How B2B Marketers Can Deliver More Business Impact

It goes without saying –  marketers need a voice at the table of the organization. To have that voice, they need to be able to show that what they’re doing is creating true value for the organization’s business. What are some steps that B2B marketers can take to prove that what they’re doing is making an impact?

In this week’s episode, we have an in-depth conversation with Mark Stouse (Chairman & CEO, Proof Analytics) about what he believes the greatest enemy of a CMO is. Mark also elaborates on why it’s important for marketers to understand how their organization generates revenue, how their efforts should impact sales, what mistakes to avoid, and how marketers can measure the results of their initiatives to highlight the impact that they’re making on the business.

https://youtu.be/UliiB4eseV8

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Mark talks about the greatest enemy of a CMO. [1:38]
  
• Some of the common mistakes and misconceptions when it comes to how marketing needs to show their business impact. [08:02]
  
• Mark shares a case study where he and his team have managed to solve a challenge for a customer. [12:59]
  
• Some small steps that B2B marketers can take to prove that what they’re doing is making an impact on the business. [24:40]
  
• Key metrics that marketers should be paying attention to. [29:29]
  

Companies & links mentioned in this episode:

• Mark Stouse on LinkedIn
  
• Proof Analytics
  

Click here to access the episode key takeaways

SPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Mark Stouse

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for B2B marketers that helps you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. Each week, we talk to B2B marketing experts who share inspirational stories, discuss our thoughts and trending topics, and provide useful marketing tips and recommendations. And now, here’s your host and co-founder of EINBLICK Consulting, Christian Klepp. Welcome, everyone to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast where you get your weekly dose of B2B marketing insights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help marketers and their companies to plan, predict, proof and pivot. So coming to us from Scottsdale Arizona Mark Stouse, welcome to the show.

Mark Stouse  00:47

Hey, it’s great to be here, man. Really is. Thank you.

Christian Klepp  00:51

Looking forward to this conversation Mark. So let’s, let’s dive in. I mean, like, I’ve enjoyed all the conversations that we’ve had so far, I think we fixed all the world’s problems in like, 15 minutes. (laugh)

Mark Stouse  01:03

Well, again, I think we succeeded in identifying them more than solving them. But yeah.

Christian Klepp  01:09

Identification is important.

Mark Stouse  01:12

It sure as hell is. Yeah.

Christian Klepp  01:15

All right. Well, let’s get this started. And let’s get it start. Let’s get this conversation started with something that you sent. And I believe it was on a conference a couple of years ago by the W2O group. And during that presentation, you spoke about what you felt was the greatest enemy of a CMO. So based on this, tell us about what you think that is, and why.

Mark Stouse  01:38

Yeah, I mean, there’s obviously a lot of different ways to look at this. But the thesis in that presentation, which I still agree with, is that the greatest enemy of the CMO is time lag. And what I mean by that is that almost every marketing investment that is made, takes a period of time to fully mature and fully generate impact, right, and thus, generate ROI. If you truncate it by saying, well, you know, we’re just going to look at whatever we can see in the next quarter in terms of impact, you’re leaving about 90, 95% of the total value of that investment on the table unidentified. And the only way that you can look and really understand the time lag is to use multivariable regression analytics, right. I mean, that’s the that’s not just an opinion. That’s a that’s a mathematical reality. So that is, that’s why I say that. One of the reasons why CEOs and CFOs have historically had such a, an opposition to a lot of brand spin spend on branding, right, type of programs, is that the time lag on those can be rather significant and B2B. And if you don’t have a way of tracking and identifying those and understanding the time lags, it can look as though nothing ever happened, that they were worthless investments, when in fact, we know very clearly that that’s not the case. They’re… well done brand is the grease on the wheel of demand, right? Demand is the machinery. And  the grease on the wheel is brand, for sure.

