Hello and welcome to The Get.

I'm your host, Erica Seidel.

The Get is all about driving smart decisions around recruiting and

leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.

This season's theme, SaaS marketing orgs, and how they're changing

in both seismic and subtle ways.

There are a lot of people in my network who say, I have loved being a marketing

leader from within a company, but I'd like to eventually serve as an operating

partner at an investment firm looking across a portfolio of companies,

helping them to uplevel their marketing.

There's sort of a mystique around this kind of role.

I've interacted with several of these marketing operating partners

in my searches, and I can say firsthand that they, like our

guest today, are great assets.

They can really help to ensure alignment between a CEO and a marketing

leader, both before and after the marketing leader joins the business.

I am excited to introduce you to Julie Zadow.

Julie serves as Growth Marketing Leader at The Riverside Company, which is a private

equity firm investing across a range of businesses, including many in software.

Previously, Julie was CMO at Reward Gateway, the HR tech platform.

She has earlier foundational experience from Workhuman, Harte-Hanks, Yankee

Group, and Aberdeen, just to name a few.

She has a great skill at not just speaking marketing, but speaking marketing in

a way that resonates with investors.

This is a really important thing.

I am excited to hear her talk about the nature of her role and how

CMOs can be successful in private equity backed environments and about

the patterns that she's seeing in SaaS marketing orgs, whether with

AI or with skillsets in general.

And just a note, the perspectives that Julie will be sharing today

are her own, they don't formally represent The Riverside Company.

Julie, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

It's great to see you again, Erica.

Great to be with you.

I am excited for this.

I love your energy.

Last time I talked with you, we covered all kinds of fun things.

I would love to get started.

Just introduce yourself a little bit.

I'd love to know the nature of your role.

It's a very cool role, like I've said.

Many people want a role like yours, and I'm wondering if

you could tell us about it.

And also, what would somebody interested in becoming a marketing

operating partner need to know that might not be evident from the outside.

Yeah, sure.

I'm happy to give the best description that I can.

As you mentioned, this opportunity for PE to think about bringing on

operational partners with functional discipline expertise in things like

marketing or sales or rev ops, I do think is becoming more and more common.

My role currently as a marketing operational partner at a PE

firm, at The Riverside Company, I think of as an evolution of the

work that I've done for decades.

As you mentioned, I've been the CMO of a few different organizations,

but many years ago I also founded my own fractional marketing leadership

company called PinchHitCMO.

I jokingly say I had a fractional marketing leadership company

before fractional was cool.

It was my opportunity to really lean into taking what I had been learning

as a marketing leader and certified in the fundamentals of executive coaching,

and then really transitioning that into being a marketing executive coach.

As a result of my particular background being actually a blend, frankly, in the

last decade or so of CMO experience and marketing executive coaching experience,

that combination, I would say, made this transition for me to work as a marketing

operational partner really natural.

So I do work very closely with some exceptionally capable CMOs, and what

I like about the work is that each engagement is actually pretty bespoke.

These are great leaders.

I love the analogy of the fact that, just like top athletes have coaches,

so do the best executives, and that is absolutely true for marketing executives.

What makes my role unique is it is about helping CMOs align with their

C-suite's point of view, but since I am coming in with Riverside, I am actually

trying to help CMOs go beyond what matters to their customer, what matters

to the C-suite they work with on a day-to-day basis, but also think about

their marketing strategy, resourcing, budgeting decisions through the lens

of how the PE firm that may own their company sees their business right now.

How do we look at marketing through the lens of business growth?

How do we look at marketing through the lens of the investment

thesis and the stage of the hold?

And how can I help the marketing leaders in the Riverside portfolio companies

be more successful, taking that pretty expansive purview into account?

I've been the CMO of a PE-backed company before, multiple PE-backed companies.

I have the battle scars.

So I jokingly say, hey, Julie Zadow - battle scars for hire.

You can bring me in and I will help your CMOs, and I will lead with a lot

of empathy, speed, and practicality, and help them use those same skills

to get better in their own roles.

That's great.

