 You'll see that as a practitioner, a heavy practitioner in the world of marketing and marketing technology might have a different spend, but it's very grounded and very consistent with a lot of what you just learned from Scott. So as Lisa said, I'm Lisa Fink. I'm the former CMO of Tableau Software. I've recently retired. I retired back at the end of 2019 after 11 years in a journey where we went from about three marketers when I started and no CMS to 300 marketers in a very well-developed CMS with a heavy Mar-Tech stack. We went from about $5 million in revenue to a billion, which was a long journey. And we went from a startup that nobody had ever heard of to IPO to then being a publicly held company that was a leader in its space. So over those 11 years, I got to learn a lot. I got to do a lot of things. I got to make a lot of mistakes. I got a lot of smart people. That helped me correct those mistakes and do better. And mostly, like I said, I learned a lot. And so I wanted to start today with my idea of what the secret formula was. Okay. So are you ready for the secret formula? All right. Here we go. Secret formula to growth is really quite simple. It's great brands attract prospects, satisfied prospects become customers, and happy customers lead the community. And guess what? Community amplifies your brand, which then leads to more prospects, more community, more brand. It's a compounding formula that we have here. And it's really pretty simple, maybe simpler than you expected, but simple doesn't make easy. And so let's look at it another way. I want to look at it as a customer journey. And I want to look at it in that context of what marketing does to influence that customer journey. The customer journey pretty much is, you know, a person is totally unaware of their problem and certainly of your product or service. Then through some efforts, maybe they become aware of their problem, they become aware of your customer. So they become an aware prospect. Then there's the whole journey, the next phase of them going from being an aware prospect to getting them to be a signed customer. What are you doing to help them become part of your franchise, part of your organization's customer base? But that doesn't stop there, especially in the world of SaaS and subscription models. It's not enough to just sign them and have them be customers. You also have to make them be successful, to help them go from just a customer to a successful customer to wanting to be part of your community, to wanting to be part of what you stand for and what you represent. And then again, it's a cycle. It's that compounding factor where the stronger your community is, the more members of your community, the more they're talking about you, the more they're influencing unaware prospects, which turns into more aware prospects, and the cycle continues. So what do we as marketers do, any of us do in this, turns out quite a lot. We actually spend a lot of time influencing and directing this journey. To start with, we direct the brand. I think that's super important. Of course, we're worrying about marketing strategy and positioning and messaging. Of course, we're thinking about communications, both externally and internally. But we're also thinking and should be thinking hard about the culture of your company, helping foster the culture. And there's a really good reason for that, and that is because brand and culture go hand in hand. I can tell you from my experience, when your brand and your culture are symbiotic, when they're the same thing, inside and outside, boy, that makes everything a lot easier. It makes messaging a lot easier. It makes matching to customers a lot easier. It makes writing a lot easier. It makes execution a lot easier, because people have expectations from a culture that turn out to show up in the brand. And in fact, there's a great book by this author, Denise Lee Yone, who wrote a couple of books on branding. And she wrote a quote, it's quite lengthy here. And she's saying that your culture and your brand cannot be separate. They really can't. If you don't have a mutually reinforcing relationship between those two things, you're losing out on a lot of opportunity. And frankly, you're taking a lot of risk with your business. The days when companies could present this brand to the outside world that was much different than the kind of culture they had internally, that used to be pretty easy 20, 30 years ago when there weren't so many channels of communication where people weren't as transparent with their sharing and with their points of view, it's not possible anymore. The world is too transparent. You have to be authentic. And I think Scott describes a need for authenticity. And it certainly shows up that brand and culture must do that together. Now, back to the journey. The next stage is what we're doing to drive that move from aware prospect to customer. In other words, what are we doing to do revenue generation? Whether it's demand generation or working with sales on account-based marketing or working to get leads in and get them in the funnel, get them matured, get them to become customers and make that experience accelerate that sales function. I think Scott identified that that was one of the top things that boards are asking from their marketing is accelerate revenue. And that's what we do in that phase of the journey. We help, we work closely with sales on that funnel and we drive to revenue. But that doesn't stop there. Getting revenue is not enough, again, in the world of subscription. We have to work closely to make them successful. We work closely with sales and customer success to ensure that customers can be successful at scale. And so we're doing things like helping with customer engagement and enablement. In a lot of ways, because of all the marketing technologies we have, we're one of the better organizations in our companies that understands automation and that humanization. We're good at that. Sometimes you see where marketing understands where automation makes sense