Christian Klepp  03:41

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m interested to know, Mark, you’ve probably heard this more times than you care to count. But how do you I wouldn’t say push back. But like, you know, we always deal with senior management, who are relatively impatient. And that’s where that factor, the time factor comes into play. And what do you say to those people that say, well, we get all that Mark, but we need results yesterday. Because we need to show that, you know, we need to justify this investment. I mean, like how you… how do you put forth I would say for lack of a better description of argumentation?

Mark Stouse  04:20

Yeah, sure. I mean, actually, in my experience, both as a CMO and as the CEO of Prove, with C suites, is that their frustration is actually far more about not knowing how to understand whether it’s working or not, and whether they should spend more or less. And the whole time lag issue, which I think everybody kind of intuitively gets, but that’s far different than being able to specify it. Right? And so when all of a sudden you show them up okay, so all the performance that the impact that you’re seeing on sales today was actually generated by investments that you made 6 to 12 months ago. And that the investments that you’re making today won’t manifest full impact for some length of time into the future. And you can show them the half-life, right of those. In other words, you know, the impact of a particular marketing investment ramps up and it hits a peak, right? And then it begins, if it’s not reinforced with additional investment, it begins to slowly degrade, right? And so when you start really approaching the business leaders on that basis, where they can say, Okay, wow, alright, so I can see right here that on this particular S curve, optimization curve, then if I spend 10 million more, I can, I can get a lot more impact, a lot more value out the other end, before I hit the point of diminishing returns, right. Assuming that they can afford it. There, they’d be insane not to do it. Right. And so I think that that’s really the issue. I think that that the whole statement that companies are looking at marketing, as, you know, what did you do for me last quarter kind of thing is true if one the rhetoric is absolutely there. But it’s, it’s because they don’t know any other way to talk about it. And they feel like that if they don’t apply the same standards to marketing that they apply to sales, that somehow marketing is going to end up spending a lot of unnecessary money. Right. So I mean, that’s really what I see. And I, you know, when they’re exposed to the analytics, because we are very definitely a bridge between marketers and the business. You know, it changes the conversation entirely. And we just totally, it becomes not about, oh, you know, we got to do this campaign or that campaign or whatever. It’s all about, okay, what do we want to achieve? And based on these analytics, if we spend more, we’ll achieve it, or we’ll achieve it faster. And is that worth the cost? Is that the way we want to spend the money? Right? That’s the real deal.

Christian Klepp  07:46

Yeah, well, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. You brought some of the stuff earlier, but like, talk to us about some common mistakes and misconceptions when it comes to how marketing needs to show that business impact and what you think can be done to address these?

Mark Stouse  08:02

So I think that, again, it’s not that this is like some unknown idea here. But I think that it gets lost a lot. Marketing’s mission, particularly well, in B2B or B2C, it just manifests differently in the two types of businesses that marketing’s mission is to help sales sell more product to more customers, that will be revenue impact. Faster, that will be cashflow impact. And more profitably, that’s quite obviously better margins, right? Than sales could do by itself. That last part is super important. So this is… it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about enterprise sales in a traditional sense, or we’re talking about retail stores, or we’re talking about e-commerce, it’s still marketing is a multiplier of something else, the performance of something else. And it can it’s not just sales, it can be recruiting and retention, it can you know, it can be all kinds of stuff, right. That is one of the things that really, I think gets lost in the competition that has been set up in most corporations, between marketing and sales. It’s competition for revenue credit. And that’s just not the way it actually works at all right? I mean, sales gets the revenue credit for the most part, but it’s marketing gets the credit for making, enabling sales to sell more faster and at a higher profit than they could otherwise have done. Right. That’s the big deal. I think that the other thing is that marketers are so focused on you measuring their KPIs that they forget that a KPI is all about the past. It’s not about the future. And there is no predictive element in data at all. It takes the analytics to distill those relationships between data between areas of performance to find out what’s the cause and effect relationships. And then we live in a multivariable world. So you can’t just use it, you can’t look at it as one to one relationships, because there’s so much intersection. And that you can’t… The unaided human brain, this is a lot of psychological research on this one. Yeah, just completely shreds, when presented with more than three variables. So that’s the…  those are some of the big misconceptions. And it’s one of the reasons why marketers continue to struggle in this area of being able to plan and then prove and pivot in the face of change, things like that. Right.

