This week Eric talks to Grant Johnson, CMO of Emburse, who believes that “life is more exciting when you’re on the edge.”
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Transcript
Grant: Since I've been a CMO since 2009, and you have to stand out, you have to be relevant and you have to be distinct.
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 Grant Johnson, CMO of Embers. He has had many tours of duty as he calls them, being the CMO of many different types of businesses, of many different sizes. And I think that's one of the things that's really interesting is he's been CMO of startups, early stage million dollar businesses all the way up to billion dollar businesses and plus. And so he is a lot of perspective to pull from to really figure out what works and what doesn't. So we talk a lot about how to build team, how to build culture, his methodology around that. Of course we talk about how to bring a brand to market, how to successfully disrupt the category. We talk a lot about differentiation, particularly for embers being in a category where, personally I say this in the interview, I feel like a lot of the businesses and brands out there are trying to tell me the same thing as a potential customer. So how do you actually stand out? And then it's actually a question that he brought up and sent to me ahead of time, but I really like it, which was, what is the biggest mistake that first time CMOs make? So I think you'll enjoy his answer to that as well. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Grant Johnson.
Hey Grant, thanks for joining me. How are things in Southern California?
Grant: Well, they're great as always. The weather's beautiful. I've played a lot of tennis over the weekend and now back at it Monday morning.
Eric: And for those that are listening and not watching, you can't see the bookshelf full of tennis trophies that grant has behind him. It's been a bit of, a little bit more than a hobby. From what you were telling me, you're like ranked or something like that?
Grant: Yeah, well at my level for 4.0 if you know the ratings and so you'd be 17 to 70 and if you're at that level, you compete with whoever comes out that weekend. So I'm a weekend warrior, I win a few of them and lose plenty, but it's a lot of fun and it keeps you young and energized, the thrill of competing and of course more fun when you win. But it's fun regardless.
Eric: Amazing. So Grant, you are actually one of the few guests that line by line answered the questions that I sent over ahead of time. And so I actually want to go through them because like I was saying before we press record, typically they're more of like a directional how we guide the conversation. But I really like the answers that you put down and I think you put them together, put them together pretty quickly based on the timing of the email. So I want to get into that as the meat of the conversation we talked about just now. There's a few other topics that we're going to touch on, but where I wanted to start is a quick story that you told me when we had our first catch up talking about this, doing this recording that I think will help people get to know who you are and then you can pay it off as you start to talk about your experience as a CMO and your recommendations for modern marketing. So you told me that at one point you got approached by a recruiter for an opportunity to go work at Intel to lead the Intel inside work, but when you asked the recruiter what the mission was for the job, the guy said don't fuck it up, that's the mission, don't mess things up. And you said, that's not for me. So do you want to expand on why that's not for you and what that tells everybody who's listening about who you are as a CMO?
Grant: Yeah, it's a great starting point Eric. I've always felt that life is more exciting at the 5%, 95% of people you might encounter are happy with going along but the excitement's really when you're on the edge or in my case working with a disruptive brand, someone trying to shake up the category. And if you look at my track record, yes, I've been part of larger companies just generally though they acquired the company I was working for and I probably didn't stay too long because I really didn't feel I could make the impact that I enjoy doing. And it was interesting, early in my career I had a reputation and built a global brand at AST computer and as you said the person who pioneered the Intel side, they saw the work I was doing and recruiter called me and once I heard the mission, it's like I can't get up on Monday morning not to screw something up. I don't mind screwing something up because you learn things by mistakes, but I'd rather try to elevate a brand or put a brand on the map personally.
Eric: Amazing. So let's get into the questions then. So the first one is what are you most curious about right now?