I have so much to pick up on from that.

One is that I think when people have gone back and forth between

running all of marketing at a company versus being a fractional leader

or some kind of consultant, it's almost like they don't typically get

credit for those stints where they have been fractional or advising.

It's almost like you're homeschooled during those times.

Then when you go back to an operational role, you don't

really get credit for them.

But in your case, you're actually saying, I'm drawing equally from

my role running marketing at company X, Y, Z and my experience

coaching, being more interstitial.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, and to some degree, I actually do think the benefit that I can bring

to the table is balancing that outside in and inside out lens simultaneously.

Being a CMO is an incredibly challenging role.

I always joke, I, as a CMO, have certainly never walked into the CFO's office and

said, you know what, Frank, I'm pretty good at balancing a checkbook, so I

think I'm gonna give you some ideas on how you can do your job better.

But I have absolutely had the experience as a CMO of having every other C-suite

functional leader try to quote unquote, "tell me how to do my job," because

they are looking from the inside of the company and trying to basically tell

you how you could potentially be more successful in your job looking out.

The same thing happens when you bump into someone on the street who

might be in a role that in some ways involves the market, and then they'll

suddenly have an opinion of how you could do your job from the outside in.

I almost try to come to the table and say, hey, this is a hard job.

Everybody has an opinion on how to get it done well.

The opportunity here is to figure out where your company is in its hold

relative to its market and through the lens that the PE firm that has

invested in your company is looking at.

What do we need to focus on now?

How do we prioritize that and get as clear as we possibly can on the direction we're

taking and the fires we're gonna let burn?

That is a huge part of how I try to show up and partner with the

CMOs in our portfolio companies.

Yeah, I like that.

Can you double click on that and maybe give an example from a recent

experience where you helped a marketing leader not just talk in terms of like

marketing speak and marketing jargon, but really align it to an investor?

'Cause I think that's a key skill that you have that I've seen in your content, I've

seen in our conversations, but I bet our listeners would love to hear an example.

Yeah, so one of the portfolio CMOs that I've been working with recently

has just done some absolutely critical and necessary foundational brand work.

And the company has won major awards and has really, absolutely, cranking

in a sense of the market, knows who they are, and understands the

unique value proposition of this particular company compared to their

competitors, which is excellent.

But like many companies, they're not getting the results that

they're absolutely looking for through the throughput of brand

to demand to leads to pipeline.

So that's an area of opportunity.

And this particular CMO had been trying for a long period of time to help - this

is an earlier stage company - help the investors understand the value of standing

up a marketing automation platform.

But she was framing it all through the lens of the leads that she could create.

And in a sense, missed the throughput and the opportunity to really calibrate

what that journey is like from brand to an MQL, to an SAL, to an SQL, to

pipeline to bookings and how, if it were as equally as important to this company

to have a brand that they understood and to also have, for example, Salesforce.com

instance where they could measure sales impact, they actually didn't have a

marketing automation platform stood up.

My ability to come in and partner with her and explain where that messy middle

could get clarified by bringing in a tool that would enable her to reorient the

great marketing work they were already doing through the lens of its impact on

sales forecasted pipeline wasn't a skill that she had yet, but she had done all

of the foundational work so necessary to set the organization up to create

that kind of opportunity, but wasn't necessarily very skilled in explaining

what kind of MarTech stack would actually make this scale and run and how that

would have an impact on business growth.

So that's an example of something that I came in and partnered with her

on and we've worked on and they've made that investment and now we're

in the guts of architecting it all.

And because there's already a really strong brand foundation there, I'm

exceedingly bullish on how successful this brand to demand to pipeline

conversion opportunity will become.

Obviously, I wouldn't have necessarily leaned into that with an early stage

company that was still struggling with identifying their ICP and really

knowing their unique value proposition and how to bring that messaging to

life because in a sense you're just gonna measure your ineffectiveness

of your starting point then.

So they were the right company.

It was the right time to make that investment, and I felt like I was in

a unique position to not just help her understand what her PE investors were

likely looking for to help justify an investment like that, but also helping

her PE investors understand how ready her marketing organization was to

put this kind of fuel into the tank.

