A few years ago we added webinars to the way we help folks learn about marketing things – and it’s been just wonderful.
That showed us a lesson in trying to do new things in service of the wider goal of helping marketers learn and meet meaningfully.
So we asked the question what would in person interviews look like? Could we do Diary of a CEO for marketing without the questions about childhood? 😂
And so today, we’re interviewing the MD of HubSpot EMEA – Mark Barry to do just that, focusing on the topic of ‘what is the future of marketing?’
Expect takeaways on:
- Blending your personal passions with your professional ambitions can create a more fulfilling career path
- Mastering the craft of storytelling and connection (like an actual rockstar)
- How Mark thinks about evolving your marketing strategy by listening closely to your audience’s needs and desires
- The role of AI in marketing
- The importance of staying adaptable and curious in the ever-changing marketing landscape
- Gain insights into putting your customers at the center of everything you do, ensuring your marketing efforts resonate deeply and create lasting connections.
- Understand how technology can enhance rather than replace human connections in marketing, making every interaction more meaningful and impactful.
- Reflect on the importance of having a core theme or purpose that guides your marketing efforts, much like a concept album that tells a coherent story from start to finish.
- Fuel your creativity and innovation in marketing by embracing opportunism and curiosity
The session is also available on The Marketing Meetup Podcast for anyone on the move!
Transcript – Automatically generated (may contain errors)
Speaker 1: Have a guess where we are.
Speaker 2: Today we’re in Dublin at HubSpot meeting the MD of the EMEA region for this great company, Mark Barry. We spent a full hour sitting down with him, having a chat all about the future of marketing, specifically looking at elements of positioning and AI and elements of leadership. It was a really reassuring, enjoyable chat where I just came out of it feeling quite relaxed, which is really nice.
Speaker 1: We then had a tour by their head of culture, who really gave us a window into what it’s like to work in a building like this or in an organisation like this. Mark touched on culture and how important it was, but actually that just became a theme that has threaded the entire day together for us. Hopefully you’ll see some of this and learn a bit more about HubSpot. Cheers. We just want you to be yourself in that sense. Can do. Lots of inappropriate questions.
Speaker 3: We have a 30 second interview with Mark Barry, where 10 seconds are him introducing his name and title.
Speaker 2: The rest of us are walking out. The rest of you are asking us to leave.
Speaker 3: We’ll do that. There’s a buzzer under the desk here. Security.
Speaker 4: Last night we were watching a video. I think it was one of the interviews you did with Startup Grind a few years ago. Okay. You introduced it saying that you had dreams of becoming a rock star. Can you speak to that? Because we’d love to know the journey.
Speaker 3: Yes, so past tense is the wrong tense. have aspirations to be a rock star. I’m only slightly tongue in cheek on that. the family business, if you like, where I grew up, we’re musicians, we’re dancers, writers, actors. I am the odd one out with a career in business. I tripped into that. For a while early in my career, I was a semi-professional musician. I’d play guitar and go to different places with bands. Not just turning up, but, actually playing. That was great. It was really fun. I particularly liked, enjoyed writing music and doing original stuff. That wasn’t the stuff that paid the bills, but that was really fun. There’s a point at which as well you’re thinking, okay, well, the rent has to be paid. How does that happen? I drifted into proper jobs, starting with, a telesales gig, which I did, which was memorable. Then into a customer service role in a mobile telco and, gradually into other jobs as I became more embedded in that side of the career. The aspiration to be a rock star, it’s never died. It’s just, I’m busy at the moment doing this sort of stuff,
Speaker 1: I love that. It’s so interesting, that performance element. Is that the rock star that you’re bringing into the business each day?
