YouSaid · the spoken record

Kipp Bodnar

lines on the record: 57
first: 2022-09-28
most recent: 2022-09-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Cash I love anybody who's great at marketing a commodity, and money is the ultimate commodity. They've done such a great job of reaching a younger demographic in a platform-centric way, whether it be through TikTok, whether it be through in-person activations. They've taken a product that had no business of being successful candidly and making it very successful through remarkable marketing.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, every way. Problems of scale, international markets are really hard. Leading a large scale team of people and helping them succeed in a hybrid work environment when nobody knows what the hell is going on. Some people want to be in an office. Some people want to be remote. There's a lot of things to get better at over the next few years.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The inbel marketing story was 10 very simple slides. The way you were doing marketing doesn't work anymore because technology changed. And because technology changed, people are ignoring you. You need to do something new. That was the story. I could give you the three-hour version or I can give you the three-minute version of that story or the three-second version of that story. And that is what makes something powerful and successful.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in marketing, everything is circular. I don't think anything dies. I think it goes dormant for a long time and then comes back around. Look, I think even some traditional advertising channels like out of home and those things, like I'm an investor in a company called OneScreen that's creating a platform for out of home and attribution for out of home. And like, that's going to be awesome. And I thought out of home had died of death a long, long time ago. So I've learned my lesson that things don't die. They go dormant for a while and they come back around.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to give everybody a cheat sheet. The more open a tactic, meaning less regulated by one company. So like email hasn't changed a lot because SMTP is inherently an open protocol. Apple has put some tracking changes in, but like email has evolved, but it's still email. And it hasn't actually changed that much. I know some of the email people will disagree, but I'm sorry, folks. It hasn't changed that much. Whereas if there is one company, Organic Search, for example, organic search has changed a ton because Google has changed the search engine results page a ton, more ads, different types of search results, and that really, normally when there's one company that has financial incentives to evolve a platform, that changes a lot. When it's an open protocol, it changes a lot less.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hey, I will pay you for an hour of your time. I will pay you for a day of your time. I don't care. I am trying to be the best in the world at this thing. Can you help me? And you flatter them, you pander them, you do whatever it takes, you go and you learn as much as humanly possible and you go through this deep immersion process where you get all this information and then you start pattern matching that information against the thing you're trying to learn about. Like I learned about art the last year. I learned all about contemporary art. I talked to galerists all over the world. It was incredible. And I probably have looked at 10,000 paintings in the last year because I wanted to understand the lessons that they taught me and how to apply them. And so now I can tell you all the things you need to know about contemporary art. I can tell you the core artist, but I can tell you why. And the why is what's important. Once you understand the why, then you've actually, you're not just like mediocre, you're actually approaching being one of the better people in the world at it.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I'll tell you a little bit about me and my approach to this, Harry. I'm a serial obsessive. I love learning things. I believe that anybody can get to like 80, 90 percent proficiency in something in three to six months of learning something. Maybe not necessarily doing something, but learning perspective, applying that knowledge. And I've done it across all kinds of things, whether it be marketing, whether it be personal hobbies, whatever that may be. How you do that is you have to approach learning very differently. Most people go and they buy the most popular books and they listen to the most popular podcasts and all of that. That's a bullshit way to do it. How you actually go and do this is you find who are the people that the majority of the world think are smart at this topic. I've got that outlined. Who are the people that those people learn from? And I go straight to them. And there's normally like these background, less popular, less personality people that have all the fucking knowledge in the whole world. And you go straight to them and you are unabashed.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to disagree with you, Harry, because the question was 10x better. It's very hard to get 10x better at the thing you are best at. If you ask me how to make the most money, I would say exactly what you said. But if you ask me how to get 10x better at something, hearing can't get 10x better at something he's been doing for the last 20 years.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The emotional side of marketing, brand building. Kieran is a logical person, right? If you are listening to this, what you want to say is what are the things that I am best at in the world and how can I get good at the opposite side? Because that's how you get 10x. Kieran is methodical. He is logical. He is analytical. If you can combine that with really emotional skills, then you are like a diamond in the world. There are very few people who can combine those things together.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question I think we're asking is oh, cool, if I have one spike of excellence, is that enough to get me to be a CMO? And an average organization, maybe, what I'm advocating for is multiple spikes of excellence, which is like, hey, I've got a spike of excellence in marketing automation. And then I went and did 18 months in product marketing and killed it. This is the progress and success we had. And then I did 18 months in acquisition demand generation marketing. We grew demand 100% year over year. Now, let me talk to you about how I also built the teams that I made to accomplish those things and how I think about hiring people. That's the ideal candidate. It's a hard thing to do in practice. But that is the person that a founder really wants.