Mandy Hornaday: Hey, Milenko, welcome to Growth Activated. I'm so excited to have you here today. Milenko, I could not be more excited for this episode. I, you know, we've been doing the C-suite series where I'm really encouraging marketing leaders to get into the minds of their other peers in the C-suite beyond just the CRO. And obviously with your experience being a CTO, a multi-time CTO, you know, marketing doesn't often talk about the relationship that they should be having with their CTO. You know, I never really hear about people talking about the CMO CTO relationship. Which is funny to me because you and I have obviously worked together at two different companies, over the span of four to five years, and we partnered together all the time and I think had a really great relationship. So I think we'll have a really meaningful conversation today and be able to surface a lot of really good insights for other marketing leaders.
Milenko Beslic: Of course, I think we have over years so many great conversations about the topic. So happy, happy to talk about it today.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. So Milenko, let's start with your background. I know you have a really interesting one. So walk us through what has brought you to today.
Milenko Beslic: Yeah, last I would say 20, just over 20 years I've been in startup space. I would say 90% of time and started as a director of engineering all the way to VP and CTO and doing this role, executive working with C-suite continuously over the last 20 years. Yeah, started a few companies, joined a few early startups and even some companies that are a little bit more mature but at a growth stage. So my experience is mostly small teams, greenfield or brownfield companies, where technology and growth are kind of the most important kind of aspect of companies.
Mandy Hornaday: And Milenko, remind me, have you been a CEO? I know you've started multiple companies. I know you've been a CTO and co-founder or founder, but have you also been a CEO?
Milenko Beslic: I have been in one company, a couple of them, I was actually acting as a CEO as well.
Mandy Hornaday: Well, hey, tell us, I'd love to dive into the CTO persona and really help others understand what CTOs are thinking about, sort of their mindsets and perspectives. So let's start with what are your biggest priorities as a CTO? What are you thinking about sort of day in and day out?
Milenko Beslic: Yeah, so just to make clear the CTO in startup is different than CTO in more mature, bigger companies. CTO in startups have very specific role. And many times mixed what CTO role in startups should be or is, right? For me, it's a business role more than just technology.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, okay.
Milenko Beslic: I've seen startups where they would promote or hire a great engineer and give them a role of CTO. That doesn't work most of the time. Being a CTO in a startup means you need to align business needs with technology. You need to figure out what technology can be applied to use to achieve the business goals. And that's many times it's misunderstood. I mean, I love working with engineers, of course, and geeking out with technology and what is the cool, what is the latest. I'm doing that myself. But when it comes to building the business, you need to put this aside. You cannot fall in love with technology and say, I want to do this because it's super cool technology. Even today's world's got AI, of course. Everyone wants to AI, but is it applicable for the business they are in? And what would stage, what's amount of AI can be used, for example. It's tricky. It may be distraction, may be overkill, overengineering, and doesn't help the business. So yeah, so my view is, as said, it's a business role. And I would say that I try to think always...
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Milenko Beslic: What is the current need for the company? And usually it's almost always is growth, right? Every company wants to grow. To grow you need to find ways to market or distribute your product. So if you don't have distribution solved, then what's the point of having a product? So distribution for product is something that I try to do, try to promote.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep. Yep.
Milenko Beslic: Always for me, it's easy to build a product. I've done it so many times from kind of greenfield, blank piece of paper, built many, many products in the past. So it's easy. Technology is easy. If you know why building an effort, who, and for the business, the business knows how to distribute, how to make money, how to promote it, how to, your point, the relationship between marketing and technology is crucial.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep.
Milenko Beslic: Because if you have different ideas, different plans, different goals and schedules, you're never going to meet in the middle and look to work together.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, there's so much good stuff to unpack there. Before I ask you my question, what is greenfield? What is...
