Mandy Hornaday: AI is changing everything about how marketing gets done, but how are CMOs really adapting to it inside their teams, their strategies, and their leadership? Hey everyone, welcome back to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Hornaday, and today I'm joined by four-time CMO Ruth Zive, who has led marketing at multiple AI-driven SaaS companies and now heads up marketing at Voices, a company redefining how brands show up through voice in the AI era. In today's episode, we cover AI in customer experience and how it's reshaping interactions and the future of brand identity, AI in the marketing team and the tools Ruth's team uses and why humans still matter, annual planning in the AI era and Ruth's framework for setting bets and aligning with sales, and lessons from a four-time CMO, from sales and marketing alignment to her ultimate mantra, outcomes over strategy. This conversation is full of perspective from the front lines of AI, brand, and executive leadership. And I know you'll walk away with ideas you can apply right away. Let's get into it. Hey Ruth, welcome to Growth Activated. We're so excited to have you here today.
Ruth Zive: Thanks Mandy. I'm super excited to be here.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, Ruth, I'd love to start a little bit with your background and some information about your career. I know you're a four-time CMO and I think a three-time CMO at an AI-driven company. So I know you've got a lot of experience to bring to the table, but bring us through a little bit of your background and how you got to where you are today.
Ruth Zive: Yeah, I mean, four-time CMO, I think more than anything just makes me sound old, which I am. I won't bore you by going all the way back. But I did, before I worked in tech as a CMO, I did work for about a decade in the nonprofit world doing marketing and fundraising. Fundraising is really just glorified sales. You're just selling goodwill instead of goods and services. And after my kids were a little bit older and in school full time, I thought, I want to ramp up my career a little bit. You know, dipped my toe in the water through an acquaintance, in the water of like the tech world, and started doing some freelance marketing on the side of my nonprofit job. And I caught the bug and I launched a marketing agency and most of my clients were in tech and software, B2B SaaS. And eventually one of those clients coaxed me in house and the rest is history. Since then, I've worked, as you mentioned, at four different software companies, scaling marketing teams and delivering pipeline so that sales can hit their revenue numbers.
Mandy Hornaday: Amazing. Amazing. What was the hardest shift for you when you went from an agency to in-house? I did the flip-flop of that. I was in-house for my whole career and then just started with an agency about a year and a half ago. It is hard. It's a hard transition.
Ruth Zive: Yeah, well, I think you'll relate to this. The biggest difference was that, you know, when I went in-house, I was able to focus on one brand and one company, and I didn't feel so pulled in a million different directions. Of course, the expectations are very different. What you're expected to deliver for that one brand is a lot more than what you have to do when they're a client of your agency. But I really enjoyed the focus and, you know, getting into the details and building a team singularly focused on one brand. I don't think I would ever go back to agency life personally.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, I was just going to ask if you'd ever go back to the agency side. I have had such an interesting journey with it myself. I think at one point I had probably 10 or 12 clients, and that was exhausting to me. After like five hours of a workday, I was probably twice as tired as I was after an eight-hour workday. And I thought, OK, this is not, first of all, sustainable.
Ruth Zive: I agree. It can be very depleting. I think if you can be disciplined and sort of set standards around how many clients you take on at once, and if you can also standardize the type of work you do for each client. But you end up getting pulled in a million different directions. It's challenging. It's not for everyone. I think I'm in a later stage of my career now. Maybe one day I would go back to consulting, but I would be very disciplined about how many clients I took on.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, interesting. Well, I'd love to talk. The last four companies that you have been a CMO at, I know, it seems like from my perspective, have a lot of similarities in terms of it seems like a very AI-driven software product for either the marketing or branding or customer experience space. I'd love to hear your perspective on, was that on purpose? Is that an area that you're really passionate about? And what have you learned with each of those companies?