Speaker 3: I guess you’d have to ask the audience, really, if that comes through. I think, though, there’s an introversion, extroversion question, if you like, that comes into play. If you’re in a customer-facing role or in a sales role, which is that there needs to at least be a portion of your time where you get energy from being around other people, It’s not completely binary, right? I think that’s important. I think the performance element, if you like, or that ability to maybe relate to people or that ability to tell an interesting story or just have a fluid conversation, some of that comes through training and practice. Performance training or even, amateur training of being on stage, that is something that gets developed, I definitely think it’s part of it. I think for me, where, again, not to overstate the success of my music career, but the high you get from being on stage, and the high doesn’t come from, playing amazingly. That’s actually pretty sad, The high comes from reaction from people, getting into us or maybe, singing along or whatever. That’s the rush, The maybe slightly sad middle-aged part of where I get that rush now is standing up in front of customers or standing up in front of teams and having a moment where you can share ideas and get some feedback. That’s the performance element. It’s so true.
Speaker 1: It’s still there, The difference in – so I struggle a little bit to run the webinars because we’ll have, say, a thousand people each week on a webinar. The number, and you’re talking to a guest. I’m just talking to one person on a screen. Whereas if we have at one of our meet-ups maybe 70, 80 people in a room, I’m, looking for the, ah, that person just found that funny, and then there’s a little rustle of laughter, and then I’m, like – and then it starts to feed me. Whereas you get some people that, oh, no, comfortable on the screen, hate standing in front of people. Whereas, I don’t know, I think the old-school part is just like – It’s like we’re good together. Yes, Joe likes the screen. I like the people. It’s funny how you get feedback in different ways.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think – even on the screen – and again, it is the constant need for approval in me. I don’t know what it is, but, I look for that feedback. Zoom is great, actually, and tools like that are great where you will get a reaction or something, like post an emoji or something like that. I try – because we’re in this world now, It’s not just the broadcast, aspect that comes with, webinars and things like that. We’re in this world now in work, It’s not possible, actually, for me to have the entire team in a room maybe once a year when we do a kickoff. We can’t do that, Adapting to that format where you’re both physical and virtual probably sometimes at the same time is the evolution of the art a little bit. having to lean into that, embrace that, get good at that. Again, I won’t claim to have mastered that, but I think it’s part of work and life today, We’ve crossed that threshold. We’re not going back.
Speaker 4: No, you’re right. I was actually watching the Taylor Swift documentary the other day because, I’m cool. It’s Tay-Tay’s life. She was speaking about that validation piece, and that piece from the crowd. I think you’re spot on. It’s about moving with the times as well and sort of acknowledging that’s where it is. We’ll definitely come to that in a minute because, we’re in such a fascinating time, as, frankly, humanity, but also in marketing with the changes that are going on, particularly in the tech sort of space. I wanted to ground us in HubSpot as well because, it’s an incredible space we’re in today. it’s just beautiful. It’s also just had such an impact on the marketing world, the world that we speak to all the time. One of the elements that I was really interested in is that I counted six hubs, for HubSpot. We had this feedback from the community as well, which is like HubSpot has become this platform for marketing, for sales, for all sorts of things. as a positioning challenge, that’s huge. That must be so fascinating as a company to try and take on that as a position to be that Swiss army knife and sort of say we are all of this, but also we are specifically this. From a marketing perspective and internally, how do you even begin to sort of think about that?
Speaker 3: It’s a fascinating challenge to think about. If you think about the foundations of HubSpot and the evolution of HubSpot, the creation of inbound marketing, the evolution of the flywheel and that approach to engaging customers, that is the kernel of what we do. It is the, as search is to Google, inbound is to HubSpot. Increasingly what happens if you’re successful, and thankfully we’ve had great success in that category, leading that category, is loyal customers ask for other things and need other things. Our job is to listen to that and evaluate that and figure out, Okay, are those interesting things to work on? Do we have the capability to do that? Do we have the desire to do that? Is there an opportunity for us to do that? That manifests as here are six hubs or eight hubs or 10 hubs or whatever. The ambition really is that HubSpot is a place where you can run the entire customer facing elements of your business from one place. Marketing is a really important part of that. That’s not the only part of that. We need to talk to our prospects. We need to enable our sales teams to do that. We need to be able to engage with our loyal customers and create a service environment for that to happen. That evolution has been, I won’t speak for our product leadership in how those ideas evolved, but I think there’s a degree of organic growth that comes with building the adjacencies around the core. I think we were talking earlier actually about companies like Microsoft where maybe the core is obvious, and then something which is really non-adjacent, but that company is doing that thing. It’s like, oh, that’s odd. Amazon, a bookseller, all of a sudden being a cloud business, that feels odd. Our approach is not that per se. We’re building around that core. Not to say that we don’t get into the self-driving car business. I think that’s pretty unlikely. Actually, those adjacencies I think are pretty obvious. I think where the idea of being or the imperative, if you like, to keep up pace and stay ahead is when emerging technologies, when other things come in that disrupt the space. That organic growth, if you like, or the building of those adjacent things around the core, again, I think is pretty obvious. It’s pretty intuitive. You can reason it. Then you have something like AI that comes along and says, AI here? Now what? You want to be ahead of that. The last paradigm shift that has been anything as disruptive as that is Nokia running the world’s most famous and useful and beloved mobile phone technology until the iPhone. The smartphone had existed before the iPhone, but Apple did it right.
