REAL MARKETERS: Outsource the Bottom 10% of Your Job

Stephanie Cox: Welcome to Real Marketers, where we hear from marketers who move fast, ask forgiveness, not permission, obsess about driving results and are filled to the brim with crazy ideas and the guts to implement them. This is not a fireside chat and there's absolutely no bullshit allowed here. I'm your host, Stephanie Cox. I have more than 15 years of marketing experience and I've pretty much done about everything in my career. I believe speed is better than perfection. I use the Oxford comma. I love Coca Cola. I have exceptionally high standards, and surround myself with people who get shit done. On this show, my guest and I will push boundaries and share the real truths about marketing and empower you to become a real marketer. There are just some people who you could talk to for hours, and today's guest is definitely one of those. I'm chatting with Andy Jolls, the CMO at FastSpring, advisor at Cloud Zero and Mission. He has more than 20 years of marketing experience and previously held leadership roles at Mission, Research Now, SSI, Instantaneously, Digital Post Mail, Cooking.com and more. We're talking about the importance of modeling in marketing, why everyone should outsource the bottom ten percent of their job, the value of listening to sales calls, and so much more. Thanks for joining me on the show Andy. Super excited to chat with you today.

Andy Jolls: Great to be here. Thanks for having me Stephanie.

Stephanie Cox: First question, tell me something about yourself that few people know.

Andy Jolls: Okay, here's one thing that I don't think a lot of folks know. Way back in the mid 90s, I wrote a column called Ask the Web Wizard. The reason I wrote that column was I created one of the first websites for Hewlett Packard, one of the first division websites. I spent a Thanksgiving vacation, me and an engineer, basically coding HTML and building a website. Maybe that's two things. Yeah, that's a thing that I don't think a lot of people know. When I share that story, especially with engineers, they think it's funny that I wrote a column called, Ask the Web Wizard.

Stephanie Cox: I just put myself on mute and was furiously Googling to see if I could find said column.

Andy Jolls: You can't find it, I don't think.

Stephanie Cox: I couldn't, at least not right away.

Andy Jolls: Yeah, no.

Stephanie Cox: That's really cool.

Andy Jolls: It's not out there. That was way back. Those are early days. This is 1996. This was literally a printed document that was circulated inside of HP, or internal. It's probably made in some old PDF software thing. It wasn't out there to get Googled.

Stephanie Cox: For those of you who are unfamiliar with printed documents, those are things that Andy and I used to create when we were early on in our career. That's how you would communicate with people.

Andy Jolls: Exactly, exactly.

Stephanie Cox: Moving on from that, I think one of the things that maybe would start our conversation off is, we were talking about this before we started recording, if you were to give a TED Talk, what would the title of that be and what would it be about?

Andy Jolls: Right, all right. The title of the TED Talk would be, Stop Creating. It's a link bait or a link bait- y type title, which is intended to get to one of my principles, which is that teams and people in general at work don't model enough. They're spending too much time trying to create things from scratch. If we could just reset our minds to basically say, " I'm just going to try to model constantly and save that really needed energy for where I really have to create." Instead of asking the question, " How do I build something?" We ask the question, " How do I go copy or model something that somebody else has done?"

Stephanie Cox: What's interesting about that is you're right. So many marketers, they feel like they're stealing or that it's not as authentic or it's not as worthy if they copy. In reality, why wouldn't you look at what someone else has done and use that as a starting point for what you're going to do?

Andy Jolls: Yeah, and I think part of the challenge is, if you're in a category in a nascent category, there's usually not very much to model off of that's right inside your category. Part of it is just expanding and saying, " Hey I'm going to look outside at things that seem relevant that then I can go have the discussions." Here's the power of actually going outside, is then you're not talking about competitors. You're talking about peers. You can reach out to them and say, " Hey, I'm really curious about why you have done X, Y, Z." Most times I found, they will talk to you. They will tell you. I think we might have talked about this in one of our other conversations, but I actually have this as a MBO for my team. They have two things that I pretty much require them to do no matter which company I go to. The first one is, they have to model. They actually have to show in the quarter that they've done something where they modeled and they can actually present to the team and tell us about the journey, what their problem was, how they got to the solution, what they modeled. Then the second one is that they outsource the bottom ten percent of their job. We can save that topic. The modeling thing is super critical to me.

