Driving Growth As A CMO, with Grant Johnson

Grant Johnson is a 4x CMO with a proven track record of more than doubling revenues and scaling businesses, building high-performance teams, and transforming global companies, from early stage to multi-billion-dollar enterprises, including: Emburse, Cylance, Kofax, Pegasystems and Symantec. Grant has been a key member of executive teams, driving growth, helping integrate more than 20 acquisitions, and fostering liquidity events valued at more than $10 billion. Grant’s a full stack marketer with expertise in all key functions, including brand, channel, customer, demand, operations, product, and Web marketing. His passion is for developing talent and he’s gratified that more than a dozen of his former staff have progressed their careers to become heads of marketing and CMO’s.

What you'll learn in this episode:

How to balance building strong brand loyalty and driving the demand that you need for growth
Best tactics to build your brand in the B2B space
How to bridge the gap between sales and marketing in B2B and ensure a smooth handoff
Marketing differently based on a company’s stage, whether it’s orgs in growth, acquisition, or integration
Common pitfalls CMOs face
Why the relationship with your CEO is so important and how can someone build it

Additional resources:

Transcript:

Intro:

Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing. But more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered, and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands' success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in.

Josh:

Today, we have the privilege of talking with Grant Johnson. Grant is a four-time CMO. He really has a proven track record of doubling revenue, scaling businesses, building high-performance teams, and transforming global companies. He's worked with people from early-stage startups all the way through multi-billion dollar enterprises. Some of the companies he's worked with are Emburse, Cylance, Kofax, and Pegasystems. So, I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation.

One of the things that I like from my conversation with Grant is this emphasis on three things: one: doing amazing demand gen, second: infusing the uniqueness of a brand into that demand gen process, and then third: really being human in how you go about doing that and how you build marketing campaigns. I think you're going to enjoy the conversation, you're going to learn from it, and Grant's going to share with us both his experience about what to pay attention to in marketing, as well as how to be a great CMO, and how to build relationships across an organization to be successful—how to build alignment. Without further ado, I really want to welcome Grant to the podcast and dive into the conversation. Hey Grant, thanks for being here.

Grant:

Hey, it's great to be talking with you today, Josh.

Josh:

Awesome. Well, I'd love if, as we get started, you could just share a little bit about your story, your career path, where it's taking you. I know you've done a lot of interesting things, made an impact for a lot of companies throughout your career. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about it?

Grant:

Yeah, I would say I was really fortunate after college. Like a lot of folks, you're just looking to get a job, and I found a fairly small company that liked to take college grads and put them on rotational assignments. And so, I worked in manufacturing and production and in customer support. And then, I eventually was in the sales and marketing organization. It was combined for this company, actually. It was funny because it wasn't separate as it is in a lot of larger companies. I was just captivated. Your trade shows and talking to customers and advertising and just like, "This is what I want to do."

And that's really how my career began. I think after I, like a lot of business folks, got an MBA, I wanted to go from the smaller company to the big leagues, and I started to work with some of the larger brands in the industry up to multi-billion dollar companies. I set myself on an intentional path to become a CMO. It wasn't necessarily a linear journey, I probably took a couple lateral steps along the way, but reached that career goal as CMO of Pegasystems in 2009, and I've been a CMO ever since.

Josh:

Awesome. Yeah, I think it's pretty funny because I think a lot of us don't maybe plan to get into marketing, but then we discover this world that's super interesting, and you dive in head-first and don't look back because I know that's my journey as well. I didn't think, "Oh, I'm going to grow up and be a marketer," but here I am, love doing that work. Can you tell me a little bit about what you're focused on in your current role over at Emburse? What are you working on?

Grant:

Well, probably the best way to frame it is orchestrating growth. When I think about the role of a CMO, it really touches uniquely all functions in a business. And so, to do that successfully across even just marketing, I'm focused on building brand, activating our current customers so they're more engaged, they become advocates for us, driving demand. As we've acquired companies and grown, it's shaping our product portfolio and elevating our position in the marketplace and our communications so that we can break through. For us, it's the office of finance, and in these times, we have a thematic ... Every quarter we have a content theme, this is optimized spend to increase financial resilience. In spite of yesterday's market rise in green day, we are still in a challenging economy. And so, we want to be relevant and helpful to our customers. And so, I really orchestrate program, strategies, tactics around that.