Speaker 1: I feel like we’ve got the hook for the video AI here. It’s going right at the beginning. That will be the thing. I’m always listening for a hook like that. That’s funny.
Speaker 4: It’s so true. In our research, we saw that you were working at a company which eventually was acquired by Vodafone. This was 1999, I think you introduced it. By the way, you do not look like you’ve been working.
Speaker 3: I started my career at nine years old.
Speaker 4: That’s fabulous.
Speaker 1: Your paper round was not right.
Speaker 4: It was downhill, down the steepest hill that I’ve ever seen in my life. If I look like you when I’ve been working since 1999, then fair play. You spoke about working for a company back then. There is that transformational shift because you were speaking about introducing e-commerce to this company at the same time as mobile tech was becoming more ubiquitous and stuff like that. How do you reflect, because we are going through this generational shift now with AI and stuff like that. When you look back on the things that you learned in terms of your own development or how a company can react to this sort of stuff, from a trait perspective, a characteristic perspective, how do you even begin to think about living in this transitional phase and making the most of it, so to speak?
Speaker 3: I think it goes back to that rock star thing. When I was 15, I wanted to be a rock star. When I was 20, I still wanted to be a rock star, but I then had other responsibilities and I needed a job to underpin that. When I was 25, I still wanted to be a rock star. I had a different job, a bigger job, a mortgage at that stage, 30 years old, still wanted to be a rock star. The point I’m trying to make is across all of those different phases, those different transitions, the world of work, the world of just how we live changed primarily through technology, but then a bunch of other crises that happened, the dot-com boom, financial collapse, pandemic. For me, at least, I think the thing that has helped me navigate my career is in some ways to always know that I have this passion for this thing over here. Again, I don’t really want to overstate that. It sounds like I’m obsessed about being a rock star, but there are things that I am passionate about that drive me. Music is one of those things, but family is one of those things. Curiosity is one of those things. Doing new things is one of those things. Had I been the type of person that had said in 1995 or 1996, I want to be an accountant, then today, however interesting this would be for your podcast, you’d be sitting in front of an accountant, because by trade, that would be the thing that I’d be doing. Maybe I’m a CFO, but trade-wise, that is the thing I’m doing. I didn’t say that. When I chose then to move into sales and then into mobile telecoms and through product and through marketing and all of that stuff, those were opportunistic choices. The reality is that when I was 15 or even when I was 20, the Internet wasn’t a thing. It was there. the Internet has been around for decades, but the Internet in common use today was not a thing. I didn’t know that I would have an Internet career, let’s say, or a technology career when I was that age. The point, I think, really, is that I’ve always been really opportunistic. I’ve never been able to answer the question, what do you want to do in five years’ time? That classic interview question. The interviewer is hoping, I want to see ambition. My answer has always been, maybe not to the interviewer, but the answer for me is always, hopefully something really interesting. That’s what I want to be doing, is still learning and still challenged and still engaging my brain and hopefully adding value in that whole exchange. To call that navigation of a career, I think, is probably giving us a little bit more credit than it’s due. I think I’ve always been opportunistic in the things that I do next. I love that. I’ve discovered it hasn’t always been just tripping over myself. I don’t want it to appear like that either. I’ve always known, or I’ve known at least for a long time, the things that give me energy. Early in my career, I was a project manager. That did not give me energy. That’s not the level of micromanagement, for want of a better way to put it, that I really enjoy. I learned a ton. It gave me a really good appreciation of structure and organization. I didn’t love it. It wasn’t something that I was passionate about. I’ve been able to parse out the things that are not valuable for my interest levels versus the things that are valuable for my interest levels. I think that to simplify it, something challenging, something difficult, something new, something that I can add to, something that I can learn from.