Yeah, yeah.

That's great.

Thank you.

It's interesting that you use the word brand because I feel like brand could

be a four-letter word, I know, [Erica laughs] in a lot of different shops.

So I think some people are still talking more about influence

and authority, and presence and messaging and positioning and such.

So, good for you.

Any thoughts on that?

And the whole is brand a four-letter word in your circles?

Well, I think it can be because, obviously, people always say, let's

harken back for a moment to the Don Draper days when marketing was

equal parts liquor and guessing.

Okay.

We've evolved past the liquor and guessing days.

I would say now we're still straddling the arc from art to science.

Is marketing art?

Is marketing science?

People tend to think that brand is only on the art side and demand

is only on the science side.

But the truth of the matter is, because, as we've all heard this stat a million

times already, the percentage of B2B buyers who show up already knowing

what they need before they're ready to talk to a salesperson, your brand

has been showing up incognito as part of the process by which a prospect is

deciding whether you are the company they're gonna get a demo from or not.

So one of the things that I think is so important about brand is to

remember not everything measurable is by definition impactful.

There are many things that will be impactful that may not yet be quite

measurable, but we can't throw the baby out with the bath water and we

still actually need to lean into both.

The challenge is figuring out, again, taking this full circle, how to calibrate

the moment you're in and what matters to the stage of growth your company is at

in terms of your marketing resource, your budget, your org design, figuring out what

brand to demand ecosystem will best get you the results that your company needs.

When you talk about the moment that you're in, do you mean, for instance, that if

you're doing pretty well, but the PE shop's in year four of a five-year hold

period and they're probably gonna exit the business in a year, then maybe you

focus more on just that, like you do less branding and more demanding, or what?

I think, historically, that has actually been an element of being a PE-backed CMO

that has potentially been underserved a little bit, which is, if your goal

as a CMO is to look as strategic as possible, and you're doubling down on

the argument about rebuilding your entire website in year four and five of a hold,

you really need to step back and try to understand what that conversation

sounds like to your PE investors who are probably in their stage of a hold where

their goal is to basically say they've done all the foundational building.

This is probably about optimizing, if not reducing, spend to basically

make top line growth look as powerful as possible, as well as EBITDA.

However, if you are a brand new CMO and you run in guns blazing and decide

that you're basically gonna focus on how fast you can speed up MQL to SAL

conversion rates, but you're not taking a moment to stop and say, how much of

our traffic and leads do we believe are being generated through digital?

How much is our website a huge part of how we show up in the

digital universe for our prospects?

And when was the last time anybody looked at whether this website

accurately reflects who we are today, and, more importantly, who we believe

we can be in three to five years?

That's the right conversation to have in year one of your hold.

It's not necessarily the right conversation to have in year five.

Don't decide that you know.

Ask the questions of your CEO and your PE investors and help them understand

the lens that you are looking at and the pivots you're willing to take

relative to them bringing you into the conversation around what matters

most right now to the business.

Yeah, that's great.

I'm imagining like a piece of content.

I'm such a content person, but year one, year three, year five, and what the goal

is and what the typical or, perhaps, usual types of marketing focus areas are.

I don't know if it can be that reduced, but that's where my head is going.

Anyway, cool.

Let's talk about SaaS marketing organizations and how they are evolving.

I'm curious to look at it from both junior levels and senior levels.

I know you have some interesting perspectives on this about how

AI is changing the game for jobs.

I remember you said you had some interns at Riverside and you had to

think about what to do with them and how to give them a good experience.

Can you talk about that?

Yeah, sure.

Obviously there's so much going on in the market right now, people talking about

the degree to which AI is potentially replacing junior roles, and frankly,

this isn't across just marketing.

This is probably across all levers.

I've had a unique opportunity to reflect on what that might mean

relative to summer interns, for example.

I have the privilege of working with two fantastic interns this summer through

my role at Riverside, and I think it's been eye-opening for both sides.

