Ever wondered what a Fractional CMO does? Andy Culligan, the latest guest on the podcast, dives into the fascinating world of Fractional CMOs. He walks us through his career journey and explains how his role has become a game-changer in today’s fast-paced marketing landscape.
Andy discusses the benefits of hiring a Fractional CMO compared to a full-time employee and shares valuable insights for businesses aiming to adapt quickly. He also offers his perspectives on the SaaS market, highlighting the importance of speed in marketing and the evolving dynamics shaped by AI and shifting buyer behaviors.
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About Andy Culligan
Andy Culligan is a marketing leader specializing in revenue growth and scaling SaaS businesses. With close to a decade of experience in both marketing and sales, Andy excels as a Fractional CMO, CRO, and Marketing Advisor. He is known for his straightforward approach to Account-Based Marketing (ABM), aligning marketing and sales teams to drive commercial success. Andy has held key marketing leadership positions at multiple SaaS companies including, Emarsys (acquired by SAP), Exponea (acquired by Bloomreach) & Leadfeeder (now Echobot). He focuses on personalized marketing strategies that create meaningful touchpoints, ultimately boosting revenue for his clients
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Meet Andy Culligan: Career Journey
00:00:39 – From SDR to Fractional CMO
00:02:58 – Growth and Challenges in SaaS Marketing
00:06:43 – Benefits of Hiring a Fractional CMO
00:12:40 – The Importance of a Marketing Plan
00:14:07 – Evergreen Marketing Tactics
00:19:33 – The Role of Speed in Marketing
00:20:45 – Future of Marketing and AI Impact
00:23:51 – Quickfire Questions: Marketing Advice
00:29:31 – Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:32:05 – Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Quotes
“Speed is something that’s important to a lot of companies.” Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
“If it’s not working for you, then it’s not working for me.” Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
“If you know your niche, nail it.” Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
“A lot of companies don’t have a plan.” Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
“Creativity always wins.” Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
Follow Andy:
Andy Culligan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-culligan/
Andy’s website: https://andyculligan.com/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Andy Culligan
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Andy Culligan
Mike:
Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Andy Culligan. Andy is a fractional CMO. Welcome to the podcast, Andy.
Andy: Thanks very much.
Mike: Well, like we always do, let’s start off by learning a bit about you, Andy. So can you tell us a little bit about your career and how you’ve ended up being a fractional CMO?
Andy: All right. So I ended up being a fractional CMO by accident, and I’ll get into that in a minute. But I started my career, or I grew up in Ireland, right? So I’m clearly Irish. You can hear that from the accent. I moved to Austria in 2009. Basically, my wife is Austrian, so I blame her for living in this beautiful, beautiful country, right? So I’ve been living here for, since 2009 and, uh, I started my career as an SDR. Then after studying marketing, I wanted to go in more towards the marketing piece. So after being an SDR, which is a sales development rep and also going into account management, I then, when I moved here, wanted to put more of a focus on marketing, then worked at a multinational for a number of years and implemented all of their marketing automation. Back then it was Marketo with the tool that I was using that back in 2010. So that’s very early stage of Marketo. Right. So one of the first people I was actually at that point in time is probably the only person in Austria with Marketo experience. Right. And then very quickly for that multinational became like the global champion for Marketo, but I wasn’t just running. Those types of programs, I was also running offline programs. I was doing a lot of events and stuff. Learned a huge amount about lead generation, basically, through that company. Then went into the tech space then, and I’ve been in the tech space ever since. So funny enough story, the chief operating officer for a company called Imarsys was checking out my profile on LinkedIn, and I just pinged him and I said, hey, Ohad, why are you looking at my profile? And that sort of brashness was accepted quite well by the Israelis. It’s an Israeli company. The Israelis can be quite brash as well. So he was like, okay, I think we need to work with this guy. They were looking for somebody that had marketing automation experience because they were looking to implement a marketing automation platform themselves. And yeah, so that was my first stint in the tech space. And the