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a hard time delegating and scaling through others. And the magic of being a marketing leader is figuring out how to scale through other people.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This works for CMO, but I think it works broader than CMO. If you want to be great at something, whether you want to be a CMO, whether you want to be CEO, found a successful company, you have to make a series of counterintuitive trade-offs that you wouldn't think you'd otherwise make. Most people that I know who want to be a CMO but don't get there don't make trade-offs. What I mean by that is like, cool. You know what, Kip, I really want to be a CMO. Well, what's the next job you're going to take? Well, you know, I've been doing marketing automation. It's going really well for me. So I'm going to go take a director of marketing automation. They're going to pay me 20% more. It's going to be awesome. I'm like, great, but what if you just go learn a completely different part of marketing? Go make 20% less in the short term, but wow, you get a real breadth of experience, and now you're actually ready to be a CMO. Most people don't make those changes. If you want to be a CMO, you have to figure out how to get a breadth of knowledge and you have to figure out how to scale your leadership and get things done through others. Most really talented marketers are amazing individual contributors.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing everybody listens to this show needs to understand is that humans are incentive based creatures. Incentives and alignment around goals and incentives fix everything. If you have a problem collaborating, it is because you have competing goals or you have competing incentives against those goals. So job one is to be very clear on those goals and make sure the goals are aligned between, whether it be marketing and product, marketing and sales. We talked about attribution. Once you have your SLA, your attribution, all that set up, it's actually very clear. The incentives are aligned and then you just come up with a check-in and like communication process around that. Most people fail because they don't set that foundation. And instead, they just go and kind of do a bunch of stuff and kind of over index on the relationship building side, which is really important. But the relationship part can be secondary if you've got the right foundation and infrastructure around goals and accountability.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of your team is like off doing other things that you're not thinking about and doing because you're trying to fix the one of those many parts that is broken in that moment.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I thought the same when he said it. Think about it. Have a pretty broad sense, and we get to the second part of your question, right? Which is the challenging part. I don't know that there's another business discipline that requires as much context switching and broad knowledge than marketing. So for example, what I mean by that is like, you need to understand the depths of distribution on Google and Facebook. You got to understand email score deliverability and GDPR and data privacy regulations. But you need to understand what great design looks like and what a perfect event experience looks like. And oh, by the way, how to model and attribute all of that so that you can do what you need to do for your sales team. Oh, and what's the story we're going to package for product, for the product team, and how are we going to take that product to market? Once you start stacking all the very different things that are actually fundamentally very different skills, it's a very broad job. And that's what makes it lonely. Because at any month, you're kind of focused on one part of it. So the vast majority...”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you know when to let someone go? You know when to let someone go when you're clear on what you're trying to achieve, set expectations with them about what it takes to get there and they have not been able to do it for a period of time that you guys agree on. Normally you would say you can normally see progress pretty quick in a month or two. You can say, oh, this person's on the progressive path they're going to get there. You can say this person is actually just not. This is actually just a fundamentally wrong job for them. They actually care about this other thing that I don't need right now and they should go to another organization and go do that and be great at it. About the changing hats there and the challenge in moving to GM. And I spoke to Kieran on your team before this and he said, I always wonder, is the role of CMO lonely?”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am awesome Other things that I need to go do, and I can't be in them at all anymore, so it doesn't matter if I'm awesome or shit. Just can't do them anymore. Well, no, it does. It does. I completely disagree with you. Because if you were awesome at them, you know how to help people. You know how to get people on stuck. You know how to push them and point them in the right direction. If you're not good at it, then you just don't have the clearest fucking idea what to do. You don't know where to point somebody. And so they're just going to run around in a circle. Totally agree with”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about the stretch VE Versus the seasoned From Yeah, and I will broaden this up to just founders overall. And I get this question all the time. Am I good with like a junior director of marketing for a while? Do I need a VP? What do I need a CMO? What is it that I need? And what you have to say is balanced teams win. Teams with a balance of perspective and skills win at the end of the day. If you're a CEO, for example, in the startup side who's passionate about marketing, been doing a lot of the company's marketing in the early days, you know what's up. You can probably get by with a stretch candidate because you know a lot of it. If you are a super product driven CEO and you are crushing on the product, you don't know shit about marketing, then stretching is not going to be a good thing. So just on the media company side, Harry, if you are awesome at operations and you are process driven, you know how to scale stuff, then you can go and stretch somebody. If you are not those things and you want to bring in somebody to be those things, then you need to have somebody with those skills more established.