Make Demand Gen Personal

Transcript

Opening

Hello, I'm Kerry Guard and welcome to tea time with tech Marketing Leaders. Season eight is a compilation around how to market to people, individuals and the importance of how we do that, as buyers shift from meeting sales and marketing, telling them what to buy, to giving them the autonomy to make their own decisions. It's a whole new world and episode one does a really good job of talking about this shift in the universe that's happening. Then this, every conversation I've had for this season, is an example of what that means. It's just such a happenstance that this all came together. If you haven't heard the first three episodes, definitely go check them out. You don't necessarily need to listen to them in order. It's just nice to continue to see examples of what Mark Schaefer calls the marketing rebellion.

What is the marketing rebellion? And how are marketers like yourselves, shaping it and you are your you are shaping it, and you are following what buyers want. It's really beautiful to hear the stories of how y'all are on the bandwagon and making it happen. So definitely check out the other episodes if you haven't done so, at any point in time, keep going or go back. It doesn't need to be an order. But it's definitely a nice compilation.

In this episode, I got to talk to Tal Valler, Director of Global Marketing at Centrical. I love this conversation with Tal. I know, I know I love all my conversations. But Tal is in New York and in Brooklyn. So I could hear the sounds of the city behind him. It was just such a lovely flashback to my time in New York City when I lived there. I just loved having the ambience of the city behind him. Then, of course, his story of where he's from, and why he's in New York, and then what he's doing in terms of tying creativity and data to make smart decisions, smart decisions that impact his bottom line, his ROI. The way he's going about doing that is simply beautiful, because it's a human strategy. It's a people strategy. It's looking at how can he connect better with humans to get better data to make better decisions? And it's, it's so good. It's so good. I love this conversation. I can't wait for you to to listen to it before we get into it. A little bit about Tal. He is a b2b marketing leader experienced in demand generation ABM Ops, Product Marketing, and that rare special place where creativity meets data to make smart decisions, which is exactly what we're going to talk about today. So let's take a listen.

Conversation

Kerry Guard: Hello, Tal, thank you for joining me on tea time with tech Marketing Leaders.

Tal Valler: Hi, Kerry, great to be here. So excited to have you before we get into our conversation, which I am.

Kerry Guard: Why don't you tell our listeners your story? What do you do and how did you get there?

Tal Valler: Cool. So for the past four years I have been with Centrical. If anybody doesn't know, well, Centrica is providing solutions for the enterprise for performance management, employee engagement and training. We provide a holistic platform that incorporates gamification, micro learning and real time performance management, taking employee performance data from the various systems that they use. Using that data in order to surface goals for them feedback in real time, reward them and recognize them for their achievements and provide training for them on things that they're having difficulties with. I joined the company initially as a consultant, then helped to do a lot of product marketing and sales enablement and chaining and making sure that sales toast the party line and you know, over the years, my role shifted. I started focusing more on the demand generation side creating a pipeline for the company. For the past six months now, I've been holding marketing and custodian for the company, please, that pretty much has everything to do with marketing and from lead generation to keeping the context engaged throughout the buying cycle to making sure that they become champions, and sing our praise to their friends, family and colleagues. You're in Brooklyn right now. Yep. Yeah, I, you know, in marketing Timing is everything. So I did the excellent move of moving from Israel to New York in February last year to join the New York office. There was like this small thing in the world of this weird little event in the world called a pandemic. In early March, so I spent about two weeks in the office in New York and from then on, I've been working at home.

Kerry Guard: Your timing is impeccable. Crazy what a whirlwind and in terms of a career and how you've ended up in Brooklyn and now working for Centrical. That's so cool. I love what Centrical does, I'm a big proponent on building the team and empowering them and thinking beyond just marketing or the service lines that they that they work on, and how they can be leaders or how they can tell stories, things that aren't just so macro to their, you know, current role. I love that in terms of your role. Now, what's one challenge you're currently facing?

