How To Nail Your First Quarter in a New Marketing Role

Grant Duncan, VP Marketing at HST Pathways, joins Tara Robertson on Demand Gen Chat to discuss the importance of keeping the top-level menu on landing pages, the use of AI in marketing, and his checklist of metrics for starting a new marketing role. Grant emphasizes the need for a buyer-friendly landing page experience and highlights generative AI's potential in saving marketers time. He also shares his tips for starting a new role, including conducting industry research, setting onboarding goals, and building trust with the team. Grant discusses his focus on bookings and pipeline metrics at HST Pathways and the upcoming initiatives he is excited about.

The Essential Steps for Onboarding Success ✅

Grant Duncan emphasizes the importance of thorough research before starting a new marketing role.

"Listen to industry podcasts and talk to peers to gain industry knowledge."

By understanding the industry, company products, competitors, and team members, marketers can hit the ground running.

Grant recommends creating a comprehensive checklist to cover analysis, metrics, reporting, plans, and materials during the onboarding phase, ensuring a smooth transition into the new role.

Building Trust and Team Collaboration 🤝

Building trust with the team and colleagues is critical for any marketer stepping into a new role. Grant emphasizes having career conversations with team members,

"Understand their goals and strengths, and identify any gaps or weaknesses within the marketing team."

He also suggests conducting a roadshow with cross-functional leaders to gather insights and perspectives

 By focusing on quick wins and presenting initial findings, marketers can establish credibility and collaboration within the organization.

Metrics and Measurement for Success 📈

Grant shares a wide array of metrics to track marketing performance effectively.

According to him,

"Metrics such as website metrics, ads, inbound requests, opportunities, pipeline dollars, bookings, events, social media, and podcasts are all crucial for measuring progress."

His approach of breaking down metrics by new logos and current customers helps measure progress against goals.

By adopting a data-driven approach and regularly comparing performance to quarterly targets, marketers can continually optimize their strategies.

The Future of Marketing 🧐

Grant Duncan's insights and strategies for marketers starting new roles provide valuable lessons for professionals at any career stage.

"Leveraging data, building trust, and embracing emerging technologies like AI are essential components of a successful marketing career."

By following Grant's lead and staying at the forefront of marketing innovation, marketers can thrive and leave a lasting impact in their roles.

As marketers adapt to changing technologies and consumer behaviors, staying informed and open to new strategies will be critical for driving success in the ever-evolving marketing landscape.

With advancements in AI and automation, marketers have a promising future ahead to increase productivity and efficiency and achieve their goals.

Episode Links

Follow Tara Robertson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taraarobertson/

Follow Grant Duncan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantmduncan/

ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/

OpenAI API: https://openai.com/product

Opus: https://www.opus.pro/

RACI project management framework: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/raci-chart/

Follow Allison Loehman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonloehman/

