And to manage all of their assignments. So this is very different. We sold that business couple of years ago, and now now building my second business. The area that we're really focused on is really understanding how leaders, CEOs, CMOs, COO, CPOs, use customer feedback as input to the work they're doing. So I have a couple of kind of questions that will bring us down that path. But yeah, maybe, maybe it'll be great to hear about you. I think you're you've got a couple of things going.
Yeah, I am. I actually just finished up a project working with cloudsmith out of Belfast in Northern Ireland. So yeah, so I've been lots of great Irish colleagues. It's been a lot of fun, great, but I just wrapped that up about two weeks, three weeks ago now, I guess. And so I'm just sort of looking for what that next opportunity is, whether it's a fractional role or something full time in particular, focused on trying to sort of transition my career into more Climate Technology Solutions. But my background, I've quiet dog's
barking, very obedient,
sort of they'll still go quiet. We have the windows open because it's such a nice day, and then they hear every sound outside and think they need to bark at it.
Corbett, are you? I'm
in Virginia, right outside Washington, DC. Okay, awesome, but my background kind of leading up into the CMO positions. I've always been in software, tech, enterprise software, SaaS solutions, but across a variety of different target audiences, I'd say the most focused has been looking at selling it solutions to IT leaders and so not business. SaaS solutions more it oriented, and have, over my career, been in product marketing, sales enablement, marketing communications, you know, before taking on sort of the leadership across across all the different marketing functions. So this is interesting to me, because I love the product marketing side of this and, you know, really getting into that understanding of the customer and figuring out how to pull their voice forward.
And it was actually from from part of that experience, but when I said the last business, I went into the company that acquired us and and I ran the product marketing function, so so it was a little bit of, kind of the pains that we'd experienced in building our own business, and then from product marketing kind of led us, led us to this point. Yeah, I was seeing the kind of the DevOps side of cloudsmith, so it's pretty hardcore. It buyers, which is interesting in a marketing world, yeah,
well, I guess you know from they're like any other buyer, right? They've got pains that they're dealing with. They've got collaboration that they're trying to make happen across their own organization and and so you just have to understand what they're trying to achieve in the same way you would with any other solution, right? It's just, you're just speaking. They might be a little different in the way they evaluate solutions. They're more likely to get more hands on more quickly in doing their own self evaluation, versus relying on salespeople to present and share and communicate information, so we see that there's a lot more of the buying cycle happening early without us even being connected to that person at all.
That's great. That's fantastic. Yeah, and they're probably more research orientated and try and try and decide and that sort of thing. Okay, interesting. So maybe as a place to start, I mean, for you, when you think of, you know, customer feedback as input into the work that you do and that your teams would have done, what do you feel are some of the biggest kind of macro problems and challenges with using customer feedback and the marketing function. Like, maybe an easy place to start is like, how is it used, and how could it be better? Or, how is it used, and what are the problems?
So beyond getting it, because I'd say getting the feedback is sometimes the first challenge. Okay, interesting. Tell me more about that, usually not connected to the customers as directly, right? So you've got Customer Success teams, you've got sales teams. They're talking to the customers. You're getting a lot of the information secondhand, unless you're running a customer community, or you're running customer councils you know, or or other kinds of focus groups, but I think that marketing, you know, some of the best feedback that that a marketer will get is just going to a trade show and being able to talk to people while you're standing in a booth, right? So your your experience there, gives some of the best feedback. But you My goal is always to make sure that I've got a really good relationship with sales and with the customer success teams to ensure that I'm getting that feedback, that I'm getting the opportunities to be on calls with customers and hear things firsthand. Tools today, like having, I forget the name of the tool we use, but you know the all the different call recorders so that you can have, we have every single one of our song and get going. Yeah, of course, exactly. So every single thing is recorded, so I can go back and watch and hear and so if there's something that was a particularly strong session with, with feedback, then I'll go, you know, ask, I'll be given sort of a tip to go look at this one and then use that as an opportunity to learn,
right? So tell me, in your experience, the nuts and bolts of how that worked. So you know, you've got recorded calls with with customers or with customers and prospects. You probably have a support channel that deals with emails and chat. You've got sales emails and communications that are going on. Maybe there's some user research, there's analytics, like, there's, there's a whole bunch of different places, yeah, what were like the real, you know, nuts and bolts of how that actually got to you? Was it that someone, you know, uploaded to a feedback system? Did people just ping on Slack and say, Hey, this is interesting. Like, how did it actually get on your desk? So