Josh:

Excellent. It sounds like a lot of it is, and I think this is key to being a successful CMO, you're having influence in many areas than just straight in the marketing area, correct? You're working across numerous parts of the business.

Grant:

Yeah, that's exactly right. I try to be a good business partner. Probably in a couple companies, and I found refreshing here, is as we were bringing together the seven operating business units to form Emburse when I came on board over three years ago in 2019, we were updating our core values. I had participated in that as a key exec at Pegasystems, coming up with their four key values, which I think they still use today. We came up with SEE IT, sincerity, empathy, empowerment, individuality, and teamwork. By the way, before COVID, so I'm glad we picked empathy because you have to be empathetic to help people get through that and work-life balance and hybrid work or remote first. And so, helping shape the culture and build a positive culture, obviously, I have to partner with the rest of the executives and in particular with the chief people officer. And so, I've enjoyed working with Danielle Tabor on our team and her team so that we can foster a really good environment where you can bring your whole self to work, take care of yourself, strike the work-life balance, continue learning and developing. That to me is as gratifying as some of the business metrics that I've achieved.

Josh:

Absolutely. I think it also results in a team that's going to do way better work across the board when you're paying attention to those soft items as well, not just the business metrics.

Grant:

Exactly right.

Josh:

Cool. Well, I'd love to shift a little bit to talking about the nuts and bolts of marketing. I know you've received a number of awards throughout your career, but I saw that you'd recently been named one of the Top 101 Marketing Influencers by CMO Huddles, so congrats for that. I'd love to dive into one of the superpowers they said that you had, which was building brand and demand at the same time—which I think is something that many CMOs and marketing departments struggle with because they're trying to drive bottom line results and sometimes brand can be forgotten in that mix for a short period of time until you realize the impact it has. So, can you share a little bit about how in your experience you've been able to tread that balance between both building strong brand loyalty and then driving the demand that you need for growth?

Grant:

Yeah, it's a great question. I've been involved in a number of CMO peer group discussions about how you do that. Do you carve out 10% of the budget for brand? But I have a unique perspective that actually started when I was a VP of marketing. Before I was a CMO, I was at a company, several hundred million, and we were competing against companies that were in the billions. We didn't have a brand budget, we had demand gen dollars. I had a very complex product line, we had eight different offerings. Every one of the product lines had a leader, and they'd come to me and say, "Hey, I see we're doing advertising, can I be in the ad? I see we're doing demand gen can my ..." And I said, "If your product is a growth product or a priority product and it helps support the overall brand proposition ..." It was FileNet which was acquired by IBM. We had a brand mission of We help you make better decisions faster.

"And so, if you support that, you're going to get featured. And if you don't ..." We had this product that was an imaging product, sort of old school. It was a great revenue generator as one would call a B school cash cow, but it wasn't that exciting. Since then, if you fast forward to Emburse, our brand mission is to humanize work. I think it's a very noble mission. We came up with it before COVID, believe it or not. In our demand gen tactics, Josh, we infuse the brand attributes. So for us, we want to stand for being real, vibrant but also humble and caring. We really gently care about our customers, and so we do a lot of things that build the brand and create demand that are woven. But some are not interwoven, but they're complementing, for example, on our social media.

We tried to create a personality last holiday season, for example. We figured it'd be, I don't know, tone deaf to be pushing our brand during a holiday, so we had the pets of Emburse take over the social media, and it was one of the most engaged posts that we did. We do other things with our committee, we call it the Emburse Collective, where we foster connections and, "Here's a customer who's been on the journey with Emburse two years. You just started, they can help you." I just came back from San Diego, California, for our, we call it, Emburse in Motion, and we had over 100 customers. How great was that? We got to see them in person. We've been doing these around the US. We did one in London and New York and Chicago and now recently San Diego. I think together brand and demand, as long as you're conscious of how they can play together, what part's discrete, can really help propel you forward faster.