Grant: I've told a lot of peers and the folks of my staff I think now is the best time to be in marketing. I, I've made a career of it, however, with technology, the ability to predict outcomes I've been in mostly workflow automation categories, but I've also been in cybersecurity. And the last company I was with again, one of the seven companies that's been acquired Silence was acquired by Blackberry, had artificial intelligence. So I think machine learning analytics, pattern recognition, the ability to just be smarter about everything we do and maybe not get it right the first time, but learn from what doesn't work and iterate is really an exciting time because whether it's intense signals to help you with pipeline or customer adoption signals to help you with product led growth or really just more willing customers open to being advocate for your brand, the analytics of the insights can help you uncover these nuggets faster.
Eric: It lines up really well with one of the things that I'm really passionate about and that we talk about a lot here at Rival, trying to understand what drives the growth of successful challenger brands. And in our framework we got six principles for successful challengers. One of them is, we call it dynamic, but basically it's what you're talking about, it's the ability to get smarter faster than everybody else. And I've always thought that that is more important than how smart you are at any given time. So there's obviously the snapshot of how much do you know right now, but then the ability to create culture, which I know we're going to talk about later on, capability workflow, process technology, which to me is kind of the top of the pyramid if you will. I really kind of see those other pieces as building the foundation. Is there anything specific that you're really excited about within that right now? Or another way of asking that question is are there specific kind of tools, tips, tech that you use at Ember so that you've seen across the landscape that you think people should go check out if they want to figure out how to bring more of this technology into how they do modern marketing?
Grant: Well the Bartec stack is just so enormous. I couldn't begin to start pointing out all the different tools. It's more try and see what works for you. We recently swapped out one of our intent signals. There's a lot of companies doing that and we swapped out our social media propagation platform to really help get our voices more broadly heard in the marketplace among key constituents and stakeholders. What I would say to make sure that whatever tool you're adopting, you know set a plan as it have somebody to manage it, what the expectations are, early check-ins, is it working, are you getting the return from the effort you put into it and the dollars the people costs? Honestly, we could probably adopt more tools. I've got eight direct reports, 60 folks in marketing here at Bursts and there's certain technology that might work for us. I just don't have a dedicated person to run it. I think at some point I'm going to have full-time what I call, I've got a couple analysts now, but just a database manipulator to figure out how to slice and dice things even beyond what we do today. So I just think really making the most what you have and if you're not getting the returns that you're looking for are the leverage. I'm in three or four peer groups and just ask another CMO and somebody will have tried either successfully or unsuccessfully will help guide you on what to consider and select.
Eric: Yeah, I think that's a great point. And also something I think about a lot is you are very rarely the first person to actually figure out how to do something. And so asking people that have already done it as a default strategy almost, that's how I think about it. And a lot of kind of stuff with rival or past jobs is like when there's a problem or opportunity that comes up, of course, yes, the straightforward, how do I solve this? But the question I always like to ask myself is, who else has solved this already and how can I learn from what they've done? So moving on to looking at a day in the life. So I know you get up early because you got calls with the East coast and time zones are tricky. You probably play some tennis at some point, but when it comes to your role as CMO of embers, what does a day in the life look like for you right now?
Grant: I try to be very structured. I think all of us, it took a while when we used to go to the offices, some folks still do, but you know have to have a level of discipline in how you approached your day. And so for me, metrics, we have what we call objectives, a key results OKR. Some folks are more familiar with KPIs. It doesn't really matter what metric you use, but the ones that I'm most responsible for, I take a look at the beginning of the week I dashboards that pushed to me. I don't have to go pull them. I get push reports from Salesforce or some other one of our analytic tools for example, and kind of look at how we're progressing and also look at what my deliverables are. I, as part of the executive leadership team, I help set the top priorities. And so marketing is not only a contributor to delivering on things like pipeline and product adoption success, but we're also the orchestrator to help sales succeed, partners succeed, product management succeed. So I really look at the interconnectedness of our objectives to make sure we have alignment and support to do the most important things first. So that's good part of my day, but also what I've found and a lot of their peers have seen this, it's really easy to just get caught up in all what I call the information overloaded interrupts. And so I try to be really disciplined also about not just giving into meetings and email management that could consume your entire day, but just blocking time. I do it every day. Some people, hey, I'll take two hours on a Friday. It doesn't matter. But you've got to have time to think. I think one of my strongest talents is helping the team think outside the box. And so we schedule brainstorming. I like to riff with my creative team or demand general product party. What if we did this? And I'll tell the team, Hey, it may be a crazy idea, but if you don't at least think about something, you're going to basically follow the herd and not stand out.