and where the personal touch makes sense and how you can put personal touches into your automation. So we can make some major contributions in this area. We also are really good at fostering connections. We're good at staying on top of social. We're good on staying on top of how the community is talking to each other. And we're good at monitoring and enabling that community, whether it's through a social presence or through events. We're making the community connections happen. And again, all of this is a compounding factor to make growth possible. The more you have satisfied customers, the more they enter the community, the more they're happy to be part of that community, the more they amplify your brand message, which by amplifying your brand message, gets you more unaware prospects to become aware prospects. So it's really kind of a nice thing. But I really want to talk a little bit more about what's underneath this cycle, what drives this cycle forward, what makes this cycle possible, especially from our perspective as marketers. In my opinion, there are two things that really drive this cycle from phase to phase. What acts as the foundation, the two things that marketing is highly dependent upon are basically data-enabling technology and content. Those are the two things. The mastering, what I call the virtuous cycle, is highly dependent on these two things. We live and die by our data-enabling technologies and by the content we put through those data-enabling technologies. And you guys know how important that is. But why in particular is it so important? Let's talk about data-enabling technology, first of all. And when I say data-enabling technology, what I mean by that is technology that not only delivers data and can keep track of what customers are doing and we can see what's happening, that behavioral data and other types of data that we capture. But also, those technologies use that data to make themselves better and make themselves smarter. A lot of AI and ML is doing that and the technologies you're using every day that you don't even know you're using them. So when I say data-enabling technology, I mean it both ways. I mean data that gets collected from the technologies but also technologies that rely on data. And in that definition, as Scott showed us, I couldn't help but resist to show this. I always show this because it's just a fact. We're talking about a ridiculous number of applications and tools and APIs and apps and services and microservices. You call this the Mar-Tech 5,000 for convenience, but I know you said it has over 7,000. Boy, it's just an incredible amount of complexity and technologies that we're facing. And even though it shows that people use 5,000 and there's really 7,000, most of us aren't even skimming the top of that. I don't think there are very many organizations using 700. Certainly a lot of us are using 200 or even 100. And I think you said the average was 91. But even small companies are using dozens. And so it's really important that we are able to organize these data enabling technologies into our version of a platform or what we might commonly call the Mar-Tech stack. In fact, when we were just chatting, Scott and I before, we were talking about whether the Mar-Tech set of technologies is really a platform or not. They're pretty loosely coupled. They're pretty loosely integrated, sometimes not so great. So I thought, no, it's not really a platform. Scott's right, it's really more of a stack. But it's important because it's letting us do things that we could never do before. The Mar-Tech stack is the foundation of everything. Whether it's when we're collecting that data, to the integration of it, to the ability to store it and make sense of it, to presenting it so we can orchestrate better marketing activities through the channels we need to be in to ultimately get to the customer. This has completely changed our practices and our capabilities. And the other thing that it's done is all this data enabling technology has radically changed how we build brands, demand, and communities. It's radically changed it. 20, 30 years ago before the internet, you pretty much placed print ads in magazines, maybe some industry newspapers. You went to some trade shows, maybe you sent direct mail. And you probably hired some appointment setting firms to call people and relentlessly call and annoy people. But it's changed now. It's not how any of these brands did it. And I bet you're mining most of your companies. It's not how you built your brands either. Because what we're doing now is we're relying on technologies or capabilities now that enable us to talk and get in front of prospects in different ways. Whether that's social media and the community, the way that Netflix has such passionate lovers of their original programming that you can connect to, or whether it's digital ad channels that are happening, things that people like Google, of course, with all we can do with Google. But even Amazon has completely changed the way that people present themselves in digital advertising. And now Amazon itself has become an advertising platform. Then it's incredible how people have taken experiences. We're building experiences that move from online to offline. Pretty seamlessly. Uber is a great example. No matter what you think about their brand, they've given you a digital experience. Then you get an in-person experience that's also digital maybe while you're in the car. And you get out of the car and you're back to being an online experience, a digital experience. Pretty seamless. The Tesla buying experience is a lot like that as well. And then of course these organizations, our technology has enabled us to tell stories very differently. The old days you tried to hit up a media writer and you tried to convince them of your point of view and then they wrote a static article. They printed it in offline media, print or newspaper and that's pretty much how it happened. But now we can tell stories. Not only do we go to journalists and have them tell very