Speaker 1: I think being opportunistic, I really resonate with that. It feels like the way you talked about HubSpot starting off with a core and building out things that the customers are talking about feels like a culture that’s within HubSpot. That actually culturally fits into the marketing industry. I think good marketers are opportunistic. They’re going, well, that hasn’t been done before. Here’s a way of getting to talk to our customers or to do a new thing. If you’ve got a team that you’re over that thinks like that and you’ve got a product that’s being built that is opportunistic, then it’s going to fit beautifully into the hands of those people that are going to use the product. It makes absolute sense.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think that with the marketing, the oft maligned science and art of marketing, I think, is a really complex one, but a super interesting one. Marketing in the broad sense, right, we include advertising and creative and everything and everything in there. It’s the leading edge of information for companies, for businesses, for ideas. There’s more than a hint of psychology that goes into it, of anthropology that goes into understanding human behavior. I happened to trip upon a TV show documentary a few weeks ago about chocolate bar advertisers in the 1980s in Britain. it was it was the Cadbury versus Roundtree, or, Terry’s or whoever else was in the mix. the battle for eyeballs and for and for, and for, creating interest and demand. It was absolutely fascinating. At its heart, I was thinking about, tactically, how different is that to how we do things today? It’s really not. it’s the, grabbing intent and creating demand and creating interest. Those are all the same important things. Appealing to those same impulses. We just we have different media, to do that now in different ways to connect. Actually that that, desire to really deeply understand the psyche of the buyer. What do they care about? Absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 4: Just people, isn’t it? it’s interesting, really, because I hear both of your answers when we speak about the HubSpot perspective, but also the personal perspective. What I can observe in how you’re speaking is like there is a core direction. for HubSpot, it’s the inbound sort of methodology, the school of et cetera. For you, it’s also like do something interesting, and you got these North stars for one of the less horrible phrase, which guide you, which sort of take you through these transition periods. in marketing, we would speak about these as just having a strategy, as an idea of where we’re going to go and the tactics shift around it and stuff like that. I love that because it’s so easy to lose. I can actually as I hear you speak, I feel my shoulders relaxing, because it’s easy to lose yourself in the idea of my job is going to look different versus I am working towards something which has a wider objective or something which is fulfilling for me as a human being that happens to work in marketing or whatever it may be. we’re all being told about losing our jobs. Actually, there’s other things, other directions that we can take in that might be within the same sector, which is still interesting.
Speaker 1: You’ve got those core principles of understanding people and their needs. Exactly. The tech just clips in, doesn’t it, around how you do it.
Speaker 3: I think you have to have a belief as well that as an individual that you can leave something in a better state than you found it. I think I know certainly for me, any time that I’ve or at least the most conscious decisions that I’ve made around joining a company or taking on a role or doing something different is not just believing, but being able to visualize where that can go. in HubSpot’s case, for example, similar to, the time I spent at Stripe and from day one, but until the day I finished that role and, from day one here at HubSpot and continually still believing that our biggest successes are still ahead of us. we have we have this, incredible foundation, but we don’t serve every customer today, with the customers that we serve. We don’t serve them with the full suite of capabilities we have today. There are capabilities we haven’t yet imagined. for me, again, going back to that thing, which is a which is a motivator. I have zero interest in supervising somebody else’s work or taking somebody and sorry, taking something and, just running it, if you like, operating it. I’m much more interested in building something. I think, again, that’s an instinct that we have here at HubSpot is we’re building for the future. When we work with our customers, we’re helping them imagine what their future can be and how they can build that and what are the capabilities they haven’t yet imagined. Our partners, the same thing.
