Episode 7: Customer Intimacy – Tell Us More…

David Cross  00:00
We all hold a bit of a greater truth inside of us, and it takes us coming together to understand what that bigger truth is. And I think that's the same thing applies with marketing. Marketing is very much of a team sport. I've learned through the years. There's a lot of things I know and have learned, but marketing and the work that I have been able to facilitate has always been better when I'm doing it with others, and whether that's growing and building internal teams working with other partners, we're now being a part of Atlas Rose. We're all bringing unique perspectives to the table that are required for us to have that sense of what's the bigger picture and what's the real truth, as we're trying to help clients.

Randi Beth Burton  00:52
Welcome to The Atlas Rose Podcast. We are excited about our guest today, David Cross. Let me tee up David like this. So we always say it's really freaking hard to grow a marketing business. It's a mantra we repeat all the time, and this guy is in the trenches of that right now. David, he cut his marketing teeth at some lesser known companies like Procter and Gamble and Coca Cola. He sat in the CMO seat of multiple private equity backed high growth B2B companies. He's repositioned brands. He's competed head to head against Microsoft, driven real growth. He has co-founded a startup and sold it to a top 20 US healthcare system. I could go on. He has got one of the most decorated marketing resumes that you'll ever see, and right now he is building something for himself from scratch, and that is Prodessa Partners, his own fractional marketing practice. And that gap between being really great at marketing and actually running a marketing business, that's where we're going to go today in conversation. So I'm excited about that. David, welcome to the show.

David Cross  02:13
Randi Beth, thank you so much. Very glad to be here.

Randi Beth Burton  02:16
Yeah. So you, you've been in big brands, you've been the consultant, you have served within companies on the client side, and now you're in the entrepreneur seat across all of those roles. What thread connects them for you?

David Cross  02:34
So I think there are a few things. The one I would start with is customer intimacy. And if people aren't familiar, there's an old consulting model. It's called the value drivers, and there are typically three of them, operational excellence, customer intimacy and product leadership. So it's an old model, very proven model. You can look at companies like Apple is product leadership, right? They've always come out with the best products, and those products help them lead in the marketplace. Walmart's a great example of operational efficiency, right? Everything they do is about the value chain and getting things as efficient as possible. What I learned through the years, and this is through 1000s of interviews across companies and talking to leaders at companies, the one that really stands out the most is customer intimacy.

David Cross  03:22
And customer intimacy is really three things. It's know my industry, know my company, and know my business. And when you do those things really well, that's how you build relationships and then ultimately build your business. So that's the area, and again, in particular, in the B2B space. Because a lot of people think, oh, that Sure, that makes sense in the world of consumer products. It's equally, if not even more important in the B2B space. A really good example of an automotive manufacturer I work for, I did consulting work for that. We did this research with them, and everyone thought operational excellence was going to be the number one thing, right? You had to get those products to the OEMs on time. Actually, OEM said, No, we expect you to get those products on time. We want you to know our business, and if you know our business and you know us really well, we'll have a much better, more productive relationship. So customer intimacy is really at the core of everything and the core of successful businesses. So I think that's the common thread I've seen across all the work I've done through the years.

David Cross  04:29
Another really important one is the use of data. I actually started my career a long time ago at Procter and Gamble, and I started in market research, and it provided this foundation of understanding the market and using information to make informed decisions and also to enable a test and learn mindset. And those are the organizations that really succeed, are the ones that do both of those so gathering information to help inform. You know, how do we want to go after a marketplace versus just the kind of proverbial finger in the wind, is really critical, and it's easy to get some data and use use that to help make some of those, again, informed decisions. And then once you're actually out and you've implemented, and you're you're executing in the marketplace, to be gathering information, looking at that information, trying to determine what it means for us, and how do we are things working the way we want or not, and if they're not, what changes do we need to make based on that information to get better? So I think that, again, using data is another critical thing that I've learned through the years.

David Cross  05:35
Probably one last one to talk about is, is this connection between strategy and execution, and it tends to be a challenge in marketing. Marketing kind of fall into two camps. We kind of we end up with a lot big emphasis on strategy and figuring out what we want to do and getting all excited, and maybe there's some creative development we all excited about, or we get really focused on tactics, and what are we actually doing to execute businesses again, that do the really well perform well are the ones that bridge both, and it becomes almost sort of a like a yin and a yang thing, where they're working together and they're working together in a constant rhythm of we define a strategy. We put that platted strategy in place. We determine exactly what that means in terms of how we want to execute, in terms of how do we best connect with our market. And then we're using information we're gathering from the market to come back and evaluate our strategy and how well our strategy is working. So again, it's that sort of symbiotic relationship between the two that needs to exist. Candidly, it's an area where marketing tends to struggle in terms of bringing those together. And that's where good marketing leaders do that, and that's an, I think it's an expectation businesses should have of marketing is that they are doing not kind of bridging both of those capability areas.

Branden O’Neil  06:58
I bet you've got a four and a five and a six. I want to stop before you get there, because there's so much gold within what you've just talked about. First of all, not even complete my notes. You said the three things in customer intimacy was to know your industry. Can you say those again?

David Cross  07:13
Yeah, it is, know my industry, know my business, and know me.

Branden O’Neil  07:18
I wanted to go back through these three threads. So customer intimacy, use of data and strategy and execution. I want to have a conversation around symptoms of not doing those things. And I'm saying this because I'm looking at these three things. And we know small business very, very well, and these three things are often not in place before we step in. So just curious, and I'll say also that doesn't always mean that there wasn't a marketer in place, either. Sadly, sometimes there was a marketer. Oftentimes there is a marketer in place, and these three things don't exist. So what are the symptoms in a business that doesn't have customer intimacy, that does not use data in their marketing efforts or otherwise business efforts, and then that does not have strategy and execution as an integrated piece. So let's talk about customer intimacy. First. What are the symptoms guys? What do we think the symptoms are of that?

David Cross  08:18
One of them is the classic, trying to be all things to all people. So they're trying to sell, trying to position themselves as having the solution to every single possible scenario that exists out there, versus making some oftentimes tough decisions around where to focus. And that where to focus translates into what products or services are you going to focus on? How are you going to message those? What have you? So then oftentimes it becomes, I really can't tell what this company does, or should I be buying from this company?

Monica Spieles  08:50
What's funny is you, as you talk about these three points of customer, can see I was looking at it almost through the lens of the business owner in they know their industry very well. That's probably what they're most intimate with. Actually, they're probably least intimate with knowing themselves within the business, what they should be doing or shouldn't, or you know, or why, like, just the reminder of why they started, where they started, and all those different intricacies. So that might even be the least the place that they know the least on some ends, and then know my business. This is where I find a lot of businesses, because they're competing on everything to be everything to everyone. They actually don't know their business very well, because it became this, we talked about this Frankenstein of a business, because they added this, and then they decided we can. We're capable of doing these in our operations. So then let's get into this market and and it adds and adds, and all of a sudden they don't actually know their business the way they think they do. And so it becomes this interesting dialog with your customer, as you're trying to get to know them, they're realizing that they may not understand or know themselves quite as much as they should.

David Cross  10:00
Monica, that's a really good point, slight tweak I would make to that is they oftentimes know their businesses, but they don't fully understand what they've built and what it means in the industry. And that's where a good marketing leader can come in. And we need to understand their business, and we need to help them understand what you have in your business. Here's how we make it relevant and differentiated in the marketplace. So it does have to be that kind of partnership. I think this one relates to the importance of relationships and a business fundamentally having relationships. So whether those relationships are with business partners with ultimate customers, with advocates, what have you. And I always try to make it really simple just to think if it's the business owner or if it's members of the executive teams to make it personal, go just think about your own relationships. Think about your relationships, maybe with a significant other. Think about relationships with children or your friends or your parents, and what does it mean to be in that relationship? And what does it take, right? You have to listen, you have to be able to engage in conversations. You have to meet them where they are. We want to take those same things that apply in a personal relationship and apply them in a business context, and that's where customer intimacy becomes so important, because without it, you can't really be in those relationships in a really productive way.

Branden O’Neil  11:15
I'd say that small business particularly has a greater opportunity to do that than big business, right? Because big business is often, I mean, you talked about your number two is the use of data, which is obviously very present in the second one too, and has some correlations between them. But you can get so far as a small business by the fact that you can see the whites of your customers eyes. A marketer or an executive or a CEO of Procter and Gamble or massive brands, they have to go like, way, way, if they do it way, way, way, way out of their way, to go meet a customer and to understand them, to be intimate with them, right? So a small business does that every single day. That's the opportunity that I think we've got yet, yet we're still falling short, right? And so I love what you said about all things to all people, if you have, and this is to the CMOs out there, or even brands that have a marketer in there, if you have either zero personas, avatars, target markets, right? So if you have no person, we call them personas. So we'll just call them persona. If you have no personas, no tool that personifies your ideal customer, then your likelihood of being of nailing this one is pretty low.