Eric: Yeah, I think about that a lot as well. I mean all that we have is time, so it's a question of how you use it and actually tying together a bit of what we were talking about before this, I think it's a constant process and a constant evolution of trying to get smarter, trying to get faster, trying to get more efficient, trying to learn from other people that have done it in different ways. So I think that focus on productivity, and that's my biggest hack as well. It sounds so simple, but what gets prioritized gets done. What gets booked in my calendar gets prioritized. Therefore if I don't put in time for brainstorm, for strategic development, for whatever those down things are, those downtime things are, then the urgent can end up taking precedence over the priority. You're
Grant: Exactly
Eric: Right And I think a lot of people that have gotten to your level, they're going to have their version of that at some point. They figured out how to manage their time so that they could play offense, they could block time to get ahead of things and do the important things, not just the urgent things.
Grant: Yeah. So I Guess on that and also just, I'm sorry, just add one more thing. You've also just need to be open some space. I came up with our campaign and burst it. You know, think about Google. So to get inverse better now we're trying to purify now our ceo, my boss asked me to accelerate brand development back in 2020. The idea came to me in 2021. If I had thought about it in 2020, I would've done it, but I'm out on a walk and I'm just open ideas, immerse it, that's it. And I talked to 20 people are bored and my peers and my staff and never say, Hey, we could do something with that. So again, if you're just, as you said, the tyranny of the urgent and just got to get all this stuff done, you don't save time for the brainstorm, these ideas won't come to you. You have to make time.
Eric: So I'm actually curious to go on a bit of a tangent because you brought it up and it was on my mind anyway, purifying things, it's kind of the holy grail for a lot of businesses. They want to become the Kleenex, the Uber, the Airbnb I, I guess it's so hard to do. It's one of those things where it's like if you can accomplish it, amazing, but it can be really hard. It's really hard to get people to change behavior in general, but to get them to actually put a label on a whole category is a very big marketing mountain to climb. I know also over here I've been seeing some ads for our friends over at Pleo in Copenhagen, at Denmark. They're trying to do the same thing, pleo it. And to me, I'm a marketer so I'm a little bit biased and I have a little bit of a lens through which I view these things. It's a bit academic, it's not just functional and emotional as a consumer, but I am a customer for, or I could be a customer for pleo, I'm not, I'm the target market. Same thing for em. Burst as a small business owner I think. Do you work with small businesses or is it more kind of enterprise?
Grant: Yeah, yeah, okay. It's a very important focus for us smb.
Eric: So To me, and again, I haven't seen your communication as much, let's just use Pleo as the example. I'm kind of like, what does that replace for me? Does it replace expensive? Does that replace, I'm trying to figure out how that fits into actual behavior change. So for me in my anecdotal story is less important. But I guess the question is what led you to deciding that this was the strategic way forward, given how challenging, at least I think it is, but let me know if you disagree and how do you actually try to accomplish something like that? Unless, you know, tell me if I'm, I'm wrong here, but there's not that many brands that have been able to do that, right?