Stephanie Cox: When you bring that up to someone, to your team when you take on a role for the first time, how do people react to that? Is that something they're excited to do? Do they question it? How do you get them on board?

Andy Jolls: I think you're right. I think the natural... There's a little natural resistance, because they're like, " Wait a minute. I chose this role, I chose this discipline of marketing because I wanted to create." I think I just have to show them that there is joy in talking to peers and there's joy in learning. As I said at the outset, looking at what we do on the personal side, outside of work, how do we learn to ski or snowboard? We don't just strap on the equipment and go. We take lessons. We look at YouTube videos. I've coached kids sports for the last several years and I never played any of these sports. I learned how to do a lot of it on YouTube, to the point where a dad asked me, " Oh I didn't know you played baseball," and I'm like, " I didn't." While you're watching Netflix, I'm watching, How to Field a Ground Ball That's Going to Your Left, on YouTube. I think that's the thing that usually pulls them across, is they see that they've done this in their personal. Then they just need to apply it to their work life. Then, once they actually start to see the results and they have more free energy to really get creative, then they're on board.

Stephanie Cox: One of the things that I started thinking about when you were talking just a few minutes ago was around this idea of imitation is the best form of flattery and how a lot of times I think marketers don't realize that. If I think about other brands that have done really well, and they're six to nine months ahead of me in my company and where we're at. I'm not saying I copy exactly what they do, but by looking at what they're doing, clearly if they're continuing to do it, it's working. How can I take that and make it relevant for my business? How can I, to your point, learn from that? One of the examples in the B2C world that I think is a really great one... I'm a big fan of Burger King. I don't eat the food because I have a gluten allergy, but I love their marketing strategy. A lot of what they've done is taking really basic ideas that everyone's done before but just put a slightly different spin on it. Is it creative? I don't know if it's creative to offer a promotional, a free Whopper to access and download your app? Is it creative to do it and pair that with, it's the free Whopper if you order it and you're 600 feet within a McDonald's? Yeah, that's creative. It's two ideas that people have done before, just putting them together in a different way. I think there's a lot of opportunity for marketers to look at, what you're saying, what other people have done and find a way to make that relevant for their business. That makes a lot of sense.

Andy Jolls: Well-

Stephanie Cox: Go ahead.

Andy Jolls: Yeah, I was going to say, I think the other piece of this is actually moving from B2B to B2C. I started my career really in B2B. I was young and it didn't seem very cool to me. I was like, " I want to move to B2C." I moved to B2C and really learned and had a great journey there and then decided, " I want to go back to B2B." Part of the reason I wanted to go back was I realized that B2B was really lacking a lot of what was done on the B2C side. That may sound sort of obvious now in 2021, but at the time when I started to make that move, there was a lot of really bad marketing in B2B. I think we've really come a long way. I will tell you, I still put up Netflix's home page as an example to teams to say, " Look at what they're doing. This is, to me, an example," and usually when I pull it up, it's changed from the last time that I've seen it. They're iterating. They're evolving. I do think that it is a great form of flattery. I think if somebody copies something that I've done, I'm flattered. I feel like, " Okay, that means I'm doing something right."

Stephanie Cox: I feel the exact same way, and I love your Netflix example, because I think sometimes B2B brands, we have gotten better, but a lot of the marketing is super boring. We feel like we have to market to companies and it's like, " We're still marketing to people you guys." I'm the same person in my B2B job as I am when I'm watching Netflix at night.

Andy Jolls: Right.

Stephanie Cox: My expectations are, a lot of times, even in a buying situation, that of a consumer. I want to get what I want, when I want to get it. I need instant gratification. I don't want to go through your sales process necessarily. I want to figure it out if this is going to work before I talk to someone. Yet I find-

Andy Jolls: Yeah, I think.

Stephanie Cox: We struggle.