I would say that it's been more ad hoc ping on Slack, kind of communications, not a concrete system that tracked that we would try to use our CRM typically, that's been Salesforce for me, where it's documenting things like the customer use case, the pain points that led them to where they, you know, to make the decision to purchase all of our customer reference information. So all of those things helped in terms of getting customer feedback and or a customer understanding. It wasn't always feedback. It's just an understanding of the customer, the dynamics, you know, who are we going to be able to use as examples to when we're focusing on different market segments. So kind of taking that, that information forward to how do we use it? You know, it's obviously a big part of that is around building your go to market strategy, knowing what audiences you're going to be targeting, how you want to prioritize those, how you want to message to them. So everything that you know product marketing does in coming through with your buyer personas, your positioning statements, your messaging documents, the sales tools that support that that is foundational for marketing communications activities, but it's also foundational for sales activities, you know, going forward and and so I think that, you know, having have when we would end up with, like these foundational documents, but then getting the information from the document to be sort of living, breathing information, not not a point in time, I think is one of the challenges. And how do you constantly kind of keep those things up to date and and keep the information all in context with the information you already had? Because I think that one of the challenges you get a new piece of information, but you're getting that without the history of of of everything that's been you've understood to that point, right? And that's where the product marketer has a physical role of of being the context provider, weaving it into updating documents on a routine basis,
right? Makes sense. Makes sense. Really interesting. So maybe Kai spent is a good example. Maybe not, or somewhere else. But what sort of volume of feedback is flowing into these organizations, and how much of that do you think then you were, you were actually seeing and using so,
I mean, we're probably just getting the tip of the iceberg, where I would imagine that there's so much more feedback coming through than we see. Because every conversation that the customer success team has with a customer while they're working with them, or that a salesperson has with a prospect, there are different points of feedback that are being gathered. There's constantly feedback being shared. It may not be gathered or documented, right? So it's, it's just information that's passing through one into one person's head and not necessarily shared back out unless someone says, ah, aha. That's, you know, something that that so and so would really benefit from knowing about.
So I think they need to be cognizant. Yeah, okay. Is that a problem? Like, like, yeah. Is that? Is that an issue, or is it just a wasted opportunity? Like, like, how do you think of that?
I think it's an issue. I think that it's it's an issue in the sense that you don't know what you don't know, right? So you don't even know to ask for these things. Because unless so someone out, the person receiving the feedback, has to know and have an easy way to share that information, to be prompted to do that otherwise, and it has to be really, really easy, sort of integrated into just the way they operate. And the easiest way, typically, is, you know, notes from a meeting. So like, we'll have Slack channels for every customer and every Slack channel, you've got kind of the key highlights coming out of the meetings that are available for anyone to go back and look at, just like the chorus calls or Gong calls are available for anyone to go back and listen to, but not everyone has The time to be searching for and and going and finding these things.
Yeah, the time is tough, especially if the scale that you guys are at, and you know how many customer Slack channels are going to be, and it's happening every day. And then you know, if you've got 15 sales people, well that's probably, you know, 60 hours of calls every single day, at least. And so how to keep on top of all that? So that's one of the things
can you think of. So we've kind of understood the challenge of getting it, using it, seeing it, trying to filter it through, keep on top of it. You know, the kind of the volume is pretty high. Can Can you think, though, of like, the actual impact of that, that problem, like, did that mean that like content just wasn't updated? Did it mean that like deals were getting missed because there was actually a new, better positioning that people could have adopted but didn't? Is there a business impact of that stuff? I
think it would be. It might be more of an efficiency impact. So as you're trying to rethink things, so it's so there could certainly be the missed opportunity, because you didn't hear this input that would have made you think completely differently about the way you were going to market, right or add something completely new into how you're positioning or going who you're going after. But I think that it's more about the efficiency. So when you are taking the time to rethink and revisit positioning, or you're working on a new campaign, and you want to check and see, okay, do we have all the freshest sort of ideas coming to the table to go back out and do the fact the fact finding through all these different channels, it takes time. So if there were a way to make it more efficient so that this information was feeding to you, I would think that that's probably the biggest impact. Now, I'm sure there are also completely missed opportunities. I don't know how you'd ever measure that though,
yeah, but I was, that's what I was exactly thinking also. So what are some of the best ways that you've seen for marketing leadership to try incorporate feedback into into kind of the work that they're doing right as you built your strategy for the overall marketing team, and then that filtered down into demand, gener, product marketing and whatever else you guys have got going on, like, like, how did, how did you think about using that? Or what are some of the best ways to do that? One example, for example, might be, I've seen teams have told me about, like, Voice of the Customer reports and kind of championing those and adopting that framework. Were there any ways that you, you tried or looked at?
