poker hand, another almost with the farmer, the crops in the field. Yeah.
7:22
There's something to be said about having crops, and they're coming and ripening in a way. But I guess
7:30
as much as we can draw the, maybe extend the analogy too far, there can be bad weather, there can be hail, things can fall apart. But there is a sense of, I would say in growing of crops, there's almost a, a patience.
7:41
It's gonna take the time it takes to develop. And you think about that for an audience, um, you can think about that for a customer base.
7:47
But, but I guess one thing that's important in what you've, you've, you've written also is you don't know which are going to win. And so the, the word of a bet is like it's a probability.
7:59
And I think the crop analogy is more like the-- while there's risk in farming, it feels more like I know my corn's gonna be ready to harvest in September or whatever it is.
8:09
And a bet is much more like, is it gonna work or is it not? And I think that's the dilemma is if you think about all the different marketing channels a, a brand can apply itself,
8:19
is it gonna work is like the underlying question. So how do you yourself deal with the uncertainty of, of that basic question? [laughs] It's really hard.
8:31
And the worst part is, kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier, even when you're winning, you might not know why you're winning, and so you can't s- like articulate.
8:39
You're just like, "Hey, I just know where things are going well right now. I don't know what's actually working." There's that old kind of marketing adage of, uh, my marketing's working, but I don't know what half.
8:49
Like, 50% of my marketing's working, 50% isn't, but I don't know which half is which. And so ultimately, the, the best advice I can give is you need to think of this as a scientist and the scientific method.
9:05
Here's a thesis. Here's what I think is gonna happen. Here's what actually happened. If you think of it in that way, there's not really wins and losses. There's just learnings or validating of the thesis.
9:17
And then if the thesis is validated, you know, put more wood behind the arrow. Do more of that thing because it's resonating with your audience.
9:24
You can't lose perpetually, and this is kind of why, uh, CMOs are usually the high- or they are the fastest turnover. A- and I believe they're the most stressful C-suite outside of the CEO.
9:39
And to be fair, like, the CEO usually has a much, like, more insane comp package than the CMO does.
9:47
So at least the CEO, there is, like, the, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, where the CMO is just really stressed out the whole time. But ultimately- Well, well, I'll bring it farther.
9:58
Why does anyone wanna be a CMO? [laughs] I ask- Threat and lack of all the certainty. Who's taking this job? I, I actually think it's gonna be a dead role in the next three to five years. I think it's,
10:11
I think it should be broken into-- 'cause here's, here's another thing that happens. A lot of times you're gonna have-- marketing is the only org that can succeed and the business can fail.
10:21
If product doesn't succeed, it fails. Sales doesn't succeed, it fails. Marketing can do great, and the company still doesn't work because sales or product.
10:29
And so that's the challenge is marketing sits in a place where there's a lot of times it's their fault, your problem. Where, for example, you're driving a ton of pipeline, but sales isn't closing.
10:41
You're doing a bunch of great marketing, but the product might not be where it needs to be. You, you, you just don't have the ability to impact products or sales and, and nor should you.
10:52
If the CM- if the CMO lives in the, um, their fault, your problem world, what kind of person is attracted to this role? Uh, a lunatic. I don't know. I, [laughs] I think of... Here's a little bit of an irony.
11:06
I probably would have made more money at Triple Whale in Vermont if I was a AE or an account executive than I was at the CMO level because these people were just printing money because the marketing was so good that they were just kicking people into the pool.
11:19
So I, I think you have to have a lot of interest in, um... basically, y- y- you, you gotta wanna throw fun parties.
11:29
Like, so if you think of marketing, marketing's all about getting people to the party, understanding if these people are cool enough to be at the party, AKA have enough money in the ICP, can actually buy your product.
11:39
Are they excited about the party? Are they gonna tell their friends about the party? Um, but you don't have to get money from them.
11:45
That's, that's really, like, I think of marketing as, um, a sales pitch from one to many, and sales is a sales pitch from one to one. Um- Yeah...
11:53
but it's, uh, I think you're seeing-- what, what you're calling out is really true though.
11:57
Like- Top level marketing for CMOs, they're-- I, I think they're probably one of the hardest people to hire because a lot of times, myself included, of like you just do it, and you're like, "I'm never gonna do it again."
12:10
I've, I've said it three times now. I, I did Triple Whale, and I was like, "I'm never gonna do CMO again."
12:14
And then I met Rishabh at Fermata, and he kinda started courting me, and then I got bored, and I was like, "All right, let's do it, run it back." And I said, "Oh, I'm never gonna do it again."
12:21
And then I met Michael, and he kinda started courting me, and then we're-- here we are. So I think it takes a really- So let's put those examples.
12:27
There's, there's three situations where you were able to bring about some outcome that the next company wanted to say, "Hey, do that for what you do here what you did over there." Yes. So what is the essence?
12:39
Is it just m-- is marketing always measured in the end by sales, or is there a marketing quality that comes through beyond just top-line numbers?
12:49
I think marketing, uh, m-marketing is always measured in, most of the time, is in pipeline or if you're product-led growth, so PLG revenue, which is actually a lot easier in a lot of ways because the feedback loop is way tighter.
13:05
For example, at Triple Whale, we started out as a, a product-led growth or PLG, and for people that aren't hip to this, it's basically I can buy without talking to a salesperson.
13:14
I can go to Patrick's website for patricksas.com, swipe my credit card, boom, I'm in the product.
13:19
Whereas when you have sales-led growth, you're gonna have y- I mean, you have to have bigger deals because the economics just doesn't work of paying a salesperson, having an SDR, these things like that.
13:30
PLG is great because, again, you have a faster feedback loop, so you know if your marketing's working or not. Whereas sales-led gets really challenging.
13:38
For example, at Fermata, we had one of our biggest contracts come through from somebody that came to an event a year and a half previous. [laughs] Like, how do you attribute that? You know what I mean?
13:48
[laughs] It's like, uh, that, that, that's such a big feedback loop. So i-it's really challenging. It's a re-- I, again, I think it's the most challenging role.
13:57
Um- I think if I, if I could go back to that question about measuring the result and what that other company said, "Oh, you've done that over here. Now come do it over here." I wonder if there's also this
14:09
bigger story that the CMO is trying to tell. And it's the one and many story you spoke to, but there's something about the-- it's a bit of a mystique. It's not like you can put your finger on exactly what it is.
14:21
So, so how does someone know whether their bigger story is starting to work, or is it a long-term bet they won't see play out for, for months or years?
14:32
How do you kind of hone in on what that bigger story is beyond the sale? Yeah. I mean, this is really important. This is where we get into the brand discussion. And so I, I think there's different archetypes of CMOs.
