Hi, you're listening to The Get, the podcast about finding and keeping

great marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.

I'm Erica Seidel, your host.

Almost every CMO has the same grumble.

"Everyone at my company thinks they're a marketer.

Everyone has an opinion, even if they are not in marketing."

But what if that's a good thing for everyone to have an opinion?

Our guest today makes this case.

What if you acknowledged that people across the company have an emotional

investment in the brand, and what if you embraced it and actually harnessed it?

Today, you'll hear from Justin Steinman.

Justin is the CMO of Definitive Healthcare, the healthcare

commercial intelligence company.

Justin joined the company to help scale to the $500 million mark

and went through an IPO already.

You'll hear about what it's like to do a rebrand, a marketing

transformation, and an IPO all at once.

You'll hear why a CMO should never use the phrase 'my marketing budget.'

You'll learn how to tell whether a company that has not traditionally

invested in marketing is ready for it.

You'll find out how to bring in best practices from big companies

to companies that are scaling up without overpowering the business.

And you'll hear one particularly revealing interview question that

you will probably want to start asking all of your candidates.

Justin, I am delighted to have you on the show.

You are pretty fresh off of an IPO for Definitive Healthcare and I would love

to jump right into this and just ask what are lessons for a CMO following in

your footsteps and facing an IPO journey?

Can you share a definite do and a definite don't?

Sure.

So first off, Erica, thanks for having me.

I'm really happy to be here.

Looking forward to a fun conversation today.

I wouldn't say that anybody's going to follow in my footsteps, right?

I mean, everybody goes on their own unique journey and does their own, and I

wouldn't be so presumptuous as to say that I have anything figured out, much less the

whole pathway to an IPO, let me tell you.

There's no such thing as a definite do and a definite don't aside from

probably one thing, which is definitely remember that you are part of a

team and that no man or woman is an island that can do this on your own.

There are a million and one t hat are part of an IPO and it's going to feel

crazy and it's going to feel like it's a rollercoaster, but you've got to

remember that you're on a team and there are people to help you along the way.

Was there something surprising about the experience that

sticks out to you when you think about going through that whole process?

Like a moment that, you know, is just very iconic of that time?

So, there are all sorts of things that

are significant from the IPO.

I mean, we went public on the NASDAQ, and probably for us, the most iconic

moment was seeing our brand new brand, our logo, visual identity, and color

scheme up on the advertisements in Times Square on the big NASDAQ Towers.

Things that I would recommend that you never do is I'd never recommend that

any CMO do what we did, which is do a complete visual identity - in fact, more

or less complete rebrand of the company at the same time as you are doing an IPO.

It's just too crazy.

And, you know, we did everything from who our core foundation is, what's our

core identity to voice and tone, to vision, mission, about us, wordmark,

logo, color scheme, website, you name it, product naming hierarchy.

And to try to rebrand that entire company and create - also we created

a category, too, just for giggles, Healthcare Commercial Intelligence.

Trying to do all of that at the same time as you are going through an IPO

and writing an S1 with the bankers and meeting with potential investors and

doing a road show video and everything.

There were days when we would literally finish the product naming

architecture, and then two hours later, I was on the phone with the bankers

telling them, hey, put this name, put these new product names in the S1.

Much less, we didn't have a couple hours for it to sit, much less the several weeks

that you would need for it to kind of sit.

But without a doubt, the most iconic moment of all was after we rang the

bell, we went out into Times Square and we saw on those massive towers our new

slogan "Discover Opportunity," logo, wordmark, everything in bright colors.

And to think that was on a drawing board, you know, six months ago, I

guess my laptop monitor, six months ago, as we are debating the finer

points of it with our advertising agency and our branding agency.

And so that was a pretty crazy experience.

It was very surreal, if you will.

That sounds awesome.

It's quite a moment.

So, a lot of what you've done at Definitive Healthcare is

a marketing transformation.

And this is kind of your signature sauce because you and I have

known each other for a while.

We've talked through various jobs that you've had.