Branden O’Neil  12:45
In the same vein, if you've got too many, if you've got like, three or four or six or eight, right? If you've got a bunch of personas, you're trying to be strategic, but you're not really right. You're trying to be all things to all people. You can never have customer intimacy with that many folks, because you're you're limited in your resources, you're limited in your time. So that that could just never, that could never work. The other thing is, the other gotcha, or symptom I wanted to throw out there was, I think that if everything is to the founders liking, you're probably not practicing customer intimacy, because they're probably not the target market. So if you've got a dictator standing in place, and that dictator in the CEO, in the owner and the founder has to be the sole person that has to like everything without any input from any customer or a thought process of a customer, then that's probably a symptom, too.

Branden O’Neil  13:39
And I'll throw one more out there is just no customer experience focus. We see that customer experience is not only a strategic activity, it's one that that you can build a strategy around, make it define and repeatable, but at the very least, to have it a culture of customer experience. Really elevating the experience of the customer is one of the most important things you can do from a marketing or a business standpoint. And so if there's no customer experience focus, then this customer intimacy thing is going to be that thread is probably cut or not existing.

Randi Beth Burton  14:10
What do you David, I think about now as a fractional marketer, your customer, the client who you're winning over. How do you facilitate customer intimacy with your client, meaning knowing them, knowing their business, knowing their industry. What does that look like on this side, trying to win business as a fractional marketer?

David Cross  14:32
So some of it is, I've been very fortunate through the years. I've worked in a lot of industries, and I have a lot of different experience. So I can, on one hand, I can come in, whether it's healthcare, whether it's technology, whether it's service providers, what have you I have good sense of a lot of different industries. So I come starting from that point, but I always come from a perspective of understanding. I think I used this before meeting the client, where they are. And so there are exercises I've developed through the years, I have an exercise I call the task at hand, and I will, literally will sit down either with a business founder or an executive team, and we spend some time, however much time we need, it can be an hour to a half a day, usually, and we're going through what are some of the business challenges that the organization is facing. And we do an exercise to try to prioritize those in terms of their impact on the business ability to execute what have you. Oftentimes we'll come up with a list of eight to 10 things that that might surface. Something might be product related to brand's point. There might be something about boy, we're not really delivering customer experience very well. There might be an operational issue, but we get all that out on the table, and it helps get alignment among with the founder and or sort of an executive team, the people who are responsible. Allows us to prioritize, but it also then says here's where marketing can have an impact.

David Cross  15:53
And there may be, let's say we come up with eight things, there may be three or four things where really marketing comes into play. But that exercise says, Hey, I care about your business. I want to understand your business, what all is going on in your business. And then we're going to figure out what marketing can do. And I think that's what's really critical. Marketing has gotten almost positioned as the sort of tactical execution, and we're going to go do stuff. And business leaders. We got a lot priorities over here, and are we going to go do this? That's not the way marketing works well. Marketing works best when it's an integral part of the business. So I think that's the the exercise is to ensure that marketing is fully integrated into the business, demonstrate marketing and a good marketing leader understands the whole context of the business. And how do we best as marketers, serve the business.

Branden O’Neil  16:43
That's good. What are the symptoms of the lack of use of data?

David Cross  16:47
That's when you ask questions about what somebody might say, Well, hey, we did really well with this campaign, or this product launch, did really well. And you ask, Well, how do you know that the symptoms is? Well, you know, we just know. Or you know, our gut, and that there is a role for gut. Marketing is an art and a science, but oftentimes the science part gets left, and that's when you ask those questions and there's no data to come back. That's usually the best indication of there's just no no measurement actually being done.

Monica Spieles  17:16
And isn't it refreshing when you're the person coming to the table, especially if you're in the in the process of trying to win business, and asking those questions, where you're saying, Well, this is, this is what I would do to hold my efforts accountable, to to doing what we say we're going to do, to something that is, that's goal related, that's measurable, that's not just going off of gut and off of we think we have customer satisfaction and all these things. What a refreshing thing to come to the table and say, I'm bringing to you something, a process that I work within, a belief that I work within, that literally holds me accountable to what I want to do for your business. I just think it doesn't happen very often anymore. People are very okay with surface level, not even approvals, but just affirmations, and that's enough to keep going and moving forward and not asking the questions that require them to bring data to the table.

David Cross  18:02
Monica, that's used a great word, accountability, particularly with marketing, there can be this feel good aspect to it, right? Oh, that that exercise, or I like that graphic, right? That looks really good. But it may or not because I go all the way back to my days at Coca Cola. There was an advertisement with that was done with an ad that was done football ad with Mean Joe Green, and this guy, he gives his jersey to this kid. And it's all warm and feeling that ad was pulled. And everyone was like, why is that up? Because they ad as feel good as it was, it actually didn't help grow the business. And that was a really good example. I remember early on in my career of because I was like, wow, that seems really good, but when, when you actually did the testing behind the ad, it just didn't work.

Branden O’Neil  19:01
Interesting. Yes, I've seen that ad. I've never heard that didn't work.

David Cross  19:05
It's a perfect example. When you actually got the data behind it, it didn't work, and that everyone had that same kind of it was very surprising.

Monica Spieles  19:13
Which goes back to getting outside of, again, getting outside of the the owner, CEO's opinion of what works and doesn't work. There's a lot of times when, when you're in the process of trying to understand the business and the brand, a lot of times at that moment in time, it's just synonymous with the with the person who owns the company, like that's what the existence of their brand is. So then, as you try to move that forward and prove that that is the needs to be more relevant to their persona. These things help back that gut feeling of well, this is what we've always done and what's always worked. Well, now let's put that to the test. If it is you, if it's a reflection of you, great, that's what we're going to do. But if it's a reflection of what we think your persona really identifies with and is drawn to, and all those things, it's going to show too. And so we get to, get to prove that gut feeling in in through the data, which becomes less of a, I told you so, and it's more of a, let's just, let's just follow the facts in line with what we what was being driven by our gut. And then we get to start to maneuver based on what we see come through. And that's that's the beauty of the art and the science together, is that they do get to work together, but eventually the light shines a little more and a little more clear if you're testing and doing those things well.

David Cross  20:31
And I think Monica that ties to the third area, which is strategy into execution. So I don't know if that was your it was a great that was a great setup. Thank you. Very, very well done. Very well done, because that's where we kind of talked about gut, but the strategy, again, should be informed, but then as you're executing, you're coming back, and we're moving beyond it's a demonstration of maturity. So we talked about accountability. The other things that are related to that, I would say are maturity and discipline. And as for smaller companies, it all time does tend to be a little bit more of a wild west, right? We're just trying to get things going, figure out what's working or not, but even small companies can take some of those initial steps to put in place strategy, get a little bit more disciplined about what they're doing so they can learn and go all right, we've actually put some thought into and hopefully there's some data behind or here's what we think our strategy should be. Now we're going to go execute, and we're going to measure and evaluate and determine if it's working or not. Even small companies can take those steps.

David Cross  21:36
I think there's a there's a misconception to be a small company, or to be entrepreneurial, you just got to kind of shoot from the hip. That is a misconception, because even good entrepreneurs have some discipline in terms of how they're thinking about a market, how they want to tackle that market, and then how they're looking at measuring success. So I think this is part of what I love about being a fractional leader, is that ability to come into an organization, understand where they are, hopefully advance them a little bit in terms of some of that maturity and discipline while, while still not putting in place or doing things that like, listen, we're just not we can't execute like that yet. Got it. What can we do that we're advancing how the business is looking at strategy and execution.

Monica Spieles  22:24
I want to take it one further in the vein of strategy and execution. And there's a misconception that for small business, that they should even do marketing in the first place. It's like, not even, is it to the level of execution or where we are the maturity of it. It's, it's, I'm just too small to even start doing marketing, and that is a I have found that to be, I think, very true for for 90% of the businesses we've we've encountered, they're like, Well, I haven't reached that maturity state, or that, that revenue point that makes sense for me, that the books say, you know, or whatever it may be, there's just this whole bubble wrapped around that. And I know that there is, and I know it to be true because I've seen it, there's a level of strategy through to execution that exists for every size of business, and they deserve it. They deserve it.

David Cross  23:10
Thank you. I was going to use that word. Every business, regardless of their size, deserves good marketing. And that's, again, it's part of what I love, also about the fractional model. And I know we'll talk a little bit more about what we do through Atlas rose, we make that possible for every business, regardless of their size or regardless of their sophistication, in terms of what's in place.

Branden O’Neil  23:35
Yeah,

Randi Beth Burton  23:35
Yeah, when you were talking about back to data, my thought was another reason people don't do it, not because they don't want to hold themselves accountable, but it's just hard. It's hard to have the discipline to put in place, the measure to be able to gather the data, and the discipline to stop and look at it, and the discipline to stop and look at your strategy and build your strategy because of a small business, you just, I don't know a single small business I've stepped into where they don't the business isn't running them to a certain extent, because you are just trying to keep it going, and you have brilliant ideas and chase them. And it's that maturity that's a great connection that happens whenever you will have, you know, instill the discipline that's needed to be able to look at the data and build the strategy.