You and I had chatted before about when I reflect back on the internships that

I had many years ago, I put them in a three-part bucket and my role as an

intern was work, and then as a result learn, and then as a result network.

What that really meant is there was usually some kind of grunt work for me to

basically lean into and work at and do.

And then hopefully as a result of doing that work, I learned something, but then

because someone was giving me that work, it meant I had the chance to network

with someone that I might not have had the chance to network with before.

That being said, I definitely have memories of being in internships where

I over-indexed on part one and part two where like I was doing a lot of work

and I was trying to learn, but no one was really pulling me into meetings or

letting me listen in on strategy sessions or giving me the opportunity to take my

work and try to imagine what it meant in context to the broader organization.

Nowadays, because of the way in which the entry-level roles are changing,

AI influenced and otherwise, we're not necessarily needing junior level people,

or interns for that matter, to do a lot of number crunching in some of the ways they

might have done, or editing some copy, which can be done very quickly using AI.

But obviously we still recognize at a macro level the importance of bringing

in the next stage of the workforce.

And even if we're not indexing as much as we maybe had in the

past on the work part of it.

I don't have a library full of paper that needs to be alphabetized and put into

a storage room, which actually is a job I did in New York City many moons ago.

But I believe that, therefore, my responsibility as someone working right

now if I have interns, is to find what they can do, but lean into the opportunity

to chat with them every day and help them focus on the learning and the networking,

and then pull that through and give them the opportunity to be in meetings and

try to understand the context and how we collaborate to make things happen.

The one thing that AI is not going to change moving forward is the

criticality of context and collaboration for our ability to achieve success

cross-functionally, and exposing interns and more junior level people

to more of how the work is getting done today gives us two benefits.

Number one, we're basically planting the seeds for future growth inside

our company with these new people that are bringing great new perspective.

And frankly, I've heard many a story lately where it's the more junior people

that actually have more functional experience leaning into the entire

cornucopia of opportunity with AI.

We're missing the chance to learn from them because we're not pulling them

into the context of how we're working enough for them to share something

that they might know that we don't yet.

So I've been trying to work with our interns to basically say there's

learning on both sides here and we just need to contextualize it for the

AI+ plus environment we're in today.

Well said.

I remember you mentioned one thing that you asked an intern,

and you said I anticipate you're gonna use AI to get this done.

And it was something like what are you regurgitating and not understanding here?

I loved that.

Can you mention that a little bit?

Sure.

One of my interns, I actually put them on a project of looking at a couple of

our Portcos and using our AI instance to get AI's recommendations of what

AI believed each Portco should do to improve their website for better

conversion and business outcomes.

And then to compare and contrast the different feedback that AI gave across

different Portcos and she did an excellent job of pulling this information together.

When we talked about it, I paused her and I said, okay, I gave the parameters of

this project around using AI for insight.

Tell me now, now that you've just gone through this presentation, where

you felt like you were parroting AI or regurgitating AI, or whether you

were able to synthesize what AI was recommending you tell me, and now

this is actually what you think.

We had a great conversation, and it enabled me to see some areas where

probably the feedback was laced with jargon that she hadn't been exposed to

yet in her business career so she didn't have any context for, and it also gave

me a really interesting opportunity to say at the end, what did you end

up thinking that AI didn't recommend?

She actually had some excellent suggestions for the user experience on

the website that AI hadn't surfaced.

It almost gave her a thought partner and helped her realize she had an

opinion to share and it was well served and I was glad to receive it.

I'm leaning into sharing it beyond the conversation that she

and I had, further down into the organizations that I'm working with.

That's a great story.

I love that.

I love the specifics here.

Can you take a broader view on SaaS marketing orgs in general, and

how do you think we will see them being reimagined or reinvented?

You know, thanks to AI.

Yeah, I do think we are in a - I dunno what to call it.

Maybe like a re-architecture moment.

And I don't just mean the tools that SaaS marketers use or B2B marketers use.

I really mean the very functions of the workflows that define

go-to-market organizations.

Everybody talks about AI through the lens of speed and efficiency, but I think

it's actually changing how marketing gets done and who you need to do it.

