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Today we are talking about the power and impact of professional communities, and we have the perfect guest to help us talk about it today Matt Hines.
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Welcome to the show.
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Hey, thanks, eric.
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So glad to be here by you just sharing a minute or two, a little bit about who you are and what you do.
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Yeah, my name is Matt.
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I've been doing B2B marketing forever.
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I started Heinz Marketing about 16 years ago and really help companies sort of create more predictable outcomes in complex sales and buying situations and I'm just really excited and proud of the work that we do.
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Awesome and we're ready to be inspired, and I think you have a pretty inspiring story about the professional community that you've been creating, in particular over the last five years or so.
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Why don't you tell us a little bit about it?
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You know, pre-pandemic we were doing a bunch of CMO breakfasts like in-person breakfasts around the country, just getting CMOs together to chat and network and learn from each other.
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And then during the pandemic, we kind of had to convert and pivot that into an online thing and what started is just a couple virtual breakfasts turned into this amazing community of now about 3,500 CMOs and heads of marketing that connects with each other literally every day in a Slack community and meets up every Friday morning in some topical Zoom meetings.
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So it's been amazing to be part of that ride over the last five years with that community, but also just very fortunate, very grateful for the impact that it clearly is having, not only for the members amongst themselves but also for the communities around us as well.
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And this is probably important because the chief marketing officer role is not one of the easier roles in corporate America.
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Right, they probably need the community more than other roles.
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Can you talk a little bit about that?
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Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the higher up you get in your career, the more likely you have a very lonely role at the company you're at where not no one else really has that job.
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No one on your leadership team sort of really fully understands what goes into that job, and I think that's particularly acute for chief market officers, chief marketing officers.
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So having a community of people that have been in the seat, are in the seat, who understand the issues you're going through, where you can get advice, best practices, benchmarks, but also commiserate.
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One of the most active channels in the CMO community is the Rantz channel and it's hilarious but it's also cathartic, I think, for a lot of CMOs that need a place to share.
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We don't record the Friday sessions.
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We treat everything inside the community as confidential to the community, so people feel like it's a safe place just with their peers to be able to share and learn, and we really treat it as not just a community of CMOs, it's about the peer person in the CMO job.
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So we talk about imposter syndrome, we talk about caregiving of your aging parents.
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There's a menopause channel, eric, in the CMO.
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Coffee Talk group.
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I don't know how many professional communities have a menopause channel.
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I'm super proud that we've got a place where people with shared life experiences can also sort of connect on things that aren't just about the job as well.
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So what's the hardest thing about building this community over the years that you faced?
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It's a great question.
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I think that one of the hardest things is keeping it truly peer to peer.
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You know, I think if you're in a CMO role you're busy.
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You've got a lot of things drawing your attention.
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My focus in this community is not about growing the volume of people in it as much as it is keeping and earning the engagement of the people in it.
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And I think that engagement comes in not only having good content and good conversations, but also ensuring that it is a truly peer-to-peer conversation.
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One of the hardest things to do is to not only maintain that exclusivity and maintain that narrow focus on CMOs and heads of marketing, but it's also hard to tell people they can't join.
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You know well-meaning people, people that are earlier in their career, people that you know want to engage in the community but aren't CMOs.
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People that are prospects of Heinz Marketing as a consulting practice that I don't want to say no to but I still, to protect the community, need to do it.
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I see a lot of communities in the market today that are kind of glorified mailing lists that I think have let in a little bit of everybody as a means of growing the community and saying we've got more members.
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But I think unless you keep it tight to a particular audience, it's hard for people to really trust it and lean in.
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And I think a key to our success and longevity of the CMO Coffee Talk community is truly keeping it a peer-to-peer group.
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Yeah, it's pretty easy for there to be drift in terms of people who come in that, like you said, they're either perhaps earlier in their career or they're a supplier or a vendor that wants to engage with CMOs, or sometimes even different flavors of agencies that are really just different flavors of suppliers or vendors Good suppliers or vendors but it makes it just a little bit awkward because they can't really empathize in the same way, right, yeah?