Josh:

I love this concept of they don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can put the brand deep into your demand gen efforts and have it be the flavor of what you're doing, which is, I think, a little bit of what I heard you explain.

Grant:

You're right, you can get more clicks or form fills, and then they come and discover you duped them, and you're not really what you say you are. That's not the end goal. The end goal’s to have authentic interactions and customers who identify with your brand. So they really should work together.

Josh:

Well, I'm interested in your thoughts, so obviously infusing the brand throughout your marketing, infusing it throughout the demand gen efforts, but what are some of the best tactics you think that maybe someone who has a smaller brand—like you referenced a little bit before, your experience of having a budget in the millions going against companies that have budgets in the billions—what are some of the tactics that brands that are challenging in a space can use that are especially effective today to build their brands? When there's so much noise, there's so much competition, where do you look to make a special impact or a breakthrough impact when you're trying to grow the brand?

Grant:

Yeah, that's another really important question to grapple with at any size, whether you're a scale-up or an established company. From a strategic viewpoint, you have to start with know what you stand for and be true to it. There's an old adage that nothing kills a bad product faster than great communications, right?

Josh:

Mm-hmm.

Grant:

And so, you have to live the brand. I was at a company earlier in my career, and we came up with this tagline, and it says, "You'll like the way we work because we're a more approachable brand." And then we had some support issues, and we weren't meeting our SLAs. And so, we changed it to something we could better deliver, "Working for your business." It happened to be a technology company, and so there was a built-in pun; it's working and we're working for your business. But it was something that we were able to deliver on. And so, I think that's it.

I counsel those early in their career to take more risks sooner, and always carve out a certain percent of your budget for trial experimentation, innovation, and just try things that can gather steam whether it's through social media or through outdoors. Recently at Emburse, we did some out-of-home. We did what I call activation to an event. We surrounded it. We had one partner where we were participating in their conference, and they said it felt like our conference. I don't know that we wanted to be that dominating, but we really had an effective strategy. But there's also just little things, like I came up with for Emburse, the Emburse It Campaign. It was really a simple campaign because we're in the spend management category, we're the number one choice for spend optimization. One of our key offerings is our travel and expense team. It’s often known as expense management solution.

And so, we came up with the phrase, "Don't just expense it, Emburse it." It was really about there's a better way, it's simpler, it's more intuitive, it's less effort. We remove the time-consuming, tedious tasks that take you away from more important work or time with your family or community. And it caught hold. We did a campaign where we were supporting a local business and every employee got involved. Then we created a guide to the best hidden gems in all these cities around the world. It really started with an idea, don't just expense it, and Emburse it, that I'd come up with. And then we did a campaign. We all know Cyber Monday, but there's Giving Tuesday. And so, "Hey, what charity do you want to support? What cause do you want to support? Don't just expense it, Emburse it."

And now when customers go live, "You've just Embursed it," they get a validating message that helps reinforce the brand promise of humanizing work and making it easier to do business and you can focus on what matters most. So I think little things like that. You have to find the adage of you get a couple pieces of kindling and some paper, you get the fire started. And if it's working, you can add fuel to the flame. If it's not, then go try something else. But I think true to the brand, experimenting, trying to find things that can really take hold because they're authentic, they resonate with your audiences, are ways that you can compete against the big guys with a differentiated value proposition versus spending money and just hoping. So I think those are some ideas that I've seen work.

Josh:

Totally. I like a bit of what you talked about with that whole campaign, the Emburse It Campaign because it does get to, I think, a mistake that many of us in B2B marketing make is to just talk about the features or the benefits of our product instead of getting to the deeper human needs right behind it that you're really feeding into. So I like that idea of really, I think, admitting not in a way that's downplaying the impact your product has, but it's admitting that someone really cares much more about going to that soccer game to see their kid play soccer after work rather than, "Oh, it was easy to expense this." So getting to that underlying idea.

