This week Eric chats to Anna Griffin of Intercom, who talks about how she sees the role of CMO in challenging the status quo.
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Transcript
Anna: So much of the immediate and sales is about what you make and so much about the long term is what you make possible.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler, and this is Scratch Bringing You Marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone. My guest today is Anna Griffin, CMO of Intercom. Anna's been an intercom for seven months now. She leads the product marketing, corporate marketing, demand generation and growth teams to amplify intercom's voice in the market, establish the company as a leader in customer communication and accelerate demand and revenue growth. Anna has a ton of experience in b2b, cmo, SVP and VP of marketing roles. She was at Nortel, she was at Juniper Networks. She's also worked with a ton of brands over the course of her career. Also on the consumer side, including AM Nortel soon, Sony Lanz, end Bank of America Toys, Saturn and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. Really fascinating conversation with Anna. We kind of got off track from the very beginning in a very good way, meaning we did not stick with the standard questions, but she just brought up a lot of interesting points that really resonated with me and with us and how we think about things here at Rival.
So a couple of the highlights from me that I know you're going to enjoy, she's very passionate about B2B marketing being brand led and not just a support function of sales. So she digs into not just why that's so important, but also how she makes it happen at these big organizations. She also touches on, which I know is something that a lot of you listening are very interested in how marketers should be thinking about protecting their marketing budget, looking into a potential economic recession. And marketing is often one of the places where budgets get cut first. So she has some advice for people on that. We talk about how important fighting point of differentiation is in the market. We talk about values and then role of the CMO and bring into life those values within an organization. And she has a lot of great thoughts on the future role of CMOs and we talk about how that's changing in the industry and she views it as kind of two paths that the future CMOs are going to take. So really enjoyed this one. I know you will too. And without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Anna Griffin, CMO of Intercom.
Hey Anna, how are you?
Anna: Fantastic. Hey Eric. Thanks for having me today.
Eric: Thank you so much for joining me. I'm very excited about this conversation. We just spent almost 20 minutes, well part of it was trying to try to find headphones and working with tech issues, but part of it was also talking about your background. We hadn't met before this call, but I've obviously checked out a bit about what you do, your background and what you're up to and I'm really excited to get into it. I wish we could have recorded some of what we already talked about, but we'll try to replicate it now.
Anna: Sounds great.
Eric: Cool. So let's start out with what are you most curious about right now
Anna: Oh Eric? My head is on fire with so many things right now to say 1, 2, 3. I could probably give you a list of 20, but I would say number one on the list is the proverbial. How do you do more with less? When I think of economic downturns, like the moments we're in right now, the pressure on every marketer on every company, but it's always marketing, always has the, you've got some liquid dollars, so how about we made pause some of that it's dealing with liquid dollars versus a headcount. And so in moments like this particularly knowing that I make a product also for marketers, I know that the customers that I serve are also deeply in the mode of how do we do more with less? How do we take moments like this? The next six months could be quite uncertain in time. And I think it's like this is the moment where you burn sacred cows.
This is the moment where you say the old way is not going to get us to what we have to do. We've got to have to try something new to truly be able to do more with less. So say goodbye to sacred cows and how do you do that? How do you know what's new to push to on to get new outcomes? So I'm super curious there cause I know my customers need that and even myself as a marketer, what are we going to push on to get something new? I have a lot of other curiosities, <laugh> and the economy and globalization and politics and gun control and all kinds of things that I know you don't want to get into today. And I certainly don't have answers for these things, but these are the things that keep me up at night.