Branden O’Neil  24:26
It's also a little bit of, know how, I mean, I haven't come across a ton of marketers who actually know, yeah, yeah, right. And so it's it, there's a there's a good mix of it, of it all, I think it. I think deep down, I'm just thinking about a symptom of a couple of these things. So I think deep down, every business owner knows and every marketer knows that they should be testing things. But instead, what we tend to do is have silver bullet mentality. We conjure up some energy and we go and we produce this one ad or this one email, and then we get it out there, and then we watched and something happens or doesn't, and if it does or if it doesn't, we know nothing. All we know is if it did or if it didn't, right. That's all we know. And so going that extra little bit one, you kind of have to know how to do a simple A/B, split test, like the method, the thinking behind it. I'll just say little bit of wisdom, only test one variable at a time. If that's one thing you learned from this session, then there you go. That's that's worth it all, because if you do, if you have an ad, and you put that ad out there, and you put another one out there right alongside it, and split test, it puts equal amount of traffic to both of them, but change one variable on it so it could be the call to action, it could be the message on it, it could be the content of the imagery on it, or whatever. That's a good A, B, split test. When you start to change two things up, you've ruined your tests. It's all over.

Branden O’Neil  25:58
You're gonna get to the end of it and you're gonna be like, I don't know really if it was this or that, or what it could be other things, right? So test one thing at a time. So there you go. Little bit of wisdom. There you should be testing the first thing, the one thing that you put out there is not the best. It's not you're never capable of a silver bullet. It can always be optimized. So if you notice that maybe you're paying for marketing to be done and they're not running tests for you and showing you how those test results are going on a very regular basis, watch out. If you are a marketer and you don't have testing embedded into your practice, it's either because you don't know how, and you need to learn, or because you're being lazy. And I'll raise my hand, I'll say, I've been lazy. I get it. I've been lazy sometimes because it's not easy. It's easier to just keep going, right? The pressure's there, but that's a lack of this second thread that David's given us here is that's that we are, we are missing out on the use of data.

David Cross  26:58
Yeah. And I think right about your point about people thinking it's it's too hard. And I think there's with technology, there's there's some that people that say it's just too hard, I can't do it. There's others that say, well, it's really easy. I'll just plug some stuff into AI and I'll get some stuff and I'll go do stuff. It'll be fine. The reality is, neither one of those things are true, and there's a lot more that's going to it. I I think back to the point about every company deserves good marketing. I was talking to somebody last week who I live in Atlanta, fairly large metropolitan area, and I was talking to somebody who owns a law firm, and we were having a conversation, and he's like, Well, you'd like to do some marketing. So he was least willing to consider it. But so we got into the conversation of how to go about it. And I hope to understand we did a little reason there are more than 3000 law firms in Atlanta. 3000 law firms in Atlanta, and it ranges from, you know, Jim's law firm in a little all the way to 30 of the top 100 law firms are in Atlanta. So now we had that conversation, and then he was like, Ooh, maybe I can't do this, but so that.

David Cross  28:05
But then it became like, No, you have to, because if you're going to compete in for 3000 it makes it even more important in terms of you've got to be really clear about so this, were these two things of identity, which is your brand. So telling him, let's we need to be really clear about what is your identity, so people understand what sets you apart from any other law firm, and why should they consider working with you. And then how do we engage? And that comes back to Brandon and talking about personas, who do you really want to target? And we got very specific about all the different types of who he should be going after and I think that's that conversation is representative of conversations with many, many, many small businesses. Unless you're just happen to be somebody who's fortunate enough to create some new market and you've got a that advantage. The reality is, there you always have many competitors. I've done a lot of work in the technology space. Same thing, there oftentimes tends to be hundreds, if not 1000s of competitors, from very small competitors all the way Randi Beth, you mentioned Microsoft, right? So it's that's where marketing comes in and has to be done in terms of helping you understand how do you compete and achieve your business objectives in those kinds of markets.

Monica Spieles  29:21
And I love that point of diving into your identity as a brand, because if you if all you're doing is competing with your competitors doing exactly what they're doing, and that's what your strategy looks like. You are by default. I mean, you are actually just becoming a mirror image of them. You are not a unique brand. You're doing what you think you're supposed to be doing because they are too. If you know your brand and you know your your persona, and you know exactly what you need to do to talk to them, by default, your strategy becomes very in line with your identity, and then it excels because of that. And so a lot of people get caught in this wheel of their strategy looks exactly. Like whatever their competition is doing, whether it makes sense for them or not, that alone is really freeing for a business. And talk about knowing your industry and then knowing your business, that's where that definition of really diving into those two pieces within customer intimacy is crucial, because it leads to the next and the next and the next, which makes your efforts so much more worthwhile, so much more authentic to you, and serves your core purpose anyway. So I think that's such a cool, a cool point to really hone in on, is is the practice of your strategy is just a really great reflection of the identity of your brand as well.

Branden O’Neil  30:36
Which, to me, we've been saying, doing marketing right? And some folks say I'm I can't do marketing. I'm not doing marketing, or I am doing marketing. And it's like, what is this doing marketing thing? Back in the day, I mean, marketing has been around forever, right? As long as business has been around, marketing has been around. It wasn't an option. This isn't like, I'm going to turn the marketing switch on and off, right? That's not a thing because marketing, think about the definitions of marketing. One, the most commonly cited one, is marketing is just the right message to the right person at the right time, the right way. Who's not trying to do that? Everybody is trying to deliver a right message to somebody at some point in time, right? I mean, everyone's trying to do that. That's just being in business, right?

Branden O’Neil  31:26
Or one that I've come up with is it's sales in the abstract. Marketing is sales in the abstract. It's the same conversation you would have knee to knee with somebody, but you're doing it in a place where you can't see them. Everybody's doing that, right? If you have a website, you're doing that. If you are on an email, if you're sending an email, you're doing that right. So that is that's happening all the time, everywhere. And then a third one that I like is more around customer experience. Is your brand is defined as the sum total of how your customer feels after every interaction with them. So you are branding, you are marketing. You are defining that, but your customer is defining it by their feelings. So that is happening, whether you like it or not. We are all every business on the planet, in all of existence is doing marketing. The question is, are we being strategic and executing on it, or are we just letting it happen to us and hoping for the best

David Cross  32:26
That's a great point, and it sort of a marketing truism, that would be another one of my themes that we cut short after the first three but is is controlling the dialog, and that to your point, It's happening, whether you know it or not, and social media and other things have even changed how organizations interact with marketplace. But that idea of controlling the dialog has become even more important for organizations in terms of understanding how is their presence showing up in the marketplace, and ensuring that across all those sort of those touch points, that the communication and the messaging is as consistent as possible, which is another point of everything communicates, and that's from all the organizations I've worked with, that's been one of the things that we've worked really hard to instill whether it's somebody answering a phone or customer service, whether it's an ad, whether it's a PowerPoint presentation, whether it's even the proposal that you deliver, every single one of those things is a touch point, and they all represent and they all say something about, as Monica said, your identity, what your brand, who you stand for, and why they should choose to work with you or not, and it's not that hard to take all those things and make sure they are working together synergistically. And that, to me, is it's the role of marketing.

David Cross  33:50
Oftentimes, people, the other thing I would say, Branden, about marketing, it oftentimes tends to be the glue across an organization, and it's oftentimes working across a lot of different functions to understand we've got this going on over here. We've got this going on over here. I oftentimes am working a lot with HR and the HR leaders in terms of a lot of internal branding to make sure that people understand who we are and they're talking about things correctly as they're even out engaging in the marketplace or possibly posting whatever it might be. So it is a really critical role of marketing to be working across all of the functions, to bring them together in a unified voice for that identity.

Branden O’Neil  34:29
100% agree.

Monica Spieles  34:30
So good, which is why it's so much more important to be a leader before you're a marketer, because if you're a marketer, then you're staying in your silo. If you're if you have that mindset, you're staying in your silo, and you're not, you're not talking to all the other leaders in the organization that really do need to be surrounded by this epicenter of, you know, not in an egotistical way, but in just a centralized way. Marketing just tends to have its its arms and everything. I was going to bring up something I wanted to get an opinion on. As we were talking about the every small business deserves marketing, good marketing, great marketing. And then we were talking about this use of data and what we're learning from it, and and what I was what was coming to mind. And those two were the, sometimes, the traps that small businesses fall into in this effort to do it, to do it right, they often fall into the trap, I think, of perfection in what they're doing, because it's they're doing it for the first time, and they want it to be great, and they want it to look just right, and every single word has to be right, because they believe everyone's reading every single thing or looking at every single ad. And so just this mentality of progress over perfection for small business specifically, I think is a really difficult challenge for businesses that I've worked with or that we've encountered. I just, I wanted to get other opinions in the room, what that's been like for you, David, and in seeing that at the at the kind of the corporately, the big level, and then the way that that kind of trickles down into the mentality of small business owners and their struggle to put something out there that isn't perfect, rather than just learning from it, like you said Branden, like just, just test it and then learn and fix it. Because everything will not be the best. It will need to be optimized. What are the sentiments of that, that mentality as we're engaging with clients?