Tal Valler: Oh, I think every marketeer is facing the same challenge. That's there's too much to do and not enough resources and good people. So you're always juggling. It's always important to try and prioritize. Even though you have a million tasks to figure out, what is the most important thing you should be working on right now and focusing on is that we're producing an event in Australia. So Australia is actually open right now. We've opened a new office there in Melbourne, and we're planning a launch event. It's so real complication to try to produce something halfway across the world with, you know, with teams in India, on the one hand, he was in Australia on the ground there taking care of the logistics and everything and the team here trying to puppeteer the whole process.

Kerry Guard: But it's so exciting to think that events are going to be happening.

Tal Valler: Yeah, something to look forward to. Yeah, I know, I know. I missed my frequent flyer mileage.

Kerry Guard: I bet. I bet. I know, I know a lot of us do. But nice to see that there's a light, a light towards the traveling tunnel. We're all looking forward to that.

In terms of our conversation today. We wanted to focus on analytics. The way I wanted to kick this conversation off is like all things in marketing. All of the terminology we have certain things tend to mean different things to different people. Not necessarily in definition, we all know what analytics means. But in terms of what analytics can do, or how we use it, I think is where the beauty and differentiating and perspective sort of comes in. So my question for you Tal, is in terms of analytics, and now being in this marketing seat that you're in, you know, what does success look like for you? How do you define success?

Tal Valler: So, I think, I don't know if you're gonna name it that way. Or this is how he positioned it to me, but I think you wrote something in the email to me about this podcast, that the topic is going to be how revenue isn't everything. Now I'm just going to argue that revenue is everything so the goal and success is revenue right? As marketers we are when we should be obsessed with revenue. You know, it's never about making your company sound cool or just creating engagement for the sake of engagement. The goal is revenue maybe with the exception of employer branding or or getting noticed by investors and even then it's somehow related to revenue. The problem isn't the revenue isn't everything is that we get obsessed with attribution in general, and I know cuz I've done it a lot get obsessed with trying to attribute revenue to a specific activity or a specific action where you know, and, you know, anybody in SAS b2b knows this, you know, nobody's ever bought because of a specific marketing activity. No, no, IBM or Unilever, which are actually clients of ours, ever came into your website, you know, filled out a form click convert and then that's it the deal was done. It's when we're looking at analytics, you know, it's really important to move away from focusing on attribution of revenue to that one activity or to that one thing and looking at a ton less Stickley, and, and avoiding you know, focusing just on the retribution of the activity, because it leads you to do really stupid things you know, that leads you to do do stupid things like align your own organization around that one metric of conversion versus doing good marketing? Right? And that makes sense.

Kerry Guard: Say more on that line, your whole organization route one, one metric. So if revenue is everything, then aren't you aligning everything around revenue?

Tal Valler: Revenue is one metric. But you know, that's as a marketing organization, you align yourself, as an organization in general, right, you're aligning yourself around, not just marketing. But when you create that situation where you're in as a market, you're in a fight to prove that that one activity or that one campaign, is what brought in revenue. You focus on attributing revenue to that one campaign, that's when you start doing silly things like, you know, putting subpar content, again, I've done this also, because we've all been there putting like, shitty content behind registration screens, just so you can capture a lead and prove that in that engagement, and feed it into your attribution model. Or, you know, presenting, MQL and SQL is that you know, you there really, you know, that, you know, didn't bring the dealer's just to show here, I brought this deal in, so I should be, you know, credited for it. That's inbound, and I brought it so dear Mr. CEO, please give me more budget for my PPC. Once, if you keep on with that train of thought, that's, that's where you start, like doing silly things. Instead of focusing on good marketing, and creating engagement at the top of the funnel, that takes time, you focus just on what you can prove immediate revenue for?