Milenko Beslic: We have idea and let's start a business. We don't have any, we don't have product, we don't have technology. We just want to start from fresh. Like a point like building factory, building factory somewhere, you find a piece of land and start building from scratch, right? So brownfield means kind of something that exists. You want to build it bigger, like go to company and build from, let's say greenfield is zero to 10, brownfield is 10 to 100. So you already have something you need to build. So I've done both, like both. So that's, yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Oh, that's, I have never heard that before. Maybe it's a technical term, but I have, I've definitely learned, I think the difference in the concepts and I've realized myself, I'm much more of what you would call a brownfield marketing leader. I really enjoy the 10 to a hundred and scaling. The building is hard. It's really hard as we've done together too.
Milenko Beslic: Yes, it is.
Mandy Hornaday: Just to sort of go back to one of the earlier points you made, I love the point you made about there's VPs of engineering and CTOs that really prioritize wanting to try cool things and do new technologies just because that's their passion and that's what they enjoy. I find the same thing happens on the marketing side too, where we sort of, you know, if we have like an events team or we have people who want to, they really believe in a certain social channel or whatever it is, and they just sort of go all in when strategically that may not be the best place to spend your time. So I think that probably happens across, and you know, it's hard to balance because I think as a VP, sort of when I was a VP of marketing running a team of 25, you know, I wanted them, it was sort of a retention tactic too, to allow people to work on things they were really excited about and passionate about, even if it wasn't directly correlated to the strategy. Um, and I think Google has a rule, right? Where it's like, is it 10% of their time they can work on innovation things or...
Milenko Beslic: They had 30% of time, I think that changed over time, but it was 30% of free time to do innovations or stuff that you want, that you like to try. I think, don't get me wrong, this is super important. Curiosity is the key in technology. Finding what's out there, what's possible. Exploring new technologies, what other people do, networking with your peers, learning what they find successful or not is super important. So it's fine. And as a CTO kind of, usually, and I think most CTOs in startups, they may not necessarily code day to day, but they're a concept. Try, let's try this technology, see if it applies to what we need and then try something else. If it works, if it's good, then talk to the engineers and try to implement that.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm-hmm.
Milenko Beslic: So staying on top of technology is important, but doesn't mean it should be used just because it's new and cool. I think the balance is like any engineering, that's the optimum, kind of how to optimize everything. Like finding the balance, what is possible and what company needs, is a difficult piece. But everybody, same in marketing. If you're not curious and finding new channels, you're going to stay behind somebody who's doing new stuff.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally, totally. I am curious before we move on, I just want to dig into the CTO persona a little bit. You mentioned early on that the startup CTO is very different than like an enterprise CTO. We talked about the startup CTO and the perspectives that you have. How would you describe what an enterprise CTO is thinking about and prioritizing on a daily basis? Why do you feel like those are different roles?
Milenko Beslic: I never done it, yeah. So it's more, I think, if you think about CTO in large company, has thousands of engineers, hundreds of thousands of engineers, it's more like publicly facing at all, that especially public companies that need investors.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, fair enough. Mm-hmm.
Milenko Beslic: What's the, where the company goes, what is a five or 10 years vision to do it? And then of course the layer of VPs or directors engineering running the operations. Well, the startup CTO is pretty much always in with the team and C-suite. Co-founder or CEO or CMO always talking about daily challenges as well. Kind of very much connected with the rest of the C-suite. In bigger companies may not be. And then in bigger companies you have the whole office of the CTO with a bunch of people who work in the CTO with the same goals to discover and try new technologies and invest in new technologies and figure out. But it's a different level.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, good point. Yeah, no, totally. Cause I did work at a large company, obviously a few, several years ago and part of what we did was tech staffing. And I remember learning, and you have to tell me if this is correct or not, but I would, from an outside perspective, from the marketing perspective, you being a CTO of a startup are also still very sharp in terms of the technical expertise and the skillset that is required. So even if you're not coding on a day-to-day basis, you know how to do it. Um, and you know how to drive the team and innovate forward. Whereas I imagine a CTO of an enterprise company, a lot of times their technical skillsets and expertise, the day-to-day technical expertise, falls away over time. And they're really, I think, to your point of like a public figure and maybe more of the management perspective of like managing the tech organization.