Eric: Oh man. Personally I'd love to get into a lot of that with you, but we probably don't have time and I owe it to our audience to try to keep us on track here. However, I will say I am going to go off track slightly, but it's still within the realm of what we're going to talk about. So I think it's really interesting. One of the things I I've been thinking about a lot recently is marketing in most organizations is treated as a cost center. And I personally, I think there's an opportunity to potentially turn it into a revenue center. It's one of the things that I've seen and that I'm really passionate about with modern B2B marketing is building a media company around what you stand for. Because a media company cares most about the attention of its audience and adding value as opposed to extracting value. And when you have a lot of attention, you can actually monetize that through sponsorship. But let's put that off to a side for a second. I think even if it doesn't get there, marketing really should be treated more like an innovation center. Marketing is the voice of the customer within the organization. One of the first things you said was you talked about your customer and you didn't say this explicitly, but this was my takeaway and you can correct me if I'm wrong, you bring that into the organization. This is what marketers need right now in terms of the products that you bring into them. But I guess if you want to build on any of that, great. But to go off script for a second one of the questions I've been hearing a lot from people because we do a series of virtual workshops as well, and I ask people what are the topics that they would want us to do a workshop on? And it's with an external guest that we bring in. It's like an hour long thing kind of like this, but with someone else co-leading it with us. And the one that I've heard most consistently is how should marketers be thinking about budgets and fighting for budgets going into potentially an economic downturn or just uncertain times when a lot of CEOs, CFOs might be coming to marketing to cut those budgets. So I'm just curious if you have any thoughts or advice on how you're clearly thinking about it, about how marketers listening should be thinking about budgeting going into whatever it is we're facing into right now.
Anna: I think we all learned a lesson or I'm a lesson with covid, but it was, it's fresh. And so you can pull back if you think it was what, two and a half years ago every company was in this exact feeling of the same moment we're in right now, uhoh happening and we don't know when it's going to get better so let's pull back. But the companies that lean in during times like this, lean in with marketing, lean in with new ways to add value to customers because again, it's a customer's market. If companies are feeling it, then the people that they serve are feeling it. And so I think the most important thing with marketing is to be able to associate how you're going to provide that value and need in this moment to that customer. Then you can talk about the spend or tactics required to meet that need. But if you can lead with <laugh>, we got to help them instead of we need more marketing dollars to promote us. It's like, no, no, we've got to help them. We can help them and we can add more value than and help them navigate a tricky time. Then we can figure out the role of sales and marketing to do that. And even the role of product to do that. There are adjustments and easements and things that can be done across the board, product sales and marketing to lean into customers. So the budget conversations are always difficult. I don't think I've ever worked anywhere even when I've had hundreds of millions of dollars to spend where budget conversations are difficult. And to your earlier point about trying to prove ROI and getting that quick association with revenue, it's just we're thinking about it the wrong way and you're thinking about it correctly, but there's no quick fix. You can't just go $1 in equals $2 out. I wish it was that easy and everyone is constantly trying to do that, but there's going to be long-term support, growth, success that marketing does that you cannot and will not be able to measure in the short term. And the answer is you always have to do both because if you give one up, you're giving the other up as well. And so in times like this a aim for the customer, B do not take the foot off the brake on some of the long-term plays. It'll set you back another two years.
Eric: I think always. But particularly when a lot of companies are playing defense, whoever can be more long-term oriented is going to have the advantage. And you might not always be able to be long-term oriented. You might need to cut budget and maybe that does need to come from marketing and you might need to prioritize short-term, but whenever you can focus on long-term, it's going to put you in a better position. So I'm jumping around all over the place just because what you're talking about is leading me in a couple directions of things I know I wanted to talk to you about. So pulling from your bio, I think this is on LinkedIn, but you talk about how your specialty is in b2, B2C business models where proper brand recognition drives sales, performance and growth. And so as we were talking about a bit before we pressed record, to me that kind of speaks to the balancing of the short term and long term objectives and within an organization, obviously it's never this simple, but sales fundamentally is much more focused on short-term revenue and marketing.I think how you were talking about is of course, the way I think about it is marketing is long-term cash flow if you're doing it. There's a lot of B2B organizations in particular where marketing ends up being a support function of sales and some organizations are that short-term oriented. But I think if you're doing marketing, the reason you have marketing within an organization is not to deliver short-term cash, it's to build a long-term cash flow through brand. So I guess that was more of a soapbox statement than it was a question, but I'd love to hear your thoughts, reactions builds on that.
Anna: I'd love that Eric, because so much of the immediate and sales is about what you make and so much about the long term is what you make possible. And that balance of marketing what you make versus what you make possible, what you sell to often becomes the, here we make this product, it does this versus what we make possible. The solving business problems, creating new business outcomes. It's a lot easier to sustain and have a long term growth and expansion within a customer, within a customer base when you can move to what we make possible. You're always going to be transactional when you're doing what we make.
