Long-Term Success for CMOs and Senior Leadership | Melinda Byerley

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Melinda Byerley, CEO and founding partner of Fiddlehead Marketing, a virtual data-driven consultancy based in San Francisco. A season to Silicon Valley veteran Melinda has led teams at companies like eBay, PayPal, SecondLife/Linden Lab, and Checkpoint Software. She's a pioneer in marketing analytics and an influencer in data privacy and ethics. In 2022, she refocused her career on AI and marketing analytics inspired by her personal triumph over breast cancer. A contributing writer, guest, lecturer, and host of the podcast Stayin' Alive in Tech, Melinda blends finance acumen with storytelling flair. Melinda, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Melinda Byerley: Thanks, David. I'm glad to be here. David McBee: I'm so happy to have you. I understand that one of your specialties is that you actually work closely with senior marketing leadership, which is kind of ideal for Simpli.fi TV because that's a big part of our audience. What is a common thread, either positive or negative, that you see happening with marketing leadership? Melinda Byerley: Well I often say it's the toughest job in technology. That's my lens that I bring to marketing as I particularly specialize in working with marketers in the tech industry. And the profession is under attack from all sides. CEOs think we don't deliver enough and CTOs think that they can do it better through technology. The finance team thinks everything can be measured and that we should measure everything on ROI. And so beleaguered might be a good word, or stressed or worried because CMO tenure has also been declining. So a lot of pressure from all sides, and we're not even getting into the introduction of AI. David McBee: And what do you think is the best way for a CMO or any senior leadership to really survive in the long term? Melinda Byerley: Honestly it starts with trust. I keep having that Billy Joel song going through my head. It's really a matter of trust. And we are as marketers, I think whether we're on the agency side or whether we're in the house, we are optimistic people by nature. That is what we do. That's how we are. And so we have a tendency to promise, over promise sometimes and under deliver or be enthusiastic before we sometimes know everything that's gone into what's going on. And we know we can fix things, we're can-do people, but sometimes we have to know why the fences are there before we tear them down. And so I would say it starts from the day one when you're going into a new role and that's learning to understand why things are the way they are before making promises that may be difficult to keep before we understand what the structural barriers are, what the problems really are inside the organization and what needs to be fixed before the next level of growth can be obtained. David McBee: So you're kind of suggesting that a CMO needs to earn trust by knowing their product, their service, their company before they start making huge changes? Melinda Byerley: Yeah. There's a fantastic book called The First 90 Days. And yes I know sometimes in startups it doesn't always feel like we have a full 90 days, but the idea is the same which is to not start prescribing right away. Great doctors slow down, make sure they understand the diagnosis, understand everything that's going on before we start making plans. And I often say that your tenure as a marketer is not defined by your first board presentation, but by your second one. It's the one you present a year from now when you say, "I said I was going to do this, what did I do?" And if there is a massive gap there without a good explanation, without full understanding, I think that's when tides start to turn and it can become very difficult to recover. David McBee: Your analogy to doctors seems like the perfect transition to ask my next question, which is how did your experience with breast cancer inspire you to go down the path of AR marketing analytics? Melinda Byerley: They're somewhat connected and somewhat not. And by the way, I'm sure you know that cancer teaches us stuff even when we're not thinking we're being taught stuff. So I could say that that lesson is ongoing. But the main thing is that when I had to take a step back from my business and it was not in a place yet where it was ready to have somebody step in for me, I had to wind large parts of the business down. I did this not just because of cancer though. I saw what was coming in 2022, the early 2022, I saw lead times start to lengthen. I saw turnover start to increase again. I saw it just getting harder and harder to close, and I knew something was up. And when cancer hit and I had to make changes in the business, I saw it as an opportunity to slow down and rethink and say, okay, where do I want Fiddlehead to be? What do marketers really need from me, and from us, going forward? In my conversations with my friends after a coming out of the end of treatment at the end of 2022 and heading into 2023, what I heard consistently was, we need you to go out and understand AI so that you can help us. And I went. But I've been running an EGC for seven years. I'm not an engineer. Aren't I a little late to this? And what I heard from, I mean investors in the space here in the valley said, 'no, you're right on time. There wasn't much for you to do until all of this started happening. And so now you're actually right on time'. And so I jumped in as I often do. My oncologist said I was one