Grant: Right. Well it's not rigor. In other words, we don't have to do this to succeed. We're growing, we're succeeding. We like a lot of companies, we try a couple major endeavors, some call it lightning strikes, needle movers, and we did a couple last year. One was to come up with a whole model we call the spin optimization model so that customers could adopt our technology over time. And that's resonated really well. It took off in a matter of months for prospects and customers to see that we want to be a partner with them and not try to push our solution, but let them adopt it at their own pace. And the reimburse, it was an idea exactly as you said, don't just expense it and burst it. There's a better way. And so we've done commercials, we've done social media campaigns, you know, go and you support local business or you support giving back and you just reimburse it, snap a photo of the receipt and then you take away the time consuming tedious task of having to gather, submit and wait for reimbursement. It happens automatically. We know that if I go out to lunch and when you're out in la, Eric, and we've got a business still going on and I spent $85, I haven't bought a bottle of wine, so it's a legitimate expense. Why submit an expense report? So we're trying an evolutionary path and to do both creative as well as our implementation team has what's called 1, 2, 3 and burst it instead of 1, 2, 3, go. And so the customer starts getting acclimated and I think we really need to have our customers become part of the movement. We're not going to create the movement. I'm not going to go ask the board for a hundred million dollars to just get people to do it. In fact, I don't think Google sent out, set out to have people Google it. That just became the way to do it. So if it happens, great. If it doesn't, we are creating some differentiation and our employee base of 900 going on a thousand is very excited by reimbursing it. And that's a value too. We're trying to engage and retain staff. So if they like it, I'm halfway home. So what the spin optimization model, is that what it was? Yeah, can you may spin talk about that optimization model a little bit if that was a Yeah,
What we did is we did research, it was research based. We talked to firms customers and what we found is a lot of companies have a vision, like everybody talks about digital transformation, everybody company needs a digitally transform. That's a given. But you can't adopt, you need people processing technology and time to adopt things. So rather than trying to say here's our portfolio, adopt it all at once, that's crazy because you just don't have the people, the bandwidth do it. So we have various stages for spend management. So you have expenses, you have invoice automation, we do payments, we do travel analytics. And so the baseline stage is ad hoc, it's unmanaged and then you manage and then you accelerate and then ultimately you optimize. And so what we do is we talk to a customer and their teams and say, Hey, where do you want to go here?
Do you have a vision? You may be happy just being managed, you never want to be optimized in expenses or you want to be optimized in expenses, but just managed in invoice, you're tired of writing checks, waiting for payments with our invoice automation from Burst. It can all happen in automated speedy fashion. So that's really what the model is about, helping customers take a look at holistically what their business objectives are and trying to align those objectives. And it so happens we align with a solution. It could be a product or a service like we help with administering our customer's accounts or running analytics reports from that's a service not a product, then that's great. And then they see us more that way. As a trusted advisor, that's the place you want to be. Nobody wants to be just trying to sell something to make the quote we you have to do that, but you want the customer to believe that you care about their future success, not the current sale.
Eric: Great. So I'll bring us back onto the main path of the conversation now. So I had a great segue, but it's great because I think that was a good tangent. I forget what the segue was now. But anyway, let's talk a little bit more about you and what mattered most to getting you to where you are. So obviously you alluded to it at the beginning of our conversation that you've kind of worked in a bunch of different businesses, been through a lot of acquisitions, but I guess quickly give the quick overview of your background and then I know you've got a couple things to share on what you think mattered most to getting you to the position and the role that you have today.
Yeah, I started a rotational assignment out of college and worked in a bunch of different departments and what lit my fire was sales and marketing, customer engagement and where the action is and shaping opinion advertising and communications as well as demand gen and so forth. And early in my career I had aspirations to be ahead of marketing. So I think being intentional, I, I've told this to a lot of people is the most important thing. There's something about the human brain and the universe that if you say I want to get somewhere, I'm not a fan believer, wish it and it make it, but just by focus and repetition and commitment and determination, you can get there. And I remember at one point I got to director first you get to manager, you manage people and you director and there was a couple VPs, I won't mention their names and I felt like I'm teaching these guys marketing or this person, let's say I could be doing that job.
Grant: I just don't. In fact, a person who recruited me at a company left and I raised my hand and said, look, I I'm ready to be vp. He said, no, you don't have any gray hair. I've got some now. Like, well why is that a criteria? So I guess I have to get older. So I finally got older and ran marketing. But I think that's really the key is to having that intentional path. I mean you can get somewhere on an accidental path. There's nothing wrong with that end point, but for me it's really been systematic approach to running marketing organizations and then trying to help companies get to the next step, next level.