Christian Klepp  08:02

Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. In your experience, do you feel sometimes, especially in maybe larger organizations, that the lines get blurred between marketing and sales in terms of like, who is doing what? Because if both sides are accountable for revenue, right, does that lead to…

Mark Stouse  11:24

I believe that it should be blurred. Right? I think the idea that, well, they’re both totally about revenue, right? Revenue and margin, and better cash flow from revenue, right? That’s what they’re all about. They perform highly symbiotic roles with each other. And they’re very different. Right? I mean, if we look, if we go back 100 years, and we look at modern marketing, as it was created in the early 1900s. This was designed to scale sales impact. It’s all about scale. Right? And it’s because sales traditionally, right? The only way you can scale it is to add more sales guys, so you don’t get any leverage. Right? All you get really is okay, in general, I know that if I hire a new sales guy, he’s going to… he or she is going to bring me another million dollars in revenue, right? And that’s historical relationship. So we can do that. But for every… That means for every million that you add, you’re adding cost basis on a linear function, right? You’re not getting any leverage at all. Marketing is all about asymmetric leverage.

Christian Klepp  12:47

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Talk to us about a challenge that you and your team have managed to solve in the past 12 months for a customer?

Mark Stouse  12:59

We have a large cybersecurity customer that was essentially peanut buttering most of their digital investments. And they also had really misunderstood what which investments were really generating brand, x, and thus acceleration impact, as opposed to top of the funnel lead gen impact. And so when all of a sudden, we started running the analytics, or more accurately, they started running the analytics in our software. And it really showed very powerfully in a very compelling way that not all pigs are equal, right? To use Orwell’s little statement, right? That that, that you can’t just say, well, LinkedIn, and Facebook and, you know, Google and whatever, right, that all these things deserve more or less equal investment. And then we showed them by you know, what the analytics, because these analytics are also allowing you to war game alternatives. And so and it’s doing it in real time, I mean, you could sit there in a meeting and war game four different alternatives in five minutes, right? So you start Wargaming it and changing the parameters of investment and these different channels, and all of a sudden, they were looking at, you know, $12 million more pipe quarter on quarter than they were generating before. Wow. Yeah, I know that, that that was rather arresting. And I think that that, you know, the natural human tendency here is to say, oh man, you know, I’ve been, you know, that shows that I didn’t know what I was doing. Right? But guess what, we all have areas like that. We all make mistakes, right? The cool thing about this company now is that they have, they understand that they are recapping the models every month. So as the external factors continue to change, they can change with them. Right? So this is where it’s very much like a GPS on your phone. Right? All of a sudden, there’s traffic ahead of you what was the best route is no longer the best route? And the GPS says, Hey, man, you need to, you know, turn right, turn left, turn right, etc., right, that that is what’s going on here. And so they went from having a situation in round numbers where 30% of their spend was suboptimal. And in a fairly significant way, in one quarter to being very, very optimized a quarter later. And being able to maintain that level of optimization, while at the same time really understanding all of these headwinds and tailwinds that are making it necessary for them to change their approach. It’s really, really interesting, right? I mean, it’s one of the things that also we were talking about this before we started recording this podcast, is Ukraine. Situation Ukraine. Yes. So obviously, that really spiked everyone’s interest in cybersecurity.

Christian Klepp  16:36

Yes.

Mark Stouse  16:37

Right. But it wasn’t just about creating more demand, it also created a lot of other sub factors, some variables, right, that all of a sudden, they were either, in their particular case, they were either going to surf that wave really, really well and get a lot of new business out of it. Or they were going to miss those waves all together. And that, I think, is also really exciting, right? The fact that you can do that.

