The Journey from Sales Leader to CMO - Mastering the Art of Personal Branding

Eric Eden: 0:59

All right, all right. All right. Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Sarah. She is a sales leader turned CMO. Sarah, welcome to the dark side.

Sarah Scudder: 1:13

I am crazy. I guess I spent most of my career actually in sales in a random space called marketing, procurement, software sale, and I did that for most of my career. And then I fell in love with content creation and the idea of building a pipeline and bringing in qualified opportunities and so I pivoted. But I will say I do miss the compensation and money in sales. Marketing is definitely. The compensation is very different. We'll just say that.

Eric Eden: 1:52

Yeah, if you're on the sale side is like top gun, like half the people wash out, but the half that don't do really well. So there's risk and there's reward in life, as they say. So you have to decide what you want. But thanks for joining us today. I understand you have a great story about remarkable things you've done to build your personal brand and we'd love to hear that.

Sarah Scudder: 2:17

Yeah. So the story that I know, eric, you asked about. You know sharing a story about marketing excellence and I wanted to change it up a little bit today and talk about not marketing excellence through a marketing role and building out a marketing team and executing for a company. I want to talk about another piece of marketing which I think is really important and often overlooked, and that is around marketeers building and maintaining their own brand. If we look at data that's out there, the average CMO or head of marketing is in their role less than two years, so it's a very high turnover role, especially if you're in a startup environment and a company starts not doing well or deals take longer to close. Oftentimes, marketing leadership is the first to get cut to free up cash flow for sales and product and other investments in the company. My point of saying that is as a marketer. It can be a higher turnover industry where you may find yourself looking for a job more frequently than you had hoped and if you want to build a really solid, safe career, the most important piece of advice that I can share is the power of building your own personal brand as a marketer. What does that mean? That means figuring out something that you want to be known for. Maybe that's organic social, maybe that's content, maybe that's paid social, maybe that's integrated campaigns, maybe that's having an analyst structure. Whatever your absolute passion is in marketing, I would recommend starting to produce your own content and distributing it across channels where the companies that are likely to hire you hang out and consume their information. And as you do this and start building your own community and own following, people are going to take notice and they're going to start checking out your videos. They're going to start consuming your content and what's going to happen is you may become known as an expert in something, and what happens to experts? People seek them out to get knowledge and get advice, and what better way to build a really safe career than having companies reaching out to you asking if you'll work with them on a fractional basis or if you'd be interested in going to work with them full time? Verse the opposite effect of you being out of work nobody knowing who you are, nobody understanding your value and your expertise, and you having to constantly go out and blindly apply for jobs online, which is often a guard wall with AI and a lot of technology that is potentially just going to kick out your application versus getting in through knowing somebody and having a reputation built. So that's a little bit of background about why I'm so passionate about this and I think it's really important. So I'm going to just talk briefly about my personal journey and experience doing this. So a few years ago, when I was in sales, I thought the outbounding motion was crazy, that my team and I were spending so much time cold calling and cold emailing people. People didn't necessarily want to talk to us, they didn't have budget, it wasn't the right time. We hadn't educated them enough about our product. I said there's got to be a better way for us to get our content out in the public so people know about us, they know about the solution we're solving and then, when they're ready, they'll raise their hand and come inbound. So I did research in the marketing procurement space. At the time again, I was selling marketing procurement enterprise software and I said where are buyers going to consume information? And LinkedIn continuously came up at the top of the list over and over again for social channels. So I said you know what? I am going to learn how to use LinkedIn. So I taught myself how to use the platform. I consumed as much content as I could, finding other people who were writing and posting and sharing about how to optimize and leverage LinkedIn. And then I said, ok, now I need to become a creator and build a brand. And so I started producing my own content and I made a commitment to myself that I was going to post every single day, seven days a week so including Saturdays and Sundays for 90 days, and the results were amazing. From the content that I was creating that was valuable and interesting to people working in marketing procurement, we, as a company, started having inbound's come in and people were saying, oh, I heard about you on LinkedIn or I read Sarah's post or I saw Sarah's video. So what that told me is that this is working and we should do more of this. So my team and I went all in on LinkedIn and started producing just incredible amounts of highly qualified, highly interesting content by leveraging subject matter experts and testing out different types of content, and from that moment, I decided that I wanted to go into marketing. So I pivoted my career from being in sales and went into marketing. After my time learning about marketing and kind of doing a hybrid sales and marketing role, I was a chief marketing officer for just under two and a half years at a technology company that was selling into the manufacturing space, and through all of the LinkedIn work that I had done, I started prioritizing building my own brand as well, and that means still to this day, I am producing my own content and I am posting almost every single day, seven days a week, sometimes multiple times a day. I am following thought leaders in the space, following friends, following companies that I want to work with. I'm reading their content, I'm posting thoughtful, insightful comments and I'm starting to really engage and network through the comments and leveraging LinkedIn as much as possible. My time with Source Day ended in December of this last year and I did a post January 1st letting people know that I was no longer with Source Day, and I have been absolutely shocked by the amount of inbound that have come in, with people saying that I was no longer with Source Day and asking if I was in the market to do fractional CMO, fractional marketing work and or go in house full time, and none of that would have happened had I not spent years building my own brand and building a reputation, establishing credibility, to have people coming inbound to me versus me having to go out and look at opportunities and blindly apply for things.

Eric Eden: 10:07

That's a great story, so you went all in on the LinkedIn strategy. I assume that the hard thing about that, as you said, was coming up with something to say and taking the time to create it every single day. Is that right?

Sarah Scudder: 10:22

Yeah. So the hardest part of getting started for me was what am I going to say? I wasn't scared of putting myself out there or having pictures or being on video. That wasn't my challenge. My challenge was what am I going to say that's interesting enough that people are actually going to want to read and respond to, because the power of LinkedIn is the comments and the engagement. It's not just doing the post and hoping for the best. And so what I did was I started surrounding myself with subject matter experts, so phone calls, meetings, interviews anybody who worked in marketing, procurement that would talk to me. I was getting on the phone, I was recording my conversations and then I was taking that and turning that into content and that was valuable because it had my own tone and my own voice and my own quirky personality. I believe in using humor and being a person, not some corporate fluff in LinkedIn, and then talking about things that matter to the people that I was selling to, and using real life stories and example is from the people that I was interviewing and spending time with Interesting, so that sounds like a good way to get the flywheel going.

Eric Eden: 11:42

Do you think this is something that people can do, anybody can do, across industries? Is this something for everybody?

Sarah Scudder: 11:51

I think it's not for everyone. If you're going to do it, you need to commit and you need to do it right. And I think what does commit mean? It means giving yourself six months to go all in on a platform and really spend the time to know your space, interview people, get to know your prospects, get to know your customers, get to know your space, and so there's a lot that goes into committing to posting really well done content regularly. So you need to make that personal commitment and investment to doing it. It's very easy to get distracted doing all the things that come up with our day jobs and things that happen in life. So for me, I block out in my calendar. It's called Dark Social. I call LinkedIn an organic social, dark social, which is like word of mouth marketing things where attribution software is hard to track. So it's actually a meeting in my calendar every day. I treat it as such. So I don't oh, I'll just get to that later, or I'll do that later, or nine o'clock at night comes and I still haven't done my post. So it's for people who are going to commit the time and effort to actually try to do it right. The other caveat is I don't believe you should do all the platforms at once. Commit to one and go all in and do it well. If you're going to say, I'm going to do 10 platforms, you're not going to do any of them well and then you're not going to see the results that you want.