And you seem really good at getting an organization to appreciate marketing,

both from a budget standpoint and a reputational standpoint internally.

Can you talk about steering that shift and that part of the

transformation and how you unlock and evolve others' view of marketing?

I'm very curious to get very specific here.

Yeah.

So there's a lot to unpack in there.

You know, I'm going to date us both here, Erica, and say that I've known

you probably for a decade at this point, and I will never forget having

lunch with you when you said, "Jus, you need to work on your LinkedIn profile.

And I think you should put that you're a senior executive with a

flair for business transformation."

And I think that flair for business transformation is actually on my

LinkedIn profile still to this day.

So kudos to you for that.

So, I do love a good transformation, if you will.

Looks, it's good to love a good transformation.

And so one of the things that I was brought into Definitive Healthcare to

do was really to up level the marketing.

It was - marketing, historically, had not been an area that

Jason, our CEO had invested in.

He's a very, very great product guy, and we have one hell of a sales engine here.

And Jason really built this company on product and sales.

And having taken private equity from admin back in 2019, and then going through an

IPO, basically the feedback was, what got you to $160 million in revenue,

isn't going to get you to 500 million.

And one of the things that you need to do is really up level marketing.

And so I had met Jason through a serendipitous introduction, actually, my

nextdoor neighbor introduced me to him.

And, you know, things went pretty quickly and I wound up, it's been

a little over a year at this point.

And so when I walked in the door, Jason gave me a lot of rein.

He said, hey, look, we don't really know a lot about marketing here at Definitive.

We've just done a lot of inbound, a lot of website, we've got a hunch that

there's a lot more, but we need you to help us frame that out and teach us.

And the thing that I've always thought about marketing, it's a

really interesting job in any company.

Because every single person is a marketer at some level and thinks

they know about marketing, right?

We all watch TV.

We all see advertisements.

We all surf the web.

How many ads do you see on a given day?

You're being marketed to.

And at the same point in time, marketing represents the ethos

of the company out to the world.

So everybody in the company is emotionally invested in marketing.

And, you know, we really felt this acutely in our brand.

Whether we pick Microsoft, Azure, or the Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, I'm

not emotionally invested in that, right?

That is a decision that our CTO and his team of engineers make and

whatever they go [with], I go great, you guys are the experts, I trust you.

Conversely, those folks are emotionally invested in what our brand is and

what our tagline is, and what we stand for, and how we look and

present ourselves to the market.

And you know what?

They have every right to be emotionally invested in that.

And they have every right to weigh in on that.

And so, to be a good CMO and get people to appreciate the value, you have to

not only acknowledge that emotional investment, but you have to embrace it.

And you have to bring people on the journey.

And you have to hear people out.

And you have to not let it get personal when you put, you know, the

new brand out there and somebody from sales who's been here maybe two years

says, "I really don't like that.

It's not who I think we are."

Well, you gotta hear that person out.

Now, the trick in all this because if you listen to everybody, you're going

to wind up with a brand of mish-mash and you're not going to stand for anything,

which is the worst thing of all.

Because if you make everybody happy, you're going to make nobody happy.

So the real trick here is to do pattern recognition and to synthesize a bunch of

data points that may at first seem random into a comprehensive view where you can

get a real true brand architecture and message and story to the marketplace.

That's a little bit about how you start to get everybody in, and you've got to

bring people on the journey and never let it get personal for you because

it's personal for everybody else.

And that's really important, I think.

That's so great.

I love this idea of acknowledging and embracing the emotional investment

that the rest of the company has in marketing because I think a

lot of people run away from it.

They're like, oh, everybody's going to have an opinion.

And like I interviewed somebody recently who said, "Other people come to me

and tell me they have a background in marketing, and I tell them, 'Well,

I have a foreground in marketing.'"

And so it's a little bit of this fight back and forth.

But you're, it's like a jujitsu move or, like, going with it as

opposed to, you know, pushing against the opinions of other people.

You really have to embrace it because people care.

And you've got to accept and appreciate that people care.