multinationals I previously was very slow moving industry. Not much had changed in decades really within that space, very slow moving, and then went into tech where it’s like going from a merry-go-round onto a roller coaster. It’s wild. And I really enjoyed that and quickly started to go up through the ranks for various reasons. We managed to get a hell of a lot of funding at the same time to go into the US market. So very rapidly, I was learning how to run a global marketing team because I was helping the then CMO build out the marketing team for various reasons. From there, I just kept on progressing and progressing, then had a global team. So all of the leads that were being generated for this large organization were coming through my team, both digital and offline. And then I got offered a job as a VP of marketing for a direct competitor. So I took that, which went down like a cup of cold sick, as you can imagine, for the Imarsys guys. But to be fair, the CEO, Ohad, and myself are still very close and a very good friend, actually. Yeah, so I worked at Exponia then for a number of years and we grew that team rapidly and grew the business rapidly. Then went on to another CMO gig at another company, which was a sales tech called Leadfeeder. And again, rapid growth during a relatively tough time, I would say, because that was during the COVID years. And we managed to grow, that was a volume SaaS business as a comparison to the high ticket sales SaaS that I was in previously, Nemarsis and Exponia. And the volume SaaS play was interesting, very, very different. Your customer acquisition costs need to be remained super low as opposed to the enterprise sale that you’d go into it with the others, with the high ticket sales. And yeah, it was interesting. We were growing MMRR by 5% month on month. while at the same time reducing churn, which was, you know, a challenge. And after COVID, you know, it came to June, 2021, and I’d doing this for almost two years at a tight budget and still growing rapidly. And, and a lot of the, a lot of the business growing through the marketing efforts. I was just exhausted. A young family, five lockdowns or whatever it is we had here. I was just like, I can’t do this anymore. For various reasons, I was just spent. So I just knew that if I continued going at the pace I was going at, I was going to burn out. So I just decided to step away from the business. Life’s too short, right? Very aligned with the CEO and everything. Very good relationship with him and we still speak. And I just said, look, my heart’s just not in it anymore. And I think if I keep going at this pace, it’s going to end in trouble for me. fully understood from his side. And I just stepped away from the business without having anything settled, nothing. I just knew that I needed to take a break. And, uh, when people started to find out that I left need feeder, they started to reach out and said, Hey, would you be interested in full-time employment here, et cetera. And, um, I just said, no, not really, but I can maybe help. And that’s where this gig came about. And I really was just looking. My plan then was, Hey, I’ll give a couple of these companies a bit of a hand, see how I get on. And then maybe one of them is a good fit for me to join as a full-time employee. And that’s three years ago. And I’ve worked with over 20 companies. And now I’ve built a team around me and so on. So actually that was in June, 2021. And I didn’t even have a website until October, 2021. I didn’t even have an email address or anything. I was working on my Gmail up until October, 2021. And, um, it just sort of dawned on me after a couple of months of doing this. I was like, Oh, there’s actually something in this. And I only knew I was called a fractional CMO when, um, a CEO of a company that I was working for introduced me to their board as a fractional CMO. I just thought I was, I’m a marketing advisor or whatever. And then I was introduced to, I was working with a company in the States and in the States, it was, it was a growing phenomenon, let’s say back then. Now it’s quite well established, but the, uh, I was introduced as a friend. Hey, this is Andy, our fractional CMO. Oh, great. You have a fractional CMO. And I was like, Oh, that’s what I have. Great. And I doubled down on that and that’s, that’s how I ended up where I am. So I sort of started this business by accident. It wasn’t planned. It just sort of happened. Right.
Mike: I love that, that absolute honesty, that there wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t something you worked out. I think to your credit, you know, what you did was you saw the opportunity and doubled down on it and really took advantage.
Andy: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike: Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about fractional CMOs. I mean, as you mentioned, they’re becoming more popular, particularly in the US. What’s the benefit of having a fractional CMO versus hiring someone to be your full-time CMO?