14:46
You have, like, a very analytical CMO. You have a brand-forward CMO. You have a performance-oriented CMO. I would probably lean more towards that kind of brand performance CMO.
14:57
Um, and ultimately- What are the characteristics of that? How would you-- a couple examples. Yeah, a couple examples of basically, I--
15:05
a lot of people will be outbound and life cycle and things that are very geared towards making the machine more efficient. Where I gear towards how do we make the machine more effective.
15:19
Another analogy is instead of worrying about how much money we're spending, I'm just gonna make so much money that we don't have to worry about our bills.
15:28
And so that's kind of the bifurcation between, like, a brand CMO versus somebody that's really kind of analytical, where I, all, all I care about is how much pipeline are we driving.
15:38
Let's just rip, like, let's just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Um, whereas another CMO might be like, "Hey, let's make our machine more efficient."
15:47
Like anybody that comes through our little kind of Plinko machine, how do we get the most out of that? And I, I just don't really obs-- like subscribe to that mentality.
15:57
Not to say it's wrong, and I think there's different phases. You, like courses for courses, you need different CMOs at different phases.
16:05
And that's why I, I really kinda lean towards that startup phase where it's like, "Hey, we have a bunch of money. Let's figure out how to grow really quickly."
16:14
And not necessarily growth at all costs, but growth is really the most important thing where, um, you get into these bigger companies, politics start to matter more, meetings. You have decision by committee.
16:25
You have all these things that aren't necessarily about impact, but they're about, um, making your boss happy, which is okay.
16:32
And there, there's nothing- And you've also, you've also made the observation of comparing a committee to a statue. Yeah. And accountability for- Yeah... making decisions that are difficult. Yeah.
16:42
We're talking about bets and making a big bet takes some courage. Yep. And then being able to stand behind it, and if it falls apart- Yep... being able to be accountable for it. Yep. So for someone who's feeling
16:54
the anxiety around standing behind a big decision, what would you encourage them? How do you, how do you reflect upon yourself, your own sense of anxiety or- Yeah... or pressure?
17:06
Um, this is actually downstream of the decision to join the company. So I've been lucky enough to work with Max and AJ, who gave me a ton of lead way in terms of, uh, brand building, budgets, et cetera.
17:20
Same thing at Fermata with Rishabh. Rishabh was actually probably crazier than I was. Like I had to pull him back sometimes.
17:27
So I think it matters who your boss is, 'cause ultimately, unless you're the founder or CEO, your, your only goal is to make your boss happy. Like everything else doesn't matter.
17:36
Even if you're succeeding and your boss isn't happy, you're not gonna be at a good place. So if you don't have that environment of risk on, again, you can't be just be making dumb bets, spending money like an idiot.
17:46
But y-you, you need that experimental or I go, "Hey, Patrick, here's the bets I'm gonna make. This is why I think they're gonna work, and this is what's gonna happen if they work.
17:56
And if they don't work, that's fine, and then we reorient the machine." I think the challenge some people get into is they are a risk on CMO- Working for a risk-off CEO.
18:08
It, that, the, you're just, that dog ain't gonna hunt, man. You're, you're not gonna change who people are. And so I think that's why it's really important to understand your personality and your boss's personality.
18:19
Because if you guys are not aligned and you don't have CEO buy-in, and you're just constantly singing for your supper and saying, "Hey, we should do this.
18:26
Hey, we should do that," um, that, that gets into some real challenges. And the other thing I would say is everybody thinks they're a marketer.
18:34
[chuckles] And so there's just so many people that'll just throw idea grenades over the fence, and you're just like, "Oh my gosh, this is really challenging."
18:41
And to your point, when you're super stressed out all the time, and [chuckles] you just have people chirping from the cheap seats, it gets really difficult.
18:48
So all the stuff that you're saying is valid, but I think it's downstream from are you and the CEO on the same page of the risk profile, the budget, and the impact that you can make?
19:00
'Cause a lot of times s- people say, "Hey, I want you to move this mountain. Here's a shovel." Uh, there's just only so much you can do, man. Like, like if you don't... Like in SaaS, you need money.
19:13
You, you-- In SaaS, I, I always use this paradigm. In SaaS, you either need to be the cool kid or the rich kid.
19:18
If you're the cool kid, that's usually, oh, you have a really cool product that can kinda sell itself, and then you go find the rich kid 'cause you can fill the room, but the rich kid has the money to pay for the party.
19:28
And then if you're the rich kid, you wanna go find the cool kids to help kind of, "Oh, I have this really cool house. Why don't you guys come party at my house?"
19:35
If you're not the cool kid or the rich kid, it's hard, man. It is, uh... I, I have very rarely seen it work.
19:44
How would you take those insights and apply them for the brand that sells a physical product through their Shopify store? Setting aside the SaaS industry- Yeah... examples,
19:56
you are selling products to such brands- Yeah... and trying to convey to them the value of what you're doing, so you have to put yourself in the mindset of what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah.
20:07
What would you say to a brand owner or a growth marketer at a brand who's trying to come to terms with all the uncertainty around the fourth quarter- Yeah... and put it in place, a more manageable making sense for them?
20:21
Yeah. So I think a lot of the BFCM is, it's gonna... I mean, this is kind of timely, but a lot of BFCM is kind of...
20:30
So I used to be a Division I, uh, cross country runner, and, uh, basically the week before the race, even probably two weeks before the race, your performance was essentially set.
20:42
Like, uh, there was nothing you were gonna do in those two weeks that were actually gonna move that set point. So I think a lot of BFCM is actually pre-BFCM. Are you getting your lists filled?
20:52
Are you running the ads that you wanna run? Um, but before that, I think ultimately there's two things that you wanna do.
20:58
As a quick break from my conversation with Rabah at TIE, I wanna tell you a story about a conversation that I witnessed in Austin the other day.
21:07
I was at David Gonzalez's internet marketing party, or it's now called Impact Makers party, which is a cool evolution in its 18th year doing things in Austin.
21:18
But anyways, the conversation came out that how would y- someone coming to the website, your website, be revealed as to their identity?
21:29
Could we identify a visitor who came to your site, identify their email address automagically, and then send them a follow-up email with an invitation? And a person in the audience said, "Whoa, that's illegal.
21:43
You can't do that." And the answer is yes. Yes, you can. In America, we have an implied consent. They can opt out, but it's okay for us to send them an email even if they haven't explicitly opted in.
21:59
Now, we wanna be careful. We wanna be intentional about how and when we do that. And it turns out that TIE makes that possible, and they do it in a way that I think is worth taking a little closer look at. And so
22:15
I'm sharing my screen here, looking at their, one of their features, which is this identity resolution feature. Not all that TIE does, but an important piece.
22:26
And so we can be intentional about what visitors we de-anonymize and then push into their Klaviyo account.