Check out Gong: https://www.gong.io/

Check out Grant’s website: https://thisisgrant.com/

Episode Transcript

0:00:00
Tara Robertson
Welcome back to a new episode of Demand gen Chat. I'm your host, Tara Robertson, head of Demand Gen at Chili Piper. In today's episode, I'm chatting with Grant Duncan. Grant is a three time VP Marketing who's now at HST Pathways. A ton of marketers are in new roles or looking for their next one right now. If you're one of them, then you definitely want to stick around. For this episode, Grant shares his checklist of metrics that help marketers start new roles off on the right foot.
0:00:26
Tara Robertson
And we also chat about how marketers are using AI to save hours a week. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Grant. Grant, thanks so much for joining me on Demand Gen Chat.
0:00:35
Grant Duncan
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
0:00:37
Tara Robertson
Yeah, of course. We've been following each other, at least I've been following you on LinkedIn for quite a while now, so really excited to finally connect. I hear you have quite a few hot takes on the marketing front these days, but I'd love to start with one that I know you've had some contentious conversations around on LinkedIn, and that's why Landing Pages should be or why we shouldn't be removing that top level menu from our landing pages, which a lot of us marketers do today.
0:01:05
Grant Duncan
Yeah, I know. That's the typical fashion and has been what has commonly been taught that when you have, let's say, an ad driving to some landing page, you should have no top of a menu, basically no way to get away from the page without filling out a form or clicking the back button. And I believe if you have a product with, let's say, a ten k or more ACV product, that's not actually the experience people want to have as a buyer.
0:01:36
Grant Duncan
Think about when you land on that. For me, I often try to click the logo and see if I can get to another page because I want to read their customer stories. I want to check out pricing, maybe. I want to see what integrations they have to other products. There's other things that I want to learn if this is a high value product than just seeing one page and learning all that there is there. So adding a top level menu so that it looks more like a normal web page, I believe creates that better buyer experience so that people can continue to educate themselves before they're ready to take that action to talk to sales.
0:02:21
Grant Duncan
Now, you could say, well, you could just make a really long web page. And that's true. You could make it longer and include more info there. But I've seen oftentimes leads check out 510 15 plus pages before submitting a demo form. And often those are customer stories. So it's going to be hard to fit full length customer stories if they're written onto one web page. So that's why I believe having a normal looking web page is better for, quote, landing pages.
0:02:57
Tara Robertson
Yeah, it's funny you say that about the long pages because I feel like that's such a trend, at least in SaaS right now, of people shoving everything onto that one page. But you can't escape. It's kind of a dead end page. So you're seeing more just giant FAQ sections, bunch of customer stories mixed in there. But often, like you said, it's not the best experience, especially if someone's never heard of your company before, they probably want to poke around.
0:03:20
Grant Duncan
I'm not opposed to putting a lot of info on a page, but I think people want to explore before they commit.
0:03:28
Tara Robertson
Yeah, and I love that caveat of if it's a high value product, because if I'm just signing up for something for free, that probably is enough for me to sign up and not have to poke around. But yeah, as we know, it's tougher to get people to commit to a demo these days. So if you're trying to get them to convert on that, they probably want to see a little bit more about.
0:03:46
Grant Duncan
You first and maybe send it to a colleague before too, which having the colleague be able to explore is also of value.
0:03:55
Tara Robertson
Definitely more people involved in deals as we know these days, and multithreading is key for getting those accounts. One other hot topic that I know we were just catching up about before this is obviously AI is all over LinkedIn Chat GPT. You can't escape it, but I know you have some experience in the time off that you had in between roles to play around with that. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
0:04:19
Grant Duncan
Yeah, so I took two weeks off before switching to my new job at HST Pathways. With that time, I used it to use the OpenAI API to create an AI based blog generator. So it would take in a CSV of prompts and topics, create around 4000 Word articles, and then auto draft those or auto publish to WordPress. All automated now. It is. You could still go through and look at them in WordPress and edit them if you needed to, but I think generative AI is a huge topic right now and something that is going to be extremely impactful for marketers.
0:05:07
Grant Duncan