Grant:

Yeah, you're exactly right. We had these concepts, we were launching the brand, they weren't necessarily ads that we were going to run, but they were put together to be of context around what's the feeling we want somebody to have. And so, you can envision, if you've been on the road and you've gone to a few cities, you're a road warrior back in those days, and I think there are still people doing that as we return to some level of post-COVID normalcy or the new normal, and there's a picture of a person arriving home and the kids are running up to hug the person and the dog's sitting there and it says ... You picture the woman exec coming home, for example, and it says "Three cities, four hotels, five days. Finally home, no expense report needed," because with Emburse we automate the process. And sort of that feeling of, "Wow, I don't have to spend my weekend gathering receipts, I can spend time with my family or my community." Everybody in my company, because we had several hundred folks at the time and then growing, they go, "That's the one. That's the spirit. That's it." We showed about 10 different concepts to try to bring the brand to life, but that was the one that really hit home. Pun intended.

Josh:

Totally. Yeah. Well, as we talk about this spirit of authenticity making things human, one of the places I think B2B brands trip up in that creating a human experience is in the handoff between sales and marketing. I talk about this with most of the CMOs I talk to on the podcast. But how have you worked to bridge that gap between sales and marketing to make sure that there's a handoff that's super smooth and that lives out the values that you have as a brand in the sales process?

Grant:

Well, I will start with an anecdote because a lot of my operating principles, philosophies, are grounded in experience. And sometimes you learn what not to do to determine what to do. Before I was a CMO, actually it was one of my mentors, somehow the CEO, he didn't like some tension, he liked healthy tension or dynamic tension. Sales and market alignment, if it's working well, it's one team, that's how it should be.

Josh:

Absolutely.

Grant:

If it's not working, as I like to say, finger pointing is an art, okay? "Here's a lead you can't follow up, the lead suck." But really, to me, and I adopted this when I first was a CMO, I said, "Well, where can I sit?" "Oh, you can sit anywhere on this floor." "Okay, where's the CRO sitting? I'm sitting next to him or her, because I want to make sure I have a partnership."

I think as I've told my team and they've embraced this philosophy, and my CRO peers have appreciated is, "Look, there's no celebration unless sales succeeds. I don't care if we're ahead of our goals, we blew out the number, we got 100 website downloads in a day who all want to demo tomorrow, if sales doesn't make the number, the company doesn't make the number, we can't celebrate, because that's really the ultimate metric of the business achieving its objectives growing top line and bottom line. But what happens, if you can agree on that, really where it turns into an effective partnership is if what I say is up and down the organizational structure, people are aligned. So if I'm aligned with the CRO, my VP's aligned with the VP of sales, my marketing demand gen managers working with somebody who runs a particular vertical or a particular North America European region, and they have regular communication, "Hey, what's working? What's not working? What are you seeing in the marketplace? Should we try this?" And so it's collaborative.

It really builds, as you said, that linkage and that bridge that, hey, it's not about marketing feeding sales or sales bringing home the big game, the win. It's about working together to have mutually shared goals, achieve those goals, and then set newer bars, never be satisfied that we hit the goal because there's probably a better objective that we can go after, more volume, more velocity, and more value, if you think about the Vs of a pipeline that determine the level of your achievement.

Josh:

I think it's really smart. As we think about building bridges, what would you say from your experience, if someone is bought into this whole process of succeeding together as a team doing that work but they're facing an adversarial sales team, maybe the CRO's on board, but the rest of the team is not on board for that collaboration? In your experience, what have you done to break through when there's a disconnect with the sales team or the sales team is being adversarial to marketing? How do you win them over?

Grant:

Well, I have to say, Josh, honestly, I've had individuals who don't want to play nice, and so you work those out one on one or with the manager. Marketing's often invited to sales meetings and kickoffs because we're key partners.

Josh:

Totally.

Grant:

The head of sales said to us reps, "Each of you should get your own marketing plan." I said, "Not going to happen." And so, there were some people in front, they were like, "Why don't I get my own marketing plan?" Because it doesn't scale. I've got 10 marketers, you've got 40 people in sales, I don't have the capacity to ... Now, can we support you in a targeted account program? Yes. Can we provide unique tactics that are relevant to your audience? Yes. But you're not going to get your own budget marketing plan. And so, that took a while for them to recognize that I wasn't just kidding, that it's not a realistic request. But yeah, I think in my experience there's been very isolated, very few and far between where folks didn't realize and come to the conclusion that we're better together …

Josh:

Totally.