Speaker 4: I came into the marketing workforce around 2014 and I was introduced to this concept of inbound. It was only it was it was only later on that I realized that was a HubSpot thing. that was things that Darmesh and Brian, the founders, spoke about and sort of coined and sort of grew. It’s funny because that became so ubiquitous as part of marketing. you do inbound and in fact, probably the largest part of marketing as a whole. Picking up on the high AI thing over here. I’m just fascinated because inbound has been the thing for forever for HubSpot. how are you speaking about that internally right now where you’re reflecting on the changes that AI bring? For example, in search, the way that searches are brought up in chat GPT or perplexity or whatever. That’s a big change to blog posts, for example. How do you start to think about that as a company? Because presumably it’s a big shift for all of you as much as it is for all of us.
Speaker 3: Yes, it’s a big shift, I suppose. It’s a big shift in the same way for us as it is for everyone else in industry or in the world at large. I suppose the way that we think about AI, the application of AI. Again, this is one of the beauties of having a technical co-founder as well as a business minded co-founders. Dharmesh jumped on AI on chat GPT day one and created Chatsbot as a hack project overnight. Again, that’s one of the things that I think is so critical to our current success, but also our future success, is that ultimately we’ve got people who like playing with stuff and making things and bringing that value to others. That’s really where Dharmesh is probably most happy, actually, is discovering this thing is super interesting. Now what? How do we apply that? How do we reason that? Our approach is really informed by that as well. If you take the application of AI in HubSpot, it’s native to HubSpot. How you use HubSpot is better because of AI. Some of that will be explicitly marked out for you like with content creation or with chat assist or things like that. Some of it will just be this tool works a lot better. It presents more insights to me in ways that I hadn’t expected because it is native to the application. That’s how we see it. It’s not a HubSpot now with AI.
Speaker 5: It’s a HubSpot.
Speaker 3: AI is built into that. I think there’s also, while it’s really important for us to appreciate the magnitude of what AI can do and what AI does, it’s probably important for us to contextualize that as well. AI as we know it today or the chat GPT version of AI, which I think has brought it to life for consumers in a way that nothing else has done before. If you think about the Google search experience today and the Google search experience 25 years ago, the Google homepage, let’s take the web version for example, looks basically the same except for the logo. The logo has changed, but it’s still that little box you type in the thing. The experience has changed immeasurably in that 25 years. For us consuming it almost unknowingly, that predictive text, that assist and suggest notion that Google productized is just like breathing air now. we don’t even think of us. Yet that experience is entirely transformed and continually transforming as a race, as a race, which is probably difficult to calculate continuously. That idea of machine learning, that idea of data led improvement and insight and enrichment has been around for quite a long time. I think, again, where AI has popped its head up, companies have been doing AI for decades. It really just popped its head up when we were able to create weird photos as consumers, and make ourselves look a little better in the headshots. That’s where it lands is when people feel us in their daily lives. I think while there is, with great power comes great responsibility. We shouldn’t overstay the magnitude of this too much.
Speaker 1: that’s great stuff. Yes, I’m glad you positioned it in that way because I hadn’t really thought of it like that. I was going to challenge you on like as somebody who’s got an account management background. I don’t know what the age difference is, but we’d like we maybe we had 47. Okay, so 43 next month, this month. Crikey. I spent my 20s driving all over the country going and having coffees with people. I would we’d get faxes as orders like. Everything was built around people and relationships. There’s the older person in me that sees AI worries that actually it becomes something that removes us from that personal connection because everything is so automated and so immediate and so data that they become a ticket as opposed to a person. Yes. I think you’ve already touched on the fact that AI is the way it’s been built is better than replacing a human. It’s actually just subtly coming in and supporting you. Is that is that where you’re going with it?