Of course there are societal risks and things that we need to think about at a broad scale, but for helping marketers do their job, there's massive potential there. At this point. I would say we're in an interesting stage as of May 2023, in that a lot of the SaaS tools incorporating generative AI are still being developed, or maybe they aren't using the newest APIs that get released. So at this point, I know this is a hot take, but I think that for many use cases actually using the API, let's say having Chat GPT write a simple Python program for you and then you use that for doing the work is going to be better than just using some of these SaaS tools.
0:06:01
Grant Duncan
For instance, if you wanted to take all your podcasts that you've done, you could transcribe all of those through the API and then create multiple blog posts based on them or find trends or how many times something is mentioned. Well, you can't do that with a SaaS tool yet, so you have to use the API if you want to have more complex use cases. Or you can imagine taking your webinars or video customer stories and saying, hey, here's the transcript, take this and build it into this specific template for a customer story or for a blog.
0:06:43
Grant Duncan
That's going to save a huge amount of time for marketers. And right now much of that is probably better served with APIs. In the future, I think the SaaS tools will get there, but either way, this is going to really help augment what marketers can do and frankly, in some places probably reduce the number of people needed as well.
0:07:09
Tara Robertson
Yeah, I think that's a great point on the transcription and kind of repackaging content piece. We've been playing around with that ourselves internally around the podcast, but also pulling social clips from the podcast that used to take me probably close to an hour per episode. I would read through the transcript and highlight parts that I thought were interesting, and it's been really cool to see what AI can do. And it picks out, almost word for word, what I would have picked out as the interesting points just based on keywords and what the I don't know how else it decides, but it just knows that this part is the contentious part that we want to put in that social clip, which is really neat, because, again, it's saving me at least, say, an hour a week. But if we do that across all the different content that we're producing, that could really add up.
0:07:52
Grant Duncan
Right. And if you can imagine saving every single person on your team an hour or a few hours, well, now you've almost created a whole new person on the team because of all the time savings.
0:08:05
Tara Robertson
So just shifting gears a little bit. A lot of marketers that I know are in brand new roles right now or they're looking for their next marketing role. So I know you've shared a ton of great resources around starting a new role on LinkedIn. I'd love to start with even before you're in a new VP marketing role, what do you think about what's top of mind for you before your first day?
0:08:26
Grant Duncan
Yeah, before starting, I'd encourage each person to do research on the industry, the company's products, the competitors, and also the people you'll be working with. If you're joining a new industry or something you're not familiar with, that industry knowledge is going to be really important to learn. One of the ways that I've done this is by Binging podcasts. In the ASC industry, the primary focus for HST pathways I had probably listened to over 200 podcast episodes. Of course, some of them were short, but I'd looked at the top five podcasts and just started listening to a ton of them while exercising, washing dishes, et cetera, and talking with peers who, you know, in the industry is also a really valuable thing to do. Another thing I'd suggest considering before you join the team, is to think about the items that you want to include in your onboarding phase.
0:09:28
Grant Duncan
Many companies will make a list for you that, hey, here are the things that we want you to learn and cover. But coming in with that list yourself is very helpful. And if you send it before to your hiring manager, that probably also is going to leave a good impression that you're starting to think about how you can prepare for this even before officially joining.
0:09:52
Tara Robertson
Yeah, you're managing up even before you join, which is pretty rare. I think that's a great skill to bring onto a team.
0:09:59
Grant Duncan
When I joined HST recently, I did this and I'll share some of the items on my list. I broke it out by what are some analysis and metrics and reporting that I want to see and then what are kind of plans and materials that I'd like to review. So on the analysis side, looking at paid search analysis of keywords that have led to ops and customers, so we could potentially free up budget for other use cases that have split the funnel. Analysis seeing by source where the leads, pipe and bookings are coming from, paid social audiences and metrics. So what are the audiences that we're using and what's actually included within those? How have they been performing?
0:10:45
Grant Duncan