Andy Jolls: Yeah, I think on the B2C side, we had it more in our head. We've got to get to that wow or magic moment quicker. This isn't going to work unless we get to that. In B2B, I think we were getting sales and revenue without doing that. Spending a little bit more energy on trying to figure out, " How do we get to that moment faster?" So that folks can really go, " Oh, I get it. I get where the excitement is." I get excited about how technology lets us do a lot of these things. One of the things my team is teasing me about is I often start my morning by getting on my Peloton and listening and actually course calls. I've geeked out. Honestly it's the exact same laptop table that the Peloton instructor has. I somehow ordered that same thing. I set up my laptop. I probably look like, if you were to take a photo of me, I probably look like an instructor. I'm literally watching Course calls and turning down the volume on the Peloton. There's a downside. My workout is definitely not as challenging. I'm not getting that good audio feedback, but I'm spending time listening to the voice of the customer and really trying to understand, " Where are the problems? Where do they actually have the aha moment," trying to figure that out.

Stephanie Cox: Do you find that other marketers are doing that? Or is that something that's an untapped advantage that marketers could start using if they would just listen in more sales calls?

Andy Jolls: Look, I think so much of our experience is friction. We're trying to figure out, how do we eliminate friction. That's how I articulate, that's our role as sales. We're there to try to figure out, how do we actually remove friction points and pull part of the story to more of the beginning of the journey? You'll see, I undertook a bit of a hack in my Peloton story. I think, for me, I joined FastSpring in December. I'm about 90 days in. I felt like in the first 90 days, I really need to learn the customer, learn the product, learn the analytics of the business. That's my obligation in the first 90 days, is to figure a lot of that out, and to do it early. I think it's always harder once you start and you start building things and then you're trying to go back later and be like, " Now I'm going to start to go talk to customers." I do get excited about some of the technology making it so that it removes friction when these conversational platforms evolved to say, " Hey, you don't actually have to go to the sales meeting at 9: 00. You can actually watch it as a recording whenever," and figuring it out. I think the next part of the journey is the natural language processing around the data and trying to figure out, " How do I just see snippets? How do I get the data aggregated?" That's part of it, is figuring out how do we actually develop habits to break through that? That's one of mine that I've done.

Stephanie Cox: One of the things that you just said that I thought was really interesting was around removing friction and how that's so important. How, as a marketer, sometimes I feel like our role is to add friction to some extent. What I mean by that is, there are metrics that we're held accountable to. A lot of people in the B2B world are held accountable to leads. We can rant on that for awhile probably.

Andy Jolls: My favorite rant.

Stephanie Cox: Right, exactly. In that situation, we are, to some extent, supposed to put a little bit of friction in to build a pipeline and a funnel. How do you balance the two? How do you balance figuring out ways to remove friction that you know makes the consumer experience better while also still being able to have the metrics to show that your marketing is working?

Andy Jolls: Yeah, this is a really hard one. There's so many places we could take this conversation. One place to take it, as an example, is pricing. If you have a value based pricing model, you've probably rightfully said, " I'm not going to display pricing on a web page because people can't figure out what that pricing means without hearing more of the story." We, as marketers, do introduce friction there. We say, " Hey, you've got to talk to somebody to learn more about pricing." The world is changing. I think you and I, as peers, can find out ballpark, what some of the pricing for some of these platforms look like by talking to each other. We have other ways to get at that pricing data. It will be interesting to see how that evolves. I think the reality is, we do find ourselves in a little bit of a predicament, where we have to introduce friction or where friction does basically... It can actually work. I guess, one of my stories about this, I remember interviewing with the CEO of eHarmony years and years and years ago. At the time, I thought that they had a great TV ad. I said, "This is a great ad. Why don't you have it on the home page?" He said to me, he goes, " Why don't you think it's on the home page?" I realized, " Oh I just asked kind of a dumb question." I knew that they were very analytics focused. He's like, " Look, we tested it and it drove conversion down because people basically got distracted by the video and the great ad and then they forgot to click through and start their journey and sign up." I don't have any biases at this point. I try not to have biases about what's going to work and really try to instill a culture of again, coming back to the modeling theme, that AB testing is really about, let's just try different things. Probably things that we've saw somewhere else and just see if they work. Let's let the data win. It is one of my favorite Jim Clark quotes, which is, " If we've got the data, we're going to go with the data. If we've got opinions, we're going to go with mine." I've used that with my team and I've used it upwards towards the CEO. I'm like, " Look, you get to make the call if we don't have the data." That's the luxury of being at the top of the hierarchy. If we've got the data, we want to be able to go with the data. That's just another mechanism, I think, helps remove a little bit of the friction thinking.