Ruth Zive: Yeah, I wish I could say it was on purpose. I don't think it was. I didn't intentionally join an AI company. The first company I was at that was really AI-driven was a company called Ada. And what appealed to me in that case was that it was just a very early-stage startup that had strong product-market fit. It was clear that they were onto something and I wanted to really try my hand at growing a team from very small to very big. I wanted to ride the wave that I believe they had caught, which proved to be true. This is before generative AI hit Main Street. They were selling an AI customer support chatbot essentially. And their product was really very elegant and exciting and they had an interesting customer base. And that was a wild ride. I guess almost five years in, a bigger, more public company that was in the exact same space came knocking and recruited me. And I was curious to see what life would be like in a public company with a much bigger global team. It was a very AI-driven product suite as well, but it wasn't just, it was a much broader product that served multiple use cases. And so that was interesting to me as well. I had a great experience there. What I think I learned is that I didn't want to be in a public company. I also didn't really want to be selling AI for the customer support use case. That is an extremely crowded, confused market. But at this point, you know, generative AI had hit Main Street, ChatGPT has disrupted everything. And I wanted to really see out the next phase of my career in the AI world, but with a particular use case in mind. And that is Voices, where I'm at currently. We, I don't know that I would characterize us as an AI company per se. I would say that we are somewhat AI-adjacent. We are selling products and solutions and services that are scarce and in high demand in the world of AI. Our offering in and of itself isn't really an, I mean, everything is an AI product today. It's, you know, become white noise for vendors to say that they're selling AI. We're not really selling AI in the way that you would imagine. We are selling solutions and services and products to supercharge other people's AI solutions. So it's a really interesting space to be. And yeah, I think it's all played out largely through happenstance, less so because I had some big grand plan around it.
Mandy Hornaday: Well, you could have had me fooled. I have been following you. I don't know if I've shared this with you, but I have been following you since your Ada days. I always used, when I was at a B2B SaaS company at the time, I don't remember how I came across Ada. It might have been just from seeing you and your personal brand on LinkedIn, but Ada was like the sort of best in class for me. I would look at what you guys were doing in terms of your website and product marketing and how you approached it, because product marketing was relatively new for me. I came up in the services industry that doesn't really do solutions marketing or product marketing well or know it at all. But there was, yeah, there was a lot of things that I would refer back to Ada and capture. And then I sort of followed you throughout your journey and it seemed methodical.
Ruth Zive: Lot of smoke and mirrors, and that's so kind of you to say, Mandy. You're swelling my head. I was blessed at Ada and even in my subsequent roles with such, you know, talented people on my team that they've all made me look good. I think we did some really special things at Ada. I'm proud of the work that we did there. It was a really exciting ride. Of course, what you should know is that I was also copying other vendors and pulling from their best practices. I had my own brand crush on Gong at the time. I was obsessed with all of Gong's marketing and the product marketing. So I guess we all recycle some of the best ideas, which I think is a great way to run a high-performing marketing organization.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. Well, I'm so curious. When you talk about Voices and how it's not really, I think you had shared, it's not really like an AI company, but at this point, everyone has an AI product. How are you, from a CMO perspective, driving your company through what's happening in the marketplace when it comes to AI? So I'm in the services industry as an example, Ruth, and the companies that I work for and compete with don't have an AI product. And so we're trying to figure out, how do we stay ahead of the marketplace? The marketplace is shifting that way. There's tons of companies that are popping up as AI products and services that will potentially change the play that we're doing. And I just would love to hear, how are you advising Voices, I guess, in terms of being future-forward in how you position yourselves in the marketplace moving forward?
Ruth Zive: Great question, lots to unpack there. Voices is a very established company that has a two-decades-long history in the traditional voiceover world. I don't know if you've ever used our services or our marketplace, but we have over 4 million professional voiceover talent on our platform. And historically, what we've done is we've matched the biggest brands in the world with voiceover talent for their campaigns and their videos and the content that they're pushing out. And Voices had a successful business that they built on the back of that use case and that marketplace. What happened a few years ago is that we started to notice, and in fairness, this long predated me, but Voices started to notice that AI companies were coming to them to build data sets, audio data sets, to tap into our network of voiceover talent and to curate audio data sets for these AI companies to train their models. You can imagine that voice data is in scarce supply. You can scrape from the internet. That's not really very ethically sourced and it's not going to have all of the different variables that an AI company needs to train models in a really scalable and durable way. And so we started to notice this interest through our marketplace even. And we took that interest, that demand, and we have been working to productize that and build a repeatable solution and go-to-market motion around that use case. And that's been a significant growth vector for us. And my challenge as CMO is to sort of connect the dots in our go-to-market motion between our history in voiceover and our future orientation around AI. It's not just data. Another use case that has become very apparent to us that I think is exciting for Voices' customers, but also for the talent, is AI voice licensing. So as voice becomes the default interface of the future, which I believe it will be in five years' time, we're not going to be typing and texting as much as we're speaking into our devices and interacting with the brands that we love. As that becomes more popular and more prevalent, brands need a voice to front-end that experience. Brands are starting to think about their actual voice as an element of their brand identity, the same way they think about their logo or their website or their font or their colors. And it's no longer sufficient to just choose a voice out of the box from your AI provider or pick a synthetic voice from what's available through some other vendors out there. They want to curate a voice based on a host of considerations, you know, language, age, gender, accent, tone of voice, acting skills, character, emotion, all of those things ultimately ladder up to brand. And so we're seeing a lot of brands come to us the same way they did for traditional voiceover to help them find the perfect voice to represent their brand in an AI-driven world. So that was a long way of saying that, you know, where we're at in this new world order at Voices has sort of evolved organically. And it's my job to figure out how to tell a compelling story that stretches across all of those different use cases because we still very much sell voiceover services. And how do we evolve that story? Not just from a go-to-market perspective, but from a product perspective. What new things are we building? What new solutions are we packaging? And then how do we position those to the people that matter in the market who are interested in buying these things? So I hope that answers the question.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally. And actually, as you were talking, it reminded me, a couple of years ago, I ran a very large event series and we were putting out video. Video marketing was still, it felt rather new at the time. And I remember having to choose the music that would go along with the videos. And we had never thought about that before. Like the brand associated with your music. We just would put in different music and think, no, that doesn't feel right. That doesn't feel associated, but we had never actually defined it. And as you were talking about the voice, to me, I was like, oh, this is the next music. At least in my experience, I'm really happy to think about that.