If the company's doing ABM campaigns, that's another good one to add to your list. To understand the performance of those, what's the current pipe and bookings compared to the goal? And depending on company size, you might want to break that out by product and net new versus expansion as well, and also understanding those targets as well as the overall historical results broken out in those ways. Chili Piper cares a lot about this, but I do as well. Conversion rates? How are you getting from lead to meeting booked to meeting attended to opportunity to closed one and being able to look at that by source the time it takes to move between each of those stages.
0:11:26
Grant Duncan
The ACVs of products, what percent of customers have bought more than one product. And then looking at your pipeline conversion to revenue as a cohort. So each quarter, how much converts to bookings or closed one there?
0:11:45
Tara Robertson
Yeah, I'm curious because, I mean, that's a great list. I'll definitely share that with our listeners. But a lot of people, especially taking on a VP marketing role, usually they're coming into either a team that maybe doesn't have the tech stack to support all of these metrics, or maybe they had some holes. Do you find having a list ready like this is that typically you get the answers you need and you can start kind of doing your homework before you start or do you get a couple of answers that are, we don't know about this one.
0:12:14
Tara Robertson
You have to figure that out now as our new VP Marketing.
0:12:18
Grant Duncan
Yeah. So I wouldn't expect you to get responses to these before you start, but at least having this in your mind as things you're going to prioritize are valuable. And even at HST, we're a 50 million Err SaaS company and we don't have all of these just ready to go. That said, it gives us a reporting roadmap for things to consider looking into and we did have a good amount of them. So that helps me gain the knowledge. And for those that we don't, we either say, hey, let's get this right away if it's a top priority, or if not, we put it on the Rev Ops reporting roadmap.
0:13:01
Tara Robertson
Yeah, that was going to be my next question is how do you say you're coming in brand new as that VP Marketing? How do you prioritize your own reporting request? It sounds like you have a pretty set process at HST, but say there wasn't that roadmap that Revops had. How would you recommend marketers approach these kind of black holes in their reporting?
0:13:22
Grant Duncan
Likely you'll also be hearing anecdotal feedback about what's working or what's not working well. So someone may be saying our SDRs really don't understand how to qualify them well, so then for me, that might trigger, okay, let's look more into the conversion rate from lead to opportunity. What's going on there? Where is the breakdown? So, I'd prioritize that as an area of earlier focus for reporting.
0:13:54
Grant Duncan
So trying to see what you hear or what you see based on the data you can get. And then of course, the company likely has at least some kind of overall reporting on leads and pipe and Arr. So understanding those will just be foundational as well.
0:14:12
Tara Robertson
So you come in with your wish list of metrics and then from there, what would be your next step once you're onboarded in a new role? What would you focus on?
0:14:23
Grant Duncan
That's the kind of analysis list. Then there's also the side of trying to understand the plans that I had in my onboarding prep checklist. And these also helped me understand where to focus. The list for me was positioning and messaging if we have any ICP or go to market playbooks, understanding our Martech stack, our sales tech stack, product launch plans, overall roadmap, if there is such for marketing, what events are we going to, how are we getting customer research, how can I consume that?
0:15:03
Grant Duncan
What the lead routing looks like, what the funnel stages are. Every company has different definitions, pricing and packaging and discounting levels. What the handoffs are for product marketing, to sales, to sales enablement and to product. What the website is our product demo videos, what the chart for the company as a whole is hiring plans and marketing budget. So those are also items I'm trying to acquire in the first 30 days and if we don't have them, then those become potential roadmap items for the marketing team.
0:15:42
Grant Duncan
If we don't have a positioning guide created, well maybe we put that as an item on the list to look at. So those are, I'd say, some of the tactical things I'm trying to learn from a metric side, from just a plan side. But if we think about the first 30 days or even the first few months generally one of the biggest things that I always try to focus on is building trust with your team and with your colleagues.
0:16:10
Grant Duncan
Because if you don't have trust, you're likely not going to get very far. People don't want to work with you, then it's going to be an uphill battle and especially with your team as well. I like to kick off career conversations early with them so that I can understand where they want to go and if they're even enjoying what they do now. And from my experience I've uncovered things that previous leaders at the company didn't know as they didn't ask.