Speaker 3: Yes, totally. I think, the practical application of AI is already embedded in stuff that we do now. The more deliberate and intentional application of us as we’re doing in HubSpot and we’re enabling our own teams by using our own technology, what we’re what we’re doing with that is we’re making the human experience a better experience. we’re making the time spent as an account manager, you driving around the country and faxing in stuff, maybe spending time going through the telephone directory for numbers. You would never contemplate doing any of that time wasting stuff anymore. Yes, most salespeople spend less than 30 or 40 percent of their time talking to customers. They spend more of their time doing admin, even if they’re not driving around the country and spending their time in their car, they’re probably spending their time at their desk frustrated with some data challenge, AI solves that and gives time to that person to be more productive and be more effective and focus actually on those human connections.
Speaker 1: That’s that. You couldn’t have said a more perfect answer for me because there’s this, as I say, old slightly older guy that’s the skeptic that goes, I don’t like all this, like I’ve got an app for everything. I haven’t even got a piece of paper. I’ve got something that looks like paper. I romanticize about old fashioned relationships and that sort of thing. What you’re saying is that actually I can do more of that. I can actually spend more time with my customers having a cup of coffee than going, oh, geez, I’ve got to go through that database and work out, when was that conversation? I wrote something on a bit of paper somewhere and actually it becomes, it’s an enabler as opposed to something that replaces what you do.
Speaker 3: Yes, but it’s important, too, to think, to remember, we would be kidding ourselves if we thought, I’ve done that roadshow as well, that gig as well. we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought that the way we showed up to customers 20 years ago is the appropriate way to still do it today because the customers are consumers as well. The buyers are consumers as well. When you interact with a travel website or a retailer or a technology company, the prospect of having to wait for somebody to answer the phone or to go into the shop is like, I don’t want to do that. I’m not doing that. actually what I want is just give me the answer fast. If I can speak it into my phone and have it, played back to me, that’s the preferred experience. As consumers, we’re all doing jobs. Some of us may be buying software as part of our job or, running a company as part of our job or leading a team. To suggest that we need to flip our personal preferences to some other orientation, some outdated business orientation of how people like to buy is a fool’s errand. we need to be thinking about our buyers, our customers in the same way as we think about our personal preferences. By the way, this spans the demographic, right? I think you’re more likely as an over 55s person to have a lower tolerance for human interaction. Yes, the thing is actually, even I think about my parents, they’ve embraced technology in ways that they would never have imagined before because it’s the way to go. they’d never contemplate walking into the bank or into the travel agent or even into the retailer for certain things anymore because that’s hassle.
Speaker 4: Yes. My dad watches more YouTube than I swear like a teenage.
Speaker 1: My dad’s in his mid-70s and he was talking about a YouTube channel that I thought he’d have no idea about. He’s like, oh, yes, I watch Mal Armstrong. I was like, what?
Speaker 4: It’s funny. You sort of roll with that. It’s fascinating. You mentioned your team as part of your answer there. I wanted to pick up on that because I think you’ve already done a bit of this when we’ve been chatting today. The narrative around these sort of shifts in the future of marketing and stuff like that is as fear inducing as it is exciting. Maybe I’m speaking from a personal perspective. Maybe everyone’s really excited and I’m just scared. I don’t know. How do you begin to speak with your team around the stuff that we’ve spoken about today? these changes that are happening in the industry and you’ve got all these external sources yammering in their ear. how do you sort of excite people about what’s coming forward and sort of get them to adopt them and try these things out and be creative with it and stuff like that?
Speaker 3: It might be a disappointing answer insofar as like these are we’re working with tech natives. we have everybody working here is au fait with technology is using us as consumers in their daily lives. The prospect of their job being easier because this thing does the thing that they don’t like doing is more exciting than not. You’re more likely to be met with can we have it now? Can we go faster now? that’s everyone from sales, reps to customer service and customer success managers and marketeers. Everyone is excited and, anticipating this change, technology shifts. Go back to the printing press, right? sure. There were people who were handwriting documents who felt, oh, no, the printing press is going to stop me doing this work. Go do something more interesting. Build printing presses, right? What those shifts in technology actually do is create opportunity. Again, even to boil it down to its most simplistic, if I’m frustrated salesperson who only gets to spend three hours out of 10 talking to customers, help me do four times, four hours out of 10, five hours out of 10. I will bite your hand off for that.