Kerry Guard: Well, that's a good point, though, because that top of the funnel does take time. When you have people up top talking, and sort of, quote unquote, breathing down your neck of, you know, we need, we need revenue, we need leads, and we need it all right now is a driving point where people tend to go, Okay, let's just do bottom of the funnel, let's just drive leads. Let's just, you know, get this done. Rather than being like, yes, we hear you. Yes, we want to do that. But first we need, to find those people and create that engagement. The Edit will happen just not as immediate as you all want it to happen is that

Tal Valler: CEOs and companies, especially startups, they'll always be chasing revenue, quick revenue and top of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel engagement. You should do it right, as a marketer, you should live in these two realms. First thing, the problem with looking at the top of the funnel, and pretending it's bottom of the funnel is one issue and then focusing on the bottom of the funnel, focusing only on people that are ready to buy and looking for a solution like yours. It's a finite situation. So you're not really creating a market, you're not really creating demand, you're just picking up the demand that's already there. So if you want to have access to unlimited demand, that's where you need to think about the long term, right?

Kerry Guard: I miss New York. It's too quiet here. But that's the thing. It's organic, right? podcasts? Yes, it's real life. It's your life. This is what working from home is all about. Maybe you'll hear my kids in a minute, who knows?

I totally hear you and I sounds like you're in a really unique spot, in that you can look at that top of the funnel. But you're saying that hyper growth place trying to understand because I've been speaking with clients on the demand Gen side, where we were very focused on the bottom of the funnel, because we needed to do that first and now and then as we've grown, the revenue, or what we like to look at is the pipeline create, right because as, as an agency, we don't really have, we can't really affect the direct sale, right? We can't help close the sale, because we're not on the other end with the sales team. So rolling, and we're such a small piece of the pie, right? So for us, we always look at what we call a pipeline created for our clients. When clients are starting off with us, they tend to be like very in that lead gen driven sort of mind frame of, of getting that pipeline up and getting those leads in. Then as that revenue grows, and they sort of run out, you're like what you're saying you run out at some point of that bottom of the funnel of people already looking for you who already know that they need this thing. Then you sort of make your way up to the top of the funnel. But are you saying that you should be working the top and the bottom of the funnel at the same time regardless of where you are, especially if you're in that growth stage?

Tal Valler: You can, you know, you know, you can turn off one engine and start running another Because you all lose the company. Again, we've, we've been through that situation ourselves where, you know, it takes time to build on top of the funnel intent and engagement and create an audience and create a following and great people that listen to you. That's where the magic happens, right? So it takes time in a few only wait till you finish the bottom of the funnel, like what's already in the pool, to start doing that, you're gonna lose, somebody else is gonna do that for you. Then, you know, when when, when that audience finally reaches that intense stage and reaches them at the bottom of the funnel that they've already been engaged and, and chained and contacted by somebody else that did all that work for, you know, for them, you have to have both of these things in parallel. You have to know how to treat those things. I think the problem and again, this is something that we face in the beginning is that a lot of companies don't know how to handle or don't understand. top of the funnel engagement, they were treated like elite; they treated the same as a bottom of the funnel intent. So if somebody comes to your website, because they're interested or because they saw a posting in social or because they watched a video or something like that, they come into your website, they do convert but not on a demo request necessarily. They download the NASA they read like an ebook. Immediately the SDR team pounces on them, or the sales team pounces on them and starts hammering them like come buy from us now message right, and then you just alienate them and you lose a good prospect. So you need to align the entire company around the strategy, you need to align all teams, and you need like an as an agency, I think one of the things a lot of agencies fail with is that they don't don't guide companies and strategy that their order takers and agencies come in when there's a marketing gap, right? When there's either no marketing or, or where the marketing team is scarce. Good agencies, partially also a consultant, right, is the strategy as well. Especially as an agency, you know, you've done it a million times that you should, you shouldn't be the trusted advisor that does that. It's the same again, you know, creating the engagement at the top of the funnel. For example, as an agency, you create the engagement at the top of the funnel in order to guide the conversation towards the bottom.

