This episode features an interview with Alison Lange Engel, CEO of Ceros, a company that provides tools and services that empower companies to create interactive content with unparalleled ease and efficiency, driving customer engagement.

In this episode, Alison discusses the power of interactive content and how to differentiate your brand amidst increasing noise. She and Ian dive into the importance of being unique and how creativity is a competitive advantage.

Key Takeaways:

• Creativity is a competitive advantage, even more so as copying assets gets easier with AI. CMOs need to get their teams off the treadmill and make space for creativity, inspiration and ideation.
• The sea of sameness is real, especially in B2B, and the world continues to get noisier. You have to disrupt and have conviction behind your big bets; check box marketing won’t cut it anymore.
• Originality is as important as ever, but teams have to find ways to do more with less and won’t succeed if they are only trying to differentiate themselves through words, tone, or processes.

Quote:

•  You're going to miss the opportunity to differentiate and tell a unique story, right, if you have your team on a treadmill constantly. And that's how most people feel. But, as a leader, you've got to create space for it and find inspiration. Encourage your team to bring ideas. We would bring magazine clips in. People would bring in their pets. People brought in old, you know, pictures, family mementos, what matters to them. You've gotta get to the heart and soul of what you're trying to do to kind of unlock your team and have your company, you know, feel fresh, feel modern, and have people take risks, right? Great companies take risks and you have to kind of create that environment to do that. The brands that don't, are in trouble and the brands that do are the ones that win.

Episode Timestamps:

*(05:50) The Trust Tree: Experiences over static content

*(25:36) The ROI of creativity

*(36:29) Advice for CMOs on creativity and boldness

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Alison on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Ceros
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Jen Rapp, CMO at Superside, an AI-powered creative service, trusted by 500+ top brands. Jen has over 20 years of experience developing and executing marketing strategies for high-growth companies, with a particular focus on working alongside entrepreneurial leaders to scale.

She discusses selling the vision and how doing good impacts marketing, sharing her lessons from her time at Patagonia and DoorDash. She also discusses winning on meta through quality creative and driving qualified leads through virtual summits.

Key Takeaways:

• Don’t sleep on meta ads. If your ICP is on Instagram, those ads can be some of the cleanest and most effective ads to drive pipeline, especially if you have quality creative.
• Virtual Summits, or essentially a stack of webinars, are a great way to get emails and drive pipeline if you are truly offering great content.
• Sell the vision, not the product. A focus on features, instead of stories, is rarely the way to go.

Quote:

• “  I would not have said this a year ago, when I first joined the company - number one is our meta, paid meta spend. I came to this company and I saw how much we were spending on Meta, and I was like, whoa, what the hell are these people doing? They're making mistakes left and right. Nope. We drive a majority, or a lot, I shouldn't say a majority, a lot of our qualified pipeline through our Meta spend. Our Meta spend also acts as our top of funnel awareness driver. When we turn off meta, we basically turn off the ability of our SDRs and our BDRs to convert people to SQLs. It is invaluable. So number one, my marketing team is like rallied around creating incredible creative for Meta.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:51) The Trust Tree: Making sure customers have confidence in you

*(12:12) The Playbook: The power of Meta ads

*(33:10) The Dust Up: Standing up to brilliant founders

*(41:01) Quick Hits: Jen’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jen on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Superside
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Steve Rotter, CMO at DeepL, a global communications platform powered by Language AI.

In this episode, Steve shares with us the power of a small uplift to your website when you see large scale website traffic, and the importance of pushing your point of view over your product features. He also dives into the value of brand in avoiding churn.

Key Takeaways:

• Small changes to the website can have a small uplift, and when you are dealing with large-scale website traffic, that can have a big impact on the business. For large enterprises, don’t underestimate the value of small optimizations on the website.
• People churn products, they don’t churn from valued brands and communities. Make sure to invest in your brand accordingly.
• Explaining your POV over pushing your features, allows you to demonstrate the outsized impact of your product more effectively.

Quote:

•  Brand is critical. My general sense is, people churn from products, they don't churn from communities, they don't churn from brands with personalities that they enjoy. So, we spend a lot of time looking at that in terms of, you know, what is the voice, what is the language, what is the identity of the brand?

Episode Timestamps:

*(04:11) The Trust Tree: People churn from products, not brands and communities

*(24:13) The Playbook: Explain your point of view, over pushing all your features

*(39:22) Quick Hits: Scott’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Scott on LinkedIn
• Learn more about DeepL
• Learn more about Caspian Studios