Milenko Beslic: Yes, lots of budgeting and yeah, of course, kind of, and you're right, it's not necessarily because I don't think they have time even to go into code. Of course, they may because they're curious and want to learn and want to stay on top of stuff, but not day to day. It's very hard because the role is much, much bigger in responsibilities than in startups.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So out of curiosity, what is keeping you up at night these days from a CTO perspective? Obviously AI's making huge waves. I've seen things in the news where the software development function seems to be disappearing overnight in a way and replaced by AI, but would love to, don't let me put words in your mouth. I want to hear what's actually keeping you up at night.
Milenko Beslic: That's definitely the biggest these days, biggest topic. Anything from what is computer science, even education looks like and for the future. Where we are going with AI. I think it's very early to say how AI is changing everything. Like if you did any innovation, let's say start with the internet. Took years to figure out the value or build the value and use it in a way how we're using today. AI is so early, I think, to know. Yeah, it's creating effects on everybody, but we still don't know how it's going to affect us and how we're going to use it. Every day is changing. Every day something new comes up and new flavors of AI or new approaches how to use AI. I think it's still on the level of, usually starts with a kind of innovation technology itself, like internet, just networking, or AI, just the models. And then the first wave is platforms, or cloud platforms, or in AI as well, kind of platforms that serve AI models. That's the first wave innovation, usually bigger company like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, they building those platforms, they have resources to do it. Then comes the next layer, which is kind of tooling for engineers. So engineers can use those platforms and models to build something. I think we are on this stage at the moment that tools are becoming advanced.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm-hmm.
Milenko Beslic: But end users, like is it sales or marketing or content writing, whatever, there's still so many small attempts to make those tools or platforms or applications for end users. It's still confusing which one is good, which one is a survivor, where is the best of time. They're not perfect yet. The only good one, not that I would say the only good one, but a good one, a good example is, at least for developers, Cursor, the company that they say is the fastest growing company in the history of SaaS, that basically provides integrated environment for developers to use AI in daily work. They grew from 1 million to 100 million revenue over few months or something like that, close to it.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow.
Milenko Beslic: It's great because they figure out that end user need simplest way in an integrated platform tool to use it in daily work and it works perfectly. I mean, not yet perfectly, but concept is perfect. The tool is going to evolve. So I'm looking forward to see what marketing...
Milenko Beslic: Which marketing apps or tools will resurface as the winners or be as dominant as Cursor is for software developers. There's few attempts, good ones, but I'm not that much involved in that piece yet. But to your point, what keeps me up at night is that these changes every day and happening new platforms and tools.
Milenko Beslic: Could be distraction. Can go in a wrong direction. Can choose the platform that is not as good as some market competitors are using. In marketing itself, I think there's tons of noise, yeah. And we see that some companies are using advanced tools for content writing, for SEO, for paid advertisement, for building short videos for social platforms. So now suddenly everybody can use it. You can create immense amount of content which is gonna compete against each other. So how you resurface, how you become dominant in, let's say, grabbing traffic for yourself. And if you're behind, if you wait for something to happen, you're going to be starting from the bottom and everybody's already on some different level. So trying to think about always how fast you can go or should go, should you ignore it? Should you wait? Should you compete on the same level as everybody else? I've seen this in...