22:35
And we do this in our work at eBusiness PROS, but TIE has customer success managers that will help you tune in the appropriate level of conservative or aggressive identification.
22:48
And so the customer service manager, I've witnessed this, can say, say in a project where the target audience is hunters, outdoorsmen. It's fair to say the majority of those customers will be men.
23:03
And so if we wanted to be targeting, we might say, "Let's not de-anonymize
23:10
visitors that TIE forecasts to be a woman," just as a way of increasing the likelihood of interest and building upon their already, you know, dialed in accuracy.
23:24
We can make those kinds of dials and adjustments, which is what I like about it, and not just being sort of scooping up with this big vacuum every visitor to your site.
23:33
And it needs to be done, of course, then in the right way. And with Klaviyo flows, we can send the right kind of warm but curious follow-up message. It could be an abandoned cart in a most obvious way.
23:47
It could be something a little more creative and as, as a welcome flow that's unique to them and what page they've landed on.
23:53
And our partners and paid ad agencies, they love to bring tools like this 'cause it helps make more value out of the paid traffic they're sending to that website.
24:03
So anyways, I think TIE's worth a closer look in an example like this for this particular reason, and you can check it out at meettie.com/frankly. Ask for what they have on offer for our Frankly listeners,
24:18
and see what might, difference it might make for you this year All right. Back to our show And this is also analogous to SaaS as well, where, um, there's a theory called jobs to be done, and the...
24:31
Oversimplifying the theory, but ultimately, people don't buy products, they hire them to do jobs. Is this emotional job? Is this a status job? Is this a utilitarian job?
24:39
So understanding what the jobs to be done that people-- why are people hiring your product is super, super important.
24:44
That will unlock most of your marketing, especially with D2C has kind of the secret weapon that high-ticket SaaS doesn't with paid ads. Paid ads are usually the lifeblood for most, um, D2C brands.
24:57
And then the second thing is personas, who are the people that are buying. And the-- when you marry those two things, you can get into a really lethal combination of performance.
25:06
And then ag- another way to think about it is jobs to be done is the lure. That's the lure to find the fish, whether it's trout, salmon, what have you. And then the personas are the lakes that you're gonna fish in.
25:18
And so using the right lure in the right lake, that's gonna help you. So you can think of it almost like targeting and messaging and marrying those two together. Ultimately, that's what's gonna happen.
25:27
And then a couple other kind of just random, but best practices type of things is a lot of people just want to-- you need to understand what your goal is for Black Friday.
25:37
Um, it sh-- usually should just be a, a money grab, but at the same time, you wanna understand, for example, your most loyal customers don't really care about discounts.
25:47
You wanna make them feel exclusive, special, give them options to get into the, the, the sale earlier, and then give them a bunch of product. Like, they're already gonna give you a bunch of money.
25:56
They don't care about the discount. They want exclusivity. They wanna feel special. They want more product for cheaper kind of thing.
26:03
Whereas there's gonna be people that are first-time buyers that are like, "Oh, man, fifty percent off, let's do that." So I think discounting is really useful in Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and you have to do it.
26:13
But discounting to the wrong people at the wrong rates can really eat into your margins, and I think that's something that you see often is everybody treats everybody equally. And, you know, it's
26:24
not a good or bad, it's just an is in the world that certain segments of your audience should get different treatment. Yeah.
26:31
Well, whether it's Black Friday prep or just generally, I like your framing of the idea of lures in the water and lakes, and those are the same personas of types of customers.
26:42
So really what we're talking about is being aware of to whom you're laying out that, that bait or that lure to. Yep. And have they bought before or not?
26:49
And better understanding what's the right bait for that context, right? Yep. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think it's today easier than ever, especially with all the AI stuff and all this. Like
27:03
AI, AI like pure AI power, it-it's not that useful, but AI-empowered humans are really useful. And so what I mean by that is you just tell Claude, "Hey, find my best customers and make me a sale, no mistakes."
27:18
Like, that's not really the show. But being able to say, "Hey, I can pull all of my data," then cohort them, and then understand, oh my gosh, when I give these people discounts, my margins go down.
27:28
Even though the, the revenue is up, I'm actually making less profit. Okay, let me see where I can move this.
27:33
There's a human in the loop, and I think those are the marketing teams and frankly, the businesses that are gonna win with, um, AI empowerment, not necessarily AI powered.
27:43
And the last thing I'll say on that, this has actually been a recent kind of epiphany, is AI is incredible at verifiable domains.
27:51
So you have like the sciences, you have economics, you have things that already have the answers, mathematics, coding, things like that. Marketing's an unverifiable domain. Marketing is as much art as it is science.
28:04
Like I have frameworks that I use, et cetera, et cetera.
28:07
I'm not saying like you-- everybody's reinventing the wheel, but there's just not-- like marketing has such a high taste vector that coding really doesn't, that mathematics doesn't, that music, that these things.
28:18
So AI is really good at verifiable domains, but not great at unverifiable domains. And that's why you're seeing AI marketing stuff. It's useful, but it's not that helpful if you take a human out of the loop.
28:34
Yeah, I appreciate the need for what so much of AI is really underlying it all is a probability. Yep. The probability of it being correct is- Yep...
28:44
you know, your interpretation and in an art and science combination of marketing, that correctness is, as you say, up to the taste, right?
28:53
So I see brands having to be the ones who curate what are-- showing themselves to be tastemakers. Yep. And not just in their own products, but in the environments and the way they use them, the way they go about them.
29:06
So that's where there's so much of that human leadership- Yep... that needs to establish the taste standard- It's-... for a brand. Yeah. It's everything.
29:16
I mean, at the end of the day, people have to know you, like you, trust you to transact with you no matter what it is. And so you have to understand, am I doing that?
29:23
And then it also just goes back to the OG funnel, man, where you have awareness, consideration, conversion.
29:29
And I think a lot of people forget-- or not forget, but the consideration phase is actually three different stages.
29:37
So you have, like I said, awareness, consideration, conversion, but in that consideration phase, I think of it in three stages where you have product aware, solution aware-- or sorry, problem aware, product aware, solution aware.
29:49
Do I know I have a problem? Okay, I do. I know I have a problem. Do I know there's a solution for my problem? Okay, yes. Do I know there's a product that offers that solution? That's what you need to push people through.
29:59
And I--
30:01
It's less of an issue in D2C because D2C you can really collapse the funnel, but in SaaS- A lot of times when people start spending a lot of money on marketing, they've already figured out their conversion, like the bottom of funnel isn't an issue.
30:14
Sometimes awareness is an issue where, hey, we have an incredible product, but people just don't know about it. But a lot of times the hardest part of the, the funnel in SaaS is consideration.
30:24
And SaaS is also very similar to, for example, like furniture or high ticket items in D2C, where you really have to push people through that, that, um, stage of funnel.