Eric: Yeah, it's interesting. I was just kind of reflecting on my career and my thoughts on that for a second because I think I kind of ended up here by accident in a way. And also I still don't really know where I'm going. I know the path that I'm on right now, but I was always fascinated when I was younger and growing up with the people that were like, I know exactly what I want to be and I'm talking growing up, not six or seven going into university in early twenties, that type of thing. And I feel like I never did. And in some ways I kind of still don't know. I've got a broad sense. And so I think, I don't know if this is fair, but there's kind of like the macro intentional of this is what I want to do. I think people are often, sorry, I'm kind of rambling here, but I think it's a really interesting part of the conversation because I think people are often very fascinated by the what of where they want to go. They want to be a CMO at a big company living in x, y,z, place making a,b,cmoney, whatever it is. And I actually think that the how and the why almost are more important. So what type of role do you want to be doing? Who do you want to be working with? What's the purpose of that job? How are you affecting the people around you? I think it's clearly not a fully formed thought in my head, but you really triggered it. I think there's a wider conversation around path basically is what I'm saying. But being intentional on figuring out what that is and then systematically working towards it while being open to changes as they come, I think is key. At least it was for me.
Grant: Yeah, there's in my mind there's no one way and as I said, you know, could be on a circumstantial path, maybe not haphazard, but you opportunistically go here and there. But I was also influenced, most of us reflect back, I'm sure some of your listeners are early, some are middle, some are in later stages of their career. And what do you remember from college? Well I remember Rag Avan, I are my political science professor who would deliver his lectures with no notes. He was brilliant. And he said as I was senior 21, he said, set out to what you want to do. You don't want to get to 50 and wish you hadn't had done something you didn't try. So I think you know, should pursue interest and passions, but ultimately if you're more intentional you just increased the likelihoods of getting to that goal. Doesn't mean the other place you get to might be better, but that's sort of why that sort of stuck out in my mind. I thought about being LA native, would I want to be, I love films, would I want to be a writer or director? But once I started working I was enjoying marketing so I'd never thought about that again. But I would encourage somebody early career, try something you want to do and if you don't succeed at least you tried and then try something else.
Eric: Yeah, it's interesting, the surface area of luck. I think I first heard that term on a Tim Ferris podcast and I kind of dip them in and out of the Tim Ferris thing. But I thought that was a really good point is you don't always know the things that are going to create opportunity for you and you certainly can't control them, but you can control how much you put yourself out there and how many opportunities you put yourself in that could become lucky for you in whatever way that is. So Grant shifting back and focusing a little bit more on marketing. So if you had to pick three rules for modern marketing, what would they be?
Grant: Yeah, this is tough. Limit it down to just three things. And I would probably say that being full brain, it's funny, I've talked to a few other CMOs and a lot of maybe 10 years ago you had come up through brand or demand or brand coms or product, but I don't know a CMO today that's not who's successful, it's not full brain. So you know, got to be analytical you have to be creative, you have to be be a good recruiter and mentor for your staff. So I think that's really pretty important. The other thing from my perspective is that you really have to be a leader that people want to follow. You probably heard the term other folks followership. It's really the sign. And I think being approachable is key. Covid was a reason why we did this, but I still think post covid, it's a reason to do one-on-ones with my entire group. Now if I had 600 people be hard, I've got 60 and so I do regular touch bases, I may have eight direct reports and they've got managers and so forth, but I want to be able to be accessible. So that's important. And then last, just being authentic. I've always been a wizzywig, what you see is what you get. I don't have any agenda and if you think I do then you're wrong because I'm just trying to help businesses grow, help my team succeed and have fun along the way.
Eric: The one-on-ones with everyone is such a key to be honest. I mean our company is 12 people, so that's easy for me. But spending time working with Gary Vaynerchuk for so long, he still made it a priority to do that even when Vayner Media was a hundred people and 500 people and a thousand people. And I'm sure to a certain extent the meetings are really short and infrequent, but I'm sure he still does it at 1500 people. So I think that that's a great one. So Grant, if you had the opportunity to start your role over again from scratch today building a true challenger brand challenger business, what would you do differently right now?