of the best informative patients he's ever had. So I figured after cancer, AI couldn't be quite that hard. So it's been a blast. I love to learn new things. It's been an opportunity to retool my skillset. And on top of it that the last 10 to 15 years as a marketer have been hard. It's been hard for agencies too, this focus on paid advertising and customer acquisition costs and all this things. Now we're going to start to go to a place where brand is going to become even more important. And in some ways it's the most exciting time we've had in a long time. So in that sense, it's been fun. David McBee: What makes you think there's going to be a shift to brand over ROI and other KPIs? Melinda Byerley: I don't think it's an end to ROI, but I think the weight has been heavily focused. If you're a brand person, it's been a tough haul the last few years with the emphasis on performance marketing. But in the age where a lot of content can be created and most of it's not going to be great, it's going to get worse. Content proliferation has been getting worse and it's going to continue to accelerate with generative AI. So what will really matter is having a brand that people trust and understand. If you're trying to decide between all the different sources, going to a brand that you trust will matter more than ever, especially in the land of deep fakes and other things that can happen. Being with trusted brands that share your values is going to be more important than ever. And we're seeing it. We're just seeing the interest in brand managers start to rise again. David McBee: Let's go back to AI. You said you dove in headfirst. What are one or two big things that you learned that you want to share with your fellow agencies and peers? Melinda Byerley: I don't think I have to tell this group of people that this is a thing. This isn't like crypto or Bitcoin or Web 3.0. This is happening. It'll be the biggest transformation in most of our lives. It will be on a par with the internet in terms of the impact it will have. Those of us who are of a certain age get to benefit from all of those other transformations we've seen. So it represents a once in a generation and probably the last big technology revolution for those of us of a certain age. And careers will be defined by our response to it and the opportunity that we have in front of us. Couple of other things. One is a lot of people are out there talking about it and not very many people know what it means. And it's more than generative AI. I mean chatGPT, Claude, all those things, they're fun, they're sexy to play with. But the real win here is to look at what is the opportunity on the top line, not just saving money by how many fewer writers can we hire, but where can we take the biggest problems that face the enterprise today and use AI to solve them? That's where the opportunity lies for marketers and for agencies. And that's the thing I'm most excited about. David McBee: Is there a really quick answer to that question that you could share with us? I know there's not, but what do you got? Melinda Byerley: The really quick answer to that question is the projects that you're pursuing right now because of the cost of cloud computing, have to be at 10 x the investment. So this is not about put AI on all the things like peanut butter. This is systematically taking the business opportunities in front of you and being really smart about what are they worth. If we could solve these, what are they worth? Pick one or two of those and go for it. David McBee: Great advice. All right before we go, I like to ask all of my guests if they have a favorite podcast or book that has been instrumental in their success. And as a podcast host, this would be your moment to talk about your podcast if you like. Melinda Byerley: Well I love my podcast because I love learning from my guests, but I know you've got agency owners on your podcast, so I'm sure everybody's heard of the Build a Better Agency podcast. I get no money from Drew McClellan, but they have been transformational for me. I have an MBA and I thought I knew how to run a business, and that's got nothing to do with running an agency. And just the straight up comradery, closeness, companionship with the people that I've met through that organization, been coached by, have had the opportunity to know. That Drew's podcast is a gold mine and I listen to it all the time. So that's the straight up truth. And as for a book, I still recommend to this day, Seth Godin's, This Is Marketing. I think it distills everything we all do into very simple. When people ask me what is marketing? I say, read this book. You can read it in an airplane flight. If you master this, it's like the Dao, if you master... It's very simple to understand and very hard to do, but if you can grasp this, you'll understand what we do. David McBee: Those are some great recommendations. All right, Melinda, what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you or get in touch? Melinda Byerley: Thank you. You can certainly visit the company website at Fiddleheadhq. Or if you want to follow along as I figure out what is AI and how it's really going to matter, you can go to melindabarley.substack.com. It's called Let's Get Real for a reason because we really want to get real about what's going on in AI. Or you can find me on LinkedIn, I'm happy to chat there. David McBee: You've been great. Thank you so much, Melinda. Melinda Byerley: Thank you, David. David McBee: And thank you all for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.