Stephanie Cox: That's a great point. The other thing I wanted to bring up when you were talking about listening to sales calls and the ability to be able to do that, I think a lot of times people forget that there's a difference between listening to sales calls and hearing sales talk about their calls. When sales talks about their calls, they're using their terminology and their perception of the conversation. What I think you can really get when you listen to an actual call yourself, and it would be great if we could get more inaudible in some of that stuff to make it more digestible as you hear the customers' words. There's a difference.

Andy Jolls: Right. I would say, this isn't just a problem to pin on sales. This is every team. I think there's always a telephone game. I think it's probably true for marketers too. What we spit back might be different than what actually was said. We're always, as human beings, I think trying to apply our... I don't know that we're trying to apply our filters but we will apply them. I do think, in this particular case in terms of the voice of the customer and the customer journey, it's helpful for everybody to go right to the source. Again, I think this was some of the things that B2C companies did really well. Intuit, I remember they used to literally walk up to people buying Turbo Tax in the store and say, " Hey can I write you a check for$ 100 and I'm going to go home with you and actually site behind your shoulder and watch you use the product," which probably seems incredibly creepy and privacy violating in 2021.

Stephanie Cox: Right now, yeah.

Andy Jolls: I think that's what we're trying to figure out. How do we get to that in B2B? How do we get to see how people are doing this? I will say, I think by just spending the time investing in listening to calls, it's also a way to build alignment, which I think is also such a great topic. I think alignment is not something that happens naturally with sales and marketing. I think if you step in and you start, because not only am I listening to the customer but I'm listening to the rep, and I'm able to go back to the rep and say, " Hey, I thought you did a really nice job. You were really helpful to me to learn how to story tell. I listened to you in this snippet talk about this." There's a lot of power in that transparency. You and I have been around long enough that it's like, we probably worked with people that felt like, " Wait a minute. I'm going to be recorded all the time? I'm not cool with this. I'm not going to be comfortable with that." I think transparency and accountability have rightfully won out here. We're able to get that alignment.

Stephanie Cox: One of the things I think has happened a lot, especially in the last two or three years, some people would be afraid to be recorded, because, " Oh it's going to be used against me," or, " I'm going to be evaluated or judged on it." I think now people are just like, " Eh." They don't even think twice about it because in reality, that's not how the tool is used, or not how it should be used. It should be used to make us all better, whether that's through coaching, whether that's through getting data and being able to use that to better improve sales, better improve marketing our products. It doesn't really matter, all sides of the business. Earlier, one of the things that you said, and I know this about you. You tell your team to outsource the last ten percent of your job. I remember the first time I heard you say that, I was like, " Wait, what?" I think you need to explain more about it and how you get people comfortable with it. I think, for some people, and I'll throw myself into that bus or the group, we're a little bit, we want to control everything. Control, there's no other word to use. How do you get people comfortable with outsourcing the last ten percent of their job, but then also not being worried that they're getting outsourced?

Andy Jolls: Yeah, look, to the last part of the question I think it's important that it's ten percent, and not 50. It really is like, let's try to figure out what we're all working on that is really something that's not at our pay grade. Just trying to figure out, if we can actually free up the bottom ten percent, then I can get you to basically replace that ten percent of the top. Not too different than the Ted Ex theme, of being like, " Well look, I'm trying to figure out a way for you to buy that ten percent back where you can actually do some really, really big things." When we come in, and I'm a believer in the whole rocks, sand, pebble analogy. Should I go through that for your audience, what that is?

Stephanie Cox: 1000% yes, please.

Andy Jolls: Okay. The way this was told to me is, a professor basically stood up in front of the class and he has two giant glass jars. In the first one, he pours in the sand, then he pours in the pebbles, then he pours in the rocks and the rocks don't fit. Then he reverses it. He pours in the rocks, then he pours in the pebbles, then he pours in the sand and it all fits easily. How this applies to business or getting shit done, as you like to say, is that if we actually make rocks, the bigger things that we have to do, more of a priority, then we'll make sure that they'll actually get done. The outsourcing thing is also intended to help get some of that time back to work on rocks, to work on bigger things. I will tell you this is another unusual thing that I do, which I'm not sure I've shared with you, which I will often tell my teams, that the way to think about rocks, or other people use Smart Goals, is to think about them as a resume point, something that they're putting on their resume. The reason I do this is no one writes a bullet point on their resume that says, " I increased conversion rates." They don't do that.