Ruth Zive: Yeah, I can give you sort of a practical example. You know, I mentioned that voice is going to become the interface of the future. Well, if you think about the automotive industry, this is happening quickly in that world because when you're in your car, you need to be hands-free, right? And so all of these cars have voice assistants to answer your questions or to interact with, you know, the tech in your car. And you know, these manufacturers take very seriously the sound of the voice that is contributing to that experience. What is that voice? Do they own that voice? Has it been properly licensed? Do they have all of the legal entitlements? Can they make changes? And that is an AI voice. Do they have access to the actor behind the voice so that if they want to evolve it, they can do that? If they want to train it on specific new use cases, they can do that. All of these considerations. And I think as consumer-facing brands start introducing tech that is voice-forward, you bank on your phone today, right? And you do that through typing and texting. It's only a matter of time until that is happening through voice. And every bank is going to want to have their own voice representing their brand in that experience. So I think this introduces massive opportunity for voiceover talent, because they want somebody that can be coached, can be directed, can do character voices. And so I think the opportunities are actually going to grow. I think they're going to be different than what they were historically. And I think how brands think about voice is changing very rapidly.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow. Well, it's so interesting to hear you talk about the marketplace. It's inspiring because I think a lot of the peers that I talk to right now, we're thinking about AI in the CMO seat in terms of, or it feels like a lot of my peers are thinking about it in terms of, how are our marketing teams leveraging AI in order to be more productive, or how's our organization leveraging it to be more efficient? And what I rarely hear is the sort of future-facing of, how are you productizing what you're doing and the changes in the industry of where we're headed.
Ruth Zive: Well, for what it's worth, I also think about the internal use cases for AI and how can I help my team to be more efficient. So that's also very top of mind for me.
Mandy Hornaday: And I want to go there. But before we do, I'd love your opinion on what are you seeing just at these past companies? And I know you talked about the customer experience company being a really saturated space. Or sorry, the customer support function. But I'd love to hear, where are you seeing the blend of brands remaining human and also leveraging AI? Like what are the guardrails here that we should be thinking about?
Ruth Zive: So one thing I'll say is that I've worked mostly in B2B enterprise SaaS. And that was certainly the case at Ada and then at my next company, LivePerson. So my frame of reference is very enterprise-oriented. And we worked with companies in very highly regulated industries. So think, you know, travel and hospitality, banking, insurance, telco, those were sort of the customers that we had. And a few things, I think, some interesting takeaways. The first, and this one won't be a surprise, there is a massive appetite to adopt AI. I think everybody, especially now, three years after ChatGPT was introduced, everybody realizes that this is going to change the way that we do business and change our lives more generally. That appetite though notwithstanding, there is a lot of confusion and trepidation around how to roll this out, especially consumer-facing, because there's real risk there. There are regulatory considerations, there are ethical considerations, legal considerations, it's complicated. We navigated this tension by introducing AI agent-facing, if you think about customer service, rather than, this was less so the case at Ada, more so the case at my last company, there's less risk if you're using AI to drive greater efficiency of your internal teams. And if you can sort of use AI to coach your agents and to get them to the answer faster, to help them to handle more customer inquiries at a time, that's an efficiency gain, which is a cost savings gain, and it doesn't introduce the same amount of risk. So I think that tension is going to persist for a while, especially in highly regulated industries. We see that at Voices as well. There's a real appetite to adopt AI voice, to train AI models, but brands increasingly want to know, where was that data sourced? Has it been appropriately licensed? What rights do I have if I use this voice? Is there some sort of liability that I should have in mind? Is someone going to sue me down the road? You know, so I think all of that is still very murky. And because of that, I mean, this isn't the only reason that I believe what I'm going to say next, but largely because of that, humans are very much still in the loop. And I think they will continue to be in the loop for some time. I don't think at all that this is a flip-the-switch proposition.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. No, totally fair. And I'd love to hear, I think, in terms of how that translates to how you run your marketing team too. In my mind, I would imagine you're very forward-thinking and your team is probably well-adopted and mature when it comes to AI, but tell us, where do you guys actually sit? What's going well and where are you hoping to take the team?