Speaker 1: Is that something that culturally is within HubSpot is about moving fast? Because I guess you’ve got there are other CRMs available, I’m sure. I’m not sure who they are, but let’s say there are that you are. Is it important to be first to the first of the gate or is it more important to make sure that HubSpot stuff is better? Even if you’re, six months behind the competition?
Speaker 3: You never like to be behind, but it’s probably both of those things. it’s probably be first, but be there when there’s an opportunity. Being first, you don’t have to be first for everything. This is not a unique HubSpot thing. when pioneers get shot, setters, find gold, so, so being first for its own sake is not a goal. Being fast, I think, is an imperative, right? We’re a business like every other. You have to be fast because, Matt Britton from Google used to say as fast is better than slow. Right. Again, it’s a pretty clarifying statement. If you’re going slowly, then you’re probably missing some opportunity. Yes, being fast is important and being fast and sometimes being first is important because it not because actually is important. If that’s what customers, current customers or prospective customers need and expect.
Speaker 1: I think I picked up on the speed thing through Joel Laugh because I always listen to a podcast called My First Million, which is part of the HubSpot Network. When they became part of HubSpot Network, I was then very aware of like others that were becoming part of it. I was like, huh, that’s a really smart play. That’s something that you have to be. I guess you have to be quite quick internally to go. Let’s acquire that, because if we don’t, someone else could. You almost get it feels like you’ve gone on a bit of a mission to go right. Where are the popular ones? Where are our audience? Who? How can we leverage this? I have to say as well, I think whoever’s in control of how they’re positioned after being acquired has done a great job because it doesn’t feel like, the MFM guys are going HubSpot. that’s obviously the only brand they now talk about, but it’s done in such a native way that I’m like, I still really enjoy this podcast. It hasn’t changed. You’ve done a great job in like not disrupting that and going, actually, we’re going to make you sound like HubSpot now. It’s like you be you, but we’re just going to like piggyback onto that. I that was where I thought, speed must be a must be a thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is really important. I think, if you’re going to make a decision to move into an area or acquire a business or build a particular capability, the decision has to be a deliberate decision and a careful decision. We have a responsibility to our customers that the decisions we’re making are going to be valuable to their customers. That is at the heart of this. Where is the value in these decisions that we’ll make or these investments that we’ll make? Does that value go to customers immediately or over time? Does it go somewhere else where maybe it’s necessary and will ultimately facilitate customers? That is ultimately the drive behind us is customers, without those customers, without them getting value from that network, without them getting value from the partners we work with, without them getting value from every interaction they have with somebody here. We then need to start thinking about, Okay, are those the right investments? Yes.
Speaker 4: That’s super interesting. I find this a lot when we speak to, I’m trying to blow smoke here, but more senior folks, in organizations, the ease at which they speak about the customers relentlessly, and have that curiosity about the folks. I think it’s a it’s a great lesson for marketers in general. with so with the marketing meetup community, we’ll have folks who are right on the spectrum of like myself when I started my marketing career on an industrial estate on the outside of Newmarket in a three person company, all the way through to the CMO of Deliveroo or whatever, there’s a wide spectrum. I remember particularly at the beginning stages of my career being asked to phone up my customers, for a conferencing company called Business of Software. As a digital native, I was terrified, like to pick up the phone and sort of say, did you enjoy the conference? Do you want to come back next year? sort of have that thing. It was a far more comfortable place to make a graphic, post it on social media, probably get a couple of likes, maybe add another couple of people to the newsletter or whatever it may be, that felt like a far more comfortable place. I just think it’s just such an interesting, relevant point to sort of be reminded to go out to folks, to have those conversations, to be curious about their worlds. It feels endlessly worthy as a as a takeaway from the session, so I think if you’re if you’re building a company or a proposition or a product or an idea, you’re doing it for someone.