Andy: Well, speed is something that’s important to a lot of companies. They know if they’re going out and looking for an exec, that it’s going to take months to probably find the right fit. And also to find the right fit, that will be able to pick up a bag and start running with things relatively quickly. I think that speed thing is is very important. A lot of companies that I work with, for them, it’s like, oh, great. You can start tomorrow. Brilliant. We have an existing team in place. This team needs to be managed. This team needs a plan. They need to be pushed forward in the right direction. That’s a big thing. The second thing is risk. My contract is very clear and simple. I don’t want to work with a customer if the customer is not happy with me. Again, life’s too short for me to be trying to prove myself within an organization. If it’s not working for you, then it’s not working for me. So with that, again, we can cut ties and then that’s it. There’s no additional costs on top of it. That’s again, going back to time being wasted and so on, and also money being wasted in terms of recruitment costs, et cetera. And then maybe a payout as well, if you have a CMO on for a year, for example, trying to get rid of somebody is not that easy. And in some organizations, for example, they’re just not ready for a full-time CMO, but they think they are, but they’re not ready. And then they figure out after a year, they’re like, oh, shoot. Actually, this was not the right time for us, right? If we’re talking about in, in the SaaS business, I’ve seen businesses that even at 40, 50 million ARR and they were recurring revenue that are still quite ready for a CMO based on the team setup that they already have. So I think there’s the timing, the risk, and then the cost. So the cost option as well, as I just mentioned, there’s a few things that you don’t need to worry about any recruitment fees. You have CMO that has the experience of working across multiple organizations at the same time. for a fraction of the cost of what a full-time CMO is gonna cost you. The important thing is though that you have somebody or people on the team that are able to go execute based on how I advise them to go execute. But I’ll be the one that will be checking them, making sure they’re doing the right things, et cetera, right?
Mike: That’s interesting. So I can see some benefits. But I guess the obvious question is, as you live in Austria, and Europe’s not always portrayed as being the most dynamic in terms of adopting new approaches, I mean, America’s, you know, really leading on the fractional CMOs approach. So is it tough marketing a service like a fractional CMO from within Europe? Or doesn’t it matter because you simply work remote for American companies?
Andy: I do both. So like I, I work in Austria. It’s funny for a long time, Austria was not really a focus for me. It still isn’t too small of a country, right? But right now I have two clients in Austria, which is funny. That just sort of fell on my lap, but not because I was doing any big promotional work for Austria. It just, I have built out a very good network over the past, maybe five years in LinkedIn and LinkedIn basically feeds my inbound. That’s where I’m getting all my inbound from. I’ve also got very good relationships with venture capitalists that I’ve worked on. at various different organizations. A lot of the companies I’ve been working with have been BC backed. They know me, they know my style, and it suits them as well to put me in front of some of their portfolio companies. So that’s been really like feeding my inbound. But in terms of adoption here, I don’t see anybody pushing against it. When I go and speak with an organization, they’re always very, very open to it, regardless if they’re in the States or of Europe, right? So right now I work with companies in the UK, in Ireland, Germany, Austria. I’ve been approached by companies in Israel, also the States as well. So I’ve also been approached by companies in Australia and so on. I just don’t want to do that because the phone will never stop if that’s the case. So, uh, you know, I don’t want to be working around the clock. But yeah, I see it being something that people are open to, even if they’re not familiar with the concept. If I bring them through the concept, it makes sense to them, right?
Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. As I understand it, Andy, you focus around SaaS as being your key market. I’m interested to know what the reason for that is. Is it because you believe you can bring the most impact, or is it simply a result of your previous experience?
Andy: I don’t think it’s just SaaS that I’d be able to bring the most impact. It’s just because my experience over the past 10 years has been in SaaS. So people see that, and it’s also hard to find SaaS marketers. So I’m very much of the opinion, if you know your niche, nail it. So that’s my niche, is in SaaS, just mostly because it’s very, very hard to find experienced SaaS marketers, right? Because it’s a relatively, in the general scheme of things, new concept. But honestly, the approach that I take should translate across non-SaaS businesses also. There’s no reason for it. And it’s very simple. I just come in and create a plan alongside the existing team, and then we go execute on that plan. I think the majority of times When I go into a business, one of the core issues is that the team just don’t have a plan. It’s there’s firing from the hip. There’s no, there’s not a line to any, any target. If there is a target, it’s not aligned to company targets. It’s not aligned to revenue targets. I think it’s, it’s aligning the marketing up to the vision of the organization, but also not just to the vision, but also to the target of the organization. And then at the same time, creating a plan around that. You’d be surprised. A lot of companies don’t have that.