Honestly, the worst thing in the world that you could do would be to

launch a new brand and have people say, "Eh, I don't really care."

Right?

That's terrible.

I got - not to pat my team on the back here - but I got like love notes from

various people across the organization, saying, you know, Justin, you and

your team have managed to put what I've always felt about this company

into our website and into our story.

One person was like, I honestly got choked up reading the new vision

and mission cause it's really who I think Definitive Healthcare is.

When you get those messages, like I started to get choked up.

I'm like, oh my god, these people care so deeply about this company.

Cause they come in and they put their heart and soul in every day.

If I can pivot a bit, it's not just about brand.

One of the things that I know you and I have always joked about over

the year when I talk about marketing budgets, I never ever, ever use

the phrase "My marketing budget."

Never.

It is our marketing budget.

It's my job as the CMO to be the best spender, best investor, best

utilizer, use that budget in the most efficient way to generate the best

return on investment for the company.

But it is never my money.

It is ours and it's collective.

And I really view myself as the steward for spending that.

And then, in order to generate the trust that you need to spend that money, you

need to have, again, radical transparency.

I publish, for anybody who wants to see it as an Excel file on our

SharePoint that has no permissions on it, our entire marketing funnel.

And you can see by segment, we have six segments we compete in, how many NQLs

we've generated, what their conversion is to a marketing sales qualified

leader, MSQL, to wins, to dollars of pipeline generated, to cost per MQL,

cost per SQL, so that everybody in the organization, if they're curious,

can see how we are performing.

And then once a month, as part of our monthly KPIs, I walk our senior

leadership team through all of our metrics in marketing and say,

hey, we decided we're going to go and double down on a specialized

campaign doing upsell for biopharma.

This is how it worked.

This is what we learned.

We crushed it over here, and over here, that campaign really didn't resonate.

And let me tell you why, and here's what we're going to do differently.

And I don't know, because I don't work in a lot of other companies, how many

CMOs come in and really give that radical transparency so everybody feels like ok,

I know where Justin's spending this money.

Because if you're not in marketing, it feels like a lot of money coming out.

Your CFO's like, oh my god, I'm just giving this check to marketing.

What am I getting again from them?

I don't really know.

You gotta really, we're a very, very data-driven company.

So giving that data and that transparency, I think gets people comfortable with how

they work with marketing and that they are getting a good return on that investment.

You know, you said that Definitive was very focused

on product and sales initially and had grown quite nicely with that.

How do you know, as a CMO, whether a company that has traditionally

not focused on marketing is really ready for that transformation and

is something worthy of your time?

Like good putty in your hands to shape versus, oh god, stay clear

of this because they say they want marketing, but they might not.

What are those signals?

Well, so at the end of the day, it's

people more than anything else.

You could have the most talented marketer in the world, and I am not that person,

you could put the most talented marketer in the world in a company where the CEO

didn't give them room to operate and was micromanaging them and thought that they

knew more than that super-talented CMO.

They wouldn't be successful.

And so, you know, when I was looking at Definitive, it really

came down to conversations.

I spent a ton of time talking with Jason, and I really understood.

I mean, Jason's a founder and CEO who started this company in his spare

bedroom in Holliston a decade ago.

And he's still here and he's that rare CEO who's been able to scale with his company

from $0, literally, all the way up to our standpoint we're 160 million in AAR today.

He's still here and working eighty hours a week.

And so I spent a ton of time with Jason, really understanding why

he was ready to do this, what had changed, what his plans were.

True story, Jason told me that we were planning to go, he was

planning, if everything went well, to go public in the fall of 2023.

And I said, Jason, you know, based on my understanding of your market, you need

to build a demand generation engine, you need to fix your brand, we need to

- he had one product marketing manager.

We gotta build up product marketing.

And Jason's like, Justin, dude, you're going to have two years to come and

build this thing, plenty of time.

I trust you.

Go and do it.

And, you know, I've been here for forty days and the board calls us up and our

first, literally, my first board meeting, and they're like, all right, so we're

going to target going public next summer.