David Cross  36:19
Yeah, and that I love that it comes back to the kind of conversation we talked we had earlier, around maturity. One of the things I've, I've found effective with companies, is to acknowledge that tendency or desire. So sometimes I'll work with a leadership team, and we will, we'll say, we'll establish a vision. There's a tool I've used in the past. We actually call it destination planning, which is, hey, where do we want to be in one, two or three years? And that's kind of like the ultimate success. And then we come back, and so we get that out, we acknowledge that is, that's kind of nirvana. That is what perfection looks like. Then what are the steps that we can take to get there? And that then it kind of gets that everyone that gets energized about where we want to go, but then it also sets people back. Right now, we can't just get there. It's going to take some work and effort. How do we break it down into small, manageable steps to get there? And then each one of those steps allows us that kind of learning opportunity. So even that kind of that that approach, allows that sense of we're going to test to learn. We know where we want to get to, what that destination is, but let's, let's take the small steps and learn, learn to get there.

Randi Beth Burton  37:30
Is there a discipline to so I was trying to figure out how to put words to this. It's sort of what you're talking about, Monica, but maybe from a different angle. And I just had this with a client and Branden, I know you have where you have this vision that you're talking about David, and we know who the company wants to be and what sets them apart. And then as we start to communicate that message to customers, so they know who we are, you almost are painting a prettier picture than who the company actually is in the moment, and yet it is what we're aspiring to be. So does marketing kind of drive the like, Are you like a tug of war pull operationally, where, hey, we're gonna we're saying this, so we're gonna make sure that everything's in line to be that and live up to it, or the tension that I'm feeling right now is is saying, I don't want to put that out there, because we're not there yet. I'm not ready to promise something we can't be, but that's who you want to be, that's who you're saying, and that's what sets you apart. So it's a real conflict that I have felt, and I think you guys have felt too. Where's the discipline there? What is the leadership look like in that moment?

David Cross  38:44
So that's where I think strategy becomes really important, because it says, let's define, what are our strategic pillars for the company? And I don't, let's say, let's say service is one of them. And you're right, Randi Beth, we define, hey, there's an ultimate thing for service, but, and maybe there could be five things that define service, but we have one of them right now, and that's okay. And we start with the one thing, and we deliver that well, but we deliver it under the umbrella of that broader kind of positioning around service that we're working towards. That's a good strategy. I love strategies that we say have legs, right? So it's we put something in place. We know it's not going to work for just the next month or two, but we know that it's going to work for several years. And we're actually almost like Tetris or something like that, right? You're adding the blocks and you're building and filling out that picture of that strategy more and more over time.

Branden O’Neil  39:39
What came to mind for me was the difference between core values and key differentiators. So core values are aspirational. They should be. They should be a marker, a milestone out in front of the team to help guide the culture and where it's headed and what in the way we need to operate in our DNA, right? So those are core values, and when you share your core values, they should be shared as core values, and not brand promises or not core not key differentiators, because key differentiators are things that we claim make us different, that our customer cares about and that our competitors can't claim those are key differentiators. So we are saying we are those things, right? So I think that that's where, and the base of our messaging is, is those key differentiators should not be the core values. Core values are internal guide posts, internal drivers for our culture. And key differentiators are external things that we talk about.

Branden O’Neil  40:38
So I think, I think confusing those can be where some of those problems exist. Now sometimes, and we'll look at a founder and owner, could look at the core values that were set and say we're not those things, of which then we just need to remind ourselves, no, we're not exactly we're not not yet, right? We are in some aspects. We're trying to be more and more every day. But like, one of our core values, is God first. Am I God first at all times of the day? Nope. Would I like to be? Yes, I would love to be. I'm trying to be right. And we've set that as a company focus, a company, core value to get better and better at every day. But for us to think that, but for us to get those confused, I think that's where a lot of problems can come in.

Monica Spieles  41:25
I think Randi Beth, where this kind of comes together, and what you were trying to in the way that you're articulating it, that I'm understanding, is this where this progress over perfection and these truths, it's like we're it's like we're stepping out and talking about ourselves for the first time when we're really afraid someone's gonna call us on our like, on our bluff, or on something that's not 100. Yeah, it's imposter syndrome as a business. And you're, you've never, you've never spoken about yourself, or you don't think you have, you have in the sales process, you have in in customer service, you've done in all these other ways. All of a sudden, it's this the term everyone uses in marketing is like, we're just being flashy and putting things out there. So it's this, it's this perception that suddenly we're shining a spotlight on ourselves, and it has to be 100% accurate. And I think that's the tension that's felt, whether it's what we're saying or that it's it's the perfect image, or it's the perk, whatever like it's that that's the tension. So whether it's whether you call it progress over perfection, or what we're saying, or imposter syndrome, I think that shows up a lot in the beginning stages of what they think is marketing now, even though, to your point Branden, they've been marketing for a long time, they've been doing marketing for a long time, suddenly it feels like the stakes are higher. And so it really keeps people, keeps businesses from producing and trying and just going and testing again in the vein of doing it strategically. That's the right that's why we want to do it. But even that is scary, because they've never, they've never shown a light on it before. So I think that's been my experience. But the way it presents and the way it manifests, it always looks a little different, to your point.

Branden O’Neil  43:10
Owners, and I'm speaking from an owner. I'm an owner, right? And we just get in our own ways all the time. And the value of having David you with all your experience and with your time and your drive and your ability to coach me, to then come in and just push me, man, that's so valuable. That's so valuable to just get me past myself and move me in a direction I can be confident in, and then we can start doing marketing, or doing performance marketing. Isn't that what you do?

David Cross  43:42
Yes, performance marketing. There's marketing again, getting its getting in its own way.

Monica Spieles  43:51
Let's circle back to the relational aspect you spoke of in customer intimacy. So in you knowing and getting to know your customer, you become the incredible benefit and value of not being in the industry, in the business, and so surrounded by what you know, you get to bring that almost that validation to the owner and to the business of who they are and and the opportunity right before them that they tend to become blind To because they're so they're so intimate with it all, that's the opposite side of not really knowing your business. So it's they, they're so intimate with their business and and the industry that they can't see the opportunity that you do and that that you get to bring this validation to, which is where we're able to come in say, Yes, this is beautiful. This is the representative of your brand. Let's move to the next thing. Let's push let's coach you through. That brings traction, that brings strategy to execution. I just think I love how that all just ends up tying together, and there's purpose in it.

David Cross  44:52
We were talking about company taking steps, and I when I hear that, I like to throw some big names out there. So Nike now, obviously, one of the biggest sports apparel, money shoes company. And I will say, Well, do you know how they started? Their original name was Blue Ribbon Sports.

Branden O’Neil  45:09
Oh, I didn't know that.

David Cross  45:10
But that, but yeah, so, and that's, and there's so many companies that are like that, Google and others, that all started, but they just got started. They learned, and they advance, like if any of these big companies that we talk about, go look at Microsoft, look at Microsoft, and look at the iteration of how they their messaging and how their logos and everything have evolved over the decades, they're just where they are now. They took a long time getting there, and so that's the one of the things I use a lot of successful companies like that. Just go look at how they've evolved. And they all did this. They all started small, they had conversations, they developed relationships, they learned and then they evolved.

Randi Beth Burton  45:33
So good. Well, speaking of your evolution of of business with Prodesse Partners, I just want to peel back the curtain a little bit on this relationship here and how we got connected to you, David, I know we're all three, grateful for what we learned from you and the experience that you bring just being able to rub shoulders or rub elbows with you, but then having gotten to spend some time with You recently during one of our licensed marketers cohort launches and getting to it's a real just privilege for us to be able to kind of share what we have learned over the years with building a marketing business and growing it and scaling it beyond Branden, the original owner, being able to grow it into into something that you know has a methodology to it and can help out other marketers, which is kind of the next big adventure for us at Atlas rose and so just grateful to have you come and join us in that, and want to you know if there's anything else you want to add to that, and kind of Your experience so far with growing and building your brand and what your what your next steps look like in this, in this early stages for you.

Randi Beth Burton  47:07
Thank you for putting that out there. I think again, we'll go personal and into the business world. And you know, on a personal level, I believe we all hold a bit of a greater truth inside of us, and it takes us coming together to understand what that bigger truth is, and I think that's the same thing applies with marketing. Marketing is very much of a team sport. There's a lot of things I know and have learned, but marketing and the work that I have been able to facilitate has always been better when I'm doing it with others, and whether that's growing and building internal teams working with other partners, or now being a part of Atlas Rose, we're all bringing unique perspectives to the table that are required for us to have that sense of what's the bigger picture and what's the real truth, as we're trying to help clients address their issues, whatever may be the task at hand. I think there's a you mentioned tension before one of the conversations. I believe in this kind of process of creative tension, and it's that idea of when we're trying to solve something, that ability to solve that issue, we always do it better when we've got multiple perspectives that are coming to the table, aligned against a common purpose, and working together and kind of elevating the conversation, in many cases, to get to an outcome that we never could have achieved on our own. So I believe that's how that's how business works well. It certainly has how marketing works well, and it's really, it's what I'm excited about with this, the relationship with Atlas Rose.