Speaker 3: You’re doing it for some stakeholder. You’re doing it for some audience. At the start, you might be super clear on who that audience is. Over time, then that audience might that audience might expand. You can’t. Data, by the way, is a great indicator of where audiences and customers want you to take them or want to take you. There is no replacement for conversation. there’s tens of thousands of years of human evolution, will demonstrate that conversation, that connection. Because in those conversations, those connections, those hallway chats, you can learn more than maybe a targeted. Hey, let’s talk about this. Okay, I’m in lane. I’m talking about this. I’m not thinking about anything else. It’s almost you want to be able to create moments as well for customers where those involuntary conversations happen. Serendipity, isn’t it? It is serendipity.
Speaker 1: It’s why we do our we’ve got was it something 130, 140 in-person events this year. They’re not particularly profitable. We don’t care because you can’t replicate that magic.
Speaker 3: I think that is a really important part of us. Humanity has to be part of what you do in the same way as purpose needs to be part of what you do. If there’s no purpose, then I can’t motivate you out of bed to drive through the snow. Without that purpose, there’s no reason to do the thing, and humanity is often at the core of that purpose. We’re doing it for some part of humanity, and it’s not only valuable. It’s critical to have a North Star. It’s critical to have something that you go after, some purpose that you go after, because otherwise you forget why you’re there. That what you mentioned there a second ago, we do 130, 140 meetups. They’re probably not profitable. You don’t you might not have a profitability challenge. You have an attribution challenge. those events themselves are not maybe paying you back immediately. Where else are they paying back? Where are they paying you back somewhere else? Where are they paying that network so that network now becomes more powerful for you? those are, the intangible marketing things. 50 percent of my marketing works, 50 percent of it doesn’t. I just don’t know which stuff. Those things are for the two people. If no one else in those meetups, that was an invaluable opportunity.
Speaker 1: We know we know it happens at every single meetup, every single time in the same way that when I was out repping years ago, I knew that if I visited six house builders in a day, I didn’t know what conversations I was going to have. I know that I would there would be some serendipity in there that, I’d bump into a marketing director. I’d learn something about the business that, they’ve I wouldn’t have learned in any other way. Yes. Super interesting.
Speaker 4: It’s wonderful. I think it’s, we normally sort of penned the theme of today to be the future of marketing, sort of walking in here and, being very aware that the conversation might take us to two different places. I think it’s interesting that sort of everything changes, but everything stays the same. there’s something really quite reassuring and lovely and, hopefully encouraging to our community, folks who can sort of go around and, A, know they’re not alone with these things, but then B, sort of, there’s some excitement to be had, some reassurance.
Speaker 1: That’s just the bit where you look at the camera and say, it’s going to be Okay. Everything’s going to be fine. Let’s keep going.
Speaker 4: This was this was the number one question that we had at the beginning, which was if you could if you could jam with any rock star past, present, future. Probably not future. That’ll be hard. Who would it be?
Speaker 3: Future A.I. I want A.I. to make my songs better. It’s a great question. It’s one of those things as well. Depends on the day you catch me. I would love to jam with Phil Linnet from Thin Lizzy. I would love to jam with Freddie Mercury. I would. Brian May, actually, from Queen. When I started playing guitar, I wanted to be Slash from Guns N’ Roses. I wouldn’t mind catching up with him. James Hetfield from Metallica wouldn’t mind catching up with him either. This is a theme here, right? There’s rock music through and through. Yes.
Speaker 4: Nice. I love that. I’m imagining a thumbnail with Slash hair on it.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Jungle is my is one of those, how like you have a few tracks that if you just need to get pepped up before, I’m a middle aged guy driving in a state Volvo, but like shit like there’s very little,
Speaker 3: actually, that can get you revved up like a really good song. That’s a fantastic intro. There’s such a feel to it. No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age is a great one to get you started as well.
Speaker 4: See, Thunderstruck is my song on the way to boot camp. That’s me, like in my Skoda.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Not at all. It’s really what an interesting job you have.
Speaker 3: It is one of those things, isn’t it? The cliche of, do what you love and you never work a day in your life. I’m incredibly fortunate. I have always, even in the career mistakes that I’ve made, and they are mistakes, objectively speaking, without those mistakes, the other opportunities wouldn’t have presented themselves. Yes, I feel exactly the same. Great. Thank you very much.