30:34
And then the last thing I'd say on that is if you are in that space, and this kind of goes back to those portfolio bets on different time horizons, sometimes people just aren't ready to purchase.
30:45
They want to buy, but they're just not ready. And so your job as a marketer is, can I stay in that decision set?
30:52
And ideally the top decision in the decision set that when I'm ready to buy a couch, I, I go to Polly and Bark because I know they have the coolest couches that I've ever wanted to see.
31:00
Or I, I finally get make a little money or have something, I buy a Rolex because that's always what I wanted.
31:06
Like, that's where brand and kind of omnipresent marketing can really help, um, when you're in D2C, SaaS, what have you.
31:14
Because sometimes, like I said, the consumer's not ready to purchase, but if you can stay omnipresent in their mind when that person is ready to purchase, they're you. And this is very similar to like CPG.
31:25
This is why Tide runs ads all the time. It's like, "Hey, I don't have a washer and dryer, but when I do, I buy Tide because I saw those commercials."
31:33
You said, and we're thinking about preparation for Black Friday, that what happens in Black Friday is really a consequence of what already preparation's been made. Yeah.
31:41
It's, it's weeks from months or the whole year beforehand. Yeah. So I do wanna make the observation that we are running a series of workshops under the Frank Lee Commerce banner in Austin- Yep...
31:52
in October to help prepare for what is happening in November in the Black Friday season, and you're gonna be at one of those workshops. Yeah, yeah. Next week we're gonna get it done. So I think-- yeah.
32:02
So I think what, what we'll see at workshops like that, I think about a brand in Austin that is doing something, I wanna say...
32:13
I wanna, I wanna give a couple examples and ask your, your feedback, going back to this idea of making bets to try and tie it to a specific example in Austin. So we have a company called Rhino USA. Yep.
32:24
They've been growing past nine figures in Austin, and you can imagine they've got their Meta and their Google dialed in. Yep. All right. So hat tip to Howard out there if you're listening.
32:34
And then they've got other creative things happening, like running a big sweepstakes. Win $100,000- Yeah. Yeah... or win a Ford F250. Yeah. That's an interesting kind of b-bet to place. Yeah.
32:47
But then I had a chance to hear Ted, the guy who's, who ran that company, describe a few weeks ago the creation of what they're calling Rhino World. Do you know about Rhino World? No.
32:59
Do you know- This sounds amazing though. I'm already in. And so
33:03
the, the idea was circling around the office there that what they, what they should do, and maybe you could help me classify this, is what kind of bet this is. Yeah. Let's go buy effectively a ranch out near the airport,
33:21
and let's put a bunch of stuff. The customer, the ICP for Rhino is what they call a blue-collar hauler. H-A-U-L-E-R. They have trucks, and they tow stuff around, and they get stuck, and they get towed out.
33:36
It's all the sort of lifestyle around that, and part of the story of Rhino is that the, the, the founders do that for fun on weekends. It's just what they do. Yeah.
33:46
It's their life, so they know the things that they need, and they create those products, and it's been a whole juggernaut.
33:51
But Rhino World, as I understand it, has become, I don't know how many acres, I mean, over a hundred, of space where they can essentially put their product into action and drive around in trucks. Oh, wow.
34:06
And that's a marketing expense. For a CMO to make a bet, I don't know how much the land costs out by the airport and F1 track- Yeah... plus the facilities to putting in buildings, tracks, maybe even a gun range.
34:19
No, I love it. How does a CMO come to terms with a bet like that? How would you classify it compared to the other examples I gave, and how do you evaluate the performance of that? Yeah, I love it.
34:29
The first thing I would say is brilliant idea. In kind of, again, s- 'cause I straddle SaaS and D2C, the first thing you need to understand, is this a show me product or a tell me product?
34:41
And like, I think Rhinos can probably be both, but when you see it, you get it. Like, it's like, oh my gosh, look at what it's doing. This is-- So this is a great way to do the show me product.
34:52
The second thing is, I wouldn't think of it as a one-off expense because what you're gonna be able to do is amortize this across all of your content now. You can throw events out there.
35:03
You can have a community out there. You can do all sorts of things. So I think this is a great bet. I love it. I'd also kind of-- I would include it almost in like a community play.
35:13
So I build all of my marketing around basically three pillars and then one ancillary pillar. So you have community, content, education, and then moonshot marketing.
35:21
And again, for SaaS, it's a, a, I think of the world in quarters because I'm in SaaS, so you'd carve out five to ten percent of your mo- quarterly budget for some crazy asymmetric bet.
35:32
I wouldn't consider this a moonshot. I think it's awesome. I think it's a community play, and then you're gonna be able to get so much content out of it. You can start hosting events out there.
35:40
You can make, you know, Rhino World. You can run an annual event. People really, really, um, under-index on having a, a pillar event every year.
35:50
Like, if you have the coolest party, man, it's a, it's a huge marketing asset. So I- Triple Whale? Triple Whale had the Whalies. Yeah, we have a Whaley back here for people that are watching.
35:59
That, that was our most successful campaign by far, for sure. Um, at Firmot, we were trying to do the same thing where we were gonna do a world's fair, but some things kind of just didn't, uh, pan out.
36:09
But having your own, like, stake in the ground for like Dreamforce, for Salesforce, et cetera, like it, it matters. It's a, it's a great thing. So- For me, I think it's brilliant. I, I, I love it.
36:20
I, I have no notes on it at all. And then I think the other cool thing is, like you said, you can start to have kind of these ancillary products around it. Um, you can start to have product development out there.
36:30
Again, content stuff. I think YouTube, Instagram, like all these things. You bring influencers out there, come try it out, all these things.
36:37
There, there's just a myriad of content plays here that, uh, make a ton of sense.
36:42
Also, um, for your VIPs, how I was telling you, like, cool, if you buy during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, run a sweepstakes and we're gonna fly you out to Austin, and you can come out to the Rhino world, and we'll treat you.
36:52
Pay, pay for everything. We'll get-- There's just so many cool things that you can do with that. I, I love it. No notes. I think it's... Uh, Howard, if you're out there, give me an invite.
37:01
I, I'd love to come shoot some guns on your ranch. From what I heard from, from Ted Rippek as he told the story, that idea was rejected by the board for a couple years. Dude,
37:14
whenever you get the board involved, man, it's always the, uh...
37:17
I have, I have s- I have weird views on all that stuff, so I, I have to be careful here, but, um, it goes back to the David Ogilvy quote of, "Go through all your parks in the city.
37:28
Walk through all your parks in the city. You'll never see a statue for a committee." Um, and so I, I think when you get into decision by committee, it gets really weird really quickly.