Eric: So how do you, taking it down a level, because I know have this conversation with a lot of people, I'm sure you do as well, taking it down to the level of if marketers listening believe in this, they believe that marketing is long term, it's about what you make possible, not what you make, CFOs, CROs, sometimes CEOs don't always either see it that way or they need to prioritize things differently. How do you have those conversations kind of fight those battles internally to be able to protect and invest in properly the role of marketing to do those jobs?
Anna: Yeah, and this is a tip for any marketer. You have to know how your company makes money and you really have to know how your company makes money. And if you can anchor the conversation around how we make money, that's how we're going to make more of it. You're having a different conversation than I need program dollars to do blank. So when I think of brand and that kind of long tail play, you have to look at your business model and go, there is a cost to acquire a customer, but that's the beginning. And most people stop there, they acquire the customer. But how do you grow that customer? How do you take 'em on a customer journey of cross-sell and upsell and platform play, which a lot of us in tech are, or are selling the value of the platform, not just the value of the product or the feature. And so to do that, you have to be having conversations about what you make possible because if you buy a product to solve a problem and that problem gets solved, well then you're done. You, you're done with the product. You have to constantly be pushing and associating into deeper value newer problems, problems that can be solved. I even think of the product that we make is so fascinating in that you can enter in and use the product in one part of the company, but the real value is when you're using it in sales and marketing and support and all of these entities working together is one. But if I just sold you a product to acquire a customer, if I just sold you a product to support a customer, if I just sold you a product to you engage a customer, you're getting goodness. But you're not getting real step change in an organization. So you know, can slice a conversation on what you have to do to be able to get further expansion, to go upmarket the awareness and education within your audience set. And it just becomes a slightly different conversation than we need to grow 20 points of awareness.
Eric: So I want to go back to your bio cause there's lots of good stuff in there. And pulling from the very first line of how you market yourself, I guess to the world on your LinkedIn is I've always been drawn to innovation engines, visionary companies that see things in a different way, challenging the status quo. I've spent my career working to develop positionings and brand strategies for these emerging challenger brands and for established corporate evolutions. So as I was saying earlier, there's a lot of similarities there and the language and certainly the philosophy of how we think about things and what we're interested in doing here at Rival. But I guess so I'm happy to talk about anything within that that you want to unpack, but to tee it up for you with a specific question. I'm curious to get your thoughts on how do you see the role of the C M O specifically in challenging the status quo?
Anna: Yeah, it, it's going to sound cliched and there's probably been 70 books written on this since the beginning of time. I'd probably say all the way back to Ogilvy on advertising back in the eighties. But that clarity in the mission and purpose that's where disruption begins because you have to see the world in a different light than perhaps your category. You have to know that you do something, the product, the company, the service does something that has to be done and the world is not going to get to where it's fullest potential unless you come in and do that thing. And I think the hardest part is for companies to find that thing because it's got to be meaningful. It has to be meaningful. You need to know that if you don't come in and innovate then the world is not going to get what it needs. And we're never going to make this up. But one company that I worked at back in the day was a net networking hardware routing, switching, but Juniper Networks. But every engineer in that company believed that they did not walk into that building at 7:00 AM and innovate the heck out of what they did. That the world was not, we weren't going to get a truly connected global society weren't. And you couldn't get there with Cisco and you, they thought about it differently. That was going to be a closed proprietary play and they wanted to open the networks up so everyone in the world could have access to truly be able to change the world. And they believe that with every fiber in their being, those companies can disrupt because their purpose in their mission is clear and it culturally it becomes clear. And that's the beginning. And then what marketing does and CMO, you take that foundation and you figure out can he filter it into the culture so that everyone truly does believe and is energized that way. A lot of being a CMO is internal marketing as much as it is external marketing. Can you get your culture around it and driving? And then number two, can you give it on a global stage? What you do is really that worthy and needed in the world that them put it on a bigger stage and tell the world about it. Tell them why they have to have this, tell them what's going to happen if they don't show them what's possible when they do. And those are really the two tricks to marketing. You know, take the foundation of the essence and the founding of the company and the founders, but then you're internally DR driving and pushing towards that clarity. And then externally you're finding the largest stages that you can stand on to help others basically see your company in the same light of and clarity of its mission.