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Milenko Beslic: Early days of internet. I was very much involved in, when I was in Cheapflights in 2000, 2003, in SEO. It's the same, same thing. Suddenly the SEO is where PPC or paid campaigns are kind of starting taking over the internet. Huge competition. And who's going to stay on the top? I think at the end there is creativity.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's crazy. I just actually did a LinkedIn post yesterday about how overwhelming it, even just to open up your LinkedIn feed right now. I don't know how about, how about you, but the amount of content that people are putting out there of like, you should be doing this, you should be doing this. There's workflows here, there's workflows here. Like, and it's overwhelming because I think the gap, like the knowledge gap between what we know we could or should be doing versus like the action gap of like, what are you actually doing? Like the more that gap widens, the more overwhelming anxiety I think is created.
Milenko Beslic: Yes, anxiety is a great, yeah, that's it. It's anxiety, kind of, yeah, are we behind? Do everything we can. Do we even have bandwidth to research? Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. And so, Milenko, while we're on the topic of marketing and saturation, I'd love to hear, and the company you were talking about was Cursor, the one that's grown the fastest in SaaS. Really interesting. I'm sure their CTO and CMO are working close together to drive growth really quick. So from your perspective, how have you seen a lot of success where the CTO and the CMO or technology and marketing are partnering together? I love that you talked about like product is easy for you, which I can validate that it is easy for you. I've seen it. You create great, great products. But that distribution piece is really important to you. Talk to me about the relationship. Is that where you start from a marketing and technology perspective? Is how are we going to get the product out there?
Milenko Beslic: Yeah, I would say relationship and lots of conversations and listening and hearing each other is important. I mean, marketing mindset is very different product technology mindset. Usually, I mean, there's overlaps that people can do both and those people are CEOs of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, whatever. Those are geniuses that have this both business marketing and product. I can't, but most of us don't, like we tend to do one thing better than the other thing. So for me, being on a product side, whenever I start something new, you start with the idea and try to figure out who can use this and how. And also I did distance myself, my thinking about how I would use it, comparing to what actually users of that product or feature would like to use it. And that's usually the most difficult thing because you try to think about kind of emotionally or think about it's only my problem, but it doesn't solve somebody else's problem. Is it a problem of majority of potential customers? So from an engineering perspective, always try to think about distance yourself and think about not assuming things that just easily. Try to understand and question and query yourself and others. How to distinguish between what people or customers need and what they want. They'll tell you what they want but is it really what they need.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Milenko Beslic: And I think in sales and marketing, usually listen to your customers and translate what they say to you that this is what they need, but actually this is only what they want. So how to separate those things. Many times in my career was, customer wants this one, let's build it. If we build it, if you have that, can easily sell. And my point was always, no, but let's see what we have. We know it's good value. Let's sell that. Not try to always adjust and add because it's easy to sell. Selling is hard. I appreciate that. It's very hard to sell anything, right? Sales skills are rare. Good sales skills are rare, marketing as well. So how you communicate the value of what you already have is difficult. The other way around is kind of, let's see what market needs and then how they buy, how much they pay, what features they need and then building it. But you need to validate both constantly, validate to revalidate.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that's something that I know it's something I learned from you back when we were building product at the services company and then again, building product at the SaaS company where you do such a good job of, at least coaching me at the time and teaching me, talk to me about the problem, talk to me about sort of the desired, you know, but I'll build the solution for you. Like I'm the technical person, I'm the product person, come to me, share with me what customers are saying, and then I'll figure out how to solve that problem. Because you're right, so often like we just think about it in terms of features. Like, we just need to add this feature here. And then all of a sudden the product will sell or that customer will be happy. And it may actually just be that there's a much better solution that you guys could get to if you understood the problem or what the customer was trying to solve.