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no-transcript.
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We get business people learn about what we do, but it's a long game.
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You can't treat this as a pipeline builder.
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You have to really lean in on the true purpose and value of a community and really build it the right way.
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I think keeping it qualified is not easy, like you're saying, but I think that definitely probably leads to the success against the normal instinct of try to make it bigger, try to get more people involved.
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If it's not quality it doesn't matter, so that's a good tip no-transcript.
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I'm really proud of One is something we call CMOs Give Back and for the last four years we've run a number of fundraising initiatives in the community to raise money for worthwhile causes and, as we record this, we've got one in partnership with the American Red Cross to raise money for those affected by the LA wildfires.
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Over the course of the last four years we've generated almost $100,000 in funds for a wide variety of domestic and international groups and I think that community is not just about the people in the community but it's about leveraging that opportunity to support those around us, and so I'm really proud of what the community has done to support that.
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I would say there's an awful lot of work in the community to help people sort of in their careers.
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There's a CM interviews provides encouragement along the job search process.
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I'm proud of that.
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I'm proud of the fact that the community created a kind of ground crowdsource, something called great people now available that are a bunch of vouch for people.
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That, especially over the last couple of years, as some companies had to let people go, let good people go in a bit of an economic downturn, they created a single resources for say like hey, listen, here's the people we had to let go.
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That are amazing and a lot of people found jobs more quickly because of that.
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So and then you know you've got, like you mentioned, they've got the menopause channel.
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There's a caregiver channel for those that are sort of increasingly having to care for those elderly parents or elderly family members.
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You know the rants channel is not just sort of funny, it's also people that can just sort of it's a place to lot off steam and to sort of not be super filtered, but no, it's kind of a safe place to go and do that.
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So to be able to support people in their career, to be able to support people through life stages that they're going through, and then to be able to have an impact on the communities in need around us has been really, really rewarding, to be honest, for being part of the community.
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That's great, and do the members in the community also share some of the successes they have?
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They do some celebrating success together.
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Yeah, so I am part of a group called the Entrepreneur Association EO for short and we meet in small groups, you know, in different markets, and one of the things in EO we talk about is 5% 5% shares.
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And so what that means is what are the things that are the bottom 5% and the top 5% of?
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And so what that means is what are the things that are the bottom 5% and the top 5% of your life?
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Bottom 5% are like gnarly issues that you're probably not posting on LinkedIn, but you need a trusted group to go over and be able to share, and we see some 5% stuff occasionally in the CMO coffee talk group.
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But then there's the top 5% that you're really proud of and really excited about.
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That, in certain contexts, might come across as bragging, might come across as like well, you're being arrogant, you're being bragging.
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You're sort of talking about you need a place to be able to celebrate that, like in amongst peers.
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It's a great place to do it.
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So we have a celebration channel you got a new job, your company exited, you were able to exercise some options, like you've worked your butt off, you continue to be a hardworking person.
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Have a place amongst your peers to be able to celebrate those things in context of that group.
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And so, yeah, I mean I think you know I'm proud that this is a group and there's people in the group that feel like they can bring up bottom 5%, that feel like they have a place to share and really celebrate together the top 5% of things happening at work as well as in their lives.
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I think it's just been rough out there for the last couple of years between some of the macro economic issues and then, before that, covid.
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I think there's a lot of cases where people professionally don't get much recognition.
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They work really hard, they dig in and there's not a lot of recognition or winning awards or people patting them on the back and it's like you know, I see people and they're like you know.
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I just did my hundredth podcast episode.
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Or we just got our YouTube channel to 100,000 subscribers and we worked for years on it.
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There should be a place for people to sort of celebrate those sorts of wins when you've sort of gone through the mud to get there, if you will.
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Well, and even things that sort of might make most sense in context of a peer group.