Yeah, so I think definitely the voice of the customer is, is a topic, you know, that people that every organization I've been in, we've maybe not always called it that, but that's always been a priority to figure out, you know, sometimes it would be looking at, maybe less today, more 10 years ago, looking at customer councils, right? And so you're using a select group for that voice of the customer now, I think it's easier because of the role of customer success and customer experience teams you know that have come to become a given, that you have those teams that that you get more information kind of captured from a broader base of customers. Of course, there's, you know, the research that might be done as well. But I think that the way that I as a marketer would use it would be so so from an enablement perspective, thinking about it like in maybe a product marketing function, creating a voice of the customer report, not done that, but it sounds, you know, like something that would be very valuable to have, but I think that sort of An education on who our customers are, what? What are their pain points? What? What are their use cases for our technology, and what's the value that they are saying they're getting from that? And so the anecdotes of value and anecdotes of pain are probably the most important thing, and I think anecdotes are often better than statistically sound data, because you can tell a story with it. You can share, you know, I was talking to, you know, customer in this industry who is having this specific problem, and it's something you can do more storytelling around, versus like a research report with lots of data in aggregate.
Yeah, I and that was one of the things, when I was thinking that you guys would, you know, were selling to the IT buyers is like, because in business, SaaS, you know, it's all about the story, and that's actually product marketing's role is, right? Okay? How do you just sit down everything that you know, the jobs to be done, that people are using your product, for your features, your whatever, and craft that into stories that demonstrate the value. Yeah, did that? Did that change fundamentally for you guys, given the kind of bars that you had? Or was it pretty,
pretty similar now, our voice, the customer framework, was, was really, actually a jobs, as you say, jobs to be done. It was jobs to be done were documented, right? That was something that was and that was built out by the product team at cloudsmith before I got there, and became a pretty valuable resource, but it was a point in time resource, and sort of an annual update being done to that, to see if things have changed. And it's something that people looked at kind of once, when they were getting onboarded and up to speed, but then, not necessarily again. It wasn't something that was living and breathing. So I think this idea of having something that allows you to engage with and be prompted to engage with feedback and information as different data points, you know, in ways with AI today, I'm sure there's so many ways that that could be kind of automatically fed into updates to documents or recommended, you know, updates. So here's if I'm filtering through all the chorus apps or chorus discussions and filtering through all the Slack channels. Here are the things that I'm hearing related to use cases and recommendations that we might have on how to update materials to support that, you know, like, I could see an interesting AI use case around that,
yeah, like, Hey, here's all our feedback sources. Hey, here's all our documentation. What doesn't match, right? Like, what are we missing? What needs to change? That's really interesting, yeah, because that was my, yeah. My final question, you know, is that, I mean, you pretty much answered it there. Like, if you could think of an ideal solution for feedback, well, what would it look like? You know, is it an aggregator and synthesizer? Is it actually built into your existing marketing tools that would help you like, can you think of an ideal kind of way that you might be able to do that?
Well, I think that the synthesis, the synthesis of the date of the information, I don't see an existing tool where that necessarily sits some of the background, the data points around it, could easily sit in, in the CRM, you know, where you're looking at information being, you know, connected to customers. And I wouldn't want in a synthesis to have lost the unique examples from customers. You'd want to have a synthesis that still maintain the unique examples, because it makes it real, and it makes you sort of trust the data in a different way. I think,
yeah, trust is so important. And you kind of want to, you want to be able to start just making some notes. You want to be able to be sure that what you're getting is right, yeah,
yeah. And I'm sure there's a content management system that that I've not been, you know, I haven't used Content Management Systems concretely, you know, in marketing, where I could say, oh, yeah, if I had this con, this would feed perfectly into my content management system as an asset, a set of assets, that would then be supporting other tools that we're creating. But I don't have that, that experience or haven't had, haven't felt that that was a big enough pain point that I wanted to invest in something, right?
Yeah, interesting. So it sounds like a lot of the ways that you've experienced this is kind of through manual workarounds, right? It's, it's, you know, getting the gun calls, trying to filter through them. It's understanding slack meshes, checking out when you can. It actually hasn't been a project or an initiative that cloudsmith Or another business that said, Hey, this is a big problem. We need to start to synthesize this or to roll out something to fix,
right? I think it's an opportunity more than it's a problem. So it might be looking at, how is this a missed opportunity in what we're doing and and it kind of goes to like competitive research, right? You always need to be doing more competitive research than you're doing or competitive monitoring, right? Unless you've got someone that's fully focused on that. When you're operating with this small company, mid sized company, you don't have a person focused on every one of these things. So I would see that the benefit would probably be strongest for the small to mid sized company, although, as as I say that a large company is going to have many more customers that they're needing to track insights from, and so even if they had an individual who was responsible for this, that individual probably has a budget and has mandates and and goals, you know, that that would be better met by having some tools to help them.