Ruth Zive: Yeah, I wouldn't characterize, the team is incredible and we are definitely leveraging AI, but I wouldn't say we're on the bleeding edge of that. I mentioned I'm old, so I bring with me a lot of experience doing things without AI. So for me, it's been a learning curve as well, even though I've been in this space for some time. We certainly use AI to create content. And this is kind of where I cut my teeth, was as a writer and a content creator. And I absolutely encourage my team to use AI to write, to get them 70% of the way there. Why wouldn't we do that? I mean, it's good, it works. But I also believe that you need a human in the loop to get you the rest of the way and to make sure that your content is authentic-sounding and differentiated and aligned to your brand identity. And really talented writers, I think, are going to continue to play that role. So I do think I have been able to free my writers internally from a lot of the more mundane work. How do you get started? How do you get to draft one? And they're able to work a lot more efficiently and ship a lot more content that is high quality because of AI. So that's, I think, table stakes for marketing teams. We're also using AI to do market research, either for prospecting purposes or competitive analysis or how to position, how to understand our ICP, how to identify gaps on the website or risks on the website. So a lot of market research use cases for AI. And then lastly, and this one, you know, most folks in marketing are talking about this, but I think SEO is going away as people start searching through AI search. And then the question is, how do you show up in those AI searches in a way that is really meaningful? And so we have a very brilliant person on our team who has gone deeply down this rabbit hole to understand all of the moving parts around this. I don't think anyone's cracked the code here necessarily, and the LLMs are changing regularly. So just when you think you have it locked down, it's sort of what search was, however many years ago. We're trying to understand those algorithms and those inputs. And it's really important to the business though, because I think we'll continue to see web traffic diminish altogether. It's not going to just transfer to AI search. People's searches are being resolved inside of the LLM. They don't need to visit your website. So how does that experience change what we do?
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. I had a guest on a couple of weeks ago. I'll have to grab the name of the software for you, but he was sharing a software that he uses that basically shows what each of the LLMs are prioritizing. Have you seen these?
Ruth Zive: I also forget the name of this. I think there are a few of them out there. We have used one of those. I can't speak to it with any real expertise or authority, but I do know we are exploring all of those things, all of those tools. And the person on my team who is spearheading this himself has built some AI agents that we are using internally to do that analysis. He's done some really exciting things. I've said to him, like, you should go do the podcast circuit and talk about what you're doing. It really is groundbreaking. And it's exciting. It's greenfield. Like everyone's learning. And so I do think being ahead of that curve is a competitive advantage.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. And for the content creation and the market research, I'm curious, are your teams just using ChatGPT, or have you built like custom GPTs or AI agents? How have you made that more efficient for the team?
Ruth Zive: I think for content, it's mostly ChatGPT. I have used other tools in other jobs. We were using a tool, and I forget the name of it, to help BDRs craft tailored sequences, also to do some of the research automatically. There are some great tools out there. We don't really have a suite at this point of specific tools. I think it's opportunistic. We use a blend of just vanilla ChatGPT and then some of the folks on the team there, I'm encouraging them. I just had a meeting earlier today with one of our product marketers who said that she was using some vibe-coding utilities to help with a product launch that we have upcoming. And so there is a real culture at Voices of, let's roll up our sleeves and figure out what's going to work for us. This is all new and we need to be leading the charge as marketers and as a company that has a point of view about AI. So I think jury's out on which tools are the best and we'll do this podcast again in a year and we can see where we're at.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely, and it reminds me of, have you heard, I'm sure you have, have you heard this term, the go-to-market engineer, that's been floating around?
Ruth Zive: Yes.
Mandy Hornaday: What is your take on that? Is that something you believe we should be thinking about investing in? Is it just rev ops with a bow? What are you thinking?