37:38
Another thing is- But you also said that you need to have-- I mean, back to tying this back to the CMO, the, the, the difficult, miserable life of a CMO,
37:48
there has to be a CEO, the owner, at least someone who's like willing to take that bet with you. Yes. This is exactly right.
37:55
This is kind of going back to what we talked about early, early on of you were telling me all the like hypotheticals that people are gonna go through.
38:02
Almost always, that's downstream of having a risk portfolio mismatch between the CMO and the CEO. Um, com-completely agree. Liquid Death, one of my favorite brands of all time.
38:14
Dude, Mike was crazier than everybody there. Like, I mean, it was, it was the... So, like, it, it really matters. And again, I'm not saying one way is right or wrong, it's just the compatibility.
38:25
You need to have a CMO that is compatible with the C-CEO's kind of vision, their risk tolerance, their ability to spend money on things that might not have instant ROI or like this. This is such a cool brand play.
38:39
Like, I, I, I love it. I love it so much. And honestly, do-- it, it's so easy for the board because the boards are gonna be very analytical. The boards are gonna be, "Hey, how do, how is this gonna net out?"
38:52
Blah, blah, blah. Nothing creative happens in a boardroom at all. It, it's the safest place on the planet. Nobody wants to take a risk because there's no incentive to take a risk.
39:00
Like, uh, their, their job there is to, uh-- they're essentially like lawyers with better suits, where their, their job is to what's the safest path forward. And- Can you imagine like the Claude AI prompt?
39:14
So what's your assessment of spending multiple millions on real estate over the course of a couple years and a dump bunch of money, and then we'll like, we'll do stuff there? Ex-exactly.
39:25
And, uh, this is again, going back to that taste vector where to me it instantly makes sense and I can see like, oh my gosh, this, this becomes an absolute goldmine and property of amazingness that you just can build absolutely the most incredible brand around, do so many cool things.
39:43
It's also in Austin, so it's a cool city. People will travel here. I mean, I have no notes on that, but I, I do empathize with, uh, getting the, uh, nays for the board. It's...
39:55
Do you-- I don't know if you can share it or not, but do you know why they ended up saying yes? How it got green lit?
40:01
'Cause that, that's interesting to me, 'cause for two years somebody saying, "No, no, no, no, no," um, and then to finally get green lit, I, I wonder how, uh, how, how Ted slid that one through.
40:10
But I, I, I've seen a lot of boards like- Well, I think it takes, at some point, whatever that particular situation was, there needs to be a vision.
40:19
There needs to be someone willing to put their balls on the line- Yep... and say, "I will, I will die on this hill." Yep, yep.
40:24
"This is what we need to do because there's all kinds of ways we could spend money, but this is the thing that sets us up for years." This is exactly right.
40:30
This is-- And ultimately, that's the other thing too, is like, uh, it, it, it comes back to, again, the CMO being an effective steward of capital, and I think this is in a great expenditure. I, I, it's so interesting.
40:43
So a CMO, as much as anything else, a CMO has to be visionary, has to be courageous, has to be willing to set this idea that might seem a little bit crazy, but be able to have credibility to the board or anyone else by saying, "This is the long-term big bet."
41:00
Yes. "We've got short-term wins we're lining up-" Yes, yes. "... and we've managed a portfolio of risk." Yes. This, uh... That's exactly right. Marketing is the highest risk org in a company. Full stop.
41:10
There, there's no org that's higher risk than marketing.
41:13
But what you just said is so important because, uh, you need to be all those things, but first and foremost, you need to be the best storyteller at the company, where you need to be-- and you have to have data.
41:23
So like, I'm a, I'm a crazy degenerate, but at the same time, when I'm going into my finance meetings or if I have to go into the board meetings and things like that, you better believe I have all these crazy stories.
41:32
But then there's data wrapped around those stories to understand you're selling a vision, but these are very analytically driven people that you need to show.
41:41
And you, you, you can't have soft metrics around like, uh, uh, there's boardroom metrics and marketing metrics, so like impressions or, or AI cer-- Like, none of that stuff matters.
41:51
You need actual cold steel, like here's pipeline, here's how quickly we're, we're truncating the sales cycle. Our ACVs are going up, things like that.
41:59
Like again, uh, this is more of a SaaS thing, but D2C has the same thing of, "Oh, our LTV is going up," or, um, you know, "Our purchase velocity is going up," or, "Oh my gosh, this unlocked retail for us because now all the buyers heard about Rhino World, and now they're wanting to put product in all these sporting goods stores wherever Rhino's being sold," et cetera, et cetera.
42:18
"We have a partnership now with Ford because of Rhino." Like- Yeah... all these things happen, and that's- That's the show.
42:24
Like, if you can't tell a story- So you said, you said the marketer-- You said the CMO has to be the best storyteller in the company. Yep. And they need to come supported by data. Yep.
42:34
That reminds me, I was in Boston a few weeks ago. Klaviyo runs an annual conference- Yep...like annual anchor events. Yep. Okay, boss. And a woman named Christina Tosi was there from Milk Bar. Yep. Yeah.
42:46
She tells a great story about how she was trying to go with a flavor for this ice cream or this thing and, and, and she ended up trying to just, just racking her s- her mind over and over and over, unable to do that.
42:59
Then, of course, the big story of Milk Bar is they have this cereal milk flavor that comes about.
43:04
She goes for a walk, she buys some corn flakes, she soaks the milk in the corn flakes, she makes ice cream out of the milk. It's this real revolutionary moment.
43:13
And one thing she affirmed in that story was no data anywhere would have ever suggested soaking corn flakes in milk as a flavor.
43:24
And people hear it, and people like-- People tasted it, and they're like, "I don't know what this is, but I love it, and I remember it. What is this?" Yes. Right? So she said, "Be careful about relying on data."
43:36
And as we think about framing all of our marketing through the lens of AI-informed processes, that is backward-looking. Data is about the past. Yes. The future is what we can imagine- Yes...with our creativity. Yes.
43:49
That's where cereal milk comes from, right? Yes. The vision that she had on her own. So how do you think about the data being put in the proper context in terms of making courageous decisions as a marketer? Yeah.
44:03
I mean, one, that's a fantastic story, and two, this is why AI will never, like, trump creative output in the whole. Like, I think it can get you to ninety percent.
44:15
You can brainstorm quicker, and you can do some interesting things there, but ultimately you'll-- wh-when people are copying you, they can never leapfrog you. They can only just go up to where your thinking is.
44:25
So I think that's a really good call-out. Uh, the, the data matters more so because y- y- you can't just be asking for millions and millions of dollars without some semblance of reality, of like, "Okay, cool.
44:37
Here's where we are. Here's..." A, a really good framework for D2C and/or SaaS is, "Here's where we were, here's where we are, here's where we're going, here's how we're gonna get there."