And I'm like, huh, what do you mean?

And Jason was like, hey, we'll figure it out, man.

So we figured it out.

But I spent a ton of time with Jason.

I spent a ton of time with Joe, our head of sales, really understanding

if Joe's team had the appetite to work with marketing and what they needed,

and if they were ready for that.

They wanted next generation marketing tools if they were going to be good

partners and, you know, tell us what marketing collateral they needed if we

were going to generate leads with it, were they prepared to follow up, and did

they have a nice ISR motion to catch them?

The answer to all of that was, obviously, yes.

And we have a tremendously tight partnership.

I talk to Joe, like, five times a day.

I talked to him three times today and it's only 1:30 or 2:00 here.

And I talked to Kate, our head of product, quite extensively to

understand her attitude and her desire to work with product marketing.

And she listed a whole bunch of things that she needed from marketing,

couldn't wait for us to get in the door here, like MRDs, market sizing,

competitive intelligence, strong product marketing collateral, and

all the good stuff that you would want your head of product to say.

And then I spent some time with the board.

I think I met with four board members one-on-one each for an hour plus,

really to understand if they were ready to invest in marketing and grow.

And to a person they all were like, yes, and here's where we see the opportunities.

These were all people from, you know, Spectrum Equity, 22C, and Advent who'd

invested in the company, and so they put their money where their proverbial

mouth is to invest in the company.

So if I didn't have that level of board support, I wouldn't have been able to come

in here and do what we needed to get done.

So it really comes down to making sure that your CEO, your board,

your head of sales, and your head of product are all aligned and

ready to make that transformation.

I like how you were asking particular questions and getting

a sense of, you know, is what they want meaty or does it need a shift?

And sometimes the CMO has to kind of educate on what they can bring to an

organization, and I guess it's like some roles have more education than others.

One of the big changes that we've made here

was this was a company that was built on the back of free trials.

And it was basically organic search results driving people to our

website, where you'd give us your contact information, and then we'd

get you on the phone for a free trial and/or a Zoom call or anything.

And because the product is so freaking compelling, the number of people who

closed deals, it was ridiculously high.

But at some point you peter out in terms of where you top off in terms of

where it gets hits from organic search.

We had never done an outbound marketing campaign.

The company had an occasional webinar here and they'd had a ton of people show up

and none of them had ever been qualified.

Well, you know, every marketer listening to this podcast knows, tell me how

many people you want on the webinar and if you don't care if they're

qualified or not, I can get them.

It's getting the qualified people on the webinar and we didn't

have any lead nurtured, right?

So we were basically, historically, before I got here, only capturing

people who were in the buying cycle and we were converting them.

The trick in marketing, particularly as we wanted to increase our average deal size

and go after more enterprise accounts, was we wanted to get people who were

not in the buying cycle into the buying cycle and then nurturing them throughout.

Frankly, that's more expensive than just doing organic search and

having free trials come in, right?

And so there was a lot of, yeah, we know we need to do this, but we're

not really sure it's going to work because this is where we got it.

Justin, we're gonna hold our breath and jump off the cliff with you here,

but I'm going to bring a parachute cause I'm really not sure that I

trust this is actually going to work, but can you please prove it to me?

And so we jumped off the cliff together this year with that, and I put together

our first real outbound campaigns and they've delivered tremendous results.

But there was a lot of healthy skepticism because we'd never done that here before.

Let's talk about the team that's behind you.

Can you talk about - well, first, is leading a marketing team for a

newly public company significantly different than for a private company?

Like, how you switched the organization post IPO?

I'm happy to say that there's been absolutely no change

to the marketing team after the IPO.

If anything, it's refreshing.

So I've got a tremendous team that works with me, just tremendous.

And I really had to disappear for large chunks of last year, working with our

CFO or general counsel, the bankers, to get all of the stuff ready for the IPO.

And so my leadership team really ran marketing day-to-day, kept the business,

not only running, but frankly, growing, even knowing that I was gone for days

or not as engaged as I would like to be.