Milenko Beslic: Yeah, that's exactly it because our minds normally goes into solutioning. Everybody's kind of solutioning. If I adjust a button or field or whatever, that's how we think. That's completely fine. And it's the same with engineering. Training tells you, no, stop. Okay. Don't think like that. I always try to remind myself also not to be solutioning, but to figure out what actual problem we are solving. And then there's methodologies in product and technology, how you actually decipher that, you unpack that and build underlining solution or technology that can solve the same problem. But then what is the best practice? What other people do? What people used to do? So you look what other people, how other people solve the same problem and try to mimic it in a way that, doesn't suddenly I log in in one site in one way, another site completely different way. 90% of internet using the same patterns most of the time. So you try to replicate that pattern, not to come up with a new one every time. So that people can feel familiar when you're using your, let's say, SaaS platform. So how is the navigation, what's the search look like, what the login look like. Myself being the user of, I don't know, cannot even count how many platforms that I had to use for businesses that I was involved in, so many SaaS platforms. I'm used to some patterns and I see that people are replicating, copying each other. And when I build, I try to stay in that kind of same lane.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm-hmm.
Milenko Beslic: Usually at least on CTO, we have to use so many different platforms out there.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Okay. So lesson number one for marketers and sales: don't solution for product and engineering. What are the other things? Yeah, no, it's such a good point. One of the other things I know you and I were chatting about last week, and funny enough, I had a CEO, I did a CEO interview, who was previously a CRO, Sloane Barbour. And he was talking about how, now that he's in the CEO role and he's got his co-founder who's the CTO, he's trying to figure out the balance of like not over-promising on product and then going to product and having the CTO say, why did you promise that? I know that that's something you and I talked about a lot. Talk to me about that challenge. What do you think about that?
Milenko Beslic: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've had these similar experiences a few times. Over-promising is a challenge. And I think as CTO, I try to always under-promise and over-deliver. It always feels better when somebody is surprised, I didn't expect that. It works amazing. Or some problems I didn't even knew I have. That for me is the most satisfying thing when I hear. When you over-promise and under-deliver, then of course, the team feels bad. Product team feels bad because could be that they couldn't deliver because of the technical issues, the challenges or the time, or just it could be even knowledge needed to build solution like that. It's easy to say, yeah, this technology can solve this problem, but implementation may be super expensive, super complicated, takes so much time. Usually product will suffer and fight other important deadlines or needs, and kind of how to balance everything, and that's not good. I mean one of the important roles of CTO is to sell to the product and technology team or development, sell the idea, sell the goals and vision of the company. So yeah, I need to translate what business needs into our specs or just in the meetings to explain why you're doing something. Not just say, let's build this and then whatever. Everybody who builds something, doesn't matter which level, wants to be proud of what they're building. They want to see users using their product feature. It doesn't matter how big or small the feature is or product is, they want to feel good about it. They want to know that users are excited, that it doesn't crash, that it's fast, that it's easy to use. And that sometimes gets lost between customers and team that builds product.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Milenko Beslic: So it's not just marketing and CMO and CTO roles and maybe a lack of communication. It's customer success. It's sales. How to join that is important. The CTO role is important to translate that. There's just two different ways to communicate to the tech team.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yep. And how have you seen the entire go-to-market function and product and engineering, I guess, what are some of the best practices you've seen where it works really well? What are some of the tips of the trade to create that alignment?
Milenko Beslic: Good question. I think clarity about what a product is, is super important. Tech team is think about the product solves one problem, but tech team usually, including myself, we usually have a challenge to explain in clear language what we do. We try to overcomplicate how we explain the product. And this communication is a challenge. And this is why I think the, it's most of the time neglected, is product marketing. Which is I think super important to start from early. Usually companies add product marketing at a later stage when they already grow. But I think it's important to have it as early as possible and continuously having in the company.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm-hmm.