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Right To be able to say I just got through a board meeting and I got an attaboy from one of our board members who never comments on things or who always is critical or who always asks really hard questions, but recognize the momentum and progress we've made.
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Even things like that amongst other CMOs that grind through board meetings and leadership presentations on a regular basis.
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Those things are important as well, and to be able to share that and then to see other people give you a high five or say, hey, that's amazing, great work, I know you're working hard.
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I mean that's community, right?
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A community is people that are together, that are supportive of each other and lean in for each other on a regular basis.
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Absolutely.
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And so, with this really awesome group of qualified people coming together, really awesome group of qualified people coming together, what sort of marketing trends are coming out of the group as we come into 2025?
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Anything notable.
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That is a standout thing that they're all focused on talking about.
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Yeah, I think that there's a couple of things.
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One is a renewed focus on customer retention, customer marketing, net retention as well as upsell and cross-sell.
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So where we've had this really great discipline effort around driving net new pipeline and top line growth from a net new customer standpoint, some of that discipline is now being put into the customer marketing side and really thinking about then CS and account managers as partners for the way we've integrated with, you know, the sales teams.
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Moving in the past, so excited to see that is one thing Seeing a lot more marketers sort of reclaim all four Ps instead of just promotion, right.
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So for marketers that are either rebranding themselves as the chief market officer to think about the market as a whole or those that are simply starting to sort of think about product market fit as a core component of what the CMO manages.
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The example I give of that is oftentimes the sales team says they want leads.
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Well, leads is a manifestation.
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Leads is a evidence of what the sales team really needs, which is a market that craves what they're buying.
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Right, and creating a market that craves what you're buying is more than just sending out offers for white papers and webinars.
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It's building a product and honing a product and positioning a product that meets that need it's a combination of brand and demand out in the marketplace.
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So repositioning what that means.
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As companies sort of reemerge from wherever we've been the last year and a half and start to grow in a more substantial way, I'm seeing more and more marketers embrace that more traditional role of not marketing as a verb but market as a noun verve, but market as a noun.
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I think the role is fluid, in some ways evolving.
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One of those ways is probably also, I think, back to being that I'm very old, like older than the internet.
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I think back to the internet days and how marketing was very different after the internet became well-adopted than before.
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And I have that feeling, sort of about AI.
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We're still in the adoption phase, but I have this feeling that we're entering sort of a new era that's just going to be different.
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It's interesting that we're entering a new sort of era, if you will.
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Do you think that's the case?
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I do, I do, but I think, if we separate marketing the verb from marketing the noun, I think the way that we market, the channels and vehicles through which we market, how we collect and leverage information, that continues to change.
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But those are vehicles that are impacting and influencing the market right, and I think, if you look across these different phases, we'll see with AI.
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But as you look across the digital phase, the internet phase, the mobile, the growth of mobile, there's some commonality in terms of how the buying journey works.
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There's commonalities in terms of how people buy.
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There's commonalities in terms of psychology, of needs and wants that exists at the consumer as well as the B2B level.
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And you know, foundationally, still to this day and it worked 40 years ago and it worked 15 years ago when I started and it works today.
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It's like who are you selling to and how do you define that subset of a subset of a market?
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Who are the people that are involved in transaction?
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What are the things that they care about?
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What does their buying journey look like?
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Whether you use AI or the internet or mobile or magic dragons to market to them is an output of how well you know your market and how well you know your buyer right and so those fundamentals I think are constant.
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I think AI is going to revolutionize how we build that and how we manage that, but that fundamental is going to stay.
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I think this sort of highlights the importance of being a part of a professional group for successful and ambitious executives, because you sort of have to know is it just something that's happening to you like an outlier, or is this something that's happening across companies, across the industry?
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I think you have the benefit when you're in a professional group of knowing what things might be an isolated issue versus like, well, this is the trend.
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I was sitting in a board meeting for one company and they were discussing the issue of how the cost of AI is more expensive than the benefit of the use case in integrating the AI into their platform.