Grant: I would move faster. One of the things I remember talking to Eric Fredrickson, our ceo, and he was stepping into his first CEO role and this is early 2020. And in Bur is bringing together a SE seven separate product lines that all had their own origin, heritage, customer base. And the power of our portfolio is that we have tailored solutions and we don't adopt a one size fits all. And there was a lot of fear and trepidation among what I would call the legacy brands that if we just at one fell swoop said we are now in burst that we might've had customer defection, we had had FUD slung at us by some of our biggest competitors or another aspirants to the crown if you will. And so we took a measured approach where we first did an endorsed brand Chrome River certified by and burst. Then we've gone to what we call a shared brand. So it's in burst, Chrome River in Burst certify, in Burst Abacus and Burst Tally and so forth. But we could have gone to a master brand or branded house right away and maybe doing it a little bit faster. You're going to always introduce change that that's the one thing about brands is the products and services change, but the brand should be the constant and I think we could have gone a little faster. I'm really proud of the progress we've made. I have a 12 point very sophisticated brand tracking measurement that I shared quarterly with other executives and the board and we're making steady progress. I just think we could have made a little faster progress if we took a little more risk earlier on.
Eric: And I really do think a lot of the work that we do is with challenger brands and it's always really interesting sitting in between kind of bigger, more established businesses and these challengers, some of which are startups and scale ups, but not all of them. I really think you can trace so many of their advantages and wins back to their ability to make decisions and move quicker, for better or for worse. The mistakes happen quicker and you get the learnings faster and then of course you get the wins and you get to the right place faster as well. So I say it's so often on here, I'm sure people are sick of higher of hearing it, but I really think that speed is one of the biggest competitive advantages that any business can have. And if you're a leader of anyone, certainly if you're the leader of a function or a company, one of the questions you should always be asking yourself is how do we move faster, especially as you get bigger. So talking to marketers out there, we've covered a lot of ground. I know we're not wrapped up yet. This is typically the question I ask at the end, but I want to ask it here. And then I've got a couple follow up questions for you based on your background and things that we've talked about. But from your experience and the role, the seat that you have within the industry today, I know you do a good amount of mentorship for other marketers out there and other CMOs. What's the one thing that you think marketers should be doing differently now?
Grant: Yeah, I think that you really have to have, we were talking about earlier in the conversation, you have to spend time on optimizing and it's never one and done. You're never like, I've got this tech stack, I've got this tool, I've got this best practice, this template. And so I'm always pushing the team like, okay, that's good, but I have a philosophy. Good enough, you can do better. So the tools will help us, but it's more the human factor. Having this restlessness that I feel I've always had, Hey, I think we could do better. We could push the envelope more here. It hasn't hit peak optimization. And so I think just making sure what parts of your business, and again, if you're strong in one area as a CMO or leader, find somebody who's stronger in the other area and then pair up with that person. And I think the team can make what we come up with together as a team. We recently did a brainstorm and we threw a bunch of ideas at the wall and a couple have really stood out and now we're pursuing those. And I think that's the thing that I would advise. And you just have just anything else, you have to carve out time. So you have to look at the data, look at the trends, look at what competitors are doing and then what could we do to make a step level improvement here, there or elsewhere.
Eric: So you teed me up very well from one of the questions that I wanted to ask you When we first got introduced, when we first had a chat a little while back before this recording, you said that you have a methodology for building teams and cultures. And I'm very curious to have you unpack that a little bit because I think a lot of people talk about team building culture capability, et cetera. I haven't heard the term methodology thrown around with it all too often. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your approach to that.