44:48
And you-- That, that's ultimately as simple as it gets, where you-- And then you, you pull your data and you say, "Okay, cool. Here's the historicals that we've had. Here's where we are now.
44:57
That was the improvement, and then this is how we're gonna get there when we launch these campaigns." Again, it's a lot of licking your finger into the wind. You're just making numbers up.
45:07
But ultimately, it's not about that. It's about the storytelling of like, "Okay, cool. When we launch Rhino World, this is what's gonna happen.
45:15
Rhino World is then gonna enable an army of influencers because we're gonna get so much content there. Those, uh, from every million impressions we get, we're actually saving X amount of dollars on ad spend.
45:26
And the-- I'm actually s-saying these a- these impressions are gonna be more valuable because they're not ads, so people aren't, they don't have their guard up.
45:34
Furthermore, we're gonna be able to get better ads, so we don't actually have to buy ads from the creative studio because we can get ads from Rhino, Rhino World.
45:42
We have these sponsorships lined up, so that's gonna actually subsidize some of Rhino World.
45:47
And then from that we can have product development out of Rhino World, where we're gonna have some of the best kind of blue-collar haulers come out, and then we're gonna have a competition for blue-collar haulers, and then we're gonna have our cereal milk bar moment because we're putting all the people that use this product in the space that is inspiring.
46:05
That's then gonna give us this to then take us to the next level, and that's how we're gonna generate a hundred percent growth year over year." That's where I think I hear- That's where I start to think of it.
46:15
Yeah, it's-- I mean, you can see the inspiration starts to run, right? You can just, you have a whole now- It's a story...story. That's brilliant. And so I think you see the, the storytelling.
46:23
You said the marketer needs to be the best teller. Let me say that again. You've said the chief marketing officer needs to be the best storyteller in the company. Yeah. And you've got to bring data along with that.
46:35
And so the data is what brings you up to the present. Yep. And then the vision is what looks into the future.
46:42
And the combination of that data orientation to understand the past and the creative ideas that can imagine the future makes that chief marketing officer at the pivotal place, right? Yes. That's exactly right.
46:53
It's like the, it's the pivotal moment of creating the future by moment by moment with what we decide to do next. That's exactly right.
47:01
I, I, I mean, it- That's why it's the most important role, besides the CEO, I would say. Yeah. There's gotta be a product, though, right? Yeah. Gotta be a product The, the product is the nuclear reactor of the company.
47:10
Like, without a product, y- you can only outmarket a mediocre to bad product for so long. Like, it, it just eventually catches up with you.
47:18
Um, and I, I think there might be some people s-listening saying, "Oh, the CEO should be the best storyteller." Yeah. Yes, I get it. Like, I think there's some splitting hairs there.
47:27
But ultimately, if you are the CMO, you are the chief cheerleader at the company. Yes, the CEO should be inspiring. Yes, they should be visionary. But normally, CEOs should just have one or two superpowers.
47:38
The marketer should be the one that is this-- That, that's usually why they roll into the CEO, where I can take Patrick's vision, synthesize it, and make it really, really incredible, where, uh, a lot of CEOs might be vectored on VC, for example.
47:52
Like in the SaaS world, they're very vectored on VC, and VC language is completely orthogonal to what the actual consumers wanna hear, what they care about, et cetera.
48:01
And so being able to synthesize that story into, um, something that is not only palatable but exciting. Like, like, people wanna be part of a movement, man. And like how can you take a moment to a movement?
48:13
That is what real marketing is. Th-that's the show.
48:16
Like, how, how can I have this idea of Rhino World and that's like a moment in my head, and now I'm gonna make this movement of like this is the destination for blue-collar haulers.
48:27
This becomes the mecca for blue-collar haul. Like that is the story that you sell. Yeah. I think that also for brands listening to this who are under 10 million, the CMO role is really the founder CEO It's 100% correct.
48:43
Right, right. And so I had a conversation earlier this summer with a brand that is, I don't know, crossing that threshold, say to 12. Yep. And it's time to hire the first CMO. Yep.
48:54
It's probably gonna be a fractional role. Yep.
48:56
And one of the things that he described to me was he said, "As the founder, I'm really good at imagining a product launch and doing it in a clever way that makes a big splash." Yep.
49:09
"I have no ability to operationalize the follow-through to bring those sales all the way through the pipeline." Yep.
49:17
And that's where the CMO role, I think, is starting to be distinguished by the CEO or the visionary initially. Yep. They can not just imagine, but they can operationalize. That, that's exactly right. I mean, I...
49:30
And I think that, uh, the company you're advising or you're talking about or whatever is exactly right, where honestly, man, a lot of people don't need a CMO until you get, get, get much bigger than that because
49:42
you know that the founder is usually the chief marketing officer, the chief cheerleader. They, they know what they wanna do. They don't-- What they need, uh, so there's kind of two things.
49:53
You, you either need an ideator or an executor, and a lot of times founders just need a lot more executional firepower. They don't need ideas.
50:01
They, they know what they wanna do, but they need somebody that can take this really wacky, crazy idea and, like you said, operationalize it, attach KPIs to it, push it through the funnel so they can then think of the next crazy idea.
50:14
I think that's the problem at companies is when you don't have that balance where you're heavy on ideas but light on execution, you end up having a whiteboard of gold and nothing gets done.
50:26
Or if you have a bunch of executors but no ideators, you, you, you're basically just shipping dumb stuff all the time, or you're doing the best practices, or you're going to Claude and say, "Hey, make me the best marketing campaign," you're executing against that.
50:39
So that's the real tension in a lot of companies is when do I bring on an actual CMO or a VP of marketing or what have you? And honestly, what's the point of it? Like some, some CEOs aren't visionaries.
50:51
Some CEOs are very product led, where they're like, "Hey, I'm, I'm a great engineer. I made a great product." Yes. "I can tell you what's going on. I, I, I can't market this thing."
51:01
That's when you need kind of a, a more of a switchblade or a Swiss Army knife CMO of like, "Okay, cool. I can take the cool utilitarian product story and make it into something sexy and fun."
51:12
Like this is a great mannequin. Let me put an Armani suit on. And some people just need essentially a shepherd for their ideas, where they just need executional bandwidth of like, "Okay, cool. Here's what I wanna do.
51:23
Go do it. I tell you what I need and when I need it, and how's what the money's for, and you go figure it out."
51:28
So I think it's really important to always start with the goal in mind when you're hiring in that marketing role. Yeah, it is.
51:34
And I think there's also something to be said for-- I mean, my, my day-to-day work is as eBusiness pros. It's a marketing agency. Yep. So part of what that CEO was asking for was, "I can do big vision.
51:45
I can throw a big product launch." But to operationalize that, that's where an agency can be supportive before they hire the internal marketing team and the CMO led by.