Christian Klepp  17:10

Yeah, that’s absolutely incredible. And just to add on to your GPS analogy, it’s almost like as if you take a U turn down the wrong street, and then the GPS then automatically readjusts a route.

Mark Stouse  17:23

That’s right. Right.

Christian Klepp  17:24

That’s, that’s the that sounds similar to what you guys that.

Mark Stouse  17:28

Actually, there’s a CMO that, like, through… could have been like six months ago, but he looked at Proof. And he’s like, you know, what I really see in this is that when I, when I use this, I’m never truly wrong. And I had to kind of think about that for a second. But that is that is true in a sense, right? I mean, think about it, you’re using the GPS on your phone to get somewhere that you’ve never been before. And it’s directing you. And even if there’s a change, and you have to change your route and all this kind of stuff. It wasn’t because you missed anything. Right? It was that the your environment changed. But you were never truly wrong. Even if you were like 10 minutes late. It wasn’t because you were wrong. Right. And there’s a so I really thought about that a lot. Because at first blush, you kind of want to go. It’s not what that means. But actually, it sort of does mean that.

Christian Klepp  18:33

Yeah, well, absolutely, absolutely. You shared this in our previous conversation, and you didn’t bring it up like a couple of minutes ago. But it was something crucial. It almost sounds like table stakes to people like you and I but marketers need to understand how their organization generates revenue, what the business model of their company looks like, and how those efforts that they roll out impact sales. So can you share your thoughts?

Mark Stouse  19:31

Absolutely. So when I was when I was a CMO, one of the things that I figured out at some point and started to do is I started to put all I mean, you know, kind of had to do it in waves, right? Didn’t do it all at once. But we ended up putting all marketers in my organizations through sales training, not just once, but sometimes more than once. They had to take a in their local, you know, community college or whatever. They had to take a finance for non-financial managers course, which again, we’re you know, we’re not trying to create little mini CFOs in marketing, right, but it was it really helped them speak the language of the business and just the fact that they could read a financial statement with some ability was really significant. I think that you have to really understand where your company is getting its revenue versus its margin. In some cases, it’s one on the same. But like at Honeywell, we had product families that were all about revenue growth, and almost no margin at that time, and then we had others that that were not about revenue growth at all. But boy, did they spin out a lot of profit, right on every deal. And so those two things, you have to invest marketing dollars in those two things very, very differently. So, I would say that in general terms, right, you have to you have to come back to, why are we doing what we’re doing? What are we trying to achieve? This is actually how we get started with a when we onboard a new customer on Proof. The first session is all about what do you want to know? Like, what are your big questions? And what is your current hypothesis about those questions? In other words, usually, your hypothesis is what you’re doing something you’re investing in a certain way, because you believe it’s true. So that is your hypothesis. So let’s test it. Let’s see that, right. So your hypothesis generates the model, which then specs out all the data sets that you’re going to need to arm that model. It’s actually very, very straightforward. It doesn’t sound like it, if you’re if you’re a marketer, and you hated math, in high school, in college, you’re probably sitting there going, Oh, my God, right. But I think that one of the things that we really succeeded in doing is making this a very, very streamlined exercise. Most of our customers get their time to value is 60 days or so. And the first value is often millions of dollars, in terms of identifying past successes that they didn’t know they had, or dollars that they were spending that maybe they should be spending in a different way.

Christian Klepp  22:47

And that in itself is already reason enough to no longer, you know, accept that excuse that so marketers come with when they say, oh, but the CEO doesn’t get marketing.

Mark Stouse  22:59

That’s right. What the CEO doesn’t get is huge spend, you know, so highly material spend on marketing, right? That hat carries with it huge opportunity costs, right, they could spend it some other way they could let it fall to the bottom line and generate better EPS, they could do all kinds of things with that money. Why are they spending it on marketing? They really want to know. The frustration is not that they somehow want to cut marketing all the time. I think that that’s the way it’s expressed. Because they don’t know any better. But when you really get in a deep conversation, it’s the they’re freaked out. And that’s I don’t think that’s an overstatement at all, they are freaked out. Not only not, it’s not just about am I spending too much money on marketing is oftentimes am I spending enough? Right, but how would I know that? How would I know what the optimized spend is? For my business in my market situation? All that kind of stuff? Right?