Mike: That’s interesting. I can certainly see the benefit of having that vision and bringing that to your client. I’m interested though, you know, in terms of what you bring, is it transferable skills that are a high level of marketing knowledge and expertise? Or is it, you know, being able to understand the company and come in and, uh, you know, really get under their skin? Is that what matters for a fractional CMO?
Andy: Well, yeah, so I really need to understand the company and the space that they’re operating in as well. Right. So a lot of times when I come into an organization, they also need to do a positioning and messaging exercise. So for that, I really need to get to know the space. Like I’ve just signed a customer. I was actually just starting with them today. And they are trying to be everything to everyone. Right. And I’ve just said it there a couple of minutes ago. The thing is, what you should really be trying to do is nail your niche. And today your niche, you need to then make sure that you have messaging and positioning, which is suited towards that niche, right? and they’ve got a lot of work to do on that. And any marketing that they’re doing is not going to be as successful if they don’t do that exercise alongside the work that they’re already doing and try to narrow it down a bit better. And that’s the case that’s probably 90% of the organizations that I come in and work with. It’s very few that come in and say, oh, we have everything perfect and everything’s running wonderfully, which is never the case anyway. But normally, if there’s a change of guard in marketing or something like that, there’s normally The focus from the rest of the C-suite is normally, hey, how can we maybe tailor our message to suit our market better, which is an ongoing exercise anyway. It’s never, it’s a living exercise. And that happens at every single organization that I come into. So to go to your point, to get to know the org and to get to know the environment and the category that they’re operating in is very important.
Mike: So do you have a process for that? Do you have a way that you go in, you learn about the company, their market, understand what they’re doing, and then build a plan? You know, is it a fixed approach or is it more flexible?
Andy: I’d say I try to keep it simple, you know, so look at what their customers are saying about them. There’s simple platforms. You can look at that in the tech space, at least if you look at G2 or Capterra. So you’d be able to figure out very quickly what people are saying and if they’re happy, unhappy, where they’re at. And then also look at what their competitors are doing or how their competitors are pushing themselves in comparison to company X. So what are you saying versus what your competitors are saying? And if you’re telling me that your competitor is 10 times the size of you, they must be doing something right. So how can we use some of the stuff that they’re already doing to bring it forward and do it a bit different? I’m not saying go copy your competitors. But I’d be, I’d be understanding that competitive landscape and how everybody else is positioning themselves and how we benchmark ourselves against that. And then that’s really how I would start. And then again, it’s about speaking with customers. So getting close to the customer, what’s the customer saying about you? What are their grievances? What are they happy about, et cetera, et cetera.
Mike: Yeah, that process kind of makes a lot of sense. One thing I think people would be interested in is, you know, you work in the SaaS market and it has a reputation for focusing a lot of budget on bottom-of-the-funnel tactics like page search. Do you have tactics you feel are evergreen tactics that translate across multiple clients, or is it always a start from scratch and build the plan from the ground up?
Andy: No, it’s not always start from scratch and build a plan up. I think there’s one thing I’ve learned and it’s, again, this sort of happened by accident as well, because as I mentioned, when I introduced myself and my career, I was in high ticket SaaS, right? So minimum deal sizes of 100 to 200K a year and the type of deals when I was working in my earlier sort of Marses and Exponia, then I went to a volume SaaS business. And when in that volume SaaS business, I sort of brought a mindset of, let’s do things that are building brands, not just spending all of our money on Google, right, or paid, which was the case. So when I first went to Leadfeeder, it was like, okay, let’s not do anything that’s not going to drive trial signups, immediate trial signups, like an immediate sugar rush of trial signups. Why would we do it if we’re not going to bring people into a free trial motion immediately? And to me, I just felt as though we were missing something. And, and again, this sort of happened by accident, but COVID hit. And, um, I spoke with a mate of mine who at the time, or I think he still is chief revenue officer and founder of a company called Reachdesk, which is a direct mail tool based out of the UK SaaS business. And we were just chatting and COVID had just hit. And I remember he was sitting in an airport terminal in, uh, in JFK trying to get the hell out of New York. Because they were starting to shut everything down. And I was like, well, this is, this is getting a bit weird. We should try to capitalize on this weird situation and maybe do some content. So we said, okay, let’s, let’s try to organize a webinar. So, um, we did this maybe on a Thursday we were chatting and we put it in on the Friday. We started promoting it on the Friday for like the following Thursday. And we had like overnight, we were talking, so we put the topic of how to, how to sell during these uncertain times. And man, like people, like