Ruth Zive: There's so many new titles popping up these days. Like, I just, we're hosting an event and somebody just registered chief AI officer, you know, like there are all these new roles. I think that we are going to see a lot of go-to-market practices standardized as a result of AI. And so I think there's probably a place for that. Am I going out and hiring somebody? Are we building a team of go-to-market engineers? We're not, but I think certain functions are going to be more standardized because of AI in the coming years. And we all have to have an open mind about what that's going to mean for our organization.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, totally. And actually that transitions nicely into something that's top of mind for me right now, which is annual planning. I don't know about you, but I always start in September for the following year. And as I'm thinking about it, it just feels, the space feels chaotic, confusing, what's working, what's not, everything's saturated. Should I be spending more on marketing? Should I be spending less? Because now I have AI. I'd love to really pick your brain on it. Let's start with, what is your approach to annual planning? How do you approach it? And is that changing, I guess, even this year?
Ruth Zive: So, you know, I have my own sort of framework around how I plan for the start of the year. I can share a little bit about that. I would just say that it's always nuanced based on the organization, based on, you know, my executive counterparts and how, you know, based on the CEO point of view. This will be the first time that I do it at Voices, because I've only been, I've been there for not a full year yet. So this is the first time that I'll really be involved in the planning process, you know, start to finish. But the way that I approach it as a marketer and as an executive, candidly, is that we always start with the revenue target. That is sort of the starting point. And, you know, what number are we chasing? And then there's usually an executive-level discussion around, okay, well, what market, are there new markets that we are pursuing to chase that number? Is there a new product that we're shipping to chase that number? Like, what are the big levers that we can pull to get to that number? And sometimes that's as simple as spending more, hiring more. That was certainly the case, you know, when I've been at like VC-backed companies years ago. I think that the pendulum has swung a little bit in recent years and companies are a little bit more disciplined with their spend, and profitability matters maybe even more than growth in some cases. Certainly at Voices, we are very disciplined about how we grow and what we spend. But it always starts with the revenue targets. Once I have a line of sight into what number we're chasing and what the big bets are that we think we're going to invest in to get us there, then, you know, I have a discussion with my sales counterparts about who's going to source what pipeline, what is going to fall to marketing, what number do I own? And then I meet with my team to talk about, okay, how are we going to get to that number? How are we going to support marketing-sourced revenue numbers? What responsibility do we have to influence the balance? Because marketing isn't just about sourcing pipeline and revenue, it's also about influence, it's also about brand awareness. And then we sort of build out our campaign strategy and our marketing strategy in support of the broader corporate goals that we've set. And then there's a budget discussion that happens alongside of that. Once we know what revenue number we're chasing, there's a discussion with finance about, how much is it going to cost to get there? Do we have significant headcount gaps that we need to address? Are we dialing up paid ads, for instance, because we know we're going to get a certain amount of pipeline through that channel? So that's kind of the process. To the second part of your question, how has AI changed that? I think that, you know, it's a combination of this pendulum swing that I mentioned that, you know, you want to be profitable, you want to be disciplined, you want to maybe be less ahead of your skis than we might've been willing to be five or six years ago. And I think AI has made that more realistic. You can operate with leaner teams with, you know, less tooling. And certainly we're thinking about that at Voices as well. Do I need as many writers as I might've needed if I didn't have access to AI? Do I need as many people doing market research or competitive analysis if I have AI at my disposal? So I think it arms us with some power to operate leaner and faster.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, I have a few questions just that you sparked for me. Just to go back to the beginning when you were talking about working with the executive team on identifying the strategic bets that will really get you to the revenue target. Are you driving those conversations? Are you a part of those conversations? Do you feel like that's really like the CEO's decision that then the team operates around? Because I find with a lot of my clients that they don't know what those strategic bets are. So a lot of times it's me pushing those conversations, but would love to understand from you, how are you involved at the table for those?
Ruth Zive: I love that question. So some of it depends on the personality of the CEO and the personalities of the people around the table. But conceptually, you know, at least for the last two times I've been a CMO, I've been very clear when I was brought in that I'm not interested in being a departmental leader. I like that part of my job and I certainly accept that as CMO, I have that responsibility. But my first team has to be the executive team. And really what I'm interested in doing is driving forward the interests of the business more strategically. And I want to be able to cross borders into other domains and influence strategic discussions. I wouldn't say I drive those conversations, certainly not. I think the CEO is the strongest and most credible voice in the room and should be, but I'm absolutely participating in those conversations. And I also think that it's marketing's responsibility to deeply understand the market. Part of what we have to do is understand, you know, what does the market look like? What does the addressable market look like? Where are there gaps and opportunities? Where are we constrained relative to our competitors? Why do our clients love us? Why do they not love us so much? Like those should all be inputs on the bets that we make. And marketing has responsibility to answer a lot of those questions and inform the discussion along those lines. And that's certainly what I set out to do at an executive level.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, that's great. I think that's something we could all do more of, at least from talking to my peers for sure. And then the second question I was going to have for you is, you talked about what part of the pipeline do you own and what part will sales carry and things like that. And I'd love to, in my past lives, I have created unintentional friction between and almost pitted sales and marketing against each other for this fight for credit and attribution, and have since tried to correct that. But I'm curious, how do you deal with it, especially knowing that you're going after enterprise-level deals where there's likely multiple touches, it's sort of a team sport? How do you really sort through that with your peers and maintain the balance between sales and marketing while still being able to show marketing's value and contribution?