Christian Klepp  24:12

Yeah, no. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. We get to the point in the conversation where we talk about actionable tips, right? And let us appreciate that you can’t do all of these things overnight, right? But what are what are some small steps that B2B marketers can take to prove right, that what they’re doing is making an impact on the business that their organization is in?

Mark Stouse  24:40

You got to really understand what you want to know. And you’ve got to and usually the marketers are not the sole source of those questions, you really need to go talk to your business guys and say, What do you want to know? You have to be able to then say, okay, what’s our feedback loop on that? So feedback loop is not just about measurable stuff, like directly measurable stuff. It’s also proxies, right? You kind of want to be able to start to say, okay, so, like, how would you measure trust, over time, increases or decreases in trust? Well, you can to ask people what they think. Right? But you could also say, well, are we seeing a deal velocity consistently improved? Quarter after quarter after quarter? Well, yes, well, I can tell you that statistically, the relationship between that and higher and higher confidence and trust scores. Whether you’re actually scoring it or not, it’s how your customers feel, right? Is, is almost that whole thing. Right? It’s like, if we look at B2B deal flow. The reason why enterprise B2B deals take so long to consummate is a lack of confidence and trust. The whole back half of the deal is risk mitigation. It’s due diligence, and what’s the risk that they’re mitigating? It’s the vendor, and all the vendors promises, right? So you got to really say that. Okay, you know, let’s back into some of this. I think you also have to say, and this, this overturns a lot of people’s understanding of what is happening, most marketers try to do this data up. In other words, they’ll say, well, I can’t I can’t do analytics until we know our data is solid. Well, any data scientists will tell you that you’re not going to know that your data is solid, unless you put it to the test with analytics.

Christian Klepp  27:07

I was just gonna say…

Mark Stouse  27:09

Right? So if anything, you know, you need to approach this very much like the scientific method of inquiry, right? Again, you just say, hey, here’s the question, here’s the hypothesis, you back into it, and then you execute it all the way back up the chain. Right. And that is, that’s, those are very actionable things, right? You also need to know that to do most analytics is not a big data problem. So machine learning is a big data solution. But like multivariable regression is a lean data solution. So you don’t need nearly as much data as you think you do in order to start to get some good results. And then the more data, you pile into it up to a certain point, you’re going to get better and better and better clarity around what’s going on. So that’s the those are a few things that I would throw in the bucket.

Christian Klepp  28:11

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think I think those are really important. And, you know, back to what you were saying, it’s, it’s a collective effort. But marketing needs to take the lead, right? To a certain extent, right. Like, for example, like, getting that information, talking to sales talking to customers is another important one, right?

Mark Stouse  28:29

Yeah. So actually, I totally agree with you. And I do think that it’s up to marketing to take the lead for this reason. Sales already has its feedback loop.

Christian Klepp  28:38

Right.

Mark Stouse  28:39

Right? It either makes its quota or it doesn’t make its quota. That’s it. The problem with applying that same logic to marketing is the issue of time lag. So marketing and sales are creating value, asynchronously, across time and space. Right. So you can’t do that with marketing. If you if you look at well, did marketing fulfill its KPIs for the following quarter? What you will be assuming? Is that what you did the previous quarter had anything to do with those KPIs at all? And most of the time, it didn’t. It was further back in time.

Christian Klepp  29:19

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, um, you brought some of these up previously, but what are what are some of those key metrics that marketers should be paying attention to?