Milenko Beslic: Which is how we translate, describe what the product do to customers. And not just customers, but the stakeholders and investors and everybody, kind of what we do, why we're doing it in a clear language. For me, sometimes I read, I look at websites and I'm reading the languages and no idea what the company does, so many times. I like bullet points and tables. It's not for me, but I'm going to see language which is kind of overly complicated or using buzzwords. Puts me off, kind of. I want in simplest way to know what it does, but this is how I think. I think I learned also that some other people who are buyers, usually could be marketers or business people, they understand this language different than I do. So they understand marketing language easily. Yeah, I know what it is. I don't, but this is how my brain works. Like differently, I have to accept that and let professionals do it and describe what the product is and how to communicate the product to the wide audience. I think this is where product marketing is crucial.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more because so often I see that companies just jump right into demand generation and like that's what they want to do right away. And demand generation doesn't work if you don't have the right messaging and you don't know who you're going after and you don't know what matters to them and the problems you're solving. And so, so often we, and then we, you know, we run these, spend a lot of money in demand gen and then they're inefficient. Maybe we do catch some fish from it, but if we haven't done the foundational work through product marketing, it's very challenging.
Milenko Beslic: Yeah, totally agree because you measure, the management measure with some conversion numbers and you can tweak the messaging to better conversion. But if you tweak messaging and this is not aligned with the product, then you convert to somebody who shouldn't be your customer. So finding the right customers, speak to the customer language that the customer understand is critical.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. And it was a fun experience working at the B2B SaaS company that we worked at together because I never really dabbled in product marketing. I was predominantly on the demand generation side and of course, when I went over to RevenueBase, that changed. I needed to learn about product marketing, but I felt like I had such a leg up because I was the persona we were selling to. I was the buyer. And so I really understood the product, the use cases of the product and the problem we were solving and that was so helpful. Anyone who does not have product marketing experience, I would recommend to think about it with the products you use day in and day out because that was so helpful, I guess, being the buyer.
Milenko Beslic: Yeah.
Milenko Beslic: And exactly as, as myself being buyer of many, many different products, and being pitched or emailed or called by so many BDRs or salespeople or hit by marketing messaging, kind of, 90% or even more is miss, wrong messaging. Wrong. Doesn't talk to me, language that, you know, the language that I understand. Doesn't communicate that they're solving my problem at all. It's just, it feels like noise. And you start ignoring this and then the channel kind of fails. Especially selling to technology, to technology leaders, is very difficult. We don't usually react on messaging. When we need something, we go and talk to people and search ourselves. But searching as well, we need to find a source. Is it website or is it some Reddit channel where people discuss it? We want somebody else's opinion about the product before we buy to validate. It's very different how the message needs to be...
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah.
Milenko Beslic: Communicated to tech leaders, and I'm certain some different fields are very different.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, totally. I think what usually breaks through the noise for me, and I feel like would probably break through the noise for you just knowing your persona, but the level of curiosity, I think because I am wanting, sometimes I just will agree to take a demo because I'm like, this is, I didn't know that this type of product existed. I should know just so that I'm up to speed and can learn what's out there, even if I have no intention to your point. I don't have the problem they're trying to solve. I don't have the intention to buy the solution. But sometimes it's really interesting just from a curiosity and a learning perspective.
Milenko Beslic: Yeah, I think I don't know how many times I tried something because I heard it mentioned on a podcast and usually by people who build that product. And sometimes many times CTOs who are talking about the products and, you see the passion behind it, you see that they really care to build it for their users and then that you trust that it's gonna be good. So, yes.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, no, it's a great marketing tip out there to build trust. I think trust and credibility is one of the main things that we as marketers are going to need to do in this incredibly saturated market where channels are just falling away as not working anymore. And what I feel like we'll start to come through is the people who've built trust and authority in their space. And we will listen to them. We already do. But I think...
Milenko Beslic: Yes. Yes.
Mandy Hornaday: You know, doing long form content like podcasts, obviously, that's one of the reasons why I created one. And doing speaking opportunities and almost like older school marketing that has sort of fallen away, right? Events and networking and media and yeah, totally.
Milenko Beslic: Yeah, it works. Yeah. Especially with this new noise that we're seeing every day, the single voice can change everything, powerful voice. So what you are doing with podcasts, I think it's amazing. Kind of getting, talking to people who has experience and sharing that. I think this is the way to do it.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. And Milenko, I mean, I know just you are so tuned into growth strategies and things, even though you're on obviously the technical side. I know you've got a lot of experience running sales led companies, PLG led companies. Obviously you've been sold to many, many times. So I'm curious what go-to-market strategies are you seeing or anticipating will start working. I guess how do you view growth changing?