we had like 2000 signups in the space of a day or something, you know, which was just unheard of. Right. And I was like, Oh, there’s something in this. So I just kept on doing it and getting more and more people on. And we started getting 3000, 4000 registrations in over a couple of space days. And I was like, okay. People were asking me, investors were asking, Hey, is this leading directly to signups? Why is it like, can we track? I’m like, it’s not, it’s not immediately. You’re not gonna be able to track it, but I’m telling you, this is having an impact on the market. And all of our competitors started to try to follow suite, but they were too late and it didn’t work for them. So my point being. The playbook that I try to go in, especially if we’re going into a volume SaaS business is, of course, go after that, like making sure that you’re efficient on your paid spend. So are you getting efficiency metrics right? So is your LTV to CAC, so your lifetime value to customer acquisition costs? Are you operating a three to one on that specific channel, whether it’s a Google or whatever, right? That means you’re being very profitable, right? If you’re over three to one, that’s a general rule of thumb, I think. If you’re over three to one, so if you’re, for every euro you spend, you’re getting three back, right? And if you’re operating at that, or if you’re operating over that, then you can spend more. You can be a bit less efficient, right? But try to aim for three to one. And then at the same time, you should always be trying to do a brand play. And brand play is a long burn. But if you don’t do a brand play, the problem is that when the time comes for the prospect to look for a solution like yours, you won’t be top of mind. So that’s always my thing is, okay, like if you’re doing a brand play, make sure you offer some actionable piece of information that doesn’t necessarily have to do anything with your product. It just helps them in their role. And then when they have the need, they’re gonna come back to you to purchase. And that worked so well for us at Leadfeeder. We’ve seen it over time. We dropped paid budgets down from 100 grand a month down to 30 grand a month, and we’re still seeing the same results. So that was after a couple of months of doing this brand piece. So without being able to fully connect the dots, but I can tell you now that that brand play was massive and had a massive impact on revenue.
Mike: One thing, you know, really interests me about what you said was speed. You mentioned speed a couple of times and you said, Oh, we’ve decided a webinar. It was the end of the week. And you basically set that webinar up for the following Thursday, turning around the webinar in a week. I mean, I know a lot of our enterprise clients would, you know, imagine trying to do that and they’d freak out if you said it would be a week. So how important is speed? I mean, is it something that’s changed, you know, with more uncertainty since when COVID hit or do you think it’s always been important? And actually, you know, are there benefits in some organizations being a bit more perhaps thoughtful and slow?
Andy: If you can put thought into it and also have some speed, then I think that’s the best mix, right? I understand on an enterprise perspective, it may be harder to get things over the line, but I would still try to have people within that, whoever’s leading the team to still put people under pressure to get things delivered quickly. I’ve been in the enterprise setting whereby it takes months and months and months to get anything over the line and 10 people need to decide on this. And honestly, the outcome is not in any way as successful as the outcome that we would see if we tried to get things over the line quickly. And being very open with those webinars, not everyone was a hit. We had one or two that didn’t go well, but we just continued with us. And actually, if I look at that as a whole, we probably did 20 to 25 of them over the space of two years. Right. For example, early on, when I seen that opportunity after initial webinar, as soon as I got off that first one. I called my head of demand, Jen, and was like, we need to organize another one for next Thursday. And he was like, oh, you’re kidding me. I was like, yes, we’re doing it. We did it, got somebody on from my network, quickly move it over the line. Again, 3,000 people. We actually broke the webinar software because it was too many people trying to get in. And again, to go to your point, does the speed matter here? Is the speed going to impact us? In that case, it 100% did. For enterprise businesses, I still am of the belief that speed is very important in these things because otherwise others are just going to get ahead of you. And as an enterprise, you probably don’t care too much about that because nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right? That’s the old adage, right? But at the same time, those larger organizations, enterprise organizations that can be quicker to market with things. That are more exciting like they’re typically the ones that are more exciting day trigger an emotional response within a community or within a network. That then leads to a sale at some point right and the point from these what we were doing there is without me actually focusing on it we were building a community because the same people were coming back week and week. And if an enterprise brand can build a community like that, that ingrains them with that brand, right? It brings people closer to that brand. So I was working within an enterprise organization. I would still deploy the same tactic week in, week out, let’s go. And it would get pushback. Don’t get me wrong. 100% pushback. But I think in that specific case, I would still have done the same way.