Ruth Zive: Well, you should not beat yourself up too badly if you had friction in the past. There's always friction between marketing and sales and there should be. I think the more interesting question is, how do you ensure that that friction is constructive and that you're able to harness the friction in a way that's going to drive forward the interests of the business and get you to your numbers? In an enterprise sales cycle, attribution is dumb, in my opinion, because the best deals in the world are the ones that the BDR was outbounding to try to open up, marketing was nurturing to try to grow brand awareness, and a partner was influencing by recommending our product. And all of those touches are important, and the order in which they happen doesn't really matter. Like at the end of the day, it's the constellation of those influences that result in the, you know, the greatest likelihood of winning the deal. So I think a lot of it just comes down to trust and agreement on what it is you're signing up for. So when I say it starts with the revenue target, you know, the next discussion I might have with sales is, how much pipeline are you comfortable having your team or the partnerships organization chase independently? Are they going to outbound? And here's what I'll sign up to try and inbound. And we start with that. We also have to shake hands on the definition of a pipeline-ready opportunity and what is an MQL and all of that stuff. And then we go and chase it, and it all works out very nicely when you hit your numbers. It's when you're not hitting your numbers, often the friction is very uncomfortable, because then it's like this turf war. Well, I sourced this much, you only sourced that much. But if you trust each other and you have an openness to problem-solve together and understand, like, why didn't we hit our number? Then I think it's okay. Like, you can't solve problems unless you're willing to talk about them. And so I try to cultivate a sense of trust with my sales counterpart. I'm definitely a marketer that believes that my job is to provide sales with healthy pipeline coverage and to support their revenue pursuits. And so I welcome feedback from the sales organization about what we could be doing differently. And then I want them to trust me when I execute on a plan that I'm the expert in marketing. And I'm lucky insofar as I think I've had that in all of my companies where I've been CMO. Have there been some uncomfortable conversations and debates with sales and marketing? For sure. But I have deeply respected the sales leaders that I've worked with. The other thing that, and this isn't the case at Voices, but was the case in my three prior companies, I like having BDRs sit inside of marketing, because I think it gives marketing more skin in the game and accountability on the pipeline front. It helps me to understand the quality of the leads that I'm generating, the impact of the messaging that I'm putting into the market, because BDRs often close that loop. They are the first-touch brand ambassador for your company. So I think that having BDRs sit inside of marketing can serve as a forcing function to drive better alignment between marketing and sales. I don't think it always needs to be the case. At Voices, they don't sit in marketing. You know, I've discussed this with my sales counterpart. Neither one of us is particularly territorial and we are very aligned on strategy. So I think we just haven't made a change. But I do think, and I meet with the BDRs regularly and I get their feedback, and I think it's an important input into marketing strategy to get to close that loop as best as you can.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. When I was in SaaS, I oversaw the BDR function. And that was so helpful. It changed my perspective in terms of, we've got to get people to a meeting, not just this MQL that we kind of throw over the fence. And how are we collectively working to get AEs in front of the right people and meetings? And that really completely shifted my perspective. We were going out, it was much more aligned in terms of going after the same accounts and having very clear ICPs.
Ruth Zive: Exactly. I say it makes me a better marketer. So selfishly, I've enjoyed having the BDR sit inside of marketing because it holds me and the rest of the team accountable in a completely different way.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'd love to hear a little bit about what channels and tactics are you betting on right now? What are you seeing that's working? What are you seeing that's not, as you think about next year? What are you really going to be leaning into within the team?
Ruth Zive: I'm bullish on events, in-person events. I think they're making a real comeback. Maybe it's because of AI, maybe it's a post-COVID reaction. I don't know. I just think, I just feel so strongly that as marketers, our primary responsibility is to make people feel something. You're not going to deliver the pipeline expectations without making people feel something. I think having face-to-face, in-person interactions with the people that you're trying to influence, nothing can beat that. And so I'm bullish on events, especially branded, curated events that you're hosting. So we have a whole strategy around that. I mentioned AI search, I think. It's less so that I think all of a sudden we're going to see a watershed of interest through AI search. It's more so that I know this is going to change SEO. And SEO has been a very dependable channel for me, and I don't want to be caught flat-footed. So I think really leaning in there and understanding the implications around AI search. And then I would say voice as a channel. Obviously, I'm bullish on that. That's what we're ultimately promoting at Voices. And I think I need to eat my own dog food and think about how we're leveraging voice from a brand perspective, from a voiceover perspective, really becoming the experts along those lines. So that's also very top of mind for me.