Milenko Beslic: So one thing, regardless of the strategy or tools or technologies that exist, I think one of the most important is the persistence and consistent marketing. Nothing beats that. Trying different things for one day, one month and switching to something else and then again, something else never works. My experience coming back from early days of SEO, when I was at Cheapflights, we have a few keywords that we optimized for in, as I said, 2003 onwards. To this day, that keyword like cheap flights to London, Boston, New York, wherever, Cheapflights is still number one after, what was that, 20 years, 22 years, still number one. And it cannot be there because it will consistently build up on those keywords. And it's very difficult to overturn some persistent marketing effort. So yes, you should try different channels. Some channels will work forever, but takes time.
Mandy Hornaday: Thank...
Milenko Beslic: Takes time to build it, takes time to be consistent. If you're building content, you find a schedule and then to build it once a week, you cannot stop, you have to do it, increase frequency. But as soon as you make a gap, somebody else is gonna jump and fill that gap. So you cannot do it. Of course you don't want to be too noisy and again, creativity, unique content, unique value that you're offering is important, aligned with your brand and everything else is important. But I think channels will change and be added constantly. Good marketing is about, is the message right? Am I talking to the right person and am I talking about value of my brand or my product in the right way? And it's going to survive. People will find it. One way or another, they're going to find it. You cannot cheat them. Cannot fool them to come to your side. Yeah, they'll smell it. Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: We're smart. Yeah. Buyers are so smart today. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. It's an interesting one. I did my episode one actually was the future of marketing leadership and some of the key skills that I think people are going to need. And one of them was the art of agility because I think we've got to, I really think it's an art on how to figure out where do you lean in and stay consistent in order to see those results, but how do you also fail fast? How do you also recognize when something isn't working and you're able to cut it off and move on? And so often marketing leaders, I see, the function is so wide, there's so many opportunities of what you could be doing, should be doing and, I think we do often to your point of like jump from thing to thing and we don't actually let things simmer. Or we spread ourselves too thin and we try and do too much. And then we can't actually achieve the level of depth or performance, and then we just assume it doesn't work because we're actually not all in on it.
Milenko Beslic: So that kind of makes me think about the very important thing, or reminds me of a very important thing, which is how you measure marketing efforts. Data, data is so critical. For me, from the beginning of my career...
Mandy Hornaday: Our biggest challenge, I think, in some ways.
Milenko Beslic: In this role, I have always been super passionate about data, understanding, having visibility, what's going on, everything from servers running or uptimes or response time, to marketing, or how people use the platform and how long they stay on the platform, to marketing channels, are they converting, performing over time. So for me, building data, data layer or data platform, or data warehouses or analytics tools on top of the product is super critical. And I'm sure that many do it. I know many do it. Do it the right way or not, that's questionable. But unfortunately, many don't even. They don't track what's going on. They don't have it properly implemented or invested in analytics. And this is usually very hard, but it's super important.
Mandy Hornaday: For sure. And I think what happens a lot is that we are tracking and measuring, but we're tracking and measuring in disparate systems where we can't actually see the unified buyer's journey or customer's journey. And so we're like doing, so many people are great at measuring and reporting for their channels or for their programs, but we're missing the bigger picture. And that's actually something I think marketing could and should be working with technology on is, customer data and prospect data and how are we creating an all inclusive data strategy that actually gives us the visibility of what's happening in our business.