Stephanie Cox: No, they shouldn't.

Andy Jolls: They shouldn't. If they're doing that, they're not getting hired. They're not getting interviews, probably. They have a complete story. Usually a resume bullet point is, " I faced this problem. I used these resources to achieve these results." Smart Goals should look like that. What I found in telling teams, " Your goals have to be smart," they still struggle. If I tell them, " Look, I'm not trying to give you some sort of signaling device about where you are on the team by telling you to update your resume. I'm not telling you to update your resume. I'm telling you, put yourself in that frame. You're writing a bullet point that you want to put on your LinkedIn." That's what your rock should read like for the quarter. That's what it should be. You should be proud. If you're reading that rock towards the end of the quarter and going, " God, I don't think I would actually put this on my LinkedIn profile," then we didn't come up with something big enough. Does that make sense?

Stephanie Cox: No, it totally does. It's such a great point to people too. I think sometimes we get stuck a little bit in, " I've always done it. Who else is going to do it? There's no one else to do it." It's, to your point, it's not a rock. Yeah, it needs to get done but does it need to get done by you?

Andy Jolls: Right.

Stephanie Cox: You mentioned resumes, which that made me think a little about what you interview for when you are looking at someone's resume and talking to them. Let's talk a little bit about that.

Andy Jolls: Now anyone that listens to this and interviews will probably know my secret sauce, but here it goes. Usually by the time somebody gets to me, they've probably met with other members of the team, or maybe you've already talked to me and we've vetted a lot of the functional capabilities. The biggest value I have, and I'm pausing because I used to describe this as intellectual curiosity. I've rebranded this to relentless curiosity. Basically, what I'm looking for in someone, that they can show me examples, both professional and personal, of relentless curiosity. I've found that is a better determinant for success than probably all the other things that I might ask questions around. If someone is really doing some pretty interesting things on the weekends, then that usually means they're going to apply that to the work. I'll pause there and I'll let you react to that and then we can keep going.

Stephanie Cox: As soon as you started talking about this, and I know this about you, my first thought was, I tell my kids this all the time, even to some extent, which is, " The best way to grow in your career long term is to have a passion for learning." To your point, relentless curiosity, you always want to learn something knew. You want to figure something out. You like problem solving. I think, to your point, that's hard to figure out with people though. Everyone says they like to learn, they like to be challenged. There's a difference between people that say they like to do it and people who do it. You mentioned earlier about baseball coaching and how when someone else is watching Netflix at night, you're watching YouTube videos to figure out how to coach baseball. That's curiosity in trying to figure something out that you don't know.

Andy Jolls: Yeah go ahead, finish your thought.

Stephanie Cox: I was going to say, how do you figure that out in an interview? You've already, to your point, vetted this person. This person can do that job. They have the skillset, the experience, et cetera, and now I'm trying to figure out, in a lot of ways, the right culture fit for what I need on the team.

Andy Jolls: That's exactly right. Again, I'll ask questions about, " Tell me what you did last weekend. Tell me what you're going to do next weekend. Tell me what you would do if you had a six week sabbatical. What would that look like? Tell me what you've actually done during COVID." I think especially for those folks who, younger folks who don't have kids for example. I have kids. I still took a class on machine learning during this time. We were locked in. For awhile, I had this, " Hey stop watching Amazon Prime and Netflix for a little while and go take a class. Go study. Go figure something out. Figure out something else to do." I think that might become an interesting interview question, " What did you do differently during COVID?" You saw your time did shift. " How did you apply that time?" I'm trying to think about different ways to get at the answer. Some candidly, which are probably a little disarming. I'm asking people, " Tell me about your weekend. I'm curious what you did." I also think that this is something that's important to interview for when you're looking at a company. I think if you have this, you want to see that the company does this. I'll never forget, I interviewed at a company, 1- 800- CONTACTS, contact lenses. I am walking through the parking lot with the CEO and there are a bunch of engineers huddled around somebody's truck. The CEO asked them, " Hey what are you all doing?" They said, " Well, Tony here doesn't like the sound of his horn so we're trying to figure out if we can actually re- engineer the sound of it."