Eric: I think it's such a good point and I totally agree on the importance of internal marketing, internal comms for the role of the cmo. And actually as you were talking, I mean I loved what you were saying about the foundation being that my words, not yours, but kind of point of difference. And I smiled a little bit because actually that's a lot of the work that we do now with Rival is helping companies find that because oftentimes, maybe less so with more experienced CMOs, but oftentimes businesses kind of in the branding exercise, skip to the, okay, what's it going to be called? What's it going to look like? Kind of the look and feel stage, how's it going to come to life? But actually that's the tip of the iceberg. That's the house that you build on top of a foundation and whether you can choose to invest in a really strong foundation, a point of difference, I think that's the keystone or that's the pillar, the main pillar of the foundation.
Eric: Or you can kind of gloss over it, but one way or another it's there. And I think you want to make it as strong as possible, but I was actually thinking as you were talking about that it'll last role that I had, obviously a company not nearly the size of the ones that you've worked at, but 150 person company. And I was like, huh, I probably could have done a better job on the internal side because there was such an energy and such a clear kind of vision of what that company was and wanted to be. And we went through the values and the internal, that whole thing with the chief people officer and all that. But I'm like, huh, it probably should have been a bigger part of my plate than what I made it. Yeah, thank you for making me think about that. Cause I think it was a good learning.
Anna: Well Eric, this is, I think so many people make, it's not a mistake, it's just they stop right there. Oh great, now we've got our values and it's on our website and it's on a poster. It's a sticker on your laptop. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's when the actual work begins in how you are going to fight to make that real in the world. And everybody in the company has a role in it. And it's not just, oh, how we're going to hold each other accountable. It's like, no, no, no. If we're going to be that in the world, show up, do what, believe in blank. You have to put your money where your mouth is and I think you nailed it. It becomes a checklist exercise like okay, so now we have good messaging and yeah, that's certainly a piece of it, but living it and pushing that to be real in the world, that's a different thing. And that, you know, asked me I don't know if it was this question or two or three questions ago, did you ask me what is the future role of a cmo look like? And there and there's couple.Eric, this is, I think so many people make, it's not a mistake, it's just they stop right there. Oh great, now we've got our values and it's on our website and it's on a poster. It's a sticker on your laptop. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's when the actual work begins in how you are going to fight to make that real in the world. And everybody in the company has a role in it. And it's not just, oh, how we're going to hold each other accountable. It's like, no, no, no. If we're going to be that in the world, show up, do what, believe in blank. You have to put your money where your mouth is and I think you nailed it. It becomes a checklist exercise like okay, so now we have good messaging and yeah, that's certainly a piece of it, but living it and pushing that to be real in the world, that's a different thing. And that, you know, asked me I don't know if it was this question or two or three questions ago, did you ask me what is the future role of a cmmo look like? And there and there's couple. A couple of routes and that could be one right there. Yeah, there's always going to be different types of CMOs because every business is different. But I'm finding the two worlds of CMOs or either becoming, you know, are the mission driven CMO, and you're going to help a company make that mission pure, big, real in the world, which means doing things to get talked about. And it's not just getting it written and posting it up. It's like no, making it real in the world. There's also another C C M O that's kind of rising role and that is much more connected to being the customer's champion their Sherpa. They're like everyone is from the beginning of time talked about the role of customer centricity, but it's a big real thing right now because the customers have more access to you and there's more data, you have more access to data to serve them well. And those are the two roles where I see CMOs, you're either becoming this masterful customer experience type leader or you are a masterful, we are going to point the company and the product and the people as our one of our greatest points of difference into being and doing in the world. So the brand has a bigger role in the category or becoming a disruptor.