David Cross  48:43
So the company I'm building, Prodesse Partners. It's very intentional. Prodessa is that the word means to be of service and to do good. That is my intention for small businesses. Whatever those businesses are, is to be of service to them. I believe I can be the best service to them by bringing not just me, but bringing all these other resources to bear, in terms of what Atlas Rose brings to the table, and that, you know, the time that we've spent together and all of the capabilities that exist in terms of, we've talked a lot about testing, so things that really make testing, I think, bring transparency to testing, and how we're looking at all the things that we're doing and how we're testing them. The ability to actually put in place strategic plans in a very disciplined way, the ability to create a really strong cadence in terms of how we are engaging and working with clients over time. Those are all things that Atlas Rose has done an incredible job of building out, and also this idea of meeting the client where they are.

David Cross  49:48
We have a whole range of different products and services, right? So I just was talking to somebody yesterday who's works with a lot of small city governments, and he works with, oftentimes, city managers, what have you. He's acknowledged need of they do a lot of communication. They're not really good at it. They're not really good at also understanding their identity and communicating. So we're talking about how best to serve them, and some of the group coaching work that we do would probably be really good for them as a starting point to allow them to very quickly come in very cost effective ways to learn some of these strategic principles we've talked about of personas, what have you, and then start to deliver on those versus other clients, where we have more sophisticated, longer term ways of engaging with them, but still bringing that discipline and cadence. That's what I love. And we talk a lot about the ability to kind of get the work done, but make sure we're really delivering the value, and that's as leaders, our time is best spent in those difficult conversations, versus creating a spreadsheet to try to manage a plan over here, that stuff's all placed. It's there. So we've got all these great systems in place that then can really enable the value added work to happen so we can truly serve those businesses.

Branden O’Neil  51:06
Yeah, thank you for that. I mean, you know, everything that we've got in place, and the reason why we why we had offer it to you, is is our goal is for you to be as successful as you possibly can and to maximize your hourly rate. So that's that's been my biggest struggle over the last 1415, years is of trying to build and grow this thing, is this balance between building it and then scaling it right? And it's because there's a million things that have to be done outside of actually your billable hour, right? So the less of that you have to do, and the more you can get back to your billable hour, it's just a better balance of life. First of all, it's a better lifestyle. And then two, you get to just spend your hours being billable and protecting your hourly rate. So all those things you mentioned, community and frameworks and all those things, it's, for me, it's like the relationship is really what's key for us. Like we would do all this for free, if you'd, if you'd be our friend. But all goes back to relationships. It really does. Yeah, it's great doing business with people you love, you know, like we say that all the time is so true, but we want you to be so stinking successful, and we're going to do everything we can to do that, and we've given you a lot for that. So anyway, I'm glad to hear you say that. Glad to hear you say that. Thank you for putting those words there.

David Cross  52:25
I think we're all part of a we have a common mission of marketing has lost its way over the years, and we are all committed to bringing marketing back to what marketing was and what it should be. We laughed earlier about performance marketing, right? What that's that's marketing, trying to market marketing, right? Oh, it needs to be about before. Well, I was talking to CEO a couple of weeks ago, and he's like, Well, what's your experience with performance market? Like, well, everything I've ever done relates to performance marketing, because if you can't, if you can't, show ultimately, how what we're doing is translating into some performance, you're not marketing. So that's that's just a good example of our marketing has kind of gone astray recently.

Randi Beth Burton 00:51
Welcome everyone. Welcome to the Atlas Rose Podcast. Today’s conversation is one that I’ve been looking forward to, we’ve been looking forward to. We have Wendy Wilburn with us. She is a fractional CMO, a StoryBrand guide, a business builder, a storyteller, founder of Windustry, her own fractional practice, and she is out there doing the work in the trenches with her clients, making things happen, and that’s exactly why we wanted her here. We are going to talk shop. We’re going to talk about what this work actually feels like, the wins, the weight of it, the leadership side of it, and really what it takes to build something that’s sustainable in the fractional world. Wendy, we’re genuinely honored to know you and excited to pick your brain a bit today. Thank you for joining.

Wendy Wilburn 01:44
Thank you. Well, I’m looking forward to this. I love good conversations with smart people.

Randi Beth Burton 01:49
Wendy, I’ll just kind of toss it to you. Can you give us just a bit of your background? You can go totally professional or tell us personal things too. We love that.

Wendy Wilburn 01:59
I’ll give you a little combo, a little poopoo trick. So I am a native Texan born and raised here in Dallas, and got an economics degree down in UT Austin, and came right back home. But my my story is a little bit different in from my career perspective, in that I learned at a young age, actually, I was 14, I learned the power of entrepreneurship versus having a job, so while all of my friends were babysitting and hostessing at Bennigan’s, now I’ve dated myself and those kinds of things, I when I became a high school freshman cheerleader, I realized that, as I had the cheerleading, well, first of all, here in Texas, football is religion and Sunday school is cheerleading, so they’re kind of hand in hand. So, but behind me were a bunch of girls in eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, fifth grade, who were trying out every spring also, and needed coaches.

Wendy Wilburn 03:11
So I started in 1983 charging $50 an hour for private cheer classes and between my freshman year of high school and going off to college, I had five figures worth of savings from teaching these cheer classes, so I learned again, the power of entrepreneurship, but I also didn’t learn until later in my adulthood, the power of leveraging others to where you know what I had done when I was 14 was created a job for myself. I hadn’t really built a business. So there’s a lesson in that that we can touch on later also. But anyway, went down to UT, got an economics degree, came back right back home to Dallas. But during my senior year of college, I started a marketing consulting firm, traditional marketing and PR firm, because the economy was horrible. It was Desert Storm, my friends who had very high GPAs were not getting jobs, so I did not have a high GPA. I had a lot of fun down at UT and barely graduated, so there was no hope for me.

Wendy Wilburn 03:11
So I started a company, and looked up eight years later, right as the internet was coming online, ’97 ’98 and realized that marketing was going to go the direction of the internet, that that was going to be the way that you could actually give data and statistics and actual actionable business insights around your marketing through the Internet where you’re as you couldn’t with traditional advert. In public relations, you can, you can make an estimate of how many people pick up a print magazine, but do they go to page 47 and look at your ad? That’s the right quarter page of the ad, and then do they call the one 800 number? And do you actually get a customer from that? There’s no tracking that.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
And so that realization led me to convert the traditional marketing consulting company to a web design, website build company, and I ran that for a couple of years and sold that to what used to be called Internet service providers before AT&T and Verizon and T Mobile got into the game. There were separate companies that were the internet service providers, like AOL was one of the biggest ones. That’s not who I sold my business to, but I sold it to one that was based here in Dallas, because I thought I needed to be a grown up and go and get a real job with a title and an office in corporate America. What you do when you’re 2728 years old. So that’s what I did, and that started kind of my journey across the rest of my career, which has been in and out of corporate America from a consulting perspective.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
So I’ve spent time at firms like Accenture valtech. There’s a company here based in Dallas called briarland partners. I’ve either been in those companies then consulting to everything from Fortune 50 to Fortune 5000 or running my own independent consulting firm, like I’m doing now, but always from the lens of Digital Strategy, digital marketing, digital brand, and how to translate that online. And so I ran across or picked up Donald Miller’s first book, his StoryBrand framework, a few years ago, and just totally was overwhelmed with a the resonance of that book with me in the idea of taking marketing 180. Most people in talking about their businesses, they’re all I, me, mine and we sentences. It’s all about their company, what they do, the services that they provide, etc.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
And to have someone like Donald Miller come out and say, You’re doing it wrong. You’re not talking to the customer and their pain point and what? Why should they care? That was a an aha moment for me. And so I was completely sold on his framework and his platform and his positioning, to the point where, this time last year, I got the StoryBrand certification and am now a certified story brand workshop and programmatic delivery of that marketing structure into clients.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
So I do that. And then I also, because of my time within Accenture and firms like that, I roll that into a digital strategy workshop. So I don’t just do the StoryBrand and then say, Okay, here’s how you need to talk to your customers. I then take that a step further and say, Okay, here’s how you need to be talking to your audience, on your website, in your email, in your social posts, when your CEO goes and speaks at a Keynote or a conference, you know these are the things that you need to be saying. This is what’s resonating with your audience, and here’s how you position yourself as the guide rather than the hero in the story.

Monica Spieles 03:44
Gosh, I’m like babysitting.I don’t know, $5 an hour is what probably my rate was. I wish I would have done wasn’t a cheerleader, but I would have loved a $50 an hour rate. Man, that’s called 10-xing right out of the gate. That’s amazing.

Wendy Wilburn 03:44
I think what I love about your story, Wendy, and when we met a few months back and we had our conversation, what I just love about your story is that you’ve got a little bit of everything. In terms of experience, you’ve got a little bit of everything. I mean, everything from from working in the biggest businesses to the some of the smallest, business and in between, to running your own, to selling your company to and all that before you were 27 Yeah, and then everything in between on that. And it’s just really cool. Where do you find the most joy in all of that? And and I know you’ve chosen a path now, obviously, in your your firm in that. And I’m just curious where, that joy, in terms of all that experience, where does that really sit now?