Kerry Guard: And that's how we do it with SEO versus PPC. You can do PPC as a top of funnel tactic for sure. But when clients are looking for those leads, right now, you know, using the SEO piece for that top of the funnel, to build that awareness and to get people interested to be there in the search. And then to be able to help to guide them through that customer journey through the pain is really helpful. And using those things together. I think it was a metric we had with one client well with a multiple of our clients actually, where it's like 15 to 18 touches before they'll even talk to a salesperson or close the deal. Right? Like people who are researchers, now they don't want to talk to salespeople, they want to do their own homework. And it takes some time to even realize they have to do the homework. And then they'll talk to somebody,

Tal Valler: It's even higher than that in the process, right? So people are researchers, now they do their own research, but only when they're interested, right? And part of the process of demand generation is, demand generation is people are not interested, they're not in research mode, they're not buying more than you want to get them to speak your language to think about their pain in your terms and the need for a solution to begin with. Right? So a lot of the time they'll be researching when they need a solution. And when they already have some idea of what the solution isn't mine. And you want to steer the conversation, you know, understand their pains, steer the conversation, talk to them, again, as a trusted adviser about their pains. So that you create that demand you create that not just engagement and improving the viewer the right solution, but there is a need for a solution to begin with.

Kerry Guard: And that's really the difference between demand dead and lead gen.

Tal Valler: Exactly, exactly. I like the example of you know, there's that picture of Steve Jobs when he released the first iPhone, right? I just hold it in front of the crowd and everybody's going wild and that's demand generation you know, you've created nobody who was interested in iPhone before nobody knew what it is that up there and he holds up there you know, and it's a and and he's creating demand for a new product. There wasn't anywhere in the process where he held a sign up for him to you know, hear the song like the end. You read about the specs of this new iPhone. Read about the specs of the phone, or why you need the phone to begin with.

Kerr Guard: His other really great example is the iPod, right? Where he held up the little device instead of 1000 songs in your pocket. Right? that one, that one line? Exactly.

Let's talk a little bit about tactics, I don't want to get too in the weeds, I want to say a bit high level, but just to make this because I feel like sometimes the funnel, especially when we're talking about awareness, and the way that you're talking about it, you mentioned some things in terms of what awareness is, to you, and around content and white papers. What sort of a strategy you would be when you're looking to build awareness? what's, what are some of your go toos.

Tal Valler: First, you have to understand your audience, and you have to get a company, not just as a marketer, but as a company, you have to be focused and, and, except that you won't be able to talk to everybody all the time about everything, you know, you have to hone in on a specific buyer, and understand where they go to to educate, what they care about, what are the match? What, what metric, are they and again, I'm talking b2b SaaS, I like that that's what I know. You know, you have to understand what is the metric that they're measured on? Where did they go to educate? What do they care about? What's the vibe in the market right now? What are people talking about? What's what what what's the translates, what day is the bond on and, and then create your content and create your messages around that around their pain. And gardener, I think has, if it's gardener, or CB, they had like this thing with challenges and sellcell challenge or market, it's to give people a new perspective about their pain point, and educate them that the way they've been seeing the problem is not necessarily the way the problem is, we're gonna get tactical, then it's that type of content content that teaches them or educates them about something new and not about your product necessarily. We've been doing very successful roundtable discussions and, and wine tasting events where we just bring executives from the companies who care about the titles that we care about and let them talk about their problems. And you know about their problems, where we are the ones that are facilitating this discussion, and we learn a hell of a lot from it, right, we learn how they eat what they care about, they learn about it from each other. And they see us as the company that brought them together and enabled this discussion. And already CSS in their corner. And then that produces a ton of content for us after because we have all these insights and all these tips from these executives shared with each other, and that we can share. And you know, also for going tactical, another thing is having somebody or somebody in your corner that understands your buyer that comes from that have walked in your buyers shoes, it's very easy for me as a marketeer to talk about marketing. If I started talking about you know, contact center metrics or, or industrial cheese cutting or whatever you're selling, it will be it will come out as marketing

Kerry Guard: Even just to get people together and hear how people are doing that just sounds just awesome.

Tal Valler: Especially now with, you know, the transition to virtual, we used to do like lunch and learns and road shows and all of that stuff, and that's gone. And maybe that's a good thing, because in the world of Russia, you can bring people in anytime, anywhere, and with a lot less production process.