Grant: Well, Eric, if I share that, none of your listeners can use that to try to recruit anybody on my team. I'll track 'em down somehow. But I think partly it's funny how it happened was I just believe in a real positive can-do culture. And I'll talk about the values that we came up with as a management team that I was pretty instrumental in finalizing for Burst, but I was at a couple companies I can't name them, but I felt the culture was not optimal. Some may have called it dysfunctional, maybe not quite toxic. And so I felt like I had to create a subculture to engage and retain folks. And partly how I do that is from the one-on-ones to recognition to ongoing communications to the quarterly recognition. So what I have set out to recognize is certain behaviors that I think help marketing become a performance driven organization. You've heard terms revenue marketing and performance marketing, it doesn't, whatever the term is, it doesn't really matter. How can you contribute more? And so I, I'll recognize folks that created pipeline or have digital savvy or teamwork or take an initiative or leadership and it's peer recognition. I don't recognize him. And so what's great about that is now peers have reasons to think about we do better as a team and who do I recognize who recognizes me? And I was just reflecting with my director of communications recently and I think we're really in a good place as a team and God don't spite me if I for saying that, but it suddenly five defectors happen in the next five weeks and it took time to do that. So you have to invest in people, you have to invest in the culture and you really have to, if people are negative, you've got to get 'em out of the business. I don't care what function they're in. And so part of it is we're better together as a team, but if we've got a detractor in the group, I want to encourage that person to go somewhere else because if you're not having fun here, please go elsewhere. But I think it, and my whole team buys into that. My, and I mean that the leadership team, maybe not every person on the team, some people may have other issues going on, whether they're not having fun and embrace or whatever company x, y, xyz. But we try to have fun, work hard, we have mandatory PTO and you know, got to be able to rest and recharge. But I think kind of building a culture where people feel like we're there for them, we're inclusive we want them to learn and grow and advance their career and achieve job satisfaction and milestones along the way. We're not just here to extract the maximum of each person. And I think some companies have that attitude surprisingly still. And I think the retention and attrition reflects that.
Eric: And I think that's always been the case, but particularly in the world of today post covid O and everything going on in the economy, I think the best talent is not going to, certainly not going to respect it and probably not accept it for very long if they don't get some of the things that you're talking about. So Grant, I think the last thing that I wanted to get your thoughts on, and we were chatting a bit about this before we pressed record. So personally, I'm just very fascinated by the category that you're in because I think it's going through a lot of disruption. There's a good amount of challenger brands and I know the UK and European landscape of it better than I do the us. But one of the things that I always think about as a marketer, but also as the target audience or the target customer, the target market for your business and a lot of the businesses over here is how do you differentiate? Because to me, and again anecdotally it seems like a lot of the offerings out there, a lot of the brands out there kind of promise and do the same thing in their marketing communication at least. Basically you can manage the finances around your business expenses, whatever it is faster to allow you to focus on the things that matter. That's kind of a lot of what I see in the industry. So how have you thought about trying to differentiate embers? And I think obviously the wider question is we really believe one of the biggest factors in the success of successful challengers, that is they find and own a very clear point of differentiation in their industry. So how are you thinking about that for your business and what advice would you give to marketers listening?
Grant: Well, first, Eric, I always say that you've hit it precisely. There are maybe categories that don't have a lot of competition. I've mostly been with challenger brands and disrupting the status quo, certainly since I've been a CMO since 2009. And you have to stand out, you have to be relevant and you have to be distinct. You can't just be relevant because everybody's like, if you think on a functional level and you go to a spec sheet and you do a comparison table, I think one company has this feature, you're probably not going to stand out. You're not going to win that. But you know what, we've done a lot of analysis, win loss analysis, customer advisory groups in-person events where we just talk to customers and we try to understand why did you choose us? Why do you stay with us? And I think our brand promise that we humanize work is a sustainable as from your strong background.