Milenko Beslic: Totally. This is really critical partnership. I've seen so many tools sold to marketing teams or sales team, CDPs and platforms that promise to solve data problem and build analytics reporting. But it's never 100% covering the needs or recording events or reporting, it's always missing some part. Never connect to everything. Connect to 90%, 80%, whatever, and then it's always something missing. So without building, if it's complex product, building internal analytics platform, I mean, this is the only way to do it properly. You can pay somebody, some platform, CDP to do it for you. It's going to be super expensive and it's not going to solve all your problems. It'll give you some false visibility maybe. Some are good, some are not as good, some kind of old school, some modern, the new startups and companies are coming with new ideas how to do it. But you need to have in-house data, same as you need product marketing, you need data analyst to work closely with the business, technology, marketing and sales to track what's going on. So many things you can discover in data. For me, it's a gold mine. I love to look at data.
Mandy Hornaday: And I guess how do you, my last question on this topic would be how would you consider prioritizing your time from a CTO perspective? Let's say you're at a startup, it's a greenfield startup and, I'm learning, I'm catching on, and you're investing, you know, all of your time in building product and obviously making sure that marketing has some distribution strategies and all the good things we talked about. It almost feels like you wouldn't have time to then help marketing on the data strategy, but you know, marketing can't do it. I mean, that's where we get in our own problem because we're not technical at that level. Although certainly I've seen a lot of success with hiring data analysts and stuff to do marketing reporting, but it's not, as you know, the data engineering and strategy behind it. So I guess, how would you encourage marketing leaders to approach their CTOs on things that aren't directly tied to the product?
Milenko Beslic: Yes, the very important thing is, in startups specifically, what you don't have is time and money, enough time, enough money. So it's always trying to balance priorities and some important things we push aside for later because we don't have resources or time to do it. So one thing that I usually do, when I start designing the new product or for new company, I think about all these aspects and try to build it in a way that I can immediately start using it. So if I build a database or application, I always think about how I store data and where I store data so I can do analysis if I need to. So I do it in a way to make my life easier, not trying to put it on top of what we built later on and become expensive and time consuming. So I need to think about all these several aspects, or many aspects, of building the company from day one. So I implement, include these things that I'll need in the future. But also I've been kind of lucky in my career that I met and worked with many amazing people like yourself that they always call for help when needed or when building a new company to join. And it makes things much easier because you bring people who you trust, you know, the experts and things work much, much easier, much better, much faster. And once we know exactly how to do it, next time, let's do it, so it kind of feels easier. But again, what you would ask is, I absolutely encourage marketing team to reach out to and talk to CTOs or tech leaders to build from the day one data warehouse or data platform to be able to track their performance. And not just to rely on tools they can buy off the shelf because they may be good, but as I said, I don't think they solve all the problems or give visibility to everything happening. You need to understand the business needs and business itself. What are the drivers? Is it pricing or is it conversion or is it sign up? Is it users? Is it revenue or is it profitability? What you actually want to measure so they can adjust. But if you don't understand revenue and profitability and the cost and only optimize for conversion, then you may miss opportunities and get wrong people for wrong amount of money.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally awesome. Well, Milenko, so good to have you today. We could have just chatted for hours. I always learn so much from you. Any final words of advice you would leave with marketing leaders out there today?
Milenko Beslic: Okay. Be curious to explore this new environment, talk to your peers, see what works for who. I think that networking is the most important. Finding time for that is difficult, but I think nothing better than networking. I'm sure there's events, there are forums, where people chat and listen and hear, but what works for who? Because I think everybody, not just marketing, and the whole new piece of product marketing technology, we all need to learn from each other and see what works. And that informs people who make products for marketers to also learn.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely.
Milenko Beslic: So just keep networking, talking to people as you do. As you do podcasts. That's your thing.
Mandy Hornaday: I love it. Awesome. Well, thank you, Milenko, so much. If people want to learn more about you, what's the best way to get in touch or see what you're up to? LinkedIn. Okay. Awesome. Well, thanks, Milenko. We'll talk soon.
Milenko Beslic: LinkedIn is always the best. Thanks, Mandy. Pleasure too. Yeah.