flexible and interesting stories, we can tell our own stories. We can become experts. We can become journalists or the reporters of our own industry through blogging, Twitter, microblogging, what have you. I think Scott, that's how Scott became recognized for his expert and authenticity in that area is he really started thinking and sharing his knowledge as a practitioner. And so we are able to do that. It's an amazing thing. Tableau has done a great job I think using data, helping people use data to tell stories with a free product called Tableau Public. It's a new way, ordinary people can tell stories with data. And then all of them are using direct communications but not just direct mail, old fashioned and not even email which is old fashioned but still effective. There's texts, there's Instagram, there's Slack, there's Drift, there's all kinds of, all kinds of new kinds of data enabled technologies. Even the phone is a much different experience than it was even 20 or 30 years ago. And you know what, we don't have to go that far to see an example of how the MarTechStack works. Here's an example of how Tableau used I think over 15 different marketing technologies to improve their use of customer records and cognitive scoring in ad bidding. And what did it, a lot of technology, a lot of integrations, we needed our developers to work on this, we needed our content people to do this because the ads mattered, we needed our campaign managers, we needed sales, we needed all these people and all these systems and all this data to come together. And what did it result in? It resulted in 16% more leads for the same cost. Now as a CMO, I mean I'm not always thinking about how to increase efficiency on spend, but it is a huge objective. You get a lot of pressure from above to make sure your budgets are effective, that your most efficient way that you can attract customers and prospects. And I actually like to see it when we can save money or do more with the same money because guess what? That means we can do more with other things too. And I love to see us expanding and experimenting. Pretty awesome to be able to do this and they did it, this team did it at scale. They did it for 250,000 keywords, 47,000 different ads and nearly 7 billion monthly impressions, which was a lot of data, a lot of associated technologies that made it possible from our MarTech stack. But even with that one example of Tableau there, you can see that this statement from the economist about a year and a half ago, or almost two years ago, the world's most valuable resources no longer oiled but data. And I'm sure you've heard it and it's almost become trite already. But the fact is it's true because data can reflect the behavior we're experiencing in the online and offline world, then we can model reality and we can understand better how to project our own offers to the market and to customers to find the best customers and prospects to join in into our franchise. So it's great that data is the new most valuable resource but there's a bit of a problem. And that is that being data-driven, as Scott also indicated, still eludes a lot of organizations. How many of you would say that your organization is data-driven or fairly close to being data-driven? How about, oh, good, okay, good. And how many of you are saying we're just on the beginning of that journey? Okay, good. And how many of you would say, you know what, haven't heard much about it, not really, management's not talking about it. Okay, so there are, you know, it's different kinds of phases you go through. So nearly everyone in this particular survey of executives about data, about big data in particular, said they're trying, but nearly two thirds admitted they're nowhere close to being successful. So here you guys are, many of you, with the skills and the smarts to understand the value of data, but as you know, the problem is there aren't enough people like you. 95% of employers say finding people with analytical skills is hard. That's pretty incredible. Just barely under cybersecurity and you know how important that is in these days. So it's pretty remarkable how the need for skills with using data and using technology, data enabling technologies has never been higher. Now why is content important? It's right there with data enabling technology in my mind. It's the other invisible force shaping what our marketing efforts can do today. And there's a huge imperative. And so again, why is it so important? Well, it's really quite simple because it's important to buyers. It's important to your customers. 60% of B2B buyers don't wanna interact with a sales rep. I think I got this from a Gartner survey by the way. And 62% say they can finalize their purchase selection criteria based solely on digital content. Wow, that is a pretty remarkable thing. That means that a lot of our relationships with our customers are starting and pretty much fully formed by the digital content that we're producing and we're delivering in an effective way. That's pretty amazing. One of the problems though with the industry is with content is that a lot of content is crap. And I will say that freely because I think Scott also said that word crap. And it's just, it's really a question of, so much of the material being useless, nearly 60% thought that in this is a 2018 survey, too much material so people can't find really what would help them at the time and they use a lot of other sources. So it's a well-known fact but and we just gotta keep working on what it is. And so what are some of the keys to successful content marketing? Well, I don't propose to have all the answers but I do love this philosophy which is stop thinking of content as a campaign asset and to sell, start thinking of as a means to start and maintain business relationships with buyers. So think about it not as, oh, I need a piece to be able to generate a lead. No, we need to talk to our buyers and our prospects about important issues and let's start a relationship with this content. And I think if you take it a higher