Kerry Guard: It sounds so much more intimate to like these big events where it's one person sort of on the stage talking to what people are doing, or where you have a booth and you're hoping people are gonna, you know, swing by and talk to you. It's, you know, creating this very intimate scenario with just a few people and undivided attention. And you're, you're in the back seat completely, like in terms of, you know, making your customer really the hero and that I mean, it's not, you're just a facilitator completely, which is so cool. And like the fly on the wall even cooler. And I agree that having gone virtual has in some cases pushed us all to get creative in these ways.

Tal Valler: Definitely, definitely, hey, our sales teams also loved them, right because we're giving them an opportunity to instead of just trying to sell people us to give people like the equivalent of Super Bowl tickets. Come have fun on our own dime, meet people, learn, you know, and you don't owe us anything for it.

Kerry Guard: I always find it difficult. From a channel perspective when it comes to advertising. It's not difficult. You've retargeted and all sorts of ways to bring people back in once they've hit your website, not a problem. But when you're talking about these more high level engagement opportunities, more these more awareness tactics, bringing people through. And in this personalized way, how, because you're right, you can't just pounce on the man, thanks for showing up to our event. Now, how can we work together? How do you bring them through to that next stage of consideration?

Tal Valler: So, again, you can't force people into consideration, right? People have like a million priorities, many of which are not related to you or to that pain point. And they might not even have that pain point at that moment in time. So it becomes a long game. And then it's all about sustaining that engagement, not just hammering that message, but staying with them, you know, staying in their market, staying with relevant content, and interesting information and entertainment, and whatever, during their process. And they come when they're ready, right. So there's a lot of these tactics like, you know, you send, you create these email nurture campaigns that have like three top of the funnel, content items, and then if somebody clicks and downloads to the top of the funnel, that's when you send them the middle of the funnel content. And it's cool, right, these things have some value, but you can't force the buyer into your desired journey. It's just not going to happen. So like, when somebody is ready, they're ready, and they'll come to you and consume these bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel pieces of content, and they'll engage you and you know, I haven't tried it too much yet. But like I'm, I'm more and more thinking about the concept, not getting most of the assets on activities, and you know, the only gated thing is, as for them, to talk to us. And we'll, we'll always give you good content, where you're everything's available, we're always gonna engage you and give you activities to take part of and I care about your engagement. When you're ready to buy or buy,

Kerry Guard: I'm seeing more clients go this route, where they engage the majority of their content and use account based marketing more to know the companies they really truly want to work with. And, because they already have that information, it doesn't matter. That content stated they know the right people are coming to their site, they might not have their personal information yet, but they know that they're the right people. And they'll, like you said, sign up for that demo, or something more towards that bottom of the funnel once they're ready. And that's what matters. And it's interesting to sort of start to think differently that way and less about that lead gen. For the right content for you, you'll come back. And you'll buy it when you're ready.

Tal Valler: Yeah, exactly. And it's like, emails are cheap. You can get them in bulk from zoom info, or clearbit, or whatever you know, you're using. The fact that you've captured the lead doesn't make it a buyer. It's exactly that ABM road, you know, you need to know who your ICP is, you need to know who your buyer is, who your target accounts are. If you're going that route, if you're a transactional, you know, B to SMB type of play, then then it's a different game, right. And marketing channels and activities that work for one company and again, been through that route. They were perfect. They want a company that will not work in another because of a different audience in b2b and enterprise, you know, knowing your target market, knowing your niche. And that's also I think, we talked earlier or before this conversation, we talked about the concept of all bound or the concept of, of not attributing is it inbound or outbound or is the SDR bringing it to the cat, bring it in the marketing bringing in like and, and focusing more on on working together to driving that pipeline driving that revenue, and getting people engaged. And at that point, you know, you don't need to have somebody's contact details. Or you don't need to capture somebody, you need to have their contact details. You don't need to capture it, or force them to give it to you. You only have the context that you need, or you can get them. And there's a lot of tools to help you understand if somebody has been on your website directly interacting with the right context of the right accounts.