Eric: So let's stay on that because that was a topic that I really wanted to get your thoughts on. Obviously you've talked about it a bit now, but I think there's more that we can uncover there. So I brought it up because I saw that you had posted an Adweek article from, it was probably a couple weeks ago now, but talking about or covering how the Unilever C M o, Connie Brams is stepping into a new role as Chief Digital and commercial officer, I believe, and there's no longer going to be a CMO at Unilever. So with what you talked about, how, you know, see the future of the CMO role being one, or could it be one or both or maybe one or the other of these paths, how does the Unilever News and them actually one of the biggest CPG companies in the world, so brand and marketing led with how they operate and how they grow. Not having a CMO anymore, what does that mean to you and what does it mean to that two path vision that you laid out now?
Anna: Well no, look, they very much do have a cmo. They just know the future of marketing and that those lines have blurred between sales, marketing support. Whose job is it to land a customer? Whose job is it to engage and create ongoing relationship with the customer? Whose job is it to support and nurture a customer? And the answer is it's become everybody's sales marketing support. They're all doing the same job. And so what I thought was brilliant about what Unilever did is it realized that, and it said therefore the role of the CMO is to focus on how we're going to do just that for the customer. And when you have divided silos, that becomes very, very difficult because sales, this is our job and we do this and this is marketing and we do these things and they've basically reorged in a way where they can serve that customer experience and realize it's one customer from the second you acquire them to how you engage them and grow them to renew them to it's one customer. And yet, so the whole company has to come along and treat them as one and not, well I want the customer to do this in my funnel and I want the customer to do this in my part of the funnel and I want the customer, the customer's smart man, they don't have to put up with that anymore. They expect more you to see them a as one, one. Anna and I need to be treated the same from sales to how I'm supported to I crack up. When you think of the last time you were on a support conversation and you're like, let's say you're bank and you're a bank, you're like, they're asking you all these questions like, dude, me, I've been banking with you for 20 years. You have that data. Do not make me go through this prompt and this queue and to let you should know me. I've been your customer for 20 freaking years. So that customer expectation, we now know it's possible to live in a frictionless world and we expect it. Now we we're not going to put up with friction. So that's why I thought it was brilliant what Unilever did, trust me, they very much have a cmo. She's just elevated the role and the company's elevated the role that it's going to play.
Eric: It's funny, coming from FinTech, we talk about that example all the time of how basically you're a completely different person to different areas of the bank, which is mind blowing on the outside, on the inside, it's still mind blowing. But you see how it got there because basically these different products are just built to what you were saying about teams and business units being siloed. It really is that way. And that's how it ends up getting delivered to the customer at the end of the day. AnScratch is a production of Rival. We are a growth consultancy that builds challenger brands, strategies and capabilities to disrupt categories. If you want to learn more about us, check out we rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me@ericwerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it and leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.d the thing with banking, or the other example, just because I did it today, is when I open up my British Airways app to check in for my flight to Amsterdam tomorrow, it makes me enter my booking reference to tell me what flights I have with how is that a thing? But it's also, you've worked at big companies as well as startups. It's hard to make those changes, especially in a regulated industry like banking airlines, telco, et cetera. I think it's interesting, we do these for rival now as well. We do these dinners, but we did these at my last company, the FinTech business as well, bringing together 10, 12 people. And we try to bring together kind of people from, back then it was from the FinTech world as well, from big bank world. And it was really interesting to bring those two worlds together because actually oftentimes they don't talk to each other. You know, kind of have the big banks. If we stick with the financial services example, you have the big banks kind of talking about, oh, well fintechs are never really going to disrupt us, us. And you have the fintechs talking about, well, big banks, they have all these terrible user experiences and all this stuff, but it's like, I don't think it's that one side doesn't know. I think it's just, it's really hard to turn an oil tanker or whatever it is, or make those types of changes. So I'd be curious to get your thoughts working with some very, very big businesses being C m O of big businesses, but also work, you know, look at your CV and you've worked with brands like Apple and Sony and Royal Caribbean and Bank of America. How do you turn an oil tanker, even if you can get people aligned philosophically of we need to be be more integrated, we need to X, Y, and Z. How do you actually start moving things in the right direction?