Grant:

... than to go it alone.

Josh:

Yeah, that's great. I'd love to shift for the rest of our conversation. I know a lot of what you do is coaching and mentoring other CMOs, and I'd love to shift the conversation in that direction. One of the things I think people, as they're in the CMO role or they're going through a new transition, is they wonder, "How do I need to show up differently or show up the same when my company's in growth mode or in acquisition or in an integration mode?" Are there different ways that you think a CMO's focus should be in each of those stages of development of an organization?

Grant:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it really depends on what I call the life cycle of a company. You can think about the analogy of life, from infancy to adolescence to adulthood. And so, there's early stage company and then there's established companies and there's market leaders, and it really calls for a different remit about how to best approach it. I remember because this is my fourth tour of duty, I like to say, as a CMO since 2009, so I'm pretty happy I've made it more than three years, three times, which I beat the law of averages.

Josh:

You have, yeah,

Grant:

I might be doing something right, I'm not sure, but I think so. And so, it depends a lot on what that particular growth stage of the company, what's going to work. You just can't uniformly apply. After I came on board and I was talking to a woman on my team who was running product marketing, I said, "Well, what did you think during the interview?" She says, "Well, I was a little concerned you were just going to apply your playbook to us." I said, "That's a great observation because that would've guaranteed either failure or shortfall." And so, for example, when I arrived at Emburse, we had, 2019, I don't know, 14,000 customers, we now have over 18,000. And so, we have a couple things going on. We have a net new motion. I have a demand gen team that works on getting new logos, new customers.

But it's equally important when you've got an established customer base. We're a mid-sized company, couple hundred million plus in ARR, and so it's also important to build a sophisticated, coordinated cross-seller upsell motion together with the sales team and the customer success team. I'm really proud that my team has helped the company meet or exceed our goals in cross-sell customer marketing for 12 straight quarters. Now, I can say, "Well, I got some great marketers," and I do. I've got some really hard working, dedicated smart people. But from the outset, and I actually did a talk on this at a recent CMO forum, from the outset, we figured out who all the stakeholders were, how we could align, lock arms, and set shared goals that we could measure success, iterate on, adjust if they weren't working, and succeed together. Had I just said, "Look, hey, we know what we're doing in marketing, you know what you're doing in sales. Hey, customer success, don't lose any customers," there's no way we would've been as successful as we have been.

And so that was important because we're at a stage where we have to both retain and grow customers as we get new customers. Some companies in early stage, you just want to get customers that believe in you, and at the later stage, you probably don't need as many new customers, but you certainly don't want to lose the thousands that you have, so you’ve got to continue to innovate. I think really adapting your tactics for the life cycle of the company and the industry is an important approach that helps you tailor programs that have a higher chance of succeeding.

Josh:

Totally. Well, let's shift fully over into this conversation about mentoring and coaching other CMOs. Obviously, you said it's your fourth tour, you have made it past the average, which is amazing. I think it's hard to make it past the average tenure on every role you've been in. But can you share a little bit about that mentoring and coaching that you're doing? What are you up to in that arena?

Grant:

Yeah, I will say my full-time focus is with Emburse and the company, but I have to say, I was reflecting and talking to somebody recently that, over the course of my CMO tenures and heads of marketing, I've mentored more than a dozen high potential folks that have gone on to become heads of marketing and CMOs. Look, I like my own accomplishments, who wouldn't, but I'm more gratified by others and what they've achieved in helping to foster that. If somebody came and said, "I want to be promoted," I'd say, "Great. Well, why don't we co-create." "What do you mean?" Isaid, "Well, I'm not going to just promote you. You tell me what are the things that we can take you to the next step, how you can contribute more and add more value to the equation of the business. If I don't promote you, people think I'm stupid. So let's co-create that."