Kerry Guard: So is that what you mean by revenue is important? We all need to care about revenue, but how we got there. It's about the team effort in making that happen and not caring necessarily, how the person how it became revenue, and more just about looking across the people who did buy and then finding those trends. So that led to Revenue as a whole versus understanding a single path to completion.

Tal Valler: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you know, it's difficult because it takes time. And patterns are, and especially, again, b2b SaaS, you don't have a million deals, right to look at the processes, and you grow up as a company. So processes and targets change. But as you start accumulating deals, you start seeing patterns, you start seeing that, you know, on average a client has so and so many interactions before they buy. And they have so and so many. And this was an acid that they like 80% of the people engaged with. So it's probably very interesting for them, and you should use it more. Everybody had at least like two case studies. So you probably need more case studies to provide your sales team, everybody that bought from you had a session where you went over ROI, or went over like proving value. So you created documents, and he created tools for that. Everybody visited the website, or at least three people from the company visited the website. So you try to build a bigger contact database in that company, engage more people in that company and Bill yourself these targets in these metrics that you kind of try to not work for the metric, but work to improve that way, get better sales, and then what you start measuring, you know, is cycle time. You know, there's lead metrics and leg metrics, lag metrics are easy. It's, how many sales? How fast was the sales cycle, if it improved, how many conversions the SDR had, and you need to measure them, but you need to measure these ones in the long term, because that's where the long term improvement and there's the lag indicators that are going to prove your results. And that's like, how many engagements were there with your posts? How many clicks? Were there in your emails? And are you actually engaging the right people with the right content to help those lag metrics?

Kerry Guard: I think given where customers are nowadays, with so much information being at their fingertips, this strategy makes a ton of sense, especially in the long run. What do you say to people who are struggling with this idea of time? Because this, you've said it multiple times that I agree, this strategy takes time. So in building up that top of the funnel to pay off? In the end, how much time have you seen that take? Is it months? years? What's sort of been your experience with, with how much time this, this can take?

Tal Valler: That's and in our world, it's months, two years, right? That's it first, it's building competency, right? That takes time understanding your audience, and you're going to do a ton of crappy content and crappy things in the beginning, as you learn as you add that, and the good thing is that engagement stats, you know, people right up tell you, or at least data will show you that they're not interested, you're not going to get a lot of clicks, you're not going to get a lot of shares, or likes or whatever, again, depends on what strategy you're using and what channels you're using. But as you see that engagement grow, that takes time so that initially there is the time to build up that capability. And then there's time to follow it and build engagement in the market, which can take at least a good six months, two years and two to a year and more depending on which market you're penetrating and what other players are in there.

Kerry Guard: But it's that it's that short term, I say short term, because in the grand scheme of things, your company's going to be around longer than six months to a year. So it's that short term pain for that long term payoff, I imagine once the leads start rolling in because you did all this work for those for those past six months to build up this awareness that people once you've captured certain people and they do start sort of coming in that that compounds,

Tal Valler: It compounds but then you have other problems, create new demand in new markets and you know, your growth goals become more aggressive. And nobody will ever say Oh, great, great job. You're done. Now. We don't need marketing anymore. And that's a good thing going so but when you start you start seeing the results. You start seeing your traffic go up, you start seeing requests go up, you start seeing pipeline and that's what we saw, you know, we started off we were completely inbound. PPC based high intent machine where we just captured intent. And there was a lot of intent in the market. But like I said, the finite intent that we got that got us to the first three to 4 million in ARR. That ends at some point and, or it slows at some point. And if you want to get to the teens, that's where you have to, to use those long term tactics.