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure they exist. I haven't come across any. But, like competitive monitoring. I mean, we used to rotate it in the product marketing team that I ran, we used to rotate it. Everyone hated doing that work. Yeah, and, and you can just imagine that that's something that that AI should help. It's like, Hey, here's all the all the competitors, all the sources, their URLs or docs, their, you know, social feeds or announcements, whatever, like, just tell me anytime, anytime anything has happened, right? Yeah, like, well, and I think be interesting. I
think that that's the insights that you need to get on competitors. There's also the insights that you want to get on customers. So, you know, just as an as an example, when you're thinking about customer, and this may be in not in the context of where you're focusing right now, but when I'm thinking about customers and knowing what what they're they're focused on at any moment in time, right? So you've got tools like six cents and zoom info that are providing the insight on on intent and what kind of topics an organization might be researching at a given point in time. And we had implemented another tool called qualified, which is starts, you know, I think at the core, it's replacing the chat box that you might have. So we had intercom and switch that out for qualified, because what qualified gave us was a whole lot of customer insights as well. It linked into the CRM systems and allowed us to and it linked into the intent systems, like sixth sense, so we could see what what a customer was looking at and doing on our website, in our documentation, in our product, and all of that as a tie in, because it was tracking what's happening on those web domains, even if they weren't chatting with us, if they were a known, unknown visitor, right then, then we could start to track information and insights that allowed us to To see, okay, they're they're starting to look at
at the pricing page or something they're not using today, right? Or
LinkedIn, too. And we could see through g2 that they were starting to research alternatives to cloudsmith, right? Okay, they might be at risk, so it's kind of protecting the dots between all these different tools that have great insights, but making sure that they're all integrated and talking to each other, qualified served as a very nice, sort of central hub for some of that information.
Interesting, yeah, I started my tech career in AD intercom, and it was interesting. I mean, when I was there, we were doing very, very different stuff. It was more around marketing communications and and support documentation and stuff like that. But that's really interesting, awesome. So climate, climate tech, interesting? Yeah, that
I need something that I can get more passionate about, you know, like I don't. It's great to see the efficiency and what you can do for DevOps and software developers and help them be, you know, more effective and create safer software. That's a big deal, but it's just not something that I personally, like, you know, latch on to. And I look at the what's happening with climate crisis around the world, and if, if I can help to scale solutions. And so the energy sector is kind of where I'm I'm thinking as kind of my first priority, because the solutions are ripe. You know, we've got the technology for a lot of the New Energy Solutions. It's just about helping people to make the move. And, yeah, yeah. So if you know anyone in those sectors, that's,
yeah, I was just thinking. I was just in the office. It's a venture capital firm in London, yeah, but they are, like a green and climate investor. Let me pop. Let me pop. The link in the chat. Transition is what they call there. Okay, yeah. They're set up by a guy called Ari Helgeson, who's a Danish guy around my last business at a Copenhagen. But, um, yeah, it's interesting, but it may, it may provide some, some inspiration on some companies. I mean, I think what you're gonna find is that the companies are probably earlier stage than where you've just come from, right? Well, what were you guys Series A, but, like, big Series A?
Yeah, they were, they were Series A, about to be Series B. I think probably six months out from going to Series B. There's definitely a mix, though, like, I'm talking to one company right now in the energy space that has, they're a Series E, and what they do is they do it's energy as a service, so it's kind of the financing of new energy solutions and the implementation of those energy solutions, and then they keep the, you know, the everything is off balance sheet for the client, where they pay for performance and pay for the reduction in consumption and costs. So it's a really interesting model. So it's still not a huge company, but it's a pretty mature company, because they kind of came out early and and now they're scaling in a big way, right? Because they are, because the technology is, is is ripe. Solar is ripe. Everyone's, you know, able to implement solar onto their building rooftops. Now it's, you know, yeah,
yeah. Interesting. And another space may be some automotive technology companies like Waymo or places like that that is kind of in that same space might be interesting to look at. Also, yeah, yeah. And
there's so many sort of back, back end pieces, whether it's just the battery technology or the, you know, because I'm not, I'm not really a b to c marketer, but definitely there are so many layers in the supply chain.
Yeah, there's a lot of B to B stuff, which actually is climate but also would be kind of actually selling to some of the more hardcore it kind of buyers that you used to that's what I was thinking. Karen, thank you so much for your time. It was really great to meet you. And I do really, really appreciate whatever way and path we end up going. You know, I don't know how, I don't know which way it's going to go right now, but that's why we just really appreciate these kind of deep dives with experienced people to share their knowledge. So I tremendously appreciate it.
Definitely keep in touch. I'd love to hear if you start to put something out into the market,
for sure, will do
great. Well, thanks again. I'm sorry about the tardiness.
No worries. I don't leave the seat. So it's all good for me. Okay, very