Mark Stouse  29:29

Well, I think that starting with the business, you absolutely need to look at that stuff like revenue margin and cash flow improvement, right? We’re gonna look at recruiting and retention these days, there’s a lot I mean, there’s different parts of the business that have different business KPIs that really matter to them, that your marketing spend, will be multiplying, will be improving it right. And not with separate money by the way, it’s all a lot of is happening with the same marketing dollars. It’s just benefiting different parts of the business in different ways and across different time periods. Right. So I would say there’s that there’s also you really need to be aware of awareness, confidence and trust data. These are three legs of the of the stool in terms of the way your customers is interacting with you, not just mechanically on a website, but more like psychographically. And if you have bad awareness or inadequate awareness, or inadequate confidence, or inadequate trust, confidence and trust are very different things, by the way, you’re going to feel that in your business, you’re going to feel that in terms of top of the funnel, mid funnel, and the bottom right, you’re going to just feel it throughout. And so, for example, in Honeywell, we had a really interesting business situation in Honeywell, and that Honeywell aerospace was already doing business with everybody who mattered in the industry. So the idea of a new logo kind of didn’t exist, unless all of a sudden somebody created a new airline. Right? So what really mattered. I mean, certainly, we wanted to grow revenue, but what really mattered was up income or profits, right? And the ability to speed up deal velocity in a highly regulated environment. And so we, our team was able to prove impact, we got, for example, on deal velocity, we improved deal velocity around 4% over a two year period of time. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot, except all of a sudden, you say, well, I’m helping to move $12 billion in revenue 5% faster through the business. I mean, my CFO was my biggest fan at Honeywell, he’s actually a member of our board at Proof today. Right? So I mean, that’s the kind of thing you need to be thinking about. The rest of it in terms of marketing metrics, is sort of like whatever you need to measure in order to support these larger questions. The idea… I’ll just I’ll finish up this way, on that question, the idea that you can create a scoreboard of marketing KPIs and prove your value to the business. It’s just not true. It doesn’t mean that data and KPIs aren’t important. They are they’re very important, right? I mean, without data, analytics is just a, it’s just sitting there, right? It’s got to have th`e, it’s got to have the stuff, right. It’s like a refinery that has no oil to refine, right? It’s like a waste, right? So you got to do that. But you cannot, you will not be able to ever prove your value, predict your value any of that stuff using data alone.

Christian Klepp  33:29

Would you say part of it should also come through qualitative means, like, for example, conducting in depth interviews with customers? Because those are things you can’t really track, for example, in quantitative formats.

Mark Stouse  33:40

Yeah, no, I, I’m a big believer in qualitative data. You have to really use it appropriately and correctly. But I think one of the big missed opportunities in a lot of marketing organizations is that they’re not up close and personal with customers. They’re kind of interacting with customers, at long range through a glass, darkly, as they used to be the phrase, right. And you’re, and that’s just not, that’s not helpful. I mean, like, what, like, what gave me originally the idea to try and do all of this stuff, you know, that turned out to be Proof 15 years ago, was sitting in executive briefing centers at HP. And at BMC Software and listening to CIOs talk about exactly the same problem. How do I show my value to the business? And how they were doing that and how they were thinking about it? Right? And what I realized was, is that you could kind of do a search and replace, and put marketing in the in place of IT. It’s same deal. Right? Now, there are differences. But the big picture is, is the same. Right? And so that’s actually where I got my inspiration. So I’m a big believer in heavy customer contact, doesn’t mean that you as CMO need to be sitting and interviewing customers every week or anything like that. Some of the best stuff is sort of like what I was just saying about the EBC. Right. Listening to them when they’re talking and they don’t know that they’re talking to you necessarily, is some of the most honest stuff that you’ll ever get.