Mike: I love that, Andy. I think it’s great advice, but it’s also probably scary, as you suggest to people in the enterprise, to have to push people to go that quickly. I really appreciate you talking about what you’ve done, Andy, and how you approach being a fractional CMO. Now I’d like to look forward to the future. There’s a lot of change in marketing. I mean, you mentioned that you were probably the first Marketo expert in Austria. That was less than 15 years ago. So clearly, things are changing very quickly. There’s now a lot of people running Marketo in Austria, as there are everywhere else. Clearly, things have made a big impact in recent years. How do you see things changing in the future? What’s going to be the changes for, say, a fractional CMO over the next five to 10 years?
Andy: It’s a good question, right? I spoke with somebody about this this morning. Actually, my brother, I spoke with my brother about this this morning. He’s a chief product officer at a tech company as well, a SaaS company. So SaaS is in the family, let’s say. And he was asking me the same question, like, am I seeing from a, cause I also run sales teams and SDR teams as well as doing the marketing piece. I need questions are you seeing marketers or sellers being replaced by solutions now i seeing that all and my simple answers that was no like across the businesses i’m working with now. Any business there’s an example that he brought up was a intercom intercom of doing a lot on the front and. I believe a lot of the stuff that they’re doing in product is AI. Instead of having people working on it, their AI is working on it. And they’ve rolled out an AI product piece, which they’ve gone all in on, and supposedly it’s not getting the uptake that they were expecting. And so I still think there’s this wariness around AI. So a lot of people are have been playing around with ChatGPT, right? Which is great, right? And there’s certain workflows and stuff that you can create to help. For example, I use ChatGPT if I need to put together a job spec, like something that would in the past taken me a long time to put together, two hours or whatever to put together. I just say to ChatGPT, hey, can you put together a job spec? or, hey, I need a landing page copy for an event that we’re running. This is the event. These are the key details. This is what it’s about. Can you come up with a landing page copy? And I’ll go and just start tailoring it, right? So really, my answer to that is I think it’s far too soon to tell how AI is going to impact on things. Other things where I see a bigger impact happening is algorithm related, right? So stuff like, for example, LinkedIn. LinkedIn was a huge driver of marketing leads and decent quality leads over the past years for many businesses, especially when they were doing things like account-based marketing, targeting the accounts that were in their total addressable market and so on, getting email addresses in exchange for eBooks, et cetera. I think that behavior, first of all, the behavior on the buyer side has changed or on the prospect side has changed. And I also think that LinkedIn, based on their algorithm, how they are doing things, first of all, it’s got much more expensive cost per lead, and the impression count has gone down rapidly. So they’ve made some changes there, which have heavily affected how things are going. So I think that’s probably playing a bigger role in the immediate future so that marketers need to tailor how they’re doing their approach towards marketing and the old channels not working the same way as they did two years ago. And now looking at, okay, what’s the best way for me to move forward? And also in the SaaS space, one of the things that’s changed significantly in the past six to nine months. is things like people requesting demos. So buyer behavior has changed massively just because of uncertainty due to, for example, the war in the Ukraine and Russia, due to the election in the US, due to inflation, due to instability globally. And with that, people are not going to your website any longer to fill out a form to see your software. Every company that I know has seen a hit in that. However, they’re still going and doing their research. So with that, there are tools, for example, like Leadfeeder, but there’s also other tools like Sixth Sense and so on that work perfectly as well. There’s more for the enterprise, whereby you could see the buyer intent of companies, for example, searching for a specific category of software, and as well also seeing those companies visiting your site. So that then gives your sales team and SDR team, if you have one, a pointer in the right direction to go after these companies and the buying council that you would typically go after, rather than just sitting there and waiting for the requested demos to rain in, right?