The best part about being done with the IPO is I'm back in my job and

I love my job and I put my hard hat on and you know, it's all right.

We're back to building our next generation of demand generation campaigns.

We're updating our messaging.

We're going deeper down in.

We're putting in new ROI calculators.

I've got a list of improvements a mile long we want to do on our website.

We're launching our own podcast called Definitively Speaking.

We're doing all sorts of stuff.

Really just kind of good old marketing.

And it's fun to go back and do that.

About the only change that's really impacted me, and it hasn't

impacted really the rest of my team, is I share responsibility for

investor relations with our CFO.

We outsource investor relations to a third party, and I handle the

marketing part of investor relations.

Our CFO, obviously, handles all the financial part of it.

And so I've had to take on that additional responsibility.

And, you know, that's like working on earnings call scripts,

keeping the IR website up to date.

All of that type of stuff has been added to my plate, but that's been a great

learning experience and a lot of fun.

But the rest of us just kind of going off and, doing good marketing

and helping the company grow.

That's great.

Good old marketing.

I like it.

And you made, as you were saying, like a transformation of marketing

and the view of marketing within the organization, was there any particular

organizational decision that you made that turned out well, or not well,

to support the business for scale?

You know, it's funny, I like to joke that everything I learned

about marketing, I learned from John Dragoon ten years ago when I was working

at Novell, or even longer than that, god.

John Dragoon was the chief marketing officer at Novell when I worked there.

If John were to walk in the door this afternoon and ask me for an org chart

of what Definitive Healthcare marketing looks like, it would look exactly

like what he was running a decade ago.

All right.

I got three teams.

I've got a product marketing team, a demand gen and marketing ops team,

and a corporate marketing team.

It ain't innovative.

It doesn't need to be innovative.

The structure works.

It's all about getting the right people in the structure.

And so none of this existed when I got here.

When I joined Definitive, there was like a digital team and then

there was like a content team.

And the people on the digital team were doing content and some of the

content team were doing digital.

And no one was really thinking about like demand gen cause

everybody and nobody owned it.

There was one person here doing product marketing.

There was someone, a former consultant, who was sort of, kind of doing

competitive intelligence, but not really.

And so what we did was we put that, almost immediately, put that structure in place.

And I brought in three VPs to run that each, one of those, and then

built out the teams underneath them.

Of the roughly twenty-five people that we have in marketing here, twenty

have been hired in the past year.

So, one thing that sometimes makes search hard for me, as

you know, a client is saying like, okay, we're at, whatever, a hundred million

and we want to get to 200 million, bring us people who have done that

arc before, who have done that climb, and people who want to do it again.

And that can be challenging.

And then you find yourself in these inane conversations, not inane, but you know,

these like, oh, how far have you scaled?

Oh, why wasn't it higher?

Well, oh, okay.

The company got bought on the way up.

Or, oh, okay, that's impressive.

Or, you know, oh, the company grew through acquisition.

Is that better than organically?

And so I've been thinking a lot lately about the difference between hiring

somebody who has scaled versus hiring somebody who has worked at scale.

And I think of you as somebody, from your previous experiences,

you've worked at scale, but you haven't done this exact climb that

you've done a Definitive Healthcare.

You haven't done that before.

So how do you think about that?

That scaling versus working at scale and how does it come across in the blend

of people that you hire on your team?

You're right, I'd never done the scale journey.

I've operated at scale.

I mean, Novell was this, before coming to Definitive Healthcare, Novell was

the smallest company I'd worked at.

You know, we were about $850 million in revenue.

Then I was at GE then Aetna, and then Aetna got bought by CVS.

I've lived at scale, some of the largest, most successful companies

in the world where I've just been a tiny cog in those organizations.

So I've seen what good looks like.

I've also, because of those organizations, seen what bad looks like, right?

Those, I wouldn't say those organizations are perfect, no organization is.

And so what you've got to find is you've got to find the people who

know what scaling looks like, but want to go on the journey to get there.