0:16:44
Grant Duncan
So then you can start to shape the role or the team differently based off of that and it also builds trust. Right? You are investing in them in this way. Also asking what the strengths, weaknesses and gaps are in marketing is important. I like to do a roadshow with different cross functional leaders as well as within the marketing team. And that's often some of the questions I ask because you'll often hear perspectives that people have that maybe only a couple of people have, but it helps.
0:17:18
Tara Robertson
Inform your insights when you're trying to build that trust. It's not always something you can force, obviously, but is that just more FaceTime when you're new? Or is there anything else you recommend people do to kind of build that trust as early as they can?
0:17:34
Grant Duncan
Yeah, I think FaceTime is a really important part. Also showing empathy in the conversations is a really big piece. So if you're having FaceTime but you're stuck up or very cold, then that's not going to come across well. And something I'm trying for the first time we'll see how long I keep it going. But I've started a marketing stand up meeting with the leadership team. So four days a week we just have a 15 to 30 minutes check in on some of the big rocks for the days where bottlenecks are so we can fix those, any employee topics we want to discuss and any other topics to bring up. And for me being so new, this has been helpful to get more time to discuss topics or discuss our philosophies or what's working.
0:18:25
Grant Duncan
So this is a new test for me, we'll see if I continue it. But the revenue leadership team does this as well and the sales team does this as well. So I thought I'd give it a try. So a couple of other things that I like to do jumping back to the 30 days part is trying to understand customers better, whether that's speaking with them or listening to gong calls, understanding the product better, especially if you're new to the industry, really going deep there.
0:18:53
Grant Duncan
And then in your 30 days, there's two final things I'd suggest. One is trying to focus on some quick wins. As much as we like to think people give us all of the benefit of the doubt in the world, getting those quick wins helps you boost your credibility early on that you're making an impact for the company. And then the second thing is boiling all of these findings into an initial findings presentation.
0:19:20
Grant Duncan
So about one ish month in. This is a great thing to be able to share to your boss or others. I typically will share it with the marketing team as well so that they're aware of some of my initial findings and thoughts. This last time I just kept it to two slides marketing Findings and Non Marketing Findings. And on each slide it had four boxes observations for highlights, observations for low lights, recommendations for top, strategies to prioritize, and then where you could help, likely where your boss can help there.
0:19:56
Grant Duncan
And that really helps summarize your ideas so people see your thinking and where you want to go. And if they're not on the same page, it's a great place to be able to check in still early on.
0:20:08
Tara Robertson
Yeah. And when you're presenting slides like that, do you also share those with the Revenue leadership or is that limited to just the marketing team?
0:20:18
Grant Duncan
Yeah, I did share it with the Revenue leadership team as well.
0:20:21
Tara Robertson
And how was the feedback?
0:20:23
Grant Duncan
Yeah, it was very positive and on some things I could see people viscerally leaning in to agreeing with some things and there were a couple of things where they had a different perspective and shared that as well. So it was helpful to tweak a couple of things too.
0:20:40
Tara Robertson
Yeah, it's really helpful to get that kind of candid feedback early on and show that you can handle it and do something productive with it that's also really good for building those relationships.
0:20:50
Grant Duncan
And I'd say a lot of what we've been talking about is the first 30 ish days. Some of this is going to bleed into the second month or third month, but in many ways past this first month you're going to be crafting the next few months based on all these initial findings. That's going to be hard to say. This is exactly what it should look like because it's going to be so situation dependent.
0:21:16
Tara Robertson
Yeah, that makes sense. But it's a really strong list of things to get started on for that first month so that you can again, get your feelings validated or your observations validated by people who have been there a little bit longer, hopefully. And then you're not spinning your wheels for the next quarter to a quarter on things that aren't really problems for anyone else in the business.
0:21:37
Grant Duncan
Yeah, I'm sure you've had similar approaches when joining a new company.
0:21:43
Tara Robertson