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Yeah, and the one investor said oh well, this is a scenario we're seeing across a lot of our companies, that it's not just that they did something wrong here, this AI integration can be very expensive.
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Wrong here, this AI integration can be very expensive.
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And so if you don't have a use case that can afford it, it doesn't make sense.
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And I think the insight that that was happening across companies is hard for a lot of executives to come across, and I think being in groups like yours, where CMOs can trade notes, is a great way for them to get these things, because things are just, I don't know.
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It seems like changing rapidly.
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I don't know if they always change just rapidly, but it feels like the change of pace is increasing.
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I think that it has innovation paradox that Pascal Fennett, who's a futurist somewhere in the Denver area, talks about.
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He says, like the innovation that happened in the past now appears far more normalized.
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It appears far slower than it actually was.
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The innovation we're facing moving forward appears steeper and faster than it will actually materialize.
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And I think if we think about everything from I mean you think about how revolutionary this phone is right and all the things it can do and just 15 years ago it didn't exist.
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Now we just take it for granted and all the things that we think AI is going to do moving forward it's going to be revolutionary too, but eventually we'll take that for granted as well.
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When you're faced with that kind of technology and those kind of sort of disruptive events in technology, it's more than just how do I use it, how do I benefit from it.
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There's also become sort of this existential am I going to understand it?
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Is the world going to pass me by?
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Am I going to become a dinosaur in my industry?
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I feel a little guilt for not being fully on top of this and fully understanding it, because I'm just trying to get through my day and get through my job and so I share all these perspectives, because I've seen versions of all of that in the CMO group as well.
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Right and so to have a place where you can share ideas, you can share experiments, you can share like in a company a few weeks ago say, we're getting 18% of net new pipeline from AI, from AI agents, like so they walk through how to do that, that's great.
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And then other people saying like I feel like a failure because I feel like I don't understand this well enough and I feel like it's moving really quickly, like where else can you have that conversation than in a trusted place?
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The other example I'll give you, eric, is we did a couple of years ago a session on imposter syndrome and we had an expert come in that's written quite a bit about it to present and at one point she said show of hands, like who in the room feels like they have imposter syndrome.
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And like 94% of people raised their hand and I'm convinced to this day that the other 6% were just multitasking and didn't hear the question.
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And afterward I literally had a handful of people say like I thought it was just me.
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I assumed that I was in the vast minority of people at our level and in our roles that feel this way and they're like no, clearly it's literally everybody, so it doesn't solve the problem.
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But to know that it is not just you, to know that it's not a problem with you, can make a very big difference in your ability to manage it and get through it.
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Absolutely so.
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If people want to learn more about the group, how can they do that?
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Just give me a call.
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You can contact me.
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We're just at HeinzMarketingcom.
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I'm Matt M-A-T-T at HeinzMarketingcom.
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If you're a B2B CMO or a head of marketing, vp or above, and you're interested in a community like this, just shoot me an email.
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I'll hook you up.
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I think you mentioned the idea of sort of things moving more quickly, moving forward.
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Find the people you trust around you that have a passion for the experimentation side of that.
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We are still very much in experimentation land with AI.
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There are a few things that are starting to land that are repeatable, programmatic, that you can apply, and the rules of those are going to change as well.
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Don't assume that you have to go and figure it all out yourself.
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Find people in your community.
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Find people in your network.
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Find people on your team that are passionate about doing that.
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Use your skills and your expertise and your experience to discern what's best to move forward with and be comfortable not knowing everything.
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You're not going to be able to learn everything.
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You're not going to know everything, but you know more than you think you do right now.
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So make the best decisions you can.
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Great advice.
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Well, thank you very much for being with us today and sharing your story and this advice, Much appreciated.
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I'm going to link to your website and your LinkedIn so people can get in touch if they would like to learn more.
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And thanks for being with us today.
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Hey, thanks so much, eric.
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I appreciate it.