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking now, my media business has grown far faster. Yeah, yeah, of course. But I need to see CEO to really run the day-to-day processes.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to look at everything from the principle and problem layer. You actually have to take the people in totality out and you have to say, I am trying to grow. What are my constraints for growth? Based on those constraints for growth, what is it that I need to do? And what does the success in doing those things look like? Literally, write it out. Like, this is what I need to do. This is the type of skills and activities that will happen to be successful. Once you have all that finished, then you can go and like overlay it on top of the people and be like, oh, well, what we need to do, actually this person has the skills to do what we need to do, so that's fantastic. And we can go and march on to do it. Or actually this person doesn't, but I think I could coach them because it's just a small gap. Or, oh, actually, there's a big gap. And what I need to do is bring in somebody with a different set of skills to help us get to that next stage of the problem.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fricking so hard. It's one of the things that Harry takes practice and repetition. You just can't hear me or you or anybody else in this world talk about it and be like, oh, cool, I got it. Do you actually How do you form that”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, okay, I'm taking back and I'm taking a different look and evaluation at this team to make sure I have what is necessary to win.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me tell you why I think that's hard. Are you a sports fan, Harry? I think you are, right? Yeah. So, for example, the NFL and the NBA in the US, there are some teams that have a person who is both the coach and the general manager. And there are some teams that have a person whose job is to be general manager. The other person's job is to be the coach. It's very hard to be both. And that's what you're asking a CMO to do, to be the coach and the general manager. And when you're the coach, you're so close to the people and you're in the trenches with the people that you have trust, you have loyalty, you have all those things. When you're a general manager, you're saying, huh, I'm trying to win. Do I have what I need to win? And that is a very, very hard thing. That's a very hard thing for a CMO. It's very hard thing for a founder. So I have found that there are times where you have to purposely put on the general manager fictitious hat. You got to say, okay, I have to take this week and think about it like I am just a general manager. Change my schedule and just be very, very objective. You really have to put in processes in place where you're”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will tell you what the most significant is. It's one of the things I talk with founders or companies I invest in constantly. Mistakes always people related. People are much harder than strategy. Strategy is often much clearer. The people side of it, do you have the right people with the right skills for the right stage of your company is actually the hard thing. The biggest mistakes I have made not hiring the right person or not knowing that I needed a person with a new level of skill set at that stage and scale of the company or holding on to somebody who was really good for that last stage of growth but isn't good for this next stage of growth too long. And being too close to that.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stark the contrast is between marketing and sales, the less effective it's going to be in the future because the customer is going to be like, oh, wait, I was sold on this thing with all this marketing messages, but now I'm getting this very different vibe and experience and message over here. Is this really what I thought I was getting?”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, marketing is eating sales, but I would actually say that stories, differentiation, personalization are eating like go to markets. If you're a great marketer and you've got content that resonates and you're using that to pull people in, drive automation, like really help them understand what you're all about, for example. Well, don't you think a sales rep's going to send a personalized video in their email about that same thing? The best companies are going to figure out how to just have that content experience transition really seamlessly from one to mini to one to one. That's all we're talking about. All we're talking about is one to many to one to one. That to me is the difference between marketing and sales is when you do something one-to-many, it's marketing, you do something one-to-one at sales. I fundamentally believe that's what's going to happen is the best teams are going to be aligned on that story and that customer journey from that like very high level brand awareness or first search result to the deck that a sales rep show, the demo the sales rep show. And I want that line to be blurrier.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying sales and marketing are going to become more different than they are similar, and that consumers are going to notice the starkness of that handoff more? In the way that actually marketing is eating up so much more of the sales funnel.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think every marketer in the future should be directly accountable to revenue, both inbound and outbound, whatever that may be. And SaaS especially, it's pretty straightforward. You have a close rate. You have an average sale price of the product you sell. If you sell a hundred dollar product and you have a 10% close rate on called a qualified lead, then great. Every qualified lead's worth $10 because you need 10 of them to get to the hundred. Yes, it's an oversimplification, but you can get to what is a simple enough example that can show contribution in a way that's not perfect, but it's going to really work and drive alignment and growth for the business because that's ultimately what matters. Not marketing getting credit, but it's like, are we doing these activities and are we getting the growth that we want on the other side?”