51:54
I actually am very pro agency at, at a lot of those scales where it's like-- 'cause the other thing is it's just messy to deal with a person. And then the other thing is
52:05
if you get in and you get somebody that's maybe ideator and executor, but then they don't ha-- like you end up burning them out or like there's just a lot to where-- 'cause usually you're gonna spend a lot of money on that person, so then they're gonna have a really small team, so then they're not gonna have a lot of executional bandwidth.
52:20
But then if I'm an ideator and executor, I get really bored 'cause all I'm doing is dumb stuff. And so I actually completely agree with you there, Patrick. I think a lot of people, um, I think there was this kind of
52:32
phase that there was a lot of agency hate, and rightfully so. There, there's some agencies that aren't, aren't the best. But at the same time, I think when it fits the right--
52:41
when it fits your company, I think it's really smart to, to have, uh, the ability to go out and get an agency because it-- you, you're gonna unlock a whole team versus unlocking a person.
52:53
And then, you know, as you grow and stuff like that, maybe you do get that.
52:55
But even I know a bunch of big brands that have in-house marketing and agencies as well where it's-- So I, I think you can slot it in in a lot of different configurations.
53:04
But ultimately, I think a lot of times when you're in that hyper-growth trajectory-- 'cause the other thing is, in my opinion, it's way easier to find great agencies like yours than it is to find a CMO or a VP of marketing.
53:16
Like that's a really hard hire and that takes a lot of time. And, um, there's also a ramping period. Anyways, I'm rambling now, but yeah, I-
53:25
Hey, a timeout to talk about something that I want in my e-commerce store maybe you might want to think about for yourself.
53:33
And let's do that by looking at something I wanna share my screen and, and show something that is a-- it's one of my favorite e-commerce stores. It's a custom book publisher and based in Boulder, Colorado, Juniper Books.
53:48
I just got off the phone with these guys and we were reviewing how they have lots of money locked up in wish lists on their e-commerce website.
53:59
And so we wanna move those buyers into the checkout process from the wish list. But do you even have a wish list for your website? There's something that is worth looking at in what Swim can bring to your Shopify store.
54:16
They're already installed on lots of Shopify Plus stores. Maybe you've already got it, but you're not making the most of it.
54:23
Swim is a sponsor of this season of the Frankly eCommerce show and gonna be helping us with a workshop in Austin in October.
54:33
But you can take advantage of it in time for Black Friday and make Your shopper who's not ready to check out yet, save it for later, and then with careful integration with Klaviyo, prompt them to come back and buy again.
54:47
So we're just finishing up a project actually with Klaviyo and with Swim and with Juniper Books to demonstrate how this can be done in our work at eBusiness Pros.
55:00
Here's a screenshot of a campaign template that has a dynamic content block featuring a product in the wish list of this customer.
55:12
And they're gonna get the regular campaign like they would this week, but there's gonna be a personalized section inviting them to go back and finish what they've saved for later on their wish list.
55:22
Just an example of ways you can help bring your customers to a, a clearer decision about when to make that purchase.
55:30
And hey, Black Friday coming up, there's no better time than this hard to remind them what the good stuff on their wish list looks like. So check out Swim.
55:38
If you're in Austin in October, check out the workshop we're gonna do together there at franklycommerce.com.
55:44
But otherwise, if you're looking for a gift for the holidays, go to juniperbooks.com and see the beautiful things they have, uh, for sale there. All right. Back to our show. Completely agree with that. I am 100% aligned.
55:57
Well, it, it is a curious time as we think about where the CMO needs to be giving their time and energy, and we think about AI doing so much of the thinking or the, the organizing or the orchestration, so to speak. Yeah.
56:13
But it's interesting to how we had a conversation with a brand that came back to us, this is in the September period. They left in March because AI was gonna do their email marketing.
56:25
And it kinda did, but they just needed a little more both hands on the wheel, accountability, direction, operational excellence, and they said, "You know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna carry this to the fourth quarter on our own."
56:37
Yeah. It's just too, it's too driven by probabilities of an AI agent where we don't know what's gonna happen one week to the next. Yeah.
56:44
So it's interesting to see how that play out, plays out, but it, uh, it does bring me to my, my last question here. I appreciate your time talking about all this stuff with me. Of course.
56:51
I imagine we could riff longer, but- Yeah... I have one last thing for you. You have moved into-- from one organization to the next, and you come in to take charge of marketing. Yep.
57:03
And you're like, "There's things that live on the budget." Yeah. There's someone's got a deck or someone's got a, a, a retainer or they've got some sort of expense that's been churning along in the background.
57:12
And I loved an example, you made the observation the other day of saying, "Pick something, ten, fifteen percent of your budget, turn it off- Yeah... and then just wait." Yeah.
57:24
And for someone who used to work at Triple Whale, talk about attribution- Yeah... and like obsessing over the details,
57:31
tell me more about what leads you to have the confidence or what are the learnings that come when you just say, "Nah, we're gonna turn that off, and we're just gonna watch"? Yeah.
57:41
I mean, again, it helps to have the relationship with the CEO of-- I have, uh, I don't wanna say carte blanche, but I have a lot of authority over the marketing org.
57:51
And, um, this in specific was something that, uh, I, I kind of...
57:56
when you take over, um, there's kind of predecessor stuff that you go through, and this was something where, um, it was kind of like a Reddit commenting service, what have you, kinda pricey, and there really wasn't a ton of performance coming from it.
58:10
So it's just like, "You know what? Let, let's just see what happens." And so we ended up just nuking it, and, uh, ultimately nothing happened. If anything, our actually AI generative, uh, results went up.
58:22
So I think it's really important to not feel inertia sometimes.
58:27
And you also-- This is why I'm big on theses, not beliefs, where if you have a belief, it becomes personal, and I don't want to like, "Oh, I believe this is important," and then it's really hard 'cause it's like a, a front on you if you're cutting it off.
58:39
But if you have a thesis of like, "Hey, I think this Reddit agency is gonna really help out and boost our, uh, you know, results in AEO, SEO," and then it doesn't, it's okay. You know what I mean?
58:49
Like I, I think the worst thing that can happen is putting good money behind bad. And this goes back to that thesis versus failures and successes of like the whole point is to take risk. So I had a thesis.
59:02
The thesis was invalidated. I stopped the experiment.
59:05
And so I think a lot of CMOs can get caught in inertia of we're just doing the thing because we-- One of the most dangerous lines is, "Oh, we've always done it that way."
59:15
And I think when you get into that world, it can be really scary because you just end up becoming a, uh, a product of your inertia versus a product of your creativity, a product of your bets, and you can't really change trajectory.
59:29
So yeah, that was something that, uh, you know, ended up cutting my way. To be fair, I've done it, uh, uh, on other places, and it was the wrong move. [laughs] We turned it right back on.