So it depends. Mostly where I've been helping and just one or two folks, I can probably take on just a few because I want to keep my focus and the company succeeding, is being a sounding board. At the top it's lonely, CEO, CRO, CFO. I mean, you don't go to the CEO as a CMO and say, "I'm not really sure what to do." I mean, I can, I've got a great relationship with our CEO, Eric Friedrichsen, and I could do that, but I could also talk to four other peers and say, "Hey, what do you guys do in this situation?" because they would have more granular detail about what they tried, what worked or what they haven't tried that they've heard could work. So that's what I think about the mentoring and coaching, is both helping them to make sure they're aligned to the executive staff, the CRO, CEO, that they're preparing and they're communicating to what's important to a board member, because I've been in about 60 board meetings, both public and private companies. You learn a few things when you're sitting through these board meetings, how to build, how to hire, what to look for in developing talent, where to place bets on resource at every stage of the organization, how to problem solve when you're stuck.

You could be stuck on a product's not getting adopted in the marketplace. You thought you had a successful launch. You could be stuck that you're not doing as well as the analysts in your rankings or with the press or in a particular segment where you're not building pipeline or closing it as well as another segment. I mean, these are the day-to-day conversations ... week to week I should say, where I'll check in with that person and just try to help them successfully navigate with an objective sounding board that is both supportive But if they gave me an idea that I don't think it’s going to work, it's not like they're doing it in front a bunch of their peers, I say, "Hey, you know what? I wouldn't probably try that one, and here's why." Said, "Oh okay, let's try this one." And so increasing their odds. I'm an athlete, I play competitive tennis still, I've gone to a couple of nationals, it's a lot of fun to do, just keeps me active and I love to compete. And so I think that we're all in very competitive markets. If you want to be the top of your game, you should have a coach, so that's my philosophy. We all get help from somebody who's done things that we haven't done.

Josh:

The amazing thing about a good coach is they offer a few tweaks to what you're already doing well and you can get so much further. Think about this from golf as I'm constantly trying to improve my golf game, right?

Grant:

Right.

Josh:

It's amazing how you can tweak something just a degree and how much better you're doing. I'd love to dig a little bit into some of the things you mentioned. I know you recently had a couple of post blog series that we'll put in the notes about pitfalls CMOs face, and I think you talked about a few of them in your comments right there. But can you dive a little bit more into the importance of building alignment and setting proper expectations, and what people should look out for as pitfalls. Or, maybe if we look at it more in a positive way, how they should focus on building that alignment and setting expectations with the people they're working with?

Grant:

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the tough things about being a CMO is everybody's an expert in marketing, and everybody has an idea. We're all exposed, as you were saying earlier, to so many messages saying, "Well, why don't we do that?" Well, that's something that we don't have the budget for. That's not really true to our brand. And so, when you create go-to-market programs, demand gen programs, communication programs, you've got to get in alignment with the rest of the go-to market and, in some cases, the rest of the executive staff, "Here's what we're doing and why." I've had some peers say, "Market marketing," so that people know what you're doing, why you're doing it, what you expect the outcomes are. We know what good looks like, and that's related to setting the expectations.

I've had a prior CEO who says, "Well, look, I see 20% of the pipeline goes close one. Sales is close to 25%. How come you're not at 25%?" I could have been intimidated and said, "Well, we'll get there." Actually, this conversation happened in the board meeting, one of our board members said, "Hold on a minute, my question is why isn't sales at 35%?" I love that. And so, I said, "Well, yeah, because if sales knows the customer versus ..." We digitally create most leads. We do a lot of inbound marketing and very multi-channel mix from papers, to PPC, to SEO, to crowdsource, all kinds of great tactics. Eventually, they engage, go to the website, raise their hand, what I call gold on a website, "Please contact me." Hallelujah. How fast can I pick up the phone or send an email? All that's going on and you need to take advantage of that.

But at the end of the day, you digitally connect with that person, it's different like, "I sold you at my last company. I'm going to sell you to this company." You've got a relationship. You've proven that you're trustworthy, you become a trusted advisor, which is the best place a salesperson can be versus somebody just thought of as salesperson. And so, we're never going to get there, but yeah, we always want to improve. And so, I think that's really key that it's easy to get out of alignment.