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're talking about a problem of attribution, which is, as always been a problem as long as marketing exists, will always be a problem as long as marketing exists. And it kind of ebbs and flows. And like, honestly, it's going to get kind of worse in the short term because data from Google and Facebook and other channels is getting worse, not better. For example, email data getting worse, not better. What you have to do is measuring something is more of an internal alignment exercise than it is an analytic exercise. You have to understand on the puts and takes between marketing sales, CFO, CEO, what do we agree on? So for example, Harry, there's overlap across marketing and sales and across marketing channels. So how are you going to account for overlap in your attribution is like a big thing that you have to figure out? And there's endless ways that you could rationalize to do it right. So it matters less what you decide and matters more that the business agrees that, oh, this way we're doing it is good and fair to everyone and is an accurate representation of what we think is going to grow and scale this company. So when I think about it,”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then you brought up the point of like how do you manage up? How do you get the resources to be successful? Well, first, you anchor it all in what are the business goals, what is the constraint for growth of that business. Because a board and a CEO is always thinking about what is the thing that we fixed would drive growth and success for this business. And you as a marketer have to tell them, this is how marketing can solve that problem. So that might be deal creation, that might be your competitive win rates. That could be a whole host of different business metrics, could be customer retention, whatever that may be. And then you package a strategy that solves just like that. You say, hey, I can help us create more deals. This is what it's going to take. It's going to take content marketing strategy. It's going to take a prospecting strategy. This is what it's going to take. This is the amount of humans and money it's going to cost to do it. Do you want to solve this problem with me or not? At that point, it's very clear. Either they're going to give you the money to solve that problem or they don't care about that problem the way you thought. So if you're not solving it, they shouldn't be upset or think you're not doing your job for not solving it because you brought to their attention.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it's a tough thing. I would say there's also a converse to what you just talked to, Harry. It's like you manage update that budget, and then your CEO and your board are often trying to push down and spread you in a bunch of directions. They're trying to cause you to be less focused. So there's this double-edge problem that both are bad for the marketing leader. What you have to do, I want to help people out there solve both of those. On the CEO of the board pushing at it and try to like extend your priorities, what you have to do is be very proactive versus reactive. You have to play offense instead of defense. And you have to say, hey, I'm looking at the state of our business. Here are the three to four key strategies and things we must nail for the next six to 12 months. And you take it and you shop it around. You go to the board meeting. You get everybody bought in. And then anytime somebody asks you to do that, you say something new. You're like, oh, well, that's not part of the things we agreed on. We'll add that in. And we'll revisit it in six months when we talk about it again. And yes, they're going to push. And yes, you might have to do some of it, but man, it will deflect a lot and it will make your life a lot easier.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practical ways to do that on top of that emotional benefit of doing that, then that doesn't matter. You can have a big, clear, horizontal business with that.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All those people have the same problems. All of those people have the same problems. The best stories are when you can find the universal truths across your customer base that people are afraid to say out loud, but they believe and tell them to them. That's what we did with inbound marketing. It's like people knew that they were sending out 10,000 direct mail cards at work and then going home and throwing everything in their mailbox away. They knew that, but they didn't want to admit that to themselves. They needed somebody to tell them. And not just tell them in a shameful way, but tell them in a, hey, it's okay. There's a better way. That is the universal truth here that I think every business has to get to is we have this big diverse group of customers. Yeah, we do, but they're all trying to grow. They're all trying to solve a crisis of disconnection with their own customers. They feel like they're a mile away from their own customers, whether that be attracting them in, keeping and retaining them. I don't care if you're an architect, a manufacturing company, a software company. I can talk to you in that way and give you real...”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now I can accelerate that demand generation that product marketing if I tell a remarkable brand story that shows people that my company in this business is going in a real long-term direction that is better and different than the other alternatives in this market.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me give the founders out there listening, I think, a framework that will help them kind of codify this a little bit. You want to think about your marketing stories in a timeline. So the brand marketing work that you do is the longest part of your timeline. That's going to be 12 to 18 months ahead of the reality of your business and your product. It's the emotional benefit. It's pointing everybody to where you're going. Then the product marketing that you're doing, that's kind of like 90 days, four months ahead of where you are right now. You're previewing, you're given some roadmap, but like it's largely in the here and now. Your demand generation is exactly in the here and now. It is what is happening right now. It's what you have to offer people and it's what customers want in the market today. And if you think about stacking those three things along that timeline, it gets a lot clearer because you basically start at the demand generation stuff and say, oh, what's my story here today? Do I got it working? And are people buying it? Great. Extend a little bit to product marketing. They say, great.