Yeah, very similar to your slides. Typically what I like to do is start, stop, continue. And again, it's very much I put it as I'm new, I don't know all the context, but here's what I'm seeing and then I just like to kind of put my thoughts out there and see. It's also helpful to revisit those. I feel like the slides you put together would be really interesting to revisit six months from now with the team to see if you've made.
0:22:06
Grant Duncan
Yeah, great point.
0:22:07
Tara Robertson
So now that you're feeling hopefully a little bit settled in your new role, I'd love to just talk about what's top of mind for you today as you're leading the marketing team at HST Pathways.
0:22:19
Grant Duncan
Some of the things top of mind for me is making sure that we are hitting the bookings target and finding new ways to grow pipeline faster. Something a little different about us is that marketing is gold on bookings. So basically arr. But you can consider bookings, as I'm sure you know, but maybe not all listeners. Bookings is essentially like when you close the deal, but you haven't recognized it as arr yet because they're not implemented yet.
0:22:54
Grant Duncan
So thinking about that as our main target and it's actually a combined inbound and outbound bookings target. But of course, bookings is a lagging indicator, so we need to look at how is the pipeline trending before. So that's still really top of mind for me. I'm also thinking a lot about how to help my team grow personally and professionally for HST. We have a great opportunity to create more social proof.
0:23:23
Grant Duncan
We don't have a lot of it right now, but we have a lot of customers, so it's a great way to be able to show that people can trust us more. And then there's a couple of content items coming in the future that still under wraps but should make a big impact in Splash.
0:23:41
Tara Robertson
That's exciting. It must be just such a good feeling to be past the initial. Like you said, I think two months in, so now you can start to make some traction and make some progress on these targets other than you mentioned your bookings target. And obviously pipeline is always important for marketers, but what other metrics are you looking at, let's say weekly? And is that different from your previous role at thingtree?
0:24:07
Grant Duncan
Yeah, the main differences I would say is more around breaking things out by product more and then looking at the expansion pipeline and bookings we're driving because a lot of the revenue that we create is from current customers buying more products. We have about seven products and of course any company is going to have different channels. So also looking at those attribution sources differently. Now in terms of the metrics, I like to have a running spreadsheet for this and each column is a week of the quarter and within that, at the top, I like to track how far we are into the quarter.
0:24:53
Grant Duncan
That way we can compare against the percent attainment to the goal and comparing that to the percent of the quarter that we're through. So for instance, if we're 40% of the way to the quarter but the goal is only at 30% or our actuals are at 30%, we can know, okay, actually we're not pacing correctly or behind. How can we improve that? And then under that, I'll look at metrics within the website, within ads, looking at the inbound request opportunities and pipeline dollars, bookings event details, social and podcast metrics, and then breaking some of those out by new logo versus current customer.
0:25:36
Tara Robertson
And do you have someone on your team owning that weekly pacing document or does everyone contribute the metrics that they own?
0:25:43
Grant Duncan
Yeah, it's a mix of Rev Ops owning many of them and then individuals on the marketing team owning specifics that Rev Ops doesn't take care of.
0:25:55
Tara Robertson
Yeah, so I can imagine Rev Ops doesn't need to touch your YouTube stream numbers or your event numbers necessarily, but they're probably helping you out with the bookings. Yeah, gotcha.
0:26:06
Grant Duncan
Yeah, I'm happy to go into detail on the breakdown within those buckets if you'd like, but those are the overall categories for metrics we're looking at.
0:26:17
Tara Robertson
Yeah, no, I think that's a really great overview. I would be curious though, on the monthly basis it looks like you also look at self reported attribution, so I'm curious how you're using that in combination with your other attribution or if that's your main source right now.
0:26:32
Grant Duncan
Yeah, we do look at the self reported attribution. We have the how did you hear about us as a required free text field on our demo form. And then we have our UTM based attribution that we can look at as well. And we do do a combo of those. One of the things that we revamped after I started was our UTM approach and strategy. We moved to pardot forms instead of this one off product that had our forms and then along with that made it so that we could capture more utms for every person along with cookies to be able to do that better. So now we'll have better UTM data, but the self reported is of course a great way to be able to find those things that you just can't find in utms.
0:27:27