You’ve also got to be checking in. I just happened to be scrolling through LinkedIn, and I saw Nick Mehta, the CEO ... I think he's a co-founder of Gainsight. He said, "Fire yourself, CEO." What I loved about that, other than it's provocative, which is great, I want to get rehired every year, but I think you have to test alignment because expectations change and then next thing you know you're out of alignment. What does good look like? It's like, "Hey, look, I'm expecting I'm going to get 2:1 ROI." And then the CEO says, "No, I wanted 5:1." "Well, when did that become the requirement?" So you’ve got to always be testing to make sure you're in alignment and you're realizing and reaching the expectations that are agreed upon versus just artificially dictated.

Josh:

And also, you’ve got to build that relationship with your CEO, that they're going to communicate that down to you before you're in front of a board meeting or something and having to deliver on results. What have you done throughout your career to build a strong relationship with your CEOs that you've worked with?

Grant:

Well, I will say, I had mentioned earlier, Josh, it's just a lot of my lessons learned about what didn't go as well as it could have gone ... differently. I will say, one of my earlier CEOs liked to get bagels in Brooklyn. I was in a Boston area on Saturdays. I had younger kids at the time, and I wanted to go to the soccer game or the baseball game or something like that. And I didn't get to know this person as well as I could have. I think that might have helped drive better alignment, and the perception of my performance, although it was good, it could have been better had I done that.

And so, when I got to Emburse, it just turns out that we were planning an executive offsite. A lot of our execs live in the Denver area and a lot of us are skiers, so we went skiing together. We tried out some new wine together and talked about each other's families. So I've gotten to know our CEO Eric Friedrichsen as a person, not just as my boss. If you can do that ... They're all different types of personalities. Some CEOs, whether they're founders or they're professional execs running the business, they may not want you to get close to them. Some people have more approachable or less approachable operating styles. But I think if you can walk in their shoes or get to know them better, it's going to help you through tough times where you can have more real conversations like, "Hey, I might have missed this, but how do we course correct together?" So I think it'll help you.

I had my second year review. And again, a lot of times your second review for a lot of CMOs is like, "We've got Superman, you're great, but we want Spiderman. So we want a different superpower, you're out." But you're trying avoid those. But I had a CEO say to me, "You were unbelievable. Your first year, what you made happen so fast, I was blown away. But in year two, yeah, you're just okay." It didn't feel good to hear, but he was right. In year two, I was just okay. I wasn't on cruise control, but I wasn't pushing. So I did like Nick Mehta like, "Okay, what do I do year three? How do I make that a more impactful year?" So you have to take that advice and continually adapt.

Josh:

Yeah. Excellent. Well, I think the next big thing, and there's a ton of stuff we could talk about, but another area I think CMOs who are maybe new in their roles are getting going and are interested in learning about is how to really ace the board meeting, make sure you're telling the right stories, make sure your perspective is being heard, et cetera. Like you said earlier in the conversation, you've been involved in over 60 board meetings, so you got some experience doing that. What are some things that you focus on as you're preparing for the board meeting and showing up in the board meeting to make sure you are showing up well, marketing's perspective is being shared well?

Grant:

Well, and especially if you're both new to being a head of marketing, CMO, and you're new to the organization, you really want to get introduced to a couple board members who've been there for a period of time and can just give you insight. "What are you looking for?" I remember talking to a board member early on and had this idea, and he said, "Well, that's great, but it's not strategic. We only get involved in strategic things. So if you want to make the website hum four times faster, go for it, but we're not going to care about that." A lot of board members tend to come from CEO, CFO, financial backgrounds, and so you really want to present in the language of the board about how you're helping drive revenue, grow pipeline, grow customers, build brand in a very tangible way and they align to what the business has set out.

Every company has an annual operating plan, quarterly objectives, and metrics, so you really want to speak that language. The best advice, again, through experience, if you are looking for a change transformation or a change initiative, boy, change is hard for all of us and change is risk for companies. But if you don't change, somebody's going to out-innovate you and then you could go from leader to lagger. You don't want that to happen.

Josh:

Totally.