59:38
But I think ultimately the whole point is no sacred cows. Like you need to be able to say, "Hey, this was the thesis. This was the experiment. Here's the results." If you're not happy with it, cut it off.
59:48
If you are happy with it, put more money behind it.
59:50
But when you start to say, "Oh, I believe this," or, "I believe that," you can get into real trouble because those start to generate dogmas, and dogmas can really lead you down, um, bad decisions because they start to, to tickle the ego, and that's a...
1:00:02
it's, you know, it's a really hard thing to deal with. Yeah. Well, I love the fact that you're saying that CMO needs to be able to have no sacred cows- Mm-hmm...
1:00:11
really have the courage to say, "We're gonna turn this off," and have a thesis behind it. And one of the ways I like to think about it is what's called a learning agenda.
1:00:19
That's something that- Which is a great way to put it... and, you know, learning agendas is an idea that a guy named David Rafeli Berman brought to me in some of our work together- It's a great-...
1:00:27
with a brand called Hotel Coach. I love that line. Yeah, that's a great line. Yeah.
1:00:30
So here's what we've learned, or here's what even like even better is looking ahead to the fourth quarter, we want to learn these things. Yep. And we're gonna make observations and run these tests to see so. Yeah. Yeah.
1:00:43
I think there's, uh, sometimes the CMO, you know, or the rather sometimes the marketing, I would say, easy out is say, "We're just gonna test." Yep.
1:00:53
And I hate that we just sort of fall back on, "We'll just test everything and see what works." There's not enough time or money to test everything. Yep.
1:01:00
You have to make a bold, clear claim and say, [inhales] "I have this thesis. We're gonna do this, but we're not gonna just test before we find out what works." I, I couldn't agree with you more.
1:01:09
I ha- one of, uh, my fav... So I went to school for economics, so one of my favorite lines from Keynes was, uh, "Strong beliefs weakly held," or, "When the data changes, so do my, so do my opinions." Mm.
1:01:19
And I think ultimately that's the best way to do it, where you need to have a really strong opinion on something, but if the data's wrong and it's showing you that you had the wrong [laughs] the...
1:01:31
There's nothing wrong with that. Move on. Like, uh, there, there's, there's nothing glory, there's no glory in, you know, dying on hills that aren't worth dying on, where it's just like...
1:01:40
Like Rhino World, I would die on that hill. I would just say, "Hey [laughs] I am very bullish on this idea," I'm like. And the problem is, sometimes you're wrong.
1:01:49
And that's why the CMOs [laughs] are- It's gig on the line... 'cause they're like, "Hey, I was wrong. I made a big, bad bet. Uh, like, can I climb out of this?"
1:01:59
And, uh, so that's, I think, the biggest challenge is product can recover from it. Finance is way more structured that you usually don't have to make big bets. It's a very risk-off org, rightfully so.
1:02:11
But marketing is like, "Hey, man, I'm looking for the most alpha and I think this is it."
1:02:16
And again, sometimes you got the bear, sometimes the bear gets you, and all you can do is keep making those experiments, keep running those experiments with, uh, a thesis, and data wrapped around that thesis, and keep telling the story the best you can.
1:02:30
But, um, you know, if you, you can't turn it around in three or four, or at least in the SaaS world, in three or four quarters, uh, you better polish that resume, buddy, 'cause [laughs] it's, uh- [laughs]
1:02:41
You're getting canned... storytelling, yeah, the storytelling can only get you so far. Ultimately, you do need to produce results. Yeah.
1:02:47
Well, I think the excitement around marketing is that combination of having the data from the past, the vision from the future- Yep...
1:02:55
and then having those accountability moments where it all comes, you know, shakes out at the end of the year, we look back and see whether it delivered. Yeah. That's part of the excitement of marketing.
1:03:04
It's what I've been doing for 30 years. Yeah. And I think it's both invigorating and it can be exhausting. Yeah. Yeah. And it can be at some point,
1:03:13
the ax comes, you dust yourself off, and you move on to the next product. Yeah. That's exactly right. I mean, it's never, uh, over till it's over. And I think the other thing that I would add there is [inhales]
1:03:26
if you're not having fun, you should evaluate why. Like, is it, is it an environment thing where I've been in some environments in the past where, uh, it was just y- you know, I, I just was...
1:03:39
If you're not having fun or if you don't think you're doing the best work of your life, I think that's a really good time to pause and reflect on why. Yeah. Sometimes it's you and sometimes it's the environment.
1:03:50
And, uh, like, if it's you, can you fix it? If it's not, then, you know, you probably need to change. Or if it is the environment, you, you probably need to leave that environment.
1:04:02
I, like, you will always lose to somebody having fun. But whenever, those are kind of my two heuristics at a role.
1:04:07
I think if you're a super talented person, the worst thing you can do is stay at the wrong place too long. And so that'd be, like, kind of my last parting advice for our listeners is, are you having fun?
1:04:18
If you're not having fun, and are you, do you think you're doing the best work of your life? And if both of those things are nos, you know, uh, I think it's a really good time to pause and reflect because, um,
1:04:31
it's really hard if you're not having fun. This is a really hard gig. Yeah. Well, Rabah, I've had fun talking with you in the Frankly Ecommerce Show.
1:04:39
I wish you well making the best of your situation at Thai, and we'll see you at our workshops in Austin in October. Amazing. Thanks so much, Patrick. Appreciate it.
1:04:48
[upbeat music] We hope you enjoyed this episode of Frankly Ecommerce with host Patrick Scott Pittman. Read episode notes and get links to learn more at franklyecommerce.com.
1:04:59
Next time you're in Austin, check out the Austin Shopify Meetup. It's open to all.
1:05:06
There's a good chance you'll meet just the right person, as it's one of the longest running meetups with 2,600 participants going on 15 years.
1:05:16
If you'd like to get more involved beyond the meetup, then Frankly Ecommerce pass holders participate in workshops and special invitation-only events. Subscribe to our newsletter at franklyecommerce.com to learn more.
1:05:30
This episode is sponsored in part by the friendly team at eBusiness PROS, a marketing firm in Austin, Texas. If you're a brand seeking to connect with an enthusiast audience and hold their attention,
1:05:42
if you want less discounting and more story, if you're curious about what we might mean by attuned marketing as contrast to behavioral trickery, then contact us at ebusinesspros.com. Ask for Abigail. That's me.
1:05:57
[upbeat music]
Frankly eCommerce
Listen on
Apple Podcasts
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Spotify
YouTube
YouTube
Recent episodes
What AI Didn't Solve about Data Analytics
Sep 19, 2026
Why Now is the Best Time to Launch a Brand with Chris Lang
Sep 4, 2026