Mandy Hornaday: Interesting. And where do you envision activating that lever?
Ruth Zive: Well, listen, we produce a lot of videos ourselves. So how are we using AI voice to be more efficient in our voiceover activities? You know, I could imagine, maybe not in the coming year, but do we have on our own website a voice-activated assistant that is guiding a visitor through their experience instead of the digital chatbot or the digital lead capture? Is there a voice-activated experience? That could be something that we explore. I think we're going to learn as we go. And this is, I always like to say to the marketing team, let's make sure that we're spending 15 to 20% of our time experimenting and getting really creative outside of all of the stuff we know we should be doing. So maybe this becomes an experiment for us.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Awesome. And I'm totally with you on events for sure. I actually have been a big believer in events for a long time. We just happened to launch an event series back in like 2010 when Meetup was just becoming a thing. And we had 15 Meetups across North America. We were doing 120 events a year. And it was a major growth lever for our company because our competitors weren't investing in events at the time. So I'm a huge fan. I'm so curious, like structurally, where do you feel like, where do you put events? Do you put events with your demand generation team? Do you put events with your brand team? Like, where does that sit for you?
Ruth Zive: I see events as part of, especially in-person events, as part of field marketing. I have this whole assembly line structure for marketing that I've talked about before. I think that the functional areas of marketing inside of B2B SaaS line up as a bit of an assembly line. You have product marketing at the front of the assembly line. They are assessing the market opportunity, surveying the competitive landscape, hopefully sharing that information with product to inform the roadmap. And then once new product is shipped, they own that go-to-market motion. How is it messaged? How is it priced and packaged? They're sharing that perspective about the market and the product with the next group inside of marketing, which would be the brand team. And the brand team is taking that perspective and translating that into market-facing assets. That team then hands those assets to the next group, which is the field marketing team. And the field marketing team is pushing those assets through campaigns and events pointed at specific segments of the market, obviously working very closely with sales. And then you've got, next to that group, the demand team, which is taking a lot of the inbound leads coming through those events and those campaigns and optimizing our channels to make sure that they're delivering a healthy volume of leads in service of these campaigns that are converting at a healthy rate and are optimized from a budget perspective. And then the last group in the assembly line is the BDR group, which is both catching the leads from all of this work that's happening, but also working alongside of the field marketing team to outbound in a way that's coordinated with the campaigns and events. So that's, on paper, how I think about it. Where it actually sits depends on the skills of the respective leaders across the team. At Voices, events sits inside of a team that I call brand and field marketing. I've compressed the team somewhat so that there are creatives on that team. And then there are also people with more of a field marketing campaign-oriented sensibility. But that's kind of how I think about it.
Mandy Hornaday: Interesting. That's fascinating. And it's interesting that I could see why you've done that. I typically would have, I think, seen field marketing with the demand gen team. I've had it there before. Again, in my past job, I had a very strong leader who had some experience with events.
Ruth Zive: You could see events also as a channel the same way that email is a channel or paid is a channel. It's a way to drive leads, but it's also an asset. A webinar, for instance, especially remote events, are like a digital asset. So it depends. I don't think this assembly line structure has to have like clear lines between them. I think you want to kind of assess the skills of the people on your team. But I do like this idea of setting it up in a framework that is kind of sequential. What I've been told by my team is it makes very clear like what the handoffs are in certain cases and how you operationalize a campaign. And then the other thing that's good about this framework is that everybody across that assembly line is working in service of two goals: PipeGen and brand awareness. And we sort of set those goals across the full team and then they break them down based on their respective areas of responsibility. But I found that it gets everybody sort of rowing in the right direction. But I don't disagree with you. Events and field marketing could sit in a variety of places along that assembly line. I have the same thing with content. I've had content sit on product marketing, for instance, depending on the skills of the product marketing leader. At Voices, it sits inside of the brand and field marketing team, but I happen to have somebody on my product marketing team who is an amazing writer. And so, you know, there's some blurriness sometimes between the lines.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. No, I love the visualization of it. I've heard about people aligning it to phases of the funnel before. I've actually never seen that in action work well, but I could see how the assembly line, even just conceptually, works.
Ruth Zive: I have a new graphic. I'll send it to you.