Wendy Wilburn 09:45
So my joy really comes when my clients have that aha moment of, oh my gosh, we have been sitting here. Wah wah wah wah wah. You know, Charlie Brown’s teacher. Into the screaming and spitting into the ocean and not getting anywhere, and then when they have that realization of, oh, if we just double down, triple down all the way in on this is our client’s problem. Here’s how our product or service solves that problem, and just the light bulb that goes off when I watch them realize, wow, our company is more than just this pen.

Wendy Wilburn 10:33
This pen is meeting in the hand of a poet is mind boggling. This pen in the hand of a composer can make people cry and move them to tears. This pen is a piece of plastic, and it writes on paper, and it’s disposable, and eventually the ink is going to run out of it and we’re going to toss it into a landfill. But the potential of this pen, and the emotionality that can come out of this pen, that’s where I get this just high off of watching a client realize that their product, even though it could be as boring as this pen, has this capability to be so much more In the world and make a difference in the world.

Monica Spieles 11:23
Oftentimes, I think we’ve, we’ve experienced that in the way of reminding the aha moment is, is the founder or the owner remembering or being reminded of why they started the business in the first place? And they got into just believing that all they were doing is selling pens, when, in fact, actually their first vision and whole, you know, mission was to equip composers, to equip poets, whatever that may be, you know. So it’s, I love that moment that you’re right. I’m doing this is not, this is not a J-O-B that I created, you know, it’s actually, it was a business I built to fulfill a mission and a purpose, and that can be lost so easily. So I love that we’ve seen those tears every once in a while that come from those moments.

Branden O'Neil 12:10
Wendy, you know our audience, our primary audience on this show, are other fractional CMOS, and so a lot of what we like to talk about here, and what we like to talk about with you is the business side of things. So, like, your story is just perfect for for folks that are trying to do something similar yourself, right as yourself. And so they’re going to come alongside your story, find themselves in it, and it’s they’re going to find it inspiring. A couple things that I find inspiring are one, I asked you, what brings you joy? And you literally lit up. And you’re a joyful person anyways, but you literally lit up, and when you were talking about that light bulb moment and things like that.

Branden O'Neil 12:50
And so I think, to the audience, I would just like to say, if you find yourself in burnout, remember the why, right? There’s a lot of fractionals out there that are just, they’re just burned out because difficult clients. It’s extremely, extremely difficult to run a fractional business and serve clients at the same time. There’s lots of reasons for that, but if we forget, it’s really easy to disconnect ourselves from why we’re doing this in the first place, and to chase the joy, you know, and that’s why I just love I love that. And so that’s inspiring. And so again, to the audience, if you don’t find yourself lighting up when you talk about why you do this, like we just saw Wendy, do, you might need to get in touch with your why. Again, you might need to think about it. Maybe you’ve never thought about it before, right? This isn’t just a way to make money. This is a way to spark joy in yourself and other people.

Branden O'Neil 13:45
So and another thing I saw in your story is that I think is lacking in the industry, a lot are folks that are willing to roll up their sleeves, right? So I think that there’s a lot of of framework pushers, maybe or or bag a trick folks, or wing it type of people that go out there and and they do their thing and say, good luck with that, right? So we often say, you know, they come in kick your puppy and say, good luck with that. So what I hear, what I’m hearing from you, and where a lot of your success is coming from, is that you’re you roll up your sleeves. It doesn’t mean that you have to do all the tactics, but it does mean that we walk along with them. So I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit more about that. I was thinking like about your workshop and the way that you just kind of are.

Wendy Wilburn 14:34
So it’s, I think you have to walk along with them. But the advantage that you provide, in my opinion, as a fractional is that you’re not completely in the forest. You have the ability to to have that, you know, somewhat outsider view, or viewpoint, to where you can offer because they’re in it. And they are in the spaghetti bowl, and your ability to be outside of that and provide a different perspective is really where the in my opinion, it’s where your compensation comes from. Like you’re not when you pay for me as a fractional CMO, you’re not paying me for what I’m doing today.

Wendy Wilburn 15:23
Right now, you’re paying me for the fact that I learned the lesson back in 1997 about fill in the blank, or what I learned in 2001 when planes hit towers and the entire, you know, our entire ecosystem of business collapsed and had to be rebuilt. You’re paying for that, and also for the creativity of different I have things that I apply to clients today, that I applied to clients back in the early 2000s that are in completely different industries. It’s funny how the pain point or the solution is the pain point on the customer is similar, and therefore the solution and the messaging can be similar.

Wendy Wilburn 16:14
And yet I’m talking about T Mobile versus a nonprofit client that I had. And that there can’t be two things that were more different, but yet, the solutioning from from my brain and the points of similarity that came together for me was to T mobile’s advantage back then, but was to this, this nonprofit’s advantage just three years ago. So, so I agree with you, Branden, that it is you’re you are walking alongside them, but only enough you don’t get sucked into their vortex of the way that they are looking at things. You have to, you have to be somewhat removed, because that’s what you’re really getting paid for.

Randi Beth Burton 16:59
Yeah, that’s really good Wendy, that’s something that’s that would be advantageous to all of us to be able to articulate when bringing on a new client. Because you get you get sometimes you’ll get pushback if you’re not in the industry of whatever it is like, so you have not helped this particular manufacturer do this thing before. Then why would I hire you? And it’s that perspective that is actually really valuable. When Branden, when you were talking about Wendy lighting up in her at her joy, I think that’s something we get to see with our clients, too. And that’s what you said, brings you joy, the aha moment, because we get to step in, into this spot, and we either we’re doing brand standards and we’re talking about who your ideal target customer is, or we’re doing a StoryBrand framework and we’re talking about what problems you solve that business owner hasn’t talked about that day in and day out with their staff, probably in a little while, and they forget why they do what they do, and they start to have that joy come back up of like, what we do really matters, and I love that we get to kind of sit at that intersection and have that conversation. But it’s that conversation that we’re having with multiple clients across multiple industries that makes us effective, because it it translates across multiple industries. It’s not it allows us to be effective no matter who it is that we’re serving.

Wendy Wilburn 18:28
Absolutely and you have to be the one that leads people to those realizations, because otherwise, if you’re talking to one manufacturer, and who’s trying, who’s trying to say, Okay, we’re trying to decide whether we’re going to hire you or not, Randi, and they’re a manufacturing firm. What have you done for other manufacturing firms? Okay, well, the end of that conversation is price. It all becomes a conversation about price. And when the conversation becomes about price, it’s a race to the bottom. Who’s going to get there faster? Who’s going to be Walmart? And then hate their life because they became Walmart. Not that I don’t like Walmart. I was in Walmart yesterday. I’m just saying it becomes so cutthroat that it takes the joy out of what your business is at all. You have to find a way to communicate the the way that you are unique, and you have to convey that emotionality, that connectiveness with your target customer, so that they feel like you’re in it with them together. That’s what creates loyalty and brand advocacy, is that co-identity that happens. It’s a very powerful force.

Monica Spieles 19:51
Back to the industry conversation. The one thing that’s really I think people forget is that when they find so much value in. Having someone from the industry be their their expert, they forget that that comes with the same bag of trip tricks that everyone else is using, and so you’re really not differentiating yourself at all. Go further into it, let’s say you do end up getting to be the outsider that comes in. We get to experience that over and over and over, still, just because we’re in doesn’t mean we’re we’re in. There’s always a battle about, well, that’s not how the industry does it. That’s not how we’ve done it. This is, you know, you’re, you’re the challenger, and that’s a really good thing. That’s a lot of times good management will recognize that’s what they hired you to do. They want you to challenge them in that regard. But other than facing those being the outsider constantly. What is something, Wendy, that you’ve experienced as it takes more energy to manage a client or to be in that seat than people probably realize when working with clients?

Wendy Wilburn 20:54
I think it’s the fact that you have to become somewhat of a psychologist or a psychiatrist, a little bit because people really do not want to change. I mean, even the fear of change and the desire to hang on to the devil you know, rather than risk it with the devil you don’t, is a powerful force, and it keeps companies stuck. It keeps people stuck in relationships that there that aren’t serving them anymore. And it takes bravery. It takes bravery to jump out there and do something different, and especially if you’re talking about a public company with stockholders and a board, and what have you done for me this quarter mentality? That’s a that’s a big it’s, it’s, it’s a huge thing to shift a brand front to a customer-centric mind set, from a product-centric mindset, and if you don’t have that leadership from the top, like a Steve Jobs type of leader, it’s it’s extremely tough, especially when you’re the expedient outsider that once you say the one time too many. Hey guys, you aren’t talking about the customer anymore. You’re talking about yourselves again. They’re like, okay, Wendy, bye, bye. We’re done. We’re done with you. We’ve heard it enough. We’re done there.