One example for me of a very quickly shifting role that has

been very disintermediated by AI is probably the BDR role.

Still critical, but that notion of how AI can change the job description of

what a BDR does or what exact skills are most important, I think is something we

really need to look at because the tools are there to really lean into making BDRs

much more efficient and effective with the impact of an actual conversation as

a result of the early stage engagement that, for example, an AI SDR can do.

For example, one of our Portcos has recently instituted a really interesting

AI SDR, and while it didn't necessarily drive an incredible volume of, for

example, net new meetings, what we've seen in terms of the quality of the meetings

generated as a result of partnering an AI SDR with a BDR has been unbelievable.

We've actually seen, I believe it's like a 33% increase in qualified pipeline as a

result of partnering an AI SDR with a BDR.

This isn't the elimination of the BDR role.

It's critical for one of our Portcos, but it is an opportunity to not just prove

the volume of what they can produce in terms of meetings generated, but actually

the quality of the meetings themselves.

That, to me, is super powerful and I see a lot of disruption happening there.

If I was gonna put a counterpoint on that and think about where do I see a role

where AI won't easily replace, the area I lean into now is product marketing.

You know, product marketing is not just messaging.

It's not just positioning.

It's that interconnected strategic orchestration.

PMNs, they translate the product value into market impact.

Then they have to do that hard work of corralling product teams, sales teams,

customer success teams, the market.

Any role where I think a huge part of leadership success at this point is very

tied to pattern recognition, stakeholder navigation, more in, maybe I'll call

it like more narrative leadership.

Those are the areas that I don't think AI is able to disintermediate quite yet.

So product marketing stands out for me as an area that, still safe, we'll call it.

Yeah.

That's great.

"Narrative leadership." I like that.

Do you see any particular expectations from Portco CEOs about AI skill

sets for marketing leaders?

Because I sometimes see job specs floating around asking for things like AI first

marketing acumen or AI fluency, et cetera.

I'm wondering are you seeing that, what does that mean, and how is it showing up?

Yeah.

I see a lot of it as well, you know what I mean?

It's just coming into the dialogue of interview processes and job

descriptions left and right these days.

And I certainly understand why, but I think we need to back it up

a little if we really wanna think about how to be effective here.

If I'm being honest, like here's what I actually think.

Okay, fine, everything with AI is unprecedented, but maybe when we

think about what this means for our candidates, I think there's maybe

more a dose of everything old is new again than we might be realizing.

For example, I remember how we thought everything was forever

changed when ABM swept the scene.

But what really changed there, other than marketing leaders needing to get

super intentional about defining and aligning, what it meant to partner with

sales for growth or we were suddenly swamped with all the capabilities

and the exploding MarTech stack.

But ultimately, we realized something very granular and foundational,

which is, okay, what are our data hygiene processes inside this company?

How do we police data hygiene at an enterprise level so that the insights

from our MarTech data are actually useful and not directionally hallucinogenic?

Which is basically what they often became.

I can harken back even more recently to what I've seen when SEO and PPC

blew up marketing budgets because they were so incredibly measurable.

But over time we learned a million impressions don't amount to much,

if a mere fraction of them convert to actual leads or pipeline.

I say all this by saying, it's too soon.

It feels too soon, to me, for a CEO to over index on saying, tell

me how you've wrestled AI to the ground as a marketing leader.

I think a better opportunity is to say, let's look at the moments where the

sands under marketing leadership feet started shifting, and tell me what your

change management approach was for that in terms of your go-to market approach,

your calibration of your team, and your collaboration with the C-suite.

We have periods of time in SaaS marketing history of, just in the

last two decades, that we can pull from here and we can learn from there.

So yes, there may be a couple unicorn SaaS marketing leaders available right

now who will leave wherever they are to come to your company to deploy their

unbelievably excellent AI impact charter.

Amazing.