Grant Duncan
And interestingly for us, a very high percentage of our inbound requests are from people who've heard about us from others. So the word of mouth is really strong. So when I see that as an example, I think, okay, how can we put more fuel to that fire and grow it, right?
0:27:45
Tara Robertson
Yeah, we see the same or very similar in our self reported attribution, but of course that doesn't come up in utms at all because we don't have every single user of ours using the exact right link that we want them to be using that's utm'd. Right. They're just talking about us on Slack or when they meet someone at an event. So having that overlap of different sources of attribution can really help you see that full picture.
0:28:09
Tara Robertson
When you brought on Pardot, was that self reported attribution already existing or did you add that piece on when you joined?
0:28:17
Grant Duncan
The self reported was already on the previous form tool. We are using Pardot for marketing automation already. I did not roll out Pardot. It's not my favorite tool, if I'm being frank.
0:28:33
Tara Robertson
But I was going to say if you're two months in, that's very impressive that you did that. That's what was my next question?
0:28:39
Grant Duncan
No. Ripping and replacing a marketing automation system is not an easy job. So I am not touching that one for a long time. We're making it work.
0:28:53
Tara Robertson
Yes, I understand, I've been there. But I was curious, when you joined, was there anything, just looking at historical self reported attribution just because you moved to such a different industry, was there anything that surprised you or was it really just overwhelmingly word of mouth?
0:29:08
Grant Duncan
Like you just said, word of mouth was the biggest. But there were other industry specific things that I would not have expected in the same way. Associations is an example. There are many state associations for these ambulatory surgery centers and we go and attend many of the events with a small booth, but sometimes they also share about us in their newsletters and the content outside of their events. And so that is an example of something that was new to me. But it's almost like these micro events with 50 to 150 people that can drive inbound for us.
0:29:53
Tara Robertson
Yeah, that's one of those things, switching industries, that you won't know what those events are until you have someone spend the time and looking into it. Yeah, useful to have that self reported data historically because that's typically something that I haven't had when coming into a new role. Usually we're the ones rolling that out.
0:30:10
Grant Duncan
Yeah, that makes sense.
0:30:12
Tara Robertson
So I'd love to know. You said it's been two months now, so obviously a lot you've been digging into in the background of things. But have you had to make any tough cuts or pause programs that the team already had running when you joined? And after looking at it with fresh eyes, maybe you thought, this doesn't really seem to be performing, or it could be better.
0:30:32
Grant Duncan
Yeah, thankfully I'm coming into a team that's already engaged and collaborative and has been growing well, so there weren't huge things that we needed to cut immediately. I'd say it's been more helping. Work with the team to revamp some programs to create fresh strategies or double down on things that are already working. So for instance, the forms and the attribution from a UTM perspective is something that I prioritized the way it was set up in the past. We wouldn't be able to see what Google Ad search term someone came in on so we could track that through from Lead to Op to Revenue.
0:31:16
Grant Duncan
Now we can do that. So there's things that I've focused on revamping or changing rather than having to cut completely.
0:31:25
Tara Robertson
That's a good place to be in coming in somewhere new that the team was already focusing on the right things and you can just kind of point them in the right direction on the tracking side. That's great.
0:31:34
Grant Duncan
Yeah.
0:31:35
Tara Robertson
Is there anything coming up in the next half of this year that you're really looking forward to, especially working with your new team?
0:31:43
Grant Duncan
One of the things when you join a new company is sometimes there are ambiguous roles and responsibilities or there's overlap or occasional confusion and we worked together to clarify some of those and use the racing matrix responsible, accountable, consulted, informed to take some of those areas that maybe there is duplicate or ambiguity and clarify them. We're excited about that because it'll allow us to have less feedback cycles and be able to know who is doing what so we can all work faster without as many questions.
0:32:30
Grant Duncan
So I'm excited to be able to work in that new format. As we talked about earlier, including and using more generative AI into our internal processes is something I'm excited about. Having more ABM campaigns get launched is something that we are newly rolling out and initial signs are pretty promising. There creating more of that social proof I talked about and I could keep going. I'm so excited about what we're doing, but that's a handful.