Mandy Hornaday: Oh, I would love that. We can include it in the show notes too. I think people would really enjoy that. And I'm just curious, so when you walk into it, if you were to walk into a smaller company per se, would you staff, are there like critical things where you would say you're going to staff one person across that entire assembly line, or would you almost start at the front of the assembly line and as you grow, you build the team along with you?
Ruth Zive: Yeah, that's also a great question. Each function doesn't require headcount behind it. And when you see the graphic, there are bullets under each function that sort of indicate the different sub-functional areas. So for demand, obviously, you've got SEO and paid ads and email and the usual suspects. You don't need a person doing each thing necessarily. What you prioritize and in what order depends on the age and stage of the company. It depends on the state of the market. It depends on the nature of your go-to-market motion. Is it a product-led motion? Is it an enterprise sales cycle? I was just meeting yesterday with a company that I've been sort of informally advising, and they've got one marketer, they're thinking of hire number two, and they're like, what do I hire for? And I said, well, it depends. It depends, do you feel that you've got a bulletproof product and you've proven product-market fit and really what you need is to drive demand? Then hire like a growth hacker, demand generalist as your next hire. If you feel like you've got organic demand coming in, but you're sort of not 100% certain about what your ICP is or where you fit in the market, then I think a strong brand product marketer is probably the right hire. So I think you have to come in as a new leader, especially in an early-stage company, and really deeply understand the market opportunity and the constraints before you lay out how you're going to stack rank who you hire.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. One of the things that I do, I'm a fractional CMO, but I also will come in and do 360-degree marketing assessments with companies at certain stages. And that's a lot of the times they want like a transformation blueprint in terms of, marketing is a support function, how do we make it a growth function? How do we get there? And I've noticed my logic and POV constantly is evolving just based on who the client is. And it's like, there's not one set formula. So I'm glad to hear that that's actually the right approach, as opposed to, sometimes I'm like, man, I should have a really strong POV that could be applied to all these different companies. But I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all proposition.
Ruth Zive: Yeah. Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: Well, Ruth, this has been such a fun conversation. I would love to hear, outside of work, what's something that you do or prioritize that makes you a really successful CMO that you would encourage us to do?
Ruth Zive: I run marathons and, no, I don't do any of that. I don't do any. Honestly, I have five kids and four grandkids. And when I have free time, I like to spend as much time as possible with my family. I also love to walk. I try to walk two hours every day. That's sort of my meditation, my time for, like, you know, being inside of my own head, listening to podcasts and just, you know, alone time I think is important. Nothing super interesting. I think I'm a pretty, I, you know, I'll share, and this is humiliating, but I love reality TV. My life is really busy. And so sometimes if I could just turn off a little bit and distract myself with nonsense, you know, I'm a Big Brother super fan.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. All right. And I love it. And I'm a big fan of walking too. And actually, I'm in Phoenix. And so the summertime is the worst for us because you can't really get outside. And I can always tell that my mental state is not as strong as other times of the year, for sure.
Ruth Zive: We have that in Toronto. I'm in Toronto and in the winter, it's not possible to walk outside. So I'm always happy when like March, April hits.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. You guys have, do you have the underground tunnels there though? Are there like underground walking?
Ruth Zive: There's a whole world underground in Toronto, but it's way downtown and not super close to where I live. And that's not really realistic for me, but it is lovely if you're visiting. Sometimes I'll just go to walk the malls, just so that I can be inside.
Mandy Hornaday: So then, Ruth, I'd love to just end here with, you know, what is one piece of advice you'd give to aspiring CMOs in today's sort of crazy world with where we're at right now?
Ruth Zive: I would say, and I often feel like a broken record saying this to my team, outcomes over strategy every day of the week. I think we tend to spin on strategy. It's safe to cultivate strategy and write out strategy documents. You've got to deliver outcomes. And this isn't my idea. This is from a great book called Amp It Up with Frank Slootman, who's at, I don't know if he's still at Snowflake, but he was at ServiceNow, then at Snowflake. And he talks a lot about this in the book and it really resonated with me. If you deliver a fantastic outcome in the absence of a great strategy, that's a win. If you have the most phenomenal strategy that delivers no outcomes, that's a fail. So always over-index on outcomes. And I think that's what allows you to grow in your career best.
Mandy Hornaday: I love that. I love that. Cool. Well, Ruth, it's been such a pleasure today. I'm sure, you know, if people wanted to connect with you, is LinkedIn the right place to do that?
Ruth Zive: LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. Come visit voices.com. But I am pretty active on LinkedIn and I try to answer direct messages when they're meaningful.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks, Ruth. Appreciate your time today.
Ruth Zive: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. Talk soon.