level to less of a campaign tactic to a strategic function it gives you a different perspective on it and I think that will increase the value of our content to our buyers and to our customers as they travel their journey with you. And I love this quote from Laura Most of Forester who said, what you have to say is more important than what channel or tactic you use to say it. Again, thinking about what you're having to say as a strategic decision or a strategic input and of course the tactical element of putting it out there is still extremely critical. So I don't want to underestimate what you have to do to get it in the right channel to get it to your target segment because you do have to choose your channels wisely. And you can create a lot of content or great content and just put it on your website and hope that, hey, if I build it, they will come. We all know that's just not true. They won't come sometimes but very rarely. So given all that sort of context, going back to the idea that what are some ideas or lessons, things that I learned about how you can drive growth. Well, I've got four of them for you. First one is evangelize. Relentlessly be somebody who is, even if you're not a technologist, relentlessly evangelize new data-enabling technologies to keep improving because they are just coming at us super fast. Now, I'm not saying cause stress in your organization. Oh my God, we're still on this old system. We need it in the system. No, you don't have to create stress. What you have to do is get people excited about the possibilities. Scott and I were talking before and I was recalling how when I started at Tableau in 2007, there weren't that many data technologies at all. There was Eloqua, which was pretty reasonable, sort of reasonable, and then there was Marketo, which had a little bit of something but a lot of stuff on paper at the time. We were trying to figure out which content management system to use. I think our decision was between Drupal and Joomla, as I recall, and it was just a very different world. But we have sense developed and the company's sense adopted many, many technologies because there's excitement about being able to do more stuff and more interesting stuff. So helping your organization have a positive attitude toward growth, keeping an open mindset about growth, about technologies is very positive things you can do. Now, sometimes you might get frustrated with your leaders, with your CMO or your heads because it seems like they're not listening or they're not going fast enough. Just be a little empathetic because they're trying to fight the good fight and it takes a lot. The larger your organization is, the more you need some governance from IT and integration with a bunch of other apps that you don't even know the company's using. They need your positive thoughts and positive energy and enthusiasm for new ways to get things done. In fact, there are some technology forces that I think are really driving marketing and impacting marketing that we have to manage against. They're the very new ones, like digital reality, but also the cognitive technologies. Like if I hear, read or see another five articles about AI or ML in my email box today, I would be shocked if it wasn't even 10. It's just a big hot trend, right? Same with blockchain, you know? Blockchain, there's still the emerging trend that that's gonna impact marketing in a big way. And first I thought, really, how? And then you start to read about it and you're like, oh, this could be pretty huge. Of course, we're still talking about some of the old new, the old new, which are things like digital experiences and analytics, still people are talking about analytics and still talking about the going to the cloud. These are still important things. Now, when you turn inward, there are many issues too, the business realities. Modernizing our core systems to enable us to adopt new technologies, to enable us to be smarter with technology is non-trivial, as a non-trivial activity, and it requires really amazing engineers and amazing developers and amazing marketing technologists. So if you have those people in your organization, grab on to them and hold on to them, because they're valuable, because that's a critical thing. Also, what are we gonna do about risk and cybersecurity? This is non-trivial, you're just a day or two away from some kind of catastrophic event. According to what you read in the media, something that's gotta be managed. And then finally, if it's true what Gartner says, Gartner says the CMO is gonna spend more than the CIO by I think it's next year. If that's true, then a lot of technology resting in the IT organization might not be the best place for it. If so, it better be a strong collaboration between marketing and IT about how things get executed and the priority of how the need for marketing technologies gets set. So we all need to be able to be patient with these trends and understand them to be able to help our organization make smart decisions. So my recommendations are, just keep learning, keep listening, I love some of Scott's recommendations. Have you heard of this one? Zapier and other ones that you mentioned to Airtable. I've heard of those. Now I'm reinspired to go back to my office and look them up. You know, you're here at this conference so obviously you're a learner and always being a lifelong learner is a good thing. And then I'm gonna ask you, even though if you're a content person or an agency, don't think of yourself as somebody who just delivers in response to it, but think of yourself as an innovator. You're smart, you're on top of issues, you're on top of trends. What can you do to help your organization innovate? Your ideas are critical. Okay, idea number two, encourage data use and champion new data sources. We wanna be able to use more data. Marketers are, in fact, can learn a lot even from just basic data. So one of the things I hear constantly is like, oh, we don't have all our data perfectly integrated yet or we don't have it all in a data warehouse