And the biggest trick in all of that is knowing what to let slide.

I could come in here on day one and, let's be honest, GE had some

of the best marketing operations reporting I've ever seen in the world.

It was marketing reporting like you wouldn't believe.

Amazing doesn't begin to cover it, okay?

I could come in here and say, I want marketing reporting at

Definitive Healthcare just like GE cause that's best in class.

And I could need, I'd need twenty people just to do that.

That doesn't make a lot of sense.

So what did I do instead?

I literally built out an Excel spreadsheet that dealt a demand generation funnel,

taking kind of what I saw, the best of what I saw at GE, and scaled it down, if

you will, to work at a company of the size of Definitive and said, all right, here's

what I want our funnel to look like.

Here's how we're going to calculate it.

And we're going to report on it weekly, and we're going to roll in, we're moving

off of HubSpot and onto Marketo, and we just moved on to Acquia for our

website, and we're using Salesforce.

And so we're putting the systems in place to start that reporting.

I know what a scaled product marketing organization looks like.

You should have MRDs, competitive battle cards, market sizing,

positioning documents, decks for every single segment, customer facing

decks for every single segment.

You know what?

When I got here, we didn't have a single positioning document.

We didn't have a single MRD.

We had no competitive intelligence.

We couldn't do all of that.

We didn't have a team.

We had one person.

So we built out a team and then we said, okay, what's the most important thing?

We need positioning documents.

That's the most fundamental, that's customer facing.

Everybody will get that.

You get your biggest bang for your buck.

So we did a round of positioning documents for all of our products and our solutions.

We haven't even touched MRDs yet.

I've been here a year.

This is the first time in my entire career I haven't had MRDs.

You know what?

I don't have the capacity or the people to write them right now.

I know we need them.

Maybe we'll get to them middle of next year, praying that we can.

But I don't want to kill the organization, have people writing MRDs on Saturdays

and Sundays, like that's just miserable.

And so the trick, as I said, is to figure out when you've seen these best in

class marketing organizations operate at scale, how do you pick the most impactful

things based on where you are in your company's journey and you get them?

If you want to shift to talk a little bit about people, which I know is a

pretty big passion of yours, Erica.

I always talk about putting people together as a puzzle.

I wanted some people who have worked at scale, right?

So, you know, our head of product marketing came from Wolters

Kluwer, our head of demand generation came from PTC, but she

previously had worked at Imprivata.

Those are all large companies.

Our head of corporate marketing came from an ad agency in Cambridge,

where there was eighty people.

We have hired product marketing people from Cardinal Health, all

the way down to a small, hundred person medical device startup.

If you look at our demand gen team, we've hired folks out of Athena Health,

again, who have worked at scale.

But our head of marketing operations is someone who's on their first

job still working at Definitive, who grew up with the company.

He's an immensely talented guy.

And so it's really that combination of blending the right skills,

attitudes, big and small, to go on that scaling journey together.

I love that.

I like the analogy of a puzzle.

I think of it that way too.

Because sometimes when I do a search, it's like, oh, we need a CMO and then

we need, you know, three people under them and should we have the CMO that

focuses on brand or on performance?

And whatever it is, they're going to have to hire somebody around them.

And I always tell people, it's like a puzzle, you know, you put in one

piece first, maybe it's the more junior person, maybe it's more senior

person, and then the rest becomes a little more clear over time.

You can't Einstein it too much.

Let me ask you a topic that you and I have discussed before, but I just, I love this.

Can you talk about your favorite interview question that you

ask when you hire somebody?

Yeah.

And so now we'll see who listens to your podcast when they prep for an

interview at Definitive Healthcare.

Because the wily listener out there will say, all right, I heard this and I know

if I'm going to get in front of Justin, I'll have my answer prepped and ready.

I've asked the same question for a decade now.

And I've asked it, I kid you not, in every single job interview I've done.

And I've interviewed two, three hundred candidates over the past decade.

And I love it.

And the question is simply, "Pick a product you think is

marketed well, and tell me why."