Mike: Yeah, I think that’s very insightful. And although perhaps you ducked a little bit what impact AI is going to have, I think what you’re saying is actually the biggest impact we’re probably going to see is behavior over the next 10 years, rather than the actual technology itself. So I really love that.
Andy: With the AI piece, I don’t know, to be honest, which is the very answer because it’s so early. AI is developing so quickly. If you compare chat GPT to, for example, other technological breakthroughs that we’ve seen over the past years, for example, smartphone. Like AI is moving so much faster than any smartphone technology did. And it’s just, it’s so hard to tell which way it’s going to go. But there’s also things like the Google is a Google, not Google lens, but, um, the Apple computer where you wear the glasses and it’s, it’s, it’s the computer in the, in the glasses, basically. Everybody, I haven’t tried it, but everybody that I know has tried is like, that is 100% the future. 100%. This is the way that we’re moving. Is that the case? I don’t know. It was the same with virtual reality 10 years ago. Did it go that way? No. 3D? 25 years ago, did it move that way? No. I don’t know. I just know that right now AI can be helpful in terms of interpreting data, large data sets, finding meaning within data, and also helping from a number of areas, for example, creating copy and stuff like that, and making things a little bit easier just to maybe speed things up on your side that would have taken a lot of manual effort prior. But now it’s too early to tell.
Mike: Yeah, that’s probably the most realistic way to summarize AI. Andy, I really appreciate your time. I know you’re super busy. So before we go, we’ve got a couple of quickfire questions we’d like to ask people. So I’ll dive straight in and ask you the first one. What’s the best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?
Andy: Ah, that’s a very good question. So I worked for somebody before that just focused heavily on execution. So as long as you’re executing, something is going to work. So the worst thing you can do as a marketer is not execute. And you might not execute because you’re maybe not confident enough to do it. You have an idea, you’re unsure about it, whatever it is. This, this marketing leader told me, make sure that you’re always executing. And that was probably the best piece of advice because people see that you’re doing that stuff is coming out, right? That’s a, it’s first of all, it’s a visuals thing. Otherwise it was like, what’s marketing doing? Nothing. Secondly, if you continue to do it that way, you will have stuff that will stick. And then an additional piece of advice on that, creativity always wins. So if you’re executing and you’re being creative with your execution, then you are ultimately going to win eventually. It’s not always going to work, but it will work sometimes. And that’s the most important thing.
Mike: That’s great advice. Love it. The other question we like to ask is if you’re talking to someone who’s just about to enter marketing as a career, perhaps as a graduate, what would be your advice to them? Don’t do it.
Andy: No, I’m joking. So yeah, my advice to them would be make sure that you understand the numbers. So many marketers come in and don’t really understand the Table got the old school, might be old school thinking nowadays, but the old school lead gen funnel, as an example, or understand how something is impacting the business goals or how something is going to impact a seller when they’re going out to market. If you understand that, then you will ultimately be more successful. And another thing is that people don’t, for whatever reason uses common sense, If you’re creating, for example, content that’s getting eyeballs on it, and those eyeballs are coming from your ICP, but you’re not able to maybe connect back the dots to closed one business, that doesn’t mean it’s not working. So there’s so many CEOs that have come across as like, could all content spend because I don’t see any deals. I don’t see any million euro deals coming from this one blog post. And you need to be able to say, no, This is driving this amount of eyeballs from this particular ICP. Therefore, it is having an impact somewhere in the sales cycle. You’re just maybe not going to be able to measure it. And that’s okay. You don’t need to measure everything. You just need to be able to show the numbers where it matters.
Mike: Yeah, I think that’s really helpful for anyone starting in marketing. Hopefully, people won’t take the first advice if they don’t do it. They’ll actually go in and get dug into the numbers and recognize that whilst those numbers are important, they’re not the whole story. This has been such a great conversation, Andy. I really appreciate it. It’s so insightful. If there’s anyone listening who wants to find out more or perhaps even is looking for a fractional CMO, what’s the best way to get hold of you?
Andy: You get me on LinkedIn, Andy Culligan, or you get me on my website, andyculligan.com. Yeah, they’re probably the best two places to get me.
Mike: Awesome, Andy. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate you being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Andy: Sure. No worries. Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