It's like it's leverageable and it can apply to spend optimization, spend management, we do, but it can apply to other categories that we've thought about over time we may venture into. But that really those two words humanize work really, we came up with that before the pandemic. It really resonates. We believe in work-life balance and we want to give time back. Yes, we do automation and we provide tools that help you save time, money and make your staff more productive. But it's how we do it and we hear time and again that we're more approachable. We care more about the customer and we have to live the brand. Co-wrote a book a million years ago on branding and I came up with this thought, which was every contact matters, every interaction matters. And I still believe it today that everyone who, especially if they're field facing, you're shaping the brand one interaction at a time. And so if we keep doing that the right way, we reeled more advocacy, we build an reimbursed brand movement. And I think that's how we differentiate. Yes, we have to innovate faster and we're working very hard. I think we've got a great development capability and we have lots of ambitions to eliminate the expense port and do away with paper checks forever and automate corporate card reconciliation. We call it modern P card, purchase card, but it's how we do it the kind of people that we bring into the company, the values. I think that's going to be the differentiating factor over time.
Eric: So I said that was the last question. I lied because I realized that you actually, so in the brief that we send over, we put something at the bottom that's like if there's any other questions you want to ask, and nobody ever takes us up on it, but you did. And I actually really like this question. And so let's touch on this real quick before we wind, wind down. So what is the biggest mistake that first time CMOs make in your opinion?
Grant: It's all about people. You come in and look, most CMO knows or CMOs are functional heads. They're not wallflowers, they're driven strong-willed folks. But I've seen with others, and I've talked to peers where they come in, it's like, well, I don't want to upset the Apple card. This person's been here five years and this person came from that acquisition. I think you can't go too fast in figuring out who's with you, who's not along for the new journey and top graded, upgrading, replacing staff. And I'll tell you the best compliment I had and I do apologize to people who left the company because they were good people, but they were not right for this particular mission. And one of the other executives said, could you take over my group for a while because I really got a clean house. I said, no, you have to do that hard work yourself. But the fact is that the mistake they make is good enough as they said, isn't it? And they've got somebody who's mediocre and well, that's not bad. Well, it is bad because you want to be outstanding. And so I had one company where in 90 days, I think that's probably a speed record, but certainly in the first six months. I mean, you don't want to wait a year and sort of assess the landscape. So I think just going faster as we were talking about in a business model is good, but when it comes to people, that's who's going to do the work for you. So you want to always try to get the best of, and I've always also noticed we've had people leave in the last two and a half years I've been there, but I also think that as you have somebody leaves, okay, now there's a chance, let's find somebody better for that role. And I think to a person, as I reflect on some of the replacements, we've done that and just somebody had the energy part of it's just like people can get burned down in rolls. You have to understand that's going to happen and you've got rising stars and shooting stars and once they've shot to the moon, they want to go to Mars, so they're going to go into a different company where they can fly to Mars.
Eric: I could not agree more. And I think it's one of those things like everything that actually matters that people hear a million times and they get it in theory, but the execution, the practice, the reality of making those tough decisions is so hard. But also where all the opportunity and all the risk actually lies. So I think that that is a fantastic place to leave it. Grant, before I let you go, one last question, who else do you think that we should have on the show, other CMOs out there that you think would be a good fit for our style, our conversation, these topics?
Grant: Well, Kathie Johnson, have you talked to her before? No relation?
Eric: I don't think so, where is she?
Grant: TalkDesk
The Salesforce has a group called the CMO Club. As I said, I'm part of a couple CMO groups and there was 12 of us that worked on, we called the CMO Playbook and we, over a period of five months, there was a Forbes article written about it, the 12 of us. And we, we'd come together and we'd talk about what's most important over the course of a CMOs career and Kathie and I and 10 other folks on there. But I just think you'd find her very refreshing and refreshing and interesting to talk to if she's open to it.
Eric: <laugh> amazing. Well, I'll have to look her up. All right, grant, I really appreciate you making the time, especially so early in your day. It's been well
Grant: And so late in your day, Eric, thanks. Good getting connected, Kia. Good luck with Rival, keep it going. I'll be watching you guys and look forward to catching up and maybe in LA the future.
Eric: Sounds good. I'll let you know when I'm over there. Thanks so much, grant. Have a good one.
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 wearerival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me at 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.