But if they don't have those skills yet, and an executive recruiter or a

CEO recognizes they've got someone who is skilled at change management, who

understands how to adapt themselves and their teams and the organization

around them for change, and they're willing to lean into thinking through

and collaborating on, number one, how AI is changing go-to-market, and

number two, how AI could potentially make the product or the service that

this company is bringing to market more effective or more measurable.

Maybe that's the starting point.

Align on your starting point and take it from there.

Great.

Thank you.

So like you're saying, AI is big, but it's not everything.

Can we talk maybe more broadly?

Can you give a piece of advice to CMOs who are considering joining private

equity backed companies on how they could be successful in that environment?

When I think about the CMOs that seem the most successful in PE-backed

organizations today, I think it's all about discovery and infrastructure.

You need to lean into, if you're just new and you're showing up,

don't trust that the organization is completely aligned on the ICP.

Clarify that ICP.

Lean in.

Make sure that that is a reset and refresh moment where needed.

Look at the foundational definitions of an MQL, an SAL, an SQL.

You'd be surprised how much tribal knowledge might be wrapped up in

those definitions that may not be serving your customer well today.

And again, coming back to really understanding the

hold year that you're in.

If year one is that discovery and infrastructure phase, I think year three

is, maybe, your acceleration phase.

Year five is exit prep, right?

And you need to understand each of those stages of hold relative to your

stages of growth and understand how to show up for the CEO, and the PE

firm, and your teams accordingly.

That's an area that I think B2B and SaaS CMOs are getting

smarter and smarter about.

But I think it's newer knowledge.

So it hasn't been quite as pressure tested as maybe we need it to be.

When you're interviewing people, do you have a favorite

question that you like to ask?

Something particularly revealing?

I do.

One of my favorite questions, once you get through all of the obvious stuff, is

that I love to just ground prospective CMOs for some of our Portcos in trying to

ask them, really, when they think about themselves professionally, the arc of

their professional marketing leadership career, when do they feel the most useful?

And to see how they unpack that question because you can learn a lot

about their style of leadership, their style of collaboration, their penchant

for risk, their willingness to learn.

So much of marketing today really comes from you could be good

without those skills, but you can't be great without those skills.

So asking somebody to deconstruct where they feel the most useful, when they've

felt the most useful, why they felt the most useful, can really unpack the core of

the CMO you're potentially bringing into your organization in a really nuanced way.

I like that.

I haven't asked that one yet, and you're giving me a good idea here

'cause I have probably dozens of people every week who contact me.

"Oh, I'm looking for a job. I wanna get on your radar."

I talk to people and I just go through these particular questions.

Why now?

What do you wanna do next?

What are your criteria?

And I always ask, what do you do that's easier than breathing?

Which is good, but then people always interpret it

as, oh, this is my superpower.

And that's fine, but it's just like a overdone kind of question.

I might sub in this question.

Thank you.

Oh, I'm flattered.

[she laughs]

I like it.

I like it.

That could be a whole interview right there because there's

all the different Ws, right?

What are you doing?

Why are you doing it?

When?

How long does it take for you to be producing that very useful value?

Et cetera.

I like it.

I like it.

Now, some CEOs are kind of gun shy about hiring CMOs because they might have failed

in the past or had somebody that didn't last as long as the CEO would've liked.

This is just a very touchy subject in the CMO world right now, but

what's your advice to a CEO who has failed at hiring a CMO in the past?

I would say if you failed at hiring a CMO before, first, you're not alone.

A lot of CEOs have.

But my advice is before you rush in to hire another CMO, let's take a step back.

Ask yourself, were you really clear on what success was meant to look like?

And have you now created the conditions for that success to

happen if it didn't happen before?

That's a pretty loaded question, but I do think that gives us the opportunity

to look at where that misalignment might have more of an origin point

than we might have otherwise realized.

At the end of the day, the CMO role is tough, but frankly, not to be

outdone by the CEO role itself.

If a CEO is expecting a marketing leader to understand what it means to champion

brand and demand and pipeline against very specific growth goals and they

haven't worked together to formulate what that means, and, each quarter of

the year, what the trade-offs will be for getting to that outcome, and, to

reference something I said earlier as a result of that prioritization, deciding

which fires you're gonna let burn?