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's super hard. What you are getting at is why the majority of startups fail. All of these things are very different disciplines, and it is a rare human being who can figure out how to prioritize and get them all right.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your peers. Most big conferences, like that's what it is. People come to our event, like we're having our event inbound in September this year, and we'll have, I don't even know how many thousands of people there, because they know that all we want is to help and educate them. That's it. They know that if they sit down in a room that they are going to get a completely valuable and different perspective on whatever topic they're sitting down in. And I've read all the MPS reports, Harry. I have read all the surveys. The top rated thing, the top reason people come is the quality of content, the quality of education. Same reason people listen to your show all the time, because that's what they want. Because that is the scarce thing in this world today. Everybody's trying to just cold sell and cold email people to all hell. It's very rare to get that value today.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about brand, Harry, I think it is the emotional benefit of not just your product, your service, but your company. Why do you exist in the world? And what do you make people feel? From the very beginning at HubSpot, our goal was we want people to feel like we are there to help them, teach them, guide them through this transformation. That just became the principle. So in the early days, I talked to startups all the time. They're like, look, I don't have a bunch of money for this expensive brand marketing. I'm like, cool, yeah. We didn't either. Tell you what we did. We had a good story that resonated with people. We wrote a book. We spoke at conferences. We wrote a blog. All that stuff was actually pretty cheap. The hard part, the expensive part, was getting the story and agreeing that that story was the right story to tell and having it really tight and everything. That whole message just kind of cascaded through. And that becomes a movement, that becomes an emotion. And so people want to come to our event. Most conferences are marketed as like, oh, it's going to be great networking. You're going to get to learn from.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About this thing, that they already know that there's already a bunch of good things out in the world to do and solve, like, why should they take the time to switch or consider your new thing?”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not necessarily more expensive, but it takes longer. You know, there's two types of business you're creating categories, you're a transformer business, or you're a better mousetrap business. And most better mousetrap businesses are 10x better, 10x cheaper, 10x faster, whatever. And transformation is like, we're going to ask you to do something completely new. We're going to ask you to leave the old way of thinking behind and think this new way. And it takes longer because you start earlier on that adoption bell curve. You start with those early adopters and then go up. When you're a better mousetrap, you start in the middle of the bell curve. You're like, oh, I know about this category. It's awesome. Let me tell you how my thing is better. The problem is when you start at the beginning of the bell curve, you can be really different. When you start in the middle, you're kind of just like everybody else. If you're running a better mousetrap business, you have to be obsessed with differentiation and emotion. I think that's where brand marketing is way more important than product marketing. Yes, you can describe the value proposition of your product, but what is the reason that somebody should believe in your brand, have emotional?”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that part of the act? If people are coming to you and saying, I need this particular product, I need this category, then you're in a market share game with all of your competitors. If you are defining that category, defining the human changes within that category, then you're growing that category and you're then not against your competitors, you are against your ability to grow that category and drive awareness for it.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies that have the best story don't start with product marketing. They start with the problem that their customer has. So if we take the HubSpot story, for example, we didn't start with, hey, you need software to do better marketing. We said, hey, technologies change the way people shop and buy. Because technologies come along, look, they're fast forwarding through your commercials. They're throwing out the yellow pages because they got Google. They don't need your direct mail. They got ads on the internet. All of these things, what are you doing? Don't you need to do marketing in a fundamentally better way? Yeah, actually I do. What do I do? Oh, it's called inbound marketing. It's amazing. You're going to create content. You're going to deliver that content through free organic channels. You're going to grow over time. You're going to own those assets versus renting them from somebody else. It's going to be amazing. And then by that time, people are like, oh, well, cool. How do I do that? Oh, well, we have some software for you. Called HubSpot. Should check it out. We can help you do all those things way better, provide amazing automation for you. But that product story.