Monica Spieles 22:32
It’s that reminder that just because they accepted change one time doesn’t mean they’re they’re bought into every single time it is, it’s you find yourself having that same conversation over and over, having to remind the goal and the road that they’re on that they chose, even though it’s not really what they wanted. They knew they had to choose it. That is a big challenge, I find, because you because you want to get into operation of we’ve got momentum now. We know the road ahead. Here’s how we keep going. But you hit roadblock, roadblock, roadblock, because it’s re-educating, re pitching, reminding that team that this is this is what we’re choosing to do, and not having to sell it over and over and over again. It’s hard. It’s hard.

Wendy Wilburn 23:17
I’ve gotten to where, when I do story brand workshops, especially if it’s like a group of people, and we’re live and I’m up in front of a whiteboard, and we get to that aha moment I’ve gotten to where now I literally whip out my phone and take pictures of the people, because I have to remind them of their faces. They they’re lighting up like, you know, two months later, when we’re in the middle of budget review time. You know it, it’s like, Wait a minute. Do you remember how this felt? Do you remember how you went, Man, that’s something we can get sink our teeth into. That’s something our sales people can get excited about that’s something that our customer service reps don’t feel like idiots trying to discount, discount, discount, you know, I I’ve gotten to where I do that to remind them, and then if they still want to, you know, cut short my contract with them, then that’s fine. It’s their choice. And I tell them, good luck. Because clearly, the you know, it’s I it’s almost a Dr.Phil moment, you know, how’s that working for you? You know, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to keep getting what you’ve always got. And so when we look at trying something else.

Branden O'Neil 24:36
I love the so we’ve been talking around this subject a lot, and then I love what you said about we can walk with them, but we can’t be in the trees with them. We have to have a wider perspective. It’s really hard in our role, especially as we want long-term relationships, to find that balance right. Because if we’re too far in the weeds with them, then we’re we’re probably being irrelevant, or certainly we’re not fulfilling our role of being able to look out and having that greater perspective. If we’re too far out, then we’re just an outsider, and we’re being irrelevant because we don’t understand the business in their minds, right in their minds. And so that balance of being a leader within the organization, but still able to look out across the horizon, that’s a tough balance to have right.

Branden O'Neil 25:21
And then, and then also, because you’re, you’re going through the bumps and the bruises of the business at the same time as them, and we are, again, I’m going to go back into your entrepreneurial roots. I’m convinced that nobody really wants to do marketing. I’m convinced that that for entrepreneurs, marketing and sales is really just a necessary evil, because what they would really love is for their business to grow and that they didn’t have to do any marketing or sales. It just happened. But the reality is, is that they have to, but they’re already coming into it like they have to, you know, I mean, like they can kind of get with the sales folks. I get it, somebody going out and talking to people like, I get that as tangible, I understand. But then it comes to marketing, and they’ve probably been burned 20 times before by marketers, and so they already have a bad taste in their mouth, and so they’re already trying to, like, I mean, they said yes to the contract, so they’re trying to pull you in, but then they’re pushing you out, and then you’re trying to do the same thing. And it’s all really difficult. This is a difficult balance to run. I mean, have you found kind of something similar?

Wendy Wilburn 26:27
Well, I find Branden, especially with smaller businesses and startups or VC PE backed firms. I’m going to give you just a like a typical scenario, it’s a tech founder, small team develop something in somebody’s fourth bedroom, and it’s a brilliant idea, but they think they’ve invented the mouse trap that’s going to cure, cure every kind of cancer for all time, for forever. And so we don’t need to market. All we have to do is just say who we are and what we do, and we don’t need to market the world is, in fact, we don’t need to market so much, Wendy, that we’re afraid that if we hired you to actually market, it would crash our entire system, because we would have so many people beating a path to our door that it we would crash the internet so we cannot be responsible for crashing the internet, so we don’t. That’s what I hear more than anything else. Is that my can of cheese is so much better than everything else in the world. I don’t, I don’t need you, and I don’t need to tell we. Just need to say who we are and what we do. And everybody will go, oh my god, I have to have that, like, it’s the fountain of youth or, you know,

Monica Spieles 27:54
And on the flip side, it’s, it’s all these businesses that have been so successful despite anything else that they’ve they’ve just tripped over success, almost, because they did create something amazing, and people did need it, and then they stopped growing, or they started realizing, now I have to engage in something. I’ve plateaued, but I’ve only ever done word of mouth marketing. I’ve only ever just had referrals, and that’s we’ve been so successful off that so, like, why do I need to, why do I need to engage in anything different? This has always worked for us, even though they know in the back of their minds we’ve been flat the last few years and and so that’s that push and pull of, like, I kind of know I need to do something different, but we’ve always been able to 40 years, 30 years off of not doing anything in marketing, and it’s just too abstract.

Wendy Wilburn 28:46
I think you know, more people like us need to get the ear of VC firms and PE firms and say, Hey, if you’re going to invest in these businesses, you are the ones that can drive in the contracts you need to allot 50% of what we’re giving you to marketing and hiring quality marketing people and quality sales people who can get out there and tell your story properly and drive this hockey stick revenue that we expect to See. What typically happens, though, is 95% of the budget goes into, or more, they overspend in R&D, and then it’s like, okay, they don’t even have, you know, the 50 bucks to put up a GoDaddy one page, you know, something. It is like, really?

Branden O'Neil 29:41
Yes, make sure that $50 doesn’t open the floodgates, because we’ll break the internet.

Wendy Wilburn 29:49
Right, right, exactly.

Randi Beth Burton 29:52
It’s so funny. Wendy, I hadn’t, I hadn’t put words to what you said around you know that you get. The pushback of like, well, I’m not sure we could handle the floodgates that would open if you did any certain amount of marketing. And I’ve had that happen, and I almost like, kind of like that they believe I would be that good. But then I also have to say, you need to let me do this, and it’s not gonna open the floodgates like you think, like, I have to lower your expectations. It actually,

Monica Spieles 30:23
You kind of said it Wendy, it comes down to an education of what marketing actually is. And a lot of people forget what it really how it should serve, what it serves, what it is. And we expect that they know that when we go in to sell ourselves. And so there’s a meeting in the middle point that we have to remind ourselves, and it continues to happen throughout the relationship of of educating what our role is, what to expect, how we hold ourselves accountable to what you expect and what you need, because otherwise it’s like we’re we’re actually talking two different conversations, and that’s why there’s never this great win or there’s frustration if we did get the deal, and that education piece is just has been missing. It’s been missing for a long time, and it becomes a part of our vernacular always, because it’s very broad. What marketing is is very broad. And we’re not going to we’re not going to cover it in a single conversation. We’re going to continue to bring you into that throughout the relationship.

Monica Spieles 31:23
And that’s I think all marketers need to need to come away with that. We’ve learned that lesson a lot of times, is we are so convinced of what we need to do and what they need to do, but all along the road, we forget that we’re still seen as the people who are just doing business cards. And so how could we possibly be influencing a pricing strategy or go to market strategy on anything like really, where does our value sit? And so, I mean, when you have that much confidence to sell yourself at $50 an hour as a cheerleader back in the day, then you certainly now have the confidence to sell yourself at with great value for what you can do for businesses and we but we’re not seen that way, because marketing isn’t seen that way.

Wendy Wilburn 32:07
And I want to go a little deeper on that. I you know, I’ve started having a theory about it seems to me that everyone that marketing gets put last and money isn’t allotted toward it because everyone thinks they can do it. Everyone doesn’t think they’re a dentist, everyone doesn’t think they’re a lawyer, everyone doesn’t think that they’re a fireman, like there are professions that people know I don’t have that skill set. I need to hire someone or I’m going to get into legal trouble. I’m going to screw up my books and get you know the IRS is going to come after me. Like these are bad things that can happen.

Wendy Wilburn 32:53
If they don’t have good marketing, really good marketing. They think they can live without it. They think it doesn’t matter. And I think most people believe in their gut that they personally are extremely influential in their words, in their behavior. I think that we all as humans, think that we have far more power than we actually have over other people. And so therefore, I think that everyone thinks at their core that they know marketing. And so that you compound those two things, it’s that not thinking that marketing is really worth all that much, and then the fact that everyone kind of thinks that their gut that they could do it, you’ve got a recipe for it just it gets set to the back burner. It gets set aside.

Wendy Wilburn 33:46
It’s, I don’t believe, I believe that the chief marketing officer is the one c-suite position that is the least respected, because it’s fluffy, it’s creative. It has been now. It’s data driven, but traditionally it’s been, oh, you’re the logo girl, or the color palette thing, or, you know, you’re designing the booth at the conference. And yes, there are things, those are aspects of marketing, but it’s rooted in a foundation that is far more powerful and influential and actually has a direct correlative to your bottom line than a lot of people give it credit for.

Monica Spieles 34:31
Yeah, the consequences are not as tangible. Sometimes you’re so right.

Randi Beth Burton 34:36
That education piece, I think that’s something that it’s this important topic for fractional because we’ve talked to we’ve talked to some who, if you’ve been in a career in where you’re a marketing director inside an organization, you’re not necessarily having to teach everyone why you’re doing what you’re doing. You just do it, and you’re either successful or you’re. Or not. When you switch into this fractional world, you also it’s important because people either think they can do marketing or don’t really understand the foundations of why things are done the way that they are. And you have to teach it.