If they don't have clarity on that, more often than not, I think CMOs are set up

to fail and really leaning into a CEO's understanding of their responsibility

to bring clarity to their expectations of that role is a critical part of

getting it right the second time, if it didn't go well the first time.

Yeah.

Just devil's advocate here, I could picture a CEO saying, alright,

it's not on me to create every single condition for success.

I need the CMO to do that too.

I wonder what you would say to that?

Because in my experience, I feel like it's not just what needs to happen, it's

what needs to happen over what timeframe and what's reasonable to expect in the

short term versus medium and long term.

Any thoughts on that?

My advice on that would probably split between whether I was dealing with

a founder CEO or a non founder CEO, because I do feel that the archetype

shows up a little differently each time.

I think founder CEOs, I've often had to advise or work with founder CEOs

to understand that there may have been a time where they themselves were the

singular personification of the brand.

They are not anymore based on the goals of this next stage of growth.

So you do need to lean into setting certain success parameters with your CMO.

That is still your job, but how they get to those outcomes needs

to be something you step away from.

I often find that founder CEOs try to get too much into the guts of how

marketing leaders are planning to get to the outcomes they need, and that

often throws off a marketing leader's sense of purpose and engagement

for being in the role at all.

I do think that more experienced CEOs are a little more comfortable,

often, letting marketing come up with the how to get to the outcomes

that qualify as business success.

But I think what often happens is that there's a lack of clarity

when CEOs often feel like, I don't understand why we're doing that.

I, myself, have had circumstances where I basically said to a CEO that I was

working with, you don't like this?

And I can tell, tell me why.

And they deconstructed why they didn't like an entire campaign.

And I said let me ask you something, is this how you would define yourself?

And I rattled off exactly who our ICP was and they said, no, not at all.

And I said, well, I know because this campaign isn't for you.

This campaign is for somebody who defines themself like this.

That is our ICP.

And that was a real "Ah ha!" moment for this person, and it helped them

realize it may be better to give their marketing leader a little more rope to

go do what they do before they decided they needed to pull on the rope too hard.

That's a great story.

How does it occur to you to do that?

Is this a skillset set of a learned thing of okay, let me step into questioning

mode and let me, I don't know, put the CEO in the shoes of the ICP?

How does that occur to you to do that?

Well, the benefit of being someone who's worked in a lot of different

environments and worked for or with a lot of different CEOs is that it has

given me a better opportunity to pause.

I try to think of a question before I get defensive with an

answer and see what happens next.

And yes, to reference a point I made earlier in this discussion,

that definitely comes from a place of battle scars for hire.

So I'm just trying to take what I've learned and repackage it

in a way that someone else gets to a better outcome faster.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's great.

We are running out of time, so I have one final question for you, Julie.

This season, again, our theme is how SaaS marketing orgs are changing

in both seismic and subtle ways.

I like alliteration.

In one sentence or so, can you describe how SaaS marketing orgs are changing in

either seismic or subtle, or both, ways?

Yes, I will do my best.

I probably will end up manifesting a sentence that has a lot of dashes and

commas to get to your one sentence goal.

But I guess what I would say is AI can do a lot, but if it's automating a bad

campaign strategy, we're not winning.

If it's generating leads that your account execs can't convert, what's the point?

And if it's eating SEO for lunch, but we're still not actually creating

content that's interesting or relevant, then really nothing's changed.

At the end of the day, context and collaboration still matter more than ever.

AI is changing SaaS marketing and B2B marketing in ways that we've never

before seen, but to some degree, it is just amplifying the importance

of leaning into change management one initiative at a time in ways

that we actually do know how to do.

And we've got this.

Great.

Thank you so much, Julie, for joining the show.

Thanks for having me.

This has been a really fun conversation.

That was Julie Zadow from the Riverside Company.

Stay tuned for the next episode of The Get coming in a couple of weeks.

Thanks for listening to The Get.

I'm your host, Erica Seidel.

The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and

leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.

We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today's top

marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.

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