0:33:03
Tara Robertson
No, that's great energy to have in a new role. That's exciting. Just curious on the ABM front, have you looked at bringing on any tools there or are you trying to prove out the ABM kind of go to market before bringing on something new?
0:33:17
Grant Duncan
Yeah, we are planning to do it ourselves to start and then consider tools in the future. Our ABM is also a little bit different because the best AVM targets are these management groups. For us, they essentially own many different surgery centers. It's almost like franchises where there's like a parent company that makes some decisions, but then much of the buying power is at the individual center level.
0:33:49
Grant Duncan
So for us we could put one logo on, let's say a LinkedIn campaign or piece of content, but that one logo can be sent out as what would look like a one to one campaign to 300 different centers. So the traditional tools don't fit as well to this kind of model, but as we scale it out, maybe we'll find that we can add technology to help with this right now, though, we're doing it manually.
0:34:23
Tara Robertson
Yeah, that's a good approach. I feel like a lot of teams do tools first and then process later, and that can get really messy. So that's exciting to try it out yourself and see what you can scale with a tool potentially in the future.
0:34:36
Grant Duncan
Yeah, I'm a big proponent of the do things that don't scale when you're starting something new, figure it out, prove it out, and then you can add on more process and technology.
0:34:47
C
Cool.
0:34:48
Tara Robertson
So I'd love to move on to our Quick Fire round, so we'll keep these ones pretty brief. First, is there another marketer you follow that our listeners should go check out?
0:34:57
Grant Duncan
I'd suggest Allison Lohman. She has amazing content and she has also recently started a new marketing role.
0:35:06
Tara Robertson
Nice. We'll give her a follow. I'll put the link in the show notes for everyone to check her out. And what's in under the radar could be a channel or a tactic that your marketing team is loving right now.
0:35:17
Grant Duncan
Listening to gong calls with customers and prospects and sharing the learnings with each other during our weekly marketing team meeting. The idea is we're cross pollinating these insights that we're each hearing and all getting smarter as a team so that we can use these insights into whatever marketing efforts we're doing. And there's some really interesting things that we're pulling out that many people on the team did not know about beforehand.
0:35:46
Tara Robertson
I love that. So, using a tool that the team already has access to to pull out insights. And how are you assigning or are you assigning different people on the marketing team different parts of the funnel, or different types of calls to listen to? Or is it just kind of ad hoc? People bring insights as they find them.
0:36:02
Grant Duncan
At this point, we're not assigning specific areas, but each person has a goal of listening to ten ICP conversations or speaking with them directly for the quarter.
0:36:16
Tara Robertson
Great. Yeah, ten is a great goal to start with for marketing team. That's awesome.
0:36:20
Grant Duncan
Yeah.
0:36:21
Tara Robertson
Great. And lastly, where can we go to find out more about you or follow your content?
0:36:26
Grant Duncan
Grant, you can search me on LinkedIn grantduncan or you can go to my website. This is Grant Love.
0:36:33
Tara Robertson
It very easy to remember.
0:36:35
Grant Duncan
Yeah, Grantduncan.com was taken already, so I came up with something else.
0:36:41
Tara Robertson
Yeah, this is Grant is even better. No way to misspell that.
0:36:45
Grant Duncan
Yep.
0:36:46
Tara Robertson
Thanks so much for joining me today. It was a great conversation, Grant.
0:36:49
Grant Duncan
Yeah, thank you. Have a good day.
0:36:51
Tara Robertson
Thanks. And thanks everybody, for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode.
0:36:56
C
Thanks for listening to Demand Gen Chat. Demand. Gen Chat is a Chili Piper podcast hosted by Tara Robertson and produced by Me Nola McCoy. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a five star rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It only takes 5 seconds and helps other marketers like you discover DemandGen chat. Also, if you'd like to have a question answered in a future episode, you can connect with Tara Robertson on LinkedIn, send her a DM with your question, and it could be answered on a future episode.
0:37:26
C
Finally, if you've gotten this far and are wondering what Chili Piper even is is, ChiliPiper helps b two B marketers book more qualified meetings for their sales teams. You can't afford to leave opportunities on the table, so let your lead self qualify and schedule a time with the right rep instantly. And that's just one of the many revenue impacting things that ChiliPiper does. Visit Chilipiper.com to learn more, and thanks again for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of Demand Gen Chat.

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