Kerry Guard: I totally agree. I totally agree. And it sounds like, and we've seen this to where clients have been really successful, where they felt that long term game in parallel, still use lead gen to get to that initial, you know, keep the lights on, so to speak, right? Like, okay, we're going to look at the existing market and get them in the door. And in the meantime, we're going to build up that content, we're going to really understand where our audiences are, some of this data from the lead gen is gonna tell us what's going on with our audience. So give us some existing customers to talk to, that we can go build that long term strategy, and have that pay off once we run out of that. Those people who have that intent, I've seen that happen. And it's been, it's amazing how it compounds, especially when you build in the ABM of it all, and it's been really cool these last 10 years watching the landscape change from lead gen to demand Gen. And you've told such a beautiful story here on how to think differently when it comes to that, and I'm so grateful for this conversation. Tell us thank you for joining me. pleasure, my pleasure. Anytime. Before we part here, I do have my final people first questions, I like to remind everybody that we are all humans, as well as marketers, and have lives outside of being just marketers and to pull back the curtain. So are you ready for my three questions? The first one is, Have you picked up any new hobbies? Last year you got some Brooklyn facts to your teammates for two weeks? And then you've been in lockdown? Have you picked up any new hobbies in that time?

Tal Valler: So I've recently started taking flying lessons on the single engine Cessna, which is pretty cool. The thing is, the weather's just started to be nice now. So I've, I've only managed to take two lessons so far. I think it's something I'm going to keep as a very interesting experience.

Kerry Guard: That's awesome. My business partner loves to fly. So I'll put you in touch. Second question for you is once you get back into the office, and you're with your team, and you're on the floor, and you're going desk to desk and you're around the water cooler, you're hanging out, you're brainstorming whatever it might be, what song would you want playing in the overhead speakers to set the vibe?

Tal Valler: Wow, that's a difficult question. So a lot of good. A lot of good hype songs. Okay, I've been with my kids. I've been playing Ramones a lot lately. Got to teach them young. Exactly. I think Ramon sets the tone well. It's good. Energy, music,

Kerry Guard: Any specific song that you prefer that you would prefer? Hi, whoa, let's go is good. Well, that's alright, I'm gonna add that to our Spotify playlist, and everybody can rock out to it. Over there. The link will be in the show notes. Alright, last question for you, tell you ready? Shoot. If you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would you go and why?

Tal Valler: Australia. Well, first thing it would make my life for this event if we're sitting up so much easier if I could actually be on the grounds I think. And second, I went there with my wife in 2013, and really missed the great beaches, great food, great people.

Kerry Guard: But when I get the chance to go out, I'll hit you up for some ideas. Take me with you. For that so dad, tell Thank you so much. It was so good to talk to you. And I really appreciate your insight.

Tal Valler: Same here. Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me. It was a pleasure. Feel free to hit me up anytime. You want company again.

Kerry Guard: Yes.

Closing

That was my conversation with Tao valor. So actionable, right? Like, don't you feel like there's so much you can just go and do I know I am. I have. I'm gonna go do it. I'm gonna go create a roundtable of people of marketing leaders to come over and have conversations about what y'all are doing, just like I'm doing in the podcast, but to actually have you all in the room together, where I'm just a fly on the wall, listening to you all talk about what's going on in your world. I mean, the whole point and we have in these podcasts to get to know you all better, and what better way for y'all to get to know each other better and hear from each other on how you're approaching some of these unique challenges you're all facing. I can't wait. I can't wait. I'm so excited. I'm gonna pull this together. It's gonna be glorious. Thank you.

For inspiration, I loved our conversation.

If you would like to connect with Tal you can find him on LinkedIn. The link is in the show notes below.

Season eight is available the whole season, all eight episodes all in one go. That's how we roll here at MKG Marketing. We want to make sure that you get to decide how you want to listen to your episodes and not have to wait around for the next one week after week. Netflix can do it. So can we keep going if you want to move on over to the next episode. It's with Nikki Wilson. She's a computer engineer, turn marketing and sales director. And this is another conversation that I'm just like, yes, it's so good because of her background of being an engineer, and then figuring out how to create an experience with her prospects that is both human and connected to them and personal but also she automates the hell out of it. And it's beautiful. And it's beautiful. So keep going. Keep going, keep listening.

Thank you for listening to tea time with tech Marketing Leaders, the podcast that helps brands get found via transparent, measurable digital marketing. I'm your host Kerry Guard and until next time.