About two years in I put a limit on it.

I said it can't be an Apple product because they were starting to answer

Apple and I got really tired of it.

So I've added the don't make it an Apple product.

I have had people answer this question about John Deere tractors,

Porsche, Tesla, Gillette shavers.

Somebody answered it recently about Johnny Walker.

You get all over the place.

Someone answered it about their Sony television one time.

And I love it.

The reason why I love this question is because it enables me to think about

the value of your marketing skills, but you set the ground rules, right?

So first off, it's a surprisingly abstract question.

But you have to immediately create a structure.

So, can you walk me through the categories of marketing?

Do you know who your end buyer is?

What's the awareness strategy, demand generation strategy, channel strategy,

positioning, pricing, packaging, all those kind of key factors of marketing.

You can come up with your own framework.

Then you've picked the rules and I'll talk to you about whatever product you want.

And then you have to say, okay, well they understand their buyer,

their buyer's needs are this.

They positioned it this way.

They price it to go after that way.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And so can you evaluate and explain to me why that product is marketing well?

I've seen people go up in flames.

They thought it was fantastic interview up to the point, and then they can't answer

that question and they don't get the job.

And I've seen people in an interview where I thought there's no way in the world I'm

going to hire this person, and then she comes in and just blows me away with an

answer to the last question, and I'm like, wow, I must've missed something here.

So it works really well.

And do you guide them as they go along and say like if somebody

takes a sentence rather than, a paragraph or two or three, do you say look, I'm

looking for you to structure it and, take some time to take a beat if you need it?

Yeah, of course.

I also engage with them.

Look, I'm a marketing nerd.

So if you want to talk about Coke and why Coke is marketed well, I'll geek

out with you and we'll talk about that and talk about Coke channel strategy.

And, you know, I'll dive down into it.

It's actually more fun when people pick consumer products cause everybody

has an opinion on a consumer product.

But I've had people talk about Salesforce.com, which I think is a

very well-marketed product or service, and all different types of stuff.

So yeah, I will dive down and nerd out with you on marketing.

And if you can nerd out with me on marketing, you're

probably going to get the job.

That's awesome.

And do you do that at the beginning of the session or well at the end?

Always the last question.

Oh, why?

If I asked you that question at the beginning,

I'm going to throw you off.

And if I throw you off, you're never going to have a chance to get an impression.

Look, interviewing is like dating, right?

So I want to get to know you.

If I hit you with that question beginning of an interview, it's going

to rattle most people cause it's not at all what you're expecting.

And look, the majority of people interviewing for us probably

will not listen to this podcast.

So they won't be expecting that question.

If I knock you off at the beginning, I'll never have a chance to get to know you.

Hopefully by the end, when you've established rapport over twenty minutes

or so when it hits you with this, you go, okay, I can roll with it.

The smart candidates always say, "Hmm, give me a minute to pick a product."

That is always the best thing to do.

Because otherwise, you just jump in and you answer it you're going

to get in all sorts of trouble.

And ultimately, and this is really important, I'm not

the hiring manager, right?

My team's the hiring manager.

So, there are very few candidates by the time they get to me

that I put the kibosh on.

I do put the kibosh on some, but if you're gonna work in my organization,

I interview a hundred percent of the people who are going to work

in Definitive Healthcare marketing.

In fact, I'm usually involved, no matter what organization I'm in,

even if you're just thirty minutes.

Cause there's nothing more important than getting the right people.

But I'm going to give my feedback back to the hiring manager and be

like, hey, look, I wouldn't hire Joe over here, but it's your call.

And you know, at the end of the day, I'm going to hold you accountable, Mr./ Ms.

Hiring Manager, for the results and your team.

And if you think I'm wrong and you want to hire Joe over here, go for it.

And if Joe delivers results, I'm more than happy to be wrong.

True story, there is someone in my marketing organization today, I'm

not going to give you the name, but this person bombed this question.

And I didn't want to hire this person.

And I told Randy, the hiring manager, I said, don't hire this person.