Anna: Yeah, well there's so much more than just process and change management. And that's the gorgeous thing about technology. And so I think it's, we'll keep playing out the instance that we've been talking about in banking. You have to have a single customer record and that single customer record has to pass and follow you at every touch that you have. And now add in AI machine learning, it gets really beautiful because now, and this is all possible with technology, in fact actually work for a company Intercom that does exactly this. And this is why I, I'm so intrigued by this. It's why I chose to work at this company. This is the future. That single customer record at every, I'm interacting with you on your website through a messenger. I'm learning something now when I go into your free trial, I know exactly how to serve up certain features of the trial. Cause I know you're a CMO, I know that you're probably going to of a certain size company, so you probably want to know these five things versus putting you into a trial where I could tell you 500 things and not knowing who you are. Then I convert you in that same customer record. Now you're re sales, they know what you were using, they how to come in and serve you. They pass you right off that same customer record. It's growing, it's growing. We know more. We can be more specific, more precise, more personal, more contextual. Now with a customer success manager, you're never repeating yourself because that record flows with you. And what's so interesting about that record is it's not creepy data, it's first party data. You're interacting, you're engaging with a product of human, a service, and that record. So it's your data, you're telling it your preferences, what you need to know, how you want to be to communicated with. And ultimately all those teams are now working as one to service you, Eric, or to service me Anna, instead of working against each other for quota and budget, the very thing that we started this phone call with is like, ah, marketing, they're fighting for budget and in their silo and they've lost perspective of it. It's really just about the customer and how are we all working in unison to get there. So it's possible with technology. I love what, what's being done in the space today. I love being able to be in the moment to market, to be with a customer in the moment in the product when they're currently thinking about you, where they need you most and starting that level of engagement. And we have all of these marketing systems that are lovely, beautiful marketing automation platforms and beautiful CRMs, but they're not in the moment. And we have a little phrase, I use this when I explain to my children what Intercom does. And it's like when <laugh> at, do you want to talk about french fries right there at the register, you're going to add french fries or not two days later when you get home and an email comes back, hi, would you like some french fries? You, you've got to be in the moment and you got to be where the customer is when they need you. And there's so much data that can be retrieved from that. So to me that's the future. It's possible it's there. Now your second question was how do you get people to get around that? And like anything you, it's start small, think big, start small, prove out a connected experience and see the impact that has to that one customer and you'll never go back.
Eric: Well, I think that is a fantastic place to start wrapping things up. As I expected we did not get through even half of the questions, but I think that's the sign of a good conversation. And I've got two more questions, quick questions for you. The second to last is what is one thing out of everything you've said, and I think people could certainly go back and take notes and probably come up with a dozen things that they should be doing differently. But if you had to choose one to leave people with, what is one thing the marketers listening to this episode should do differently?
Anna: You have to ask yourself the question, are you there? Are you there with a customer at the most critical moments of transaction? And if you don't have a solution for that you should be thinking about one. But because again, you have a beautiful MarTech stack, I'm sure your marketing automation and your ABM is all doing amazing things, but it could do so much more if you could be in context in the moment w with a customer when they need you most because that's what they expect. And if you're not, then you're behind the game.
Eric: And last question, who should we have on the show? Who's a guest that you would recommend?
Anna: What I think would be super interesting a dear good old friend of mine, I think you should have Keith Grossman. Keith is the president of Time and Benny Hoff bought time and put it on a reinvention journey about two years ago. And Keith has brought in NFTs, he's brought in crypto, he's brought in really amazing modern technology to disrupt an existing category. And that's what you love to talk about. And I don't know anyone better and more intriguing that than Keith Goman.
Eric: Amazing. All right, well we'll have to get him on the show. I think that's a great recommendation. Anna, thank you so much for making the time. I really enjoyed this. I know people listening will as well. If people want to get in touch with you, connect with you, or find out more about the work you're doing at Intercom, where should we send them?
Anna: You send them to intercom.io and we will be there with a messenger to greet you real time and make sure that we can engage with you and deliver on everything that you need and want to know or you could always reach me on LinkedIn.
Eric: Sounds good. All right, Anna, thanks so much. You have a great day.
Anna: Okay, all the best, Eric, take care.
Eric: Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a growth consultancy that builds challenger brands, strategies and capabilities to disrupt categories. If you want to learn more about us, check out we rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me eric@wearerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it and leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