Christian Klepp  35:44

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, this next question, what’s the status quo that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Mark Stouse  35:59

The idea that data or analytics is the enemy of creativity is a really, really, really awful belief that I know exists a lot, right? So many marketers, you know, they, if they were honest, I will certainly fell into this category much earlier in my life, you know, that part of the reason why they became a marketer was that 25 years ago, it didn’t involve math, except being able to track your budget. Right? So it seemed very creative, and very fun in that sense, and not overly burdened with the unpleasantness of math, right? That has totally changed. And yet a lot of marketers have not changed with it. I’m, I’m a huge believer in Rev ops, teams, huge believer. I think that they, they’re indispensable. But one of the reasons why they are indispensable is that most mainstream, let’s call them operational marketers, marketers who are doing campaigns, more traditional marketers, if you want to think of it that way, have refused to learn this stuff. And I think that’s a real missed opportunity. I think also, you know, a great example of this, unfortunately, is the communications profession, who are even more behind the curve than marketers. And yet, great communications, in some ways, has more late stage deal and impact than anything that happens in paid and owned channels, right. And so here you have a profession that literally is ignoring its fantastic contributions to the business, because it doesn’t want to have to do math. And I just, I think that that is a really, that’s really tragic. Because they keep in that case, communications, in many companies, not all, but in many continues to sink in the org chart, right? They keep on being kind of demoted as a professional in the org chart. And it should not be that way. It’s actually that is 100% wrong. It’s a 180 from reality, but it’s totally tied to their unwillingness to do the math.

Christian Klepp  38:48

No, absolutely. And that’s their reluctance as you as you rightfully said to evolve, right? Like, I mean, gone are the days of like, you know, we’re no longer in that era with Don Draper, and Madmen, smoking cigarettes and offices on Madison Avenue. I mean…

Mark Stouse  39:03

They already know though, the irony of that, is that if you go back to the 1950s, and 60s, whether we’re talking about advertising, or we’re talking about comms agencies, PR agencies, they were far more data driven. Right, than they are today, right? I mean, you look at a marketing agency outside of the media planning area, right. Analytics is not really around. And that is that should it shouldn’t be that way. Because actually, what I find is that the more understanding I have of a problem, and that is usually related to the right data or the right analytics, right, the more creative I become. Because what is what is creativity? Creativity is problem solving. Right? If you don’t understand the problem, you are not going to be creative. You might be fun. Cool idea. But it probably it won’t solve a problem.

Christian Klepp  40:22

Yeah, it’s fair enough. Fair enough. And that’s the I mean, at least for me, in fact, So that’s the reason why the marketing profession exists, it exists to solve a problem or problems, let’s plural form, right?

Mark Stouse  40:35

And actually, they do it better than almost any other part of a large company, right? I mean, today, you have three parts of large companies that are true multipliers of other people’s performance. One is HR, IT because everything is an IT thing at some level, and marketing, right. Marketing is actually the most important multiplier of the three. Now, a lot of people will go, wow, you know, like you said, the marketing more important than people, right? Well, not, that’s not really what I mean. What I mean is, is that its ability to scale impact. Marketing’s ability to scale in fact, is much greater than any human team’s ability. Because, again, a human team is a linear function. But marketing is exponential. Right? So it’s just it’s not about, like one being somehow way intrinsically way better than the other or one being inferior to the other. It’s about what they are and what they do. So.

Christian Klepp  41:53

Yeah, well, that’s fair enough. That’s fair enough, Mark. This has been an incredibly informative, thought provoking conversation. So thanks again, for coming on the show and sharing your expertise and experience with the audience. So quick introduce yourself, and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Mark Stouse  42:12

So my name is Mark Stouse. I’m sure he’ll probably have my name. Yes. Yeah, on the screen. I’m very active on LinkedIn. So that’s probably one of the best places to reach me. And I’m very responsive on that platform. I’m also on Twitter, and very responsive there. You can also reach me through the website, you can reach me through email, email maybe not the best way to reach me. So actually, I would really encourage you to just reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Christian Klepp  42:47

Fantastic, fantastic. Mark. Once again. Thanks again for your time. Take care. Stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Mark Stouse  42:55

All right, thanks, man.

Christian Klepp  42:56

Thanks. Bye for now.