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I give you my rant on product marketing. Harry just gave us his rant. I'm going to give you mine. Well, most founders are inherently logical humans, and they're often very product-driven humans. So you know what they do? They go hire product marketing as one of the first functions they want to hire. You're like, oh, this sounds great. You're going to help me tell a story around the product. That's never what happens. What happens is those people become operators and project story pushers around. Oh, I'm going to run to this product leader, to this business leader, and it becomes internal gymnastics versus external storytelling. They pull these product marketers so close to them that their product markers are too close to the founder and not close enough to the customer. And when the product marketers do get closer to the customer, the companies often don't make the hard choice of saying, this is what my customer wants, but it's not what we're going to give them because they need something they do not yet know that they want. I need to package a different story for them. I think the best”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work, we're going to survive, we're going to be great, we're going to be successful. To a time when you thought one was working double down on it and it didn't work. That's a good question. So in the early days of HubSpot, we had a free tool called Website Grader. You put your website in, it returned a report. People were sharing it on social, like really grew, big part of how”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really going in hard to test one, do you dedicate budget to YouTube to really give it a go or sprinkle across five and see what hits? I'm a fan hearing of a more focused approach. I think of marketing as a venture capitalist, whether you're big established venture capitalists like Sequoia, an angel investor anywhere in between. Your job is to make really smart decisions and win on a bunch of asymmetric returns. So it's actually like how many channels do I think I actually have the chance for an asymmetric return on? It's actually not that many. And most of the time when people spread themselves thin across five, six different things, it's because they don't realize that. Once you're very clear on the asymmetry of the return, you can say, ah, there's actually only like two things that are going to give me the return I want. And I should just go as aggressive as possible of those two things. And I have to make one of them work. If I make both of them work, then I'm a legend. And then we have scaled this thing beyond what anybody thought is possible. If I make one of them,”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love that I wish I would love that. I mean, you're in London, which is my favorite city, not just in the world, but my favorite city to have a martine. You should come, we could do a much more.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if you look, you're a really smart, savvy investor, right? You've seen all kinds of companies at all kinds of stages. I think you're going to agree that the following is true. Startup that gets traction and really kicks off. They've got one predictable growth channel. It's often ads. A startup that really scales and flirts with that $50, $100 million run rate. They have two predictable growth channels. Normally it's ads plus one other thing, whether it be YouTube, whether it be Google search, whether it be some type of free product, virality, whatever. The company that scales goes public really has a future to be a big scale company, really only has three scale distribution channels. They don't have 10. They got three. So if you're a founder and you're in that first bucket, jobs just get to one and have that one keep working for you and then as you scale no, you're going to need to add one more, not five more, one more. People think that they need to do way more than they actually need to. I totally agree with you.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are good at what you do in distributing things on the internet, every channel of any scale that I know of, you have years and years of runway. My first job at HubSpot is I wrote the HubSpot blog. I think we did like three posts a day for year or whatever. We did that to get organic search traffic. We're still doing that. We are 14 years, 15 years into that blog grind, and it's still working. We're still growing that traffic. Yeah, we've expanded topics. Yes, we're optimizing the old stuff, all of that. But think about that. I made that work for over a decade and a half. If you're thinking you're going to run out of runway in 12 months, you're just kind of an idiot. You're not thinking about the real potential of what you have. Humanity's natural proclivity is to go do a new thing because they're bored of the old thing. The most successful people say, wait, wait, wait, I have this thing that's working really well. How do I make it better and better every day? And how do I be a top 1% person in the world at this thing?”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Repeatable template growth strategy that allows you to grow through basically search template product action. Great, then you don't have to go and have this personal brand. But if you don't have an answer to that distribution strategy, then you have to care about content and personal brand because that by default is your distribution strategy. And you are going to be distribution constrained more than you are going to be product constrained unless you are just completely inept at building the thing you're building.”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's what you have to know. I'm a first principles driven person. I'm just logical to a fault for better or for worse. Every company in the world is either distribution constrained or product constrained. They don't have a product that's good enough to sell to their customers or the price that they want to sell it for. Or they do and they can't get that product out in front of customers for a low enough cost. Normally what happens when you're early on in a business, those two things are kind of like S curves. And the product S curve is always the first, right? You're trying to find product market fit. You kind of get middle of the way up that curve and you kind of found it. And that's awesome. And then you start that second S curve, which is the distribution one. And most companies fail not because of the product curve, but because of the distribution curve. You could not want to do content, what have you. You have to solve distribution. So what I would say to them is cool. You don't want to be a creator. You don't care about personal brand. Great. How are we going to get scalable distribution at a low cost? The content's one way, but if you tell me you have an awesome viral loop, cool, then I don't give a shit if you care about content. You can make it work. If you have some...”
2022-09-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source