or a cloud warehouse. So we're not doing anything. Oh my gosh, that's unfortunate. Because even though we think that, we might think like we want all the data, we want a 360 degree view and sometimes we question when we don't have the full view and sometimes we think by the data we don't have is more important than the data we do have. The fact is people just need to get started and I love this quote from Charles Babbage, a mathematician from like the 1800s or something. He said, and I find this to be true, time and time again, errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. Okay, so I'd rather make a smaller error than a bigger error, okay? Just because I don't have all the data doesn't mean I can't get a good answer or get some good direction or insight. Here's a good example, real simple. This is just data from our website out of Drew Paul or from our web logs and it's telling me that, hey, those Germans and German language content really love more than other languages or other language groups. They love to click on data visualizations and graphics less so on white papers. Hey, that's informative. If I'm marketing to the German market and putting it in German, all right, I learned something today. I'm a content marketer. I can be smarter about what's gonna be effective. All right, some quick recommendations. Encourage people to analyze and use data, including yourself, don't be afraid. You know, ask to understand the data flows, especially as it relates to content because you wanna understand which of your content is the best performing so you can create more like it and then get to know other groups because they have data and they have know-how that you can share with them. Third, really important because the brand is so important to the customer journey and to the virtuous cycle. Every touch is a brand touch and most touches are digital. Let's face it. These are all, these are a long list of outbound and outbound activities you can do and I've bolded things that are fairly digital online but even things that are offline at in-person events and conferences and trade shows, boy, you can make those pretty effective by using smart digital technologies to make those experiences smarter and better. Whether it's a mobile app at a conference or when they get back to the office after a conference they're doing smart stuff there, that's a great thing. So let me just speed up a little bit. So my recommendations are that you show you care about the brand and show that you care about the customer experience. I love Scott's idea that CX has its own ROI and it really does. LaCroix aside, CX does have its own ROI. So come to your job, whatever it is you do with that idea from a customer mindset and if that means getting out of your office and talking to some customers, my gosh, do it or you run into someone at a conference who says, hey, are you your product? Talk to them. He or she who speaks with the voice of the customer is going to have the most credibility at a meeting and so be that person who's credible. We need you to do that. And then finally, it doesn't matter if you have people reporting to you or not, be a leader, empower your company's most valuable assets, be a culture builder. When you're a culture builder, you're a brand builder and that is gonna be a very valuable thing to the virtuous cycle as we already saw. The other huge benefit is that if you're a culture builder and you're attracting great people into your team, great people around you, it will help you accomplish the difficult path of growth because people really are the differentiating factor. In fact, I love this, if you must choose between a great plan with a mediocre team or a mediocre plan with a great team, take the great team every time because a great team will fix a bad plan. A mediocre team, hmm, probably can't even execute a great plan. The thing is, and don't underestimate this, a lot of mediocre teams are actually great teams in hiding. They just need someone to come in and show them the way and you can be the person that has that enthusiasm for wanting to do great work and that can drive a team to excellence. Okay, so my recommendations are, look for fit in your job. Is do you coming in and feeling like you love your job? Now, you don't have to love it 100% of every day. In fact, I just read an article this morning that says, if you love the things you're doing at your job at least 20% of the day, that's enough. In fact, there's really no difference if you love your job 20% of the day or 50% of the day. 20% of the day, if the things you're doing you love doing, then you're in a place that fits. If you're not, maybe find a place where you can be part of the culture builder and you can feel like more of a fit. Be an example of that culture as well and then lead. You can lead by enabling and innovating. No matter what your role is, it's not about managing people. As I said, it's about leadership and people are looking for leaders. You can be that leader. Okay, so remember that secret formula. It's real simple, great brands attract prospects, satisfied prospects become customers, happy customers lead to community and strong communities amplify great brands. It's doable. It really is. Now you can borrow it and adjust it and change it and make it better to work for your world. I found that this worked for me and Tableau as we grew to a billion. And frankly, this formula might not work for them for the next five billion, but it took us to a pretty good journey at this point. But the real thing is that content, data enabling technology and people are what underlie this all. And this is really what the key point is. Content and data technologies are enabling us to do anything. And each of us with our colleagues is really the ones making it happen. And that's not just for today, but for every day. So it's our moment, it's your moment, seize it. So I wanna thank you so much for having me speak and like Scott, I'll be down here and I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks so much.