Grant:

I have found that it's really good to preview. Preview with the CEO, maybe a couple of their peers who will be in the board meeting, maybe a board member or two and say, "What do you think?" I've had that help me so that by the time I get to the board meeting, I've already got some advocates. They may not accept the recommendation, they'll have some input, that's why you hire them as board members. You always take feedback constructively and say, "Okay, yeah, maybe we could do a little bit more here. We could try that." But I think that helps. If you go in and you also have you’re poor on metrics that are disconnected from the end result of closing business, you're going to be in trouble as well. You've heard the term vanity metrics, right? We all have.

Josh:

Of course, yeah.

Grant:

We can all say, "Hey, we're better than the industry average and we have 2X here and 5X here." So what? how did it impact sales? Does your CRO agree with you? I think that's how you can have better conversations and do well in your board meeting participation.

Josh:

Awesome. Cool. Well, this has been a super rich conversation. I feel like you could dive in for a long time, but we're running low on time. I wanted to ask you really one question to wrap up, and this is a question I ask everyone. Obviously, CMO Huddles decided what your superpower was and announced it, but I'd love to hear what you think your superpower is as a marketer. What makes you special and what you bring to Emburse and the other companies that you've worked with?

Grant:

I love that question, Josh. If a recruiter was to call me and say, "What's your superpower? You can only pick one," I would say demand gen. But I really feel as a four-time CMO that I've learned all what I call the key levers that help drive marketing contribution to business, optimize your product portfolio, so product marketing, demand gen brand building, strategic communications. The fifth one is, well, you better understand the martech stack, I mean, because it can really help you. I've gone deep into a lot of our stacks, [inaudible 00:42:44].

But I think for me what I consider my superpower that would be for general purposes is building high-performance teams. I pride myself in being able to spot talent. I've pissed off VPs on my team when I said no to a hirer. "Why not?" And I give them five reasons why not. "Oh okay, I hadn't thought about it that way." There's a war for talent, you want to get talented people on board, and when you find that person, get them on board fast. But you don't want to just settle for mediocrity because it'll eventually weigh you down.

There's a whole methodology to doing that. I'm proud that the three years that I've been here at Emburse, there's maybe one or two people that I call regrettable departures. Everybody has turnover, especially with COVID, but I think we've created a really positive learning, growing, contributing environment. Promoted a lot of people based on achievements, not just because we liked them, but they really delivered progressively. It's underrated the importance of your people skills. Somebody would be hired because they were at this brand or they did this great program, but if you can't get followership, if people don't want to learn from you and work with you and be part of that team, you're going to lose folks. At the end of the day, I don't care how good your strategy is, if nobody's around to execute it, you're going to fail.

Josh:

Totally. Yeah, that's great. I think, at the end of the day, a lot of your comments have reflected around that fact that marketing is a people effort. It's driven by people, and it has to connect with real people, so that team is essential to be successful. Well, Grant, how can people keep up with what you're doing if they want to after this conversation? Where can they find you online? What's the best way to keep up with your ideas and your thinking?

Grant:

Well, I appreciate that. I'm @grantejohnson1 on LinkedIn. That's also my Gmail address, I keep it pretty simple. It's also my Twitter handle. It's all @grantejohnson1. I don't know how I was able to get it, maybe I was just there early on. And then as you mentioned, I have an active blog site on WordPress called CMO Mentor. And here's a shock, cmomentor.com, I just came up with it, and it was available. I didn't expect it to be available. So somebody hadn't picked it, so it's now my blog site. I do write about best practices and coaching advice for heads of marketing and aspiring CMOs.

Josh:

Awesome. I've been on your blog, obviously mentioned it already, but there's a wealth of knowledge for people to get up there and read through some articles, so I definitely encourage people to do that. Well, Grant, thanks so much for giving us some of your time today for having a conversation. It's been really rich to learn about what you've learned throughout your career and also how you should approach those key fundamentals of being a CMO. I appreciate everything you've shared.

Grant:

Well, it's been my pleasure, Josh, I applaud you for such thought-provoking questions. It made it easy for me just to share my experience and come across with the knowledge I've gained and many of the mistakes that I've learned from. So that's what life's about. Always be learning, always be open, and I appreciate the opportunity.

Josh:

Yeah, absolutely.

Outro:

Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand and marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a brand and marketing agency in Seattle, Washington. Our producer is Rob Gregerson of Legato Productions.