Randi Beth Burton 35:18
Atlas Rose began as marketing strategy coaches. That was a name before it was Atlas rose, because that’s really what we are. We’re coaches, we’re teachers, we we don’t tend to call ourselves consultants, because we don’t want to just come in and say, This is what you should do and then leave. There’s a lot more teaching that goes into that, and here’s the why behind it, and this is how you can evaluate its effectiveness and so forth. I find that that that’s a difference, typically, from being within an organization to then becoming fractional. How often do you find, Wendy, that you are teaching a lot? Or for me, in my absence of teaching, I usually find that I wish I had or that I had gone back and explained certain things. How’s that? How’s that experience been for you when you’re serving clients?

Wendy Wilburn 36:11
You know, I do find that I’m teaching a lot. I find that it takes a lot of understanding the client’s background and where they’ve come from, and what they’ve been through up to the point that they engage with me what’s worked and what hasn’t, and then really drilling into well, why do you think that hasn’t worked? Or why do you think that has worked? And usually, nine times out of 10, I can find that thread from someone in the room who says something that can then be the start of the foundation that I lay as to why the StoryBrand framework works like I can talk till I’m blue in the face about movies and storytelling. And this is the seven step arc of every movie you go to and every book you read like this is, this is what we as humans emotionally connect to.

Wendy Wilburn 37:12
We connect to this pattern of storytelling, but saying that and having them realize, okay, yeah, I see that in Star Wars, and then trying to apply that to their again pen company, that’s a that’s a big chasm to get them across, unless I can extract out of someone in the room that one time that they were able to sell a palette of 24,000 pins to blah customer, tell us about that. How did that happen? How did you get there? What did you do? And then they tell the story. And inevitably, there’s a thread that will link to the StoryBrand concept. And then once I can get them to lower them, the people in the room, to lower their guard on okay, this woman isn’t whack a doodle, maybe I can listen to this a little bit, then you can start the process of influencing that. But it’s, it’s education, I mean, and it’s a lot of listening, it’s a lot of listening, and a lot of you know.

Monica Spieles 38:24
And lot of conviction in that you’ve seen it time and time again, you know, the foundations of marketing that are crucial to have established to be successful in any kind of, you know, strategy that you’re you’re going after, and to have the conviction to stand behind that every time and not let that be a loose acceptance of if we’re going to do it or not. You know it is, it is how we’re going to run this effort. And so that’s that’s crucial.

Branden O'Neil 38:51
I always say that we have to earn the right to call ourselves CMOs every time we enter into a client situation. Right? We are not gifted that, sure they may be buying our marketing title or whatever product, productization, you know that we sold our agreement under. But at the end of the day, we have to come in, and we’ve got to earn that. And at Atlas Rose, what we do, the way that we do that is, is we start off with, like a real deal, big, heavy lift of a 12 month strategy, typically. There’s other ways to start, but typically that’s that’s how it works best, because when we’re able to come in and and tell the client things that may they may not have known or asked questions that they haven’t been asked before or asked in a while, but business type questions, not marketing type questions, right?

Branden O'Neil 39:45
I mean, it’s not like, what’s your favorite kind of social media post, and, you know, how can we help you? It’s like, it when we start to dig in and understand the profitability, like, what are the growth levers of this darn thing, then all of a sudden they’re like, Oh, you, you are concerned about more than just marketing, right? You are concerned about my business, and I understand that, and I’m, I’m glad that I’ve got that kind of commitment, and now you’re bringing me value, and now I want to call you my CMO, right? But I think a lot of times we come in under this, you know, I’ve earned my right to call myself a CMO, whether we’ve earned it or not, and and we and we expect that respect right out of the gate. And I think that’s a mistake.

Wendy Wilburn 40:29
It is. I mean all relationships start with listening. I mean all really good relationships start with listening. And, you know, I say pretty quickly in the conversation that I am a marketer for the sake of sales, not for the sake of being creative. I really don’t care about being creative. Do I like it when I am creative? Yes, but I only care that I’m moving the needle. What’s going to work, and how can we quickly get to a point where we dial in on exactly what that message is and then hit it over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Wendy Wilburn 41:12
Because, and here’s the other thing that clients want to do, I find all the time, you hit on the right thing, but then they want to get all creative around it, like, oh, well, we said this, but now we need to say that, and then we need to say this, because the customer has moved on to this or that, or whatever, and it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get really, really good at the thing that you’re known for. And then maybe, if you’re lucky, you can branch out. Do y’all tell the story of Lululemon and who their ideal target customer is? Do y’all know that story?

Monica Spieles 41:50
No. Curious. Yeah.

Wendy Wilburn 41:52
Tell me who you think lululemon’s ideal target customer is. Describe that person.

Monica Spieles 41:59
College aged girl with a parent’s credit card who mildly wants to work out.

Randi Beth Burton 42:13
I was gonna say something similar, around the price point that they they are wealthy and more the yoga class at 11am type.

Branden O'Neil 42:26
Their target market is the guys who like watching girls in yoga pants.

Wendy Wilburn 42:34
That’s interesting. You went to the guy’s perspective. Okay, I love it. So everyone was wrong, just like I was wrong. So when I first had to take a guess at this, I said it’s the 45 year old soccer mom driving an Escalade, wearing Uggs and is running through Chick fil A on her way to pick up 3.5 kids from ballet, tuba and whatever else. So we’re all wrong. So lululemon’s Target, ideal customer is a 28 year old engaged woman named Ocean who owns her own condo, earns $125,000 a year, travels four times a year and spends two and a half hours a day working out. So lots of things going on in that description. Number one, her age, 28 number two, her income, $125,000 that’s pretty good for a single woman, owns her own condo, travels four times a year, spends two and a half hours a day working out.

Wendy Wilburn 43:49
But what I love the best is that her name is Ocean. Like you see her, she’s like boho chic, you know, she’s got the tie dye tank top, like hanging off a shoulder, you know she but she earns great money because so she can afford the pants, but she’s got all this kind of hippie vibe going on also. So that makes me tell when I tell customers this, that that is who Lululemon is talking to. They’re like, Well, why now is there men’s clothing? Why are they now, you know, going in on mats and and water bottles, and Lululemon is now this whole ecosystem of things. Yes, it is, but it’s because they got really, really good at Ocean, and Ocean is who built the whole Lululemon ecosystem. So when you totally go in on who your ideal customer is, you then can grow your revenue to the point where you can deviate here a little bit, or zag over there a little bit, and create new business units and new customer profiles. But you can’t ever get there trying to talk to everyone. You won’t get there trying to talk to everyone. You have to talk to Ocean first.

Randi Beth Burton 45:17
Well, Wendy, this has been a treat, really. I love where the conversation went. And thank you so much for your insight. We do have some like rapid fire questions that we would like to just throw at you to close it out. If we can do that, what’s your go to coffee order?

Wendy Wilburn 45:38
Oh, my. At Starbucks. It’s a flat white.

Monica Spieles 45:43
Flat white. Are you a morning person or a night owl?

Wendy Wilburn 45:48
I’m a morning person.

Branden O'Neil 45:50
What’s your favorite book that you’ve read here recently?

Wendy Wilburn 45:53
Honestly, my favorite book that I’ve read in the last couple of years is a book by Elizabeth Lesser called Cassandra Speaks. It’s a hot pink book jacket, but the subtitle is, when women tell the story, the human story changes, and it’s a it’s definitely a feminist book, and it’s all about how the person in the room with the power is the person who tells the story. There’s a quote by Steve Jobs that’s along those lines. Also something about the most powerful person in the room is the storyteller. And historically, our history has been shared and told and passed down through Anglo Saxon white men, and so what would happen to our understanding of our history and our culture if women were allowed more of a voice in the room historically? How would that be different? So it’s very much, and it’s based on the Roman story of Cassandra and how she went insane. And I will let your audience look that up.

Monica Spieles 47:05
Fun. Last question would be, what’s one place you would travel to and anywhere in the world, over and over and over again?

Wendy Wilburn 47:12
Oh, Venice, Italy.

Branden O'Neil 47:14
I have one more last question, and that is more serious question. What advice would you give fractionals, especially fractionals are just starting out, what advice would you like to give fractionals?

Wendy Wilburn 47:28
I think the best advice is just kind of general advice. It’s you have to believe in yourself enough to convey that you are trustworthy and that you have the experience and the skill set and the mindset of someone who can truly be of service to your client’s company. I did a post, kind of a mini rant yesterday on LinkedIn about trust in marketing, and I said that trust is the coin, if you will, for 2026 marketing, and that you’ve got to that trust only comes when you’re having the same messaging over and over and over as a brand trust only comes between two people when I stay consistent over and over and over as a person. So my advice to people who are considering becoming a chief fractional or are already in it, just stay consistent with what you’re doing and stick to your guns about what you believe and your frameworks that you know are effective, because I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older in life that you know most people don’t know what they’re talking about, and so be the One person in the room who does and and stick to your guns.