And he said, I'm going to disagree with you.

I'm going to hire this person.

And this person's going to prove you wrong.

And I'm happy to report that actually told Randy the other day, "I was wrong.

This person did bomb the question, but it's turned out to be a fantastic hire."

Let's pivot a little bit since we are running out of time.

I would love to hear you, looking ahead to 2022, are there any trends

that you foresee for B2B SaaS marketers that are in scale-up mode?

The biggest trend that I see right now is it is wicked difficult to hire.

That's the Massachusetts guy in me coming through.

I wish the hiring market had been like this fifteen years ago

when I was a product marketing manager coming out of B school.

My god, I could have written my ticket instead of, you know,

praying for getting a job and doing tons and tons of interviewing.

Many more doors slammed in my face than offers that I got.

I think the war for talent next year is going to be every bit, if not more,

brutal than it has been this year.

And so when you've got a winning person on your team, you got to

keep that person on your team.

I think that's the big one.

Second trend I see, and this is, again, kind of in the "no kidding"

or, "thanks, genius" category, you got to continue to be able to measure.

And I think a measurement is going to be really tricky because of

all the changes that are going on with, you know, the mobile devices

and the tracking and Apple's new privacy policies that are going on.

I think most people know this by now, but Google has actually shifted

its rankings to be mobile first now.

So if we are in a world where we're all trying to market to people on their

mobile devices, and then we've got the conflicting challenge of Apple and more

and more privacy regulations going on, how do we get the right metrics and insight in

a world where we can make good decisions?

Marketing over the past ten years has been way more data-driven.

And so, as a result of being digital, we're all used to

having all this good data.

I don't know what kind of data we're gonna be able to get next year.

I mean, I'm sure we're gonna figure it out, but that trend

worries me a little bit.

I think those are probably the two big things that are on my mind right now, are

kind of top of mind or I'm thinking about.

That's great.

It's interesting the first one about hiring.

You're making a joke about coming out of B school and, like, being

happy to get whatever job you got.

It's making me think about the abundancy mindset versus the scarcity mindset

and somebody coming up in their career now, they're likely going to have more

of an abundance mindset and that might stick with them over the course of

their career versus people who came out, you know, during more of a recession

and were building their careers then.

So that's, I think that's a really interesting extension.

It really is.

And you know, the other question is the grass might not always be greener, right?

People are saying, oh, I'm going to leave a job.

And I'm going to make $10,000 more.

And yeah, $10,000 is a chunk of change.

Don't get me wrong.

But if you're going from a place where you have a tremendous work-life

balance, you really like the people that you're working here, and so suddenly

you're making $10,000 more, but you're working every Sunday, is it worth it?

And I think people right now are chasing a little bit of the money because the market

is so frothy without thinking about the other components that go into the job.

Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see just

the effect of this over time.

This is awesome.

Thank you so much for joining me.

It's so great to talk with you about scale and scaling and having

scaled and your hiring and your organizational kind of decisions.

It's great to get a lens into the world of Justin Steinman.

So thank you so much for joining the show.

Thanks for having me.

This was a lot of fun.

That was Justin Steinman, the Chief Marketing

Officer from Definitive Healthcare.

Justin had great tips on boosting marketing's contribution and

reputation and transparency.

Next time on The Get, you'll hear from Cynthia Gumbert, CMO of SmartBear,

about scaling a SaaS business in the product-led-growth era and how to

build a business first, marketing second mindset on the marketing team.

Don't miss it.

Thanks for listening to The Get.

I'm your host, Erica Seidel.

Hiring great marketing leaders is not easy.

The Get is designed to inspire smart decisions about recruiting and

leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.

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

marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.

This season's theme is Solving for the Scale Journey.

If you liked this episode, please share it.

For other insights on recruiting great marketing leaders, what I

call the 'make money' marketing leaders rather than the 'make it

pretty' ones, follow me on LinkedIn.

You can also sign up for my newsletter at TheConnectiveGood.com.

The Get is produced by Evo Terra and Simpler Media Productions.