Stephanie Cox: Why?

Andy Jolls: Because he just didn't like it. He didn't like it. He wanted to change it. He wanted to see if he could change it because it bothered him.

Stephanie Cox: That sounds like something my husband would do and he's like, " I'm going to spend five hours in the garage just to see if this is possible." I'm like, " Okay."

Andy Jolls: Look, I think that kind of tinkering is super important to have in your fabric. I think you're wanting folks, I think, people that are that curious. They're going to tinker. They're going to be constantly be exploring and trying to figure out how to get this done. I think it's really hard to model behavior if you're just not naturally curious. Or you can't figure out how to apply that at work. Then you're not constantly looking. By the way, I think one thing that makes me different than a lot of my peers and I'll actually admit this, I'm not a huge book reader. That doesn't mean that I'm not intellectually curious. I read a lot of stuff online. I'm more fragmented in my digestion of information I think. It's always interesting because I feel like when I listen to everybody's podcast, " Oh I'm a huge reader. Oh I'm a huge reader." Frankly, I feel a little bit like, the imposter thing starts to come in and I'm like, " Oh wow, am I not that smart? All these people are reading all these books." I end up reading a lot of fragments of books because I'm reading through and basically saying, " Okay, I want to figure out how to get the gist." It can be a topic for another day.

Stephanie Cox: I'm the same way. I am a big reader but I'm not a big reader of business books. Mainly because I feel like they're an echo chamber for what's on LinkedIn.

Andy Jolls: Right.

Stephanie Cox: It just doesn't bring value to me. I like to read all kinds of other things. I read a lot online as well. I think people learn differently too. Some people would rather watch videos to learn whereas other people, like for me, I read a lot faster than I could watch a video. I would prefer to read something than watch a video.

Andy Jolls: Yeah.

Stephanie Cox: Personal preference.

Andy Jolls: I think that makes it challenging for us as marketers too, because you're trying to figure out. Going back to that eHarmony example, it's like, aren't there some people that that's how they absorb the journey? They're going to want the video. Maybe part of the realization is it doesn't always have to happen on the home page and you can figure out how you talk to different folks in different ways, different parts of the site.

Stephanie Cox: Exactly. Final question for you, if you could give one piece of advice to marketers today, in 2021, what would it be?

Andy Jolls: I think the piece of advice that I would give to younger folks, I reframed the question to think about myself, the younger version of myself. That is, spend more time networking. Spend more time, but the right kind of networking. Don't focus so much on your personal brand. Try to figure out how you can spend more time with peers, understanding how to hone your craft. Really get good at your craft. I didn't mention this, so I want to mention this. I have one more sort of undocumented but said goal to my team, which is to say, I want you to become so good at this that you're asked to be on a panel. That language is on purpose, which is that I realize that not everybody is an extrovert. Not everybody wants to actually go be on a panel. Everybody should be good enough that they at least get asked. Then they can decide, " Yeah I want to do this," or, " I don't want to do it." It's me or it's not me. That's the piece of advice that I would definitely give certainly most younger marketers.

Stephanie Cox: I absolutely loved Andy's idea of outsourcing the bottom ten percent of your job, once I had time to digest it. The first time I ever him say that, and it's been a while ago, I was like, " What are you talking about? That sounds crazy." Then when he explained it more, I started thinking about it and I was like, " This is actually brilliant." There are things that all of us do regardless of the level you are in your career, that are, as Andy said, below you pay grade. They're not worth your time. If you had budget, because you outsourced that to someone else. That way you can spend ten percent of your time focused on something else. I think that's a challenge for all of us. Is there a way for us to outsource ten percent of our job? Can you get some budget to go do that? If so, why aren't we doing that? That's what I challenge all of us to do this week. Ask your boss if you can get some budget to go outsource something that you're doing that isn't worth your time but still needs to get done. I think you might be surprised how often they say yes. You've been listening to Real Marketers. If you love what you heard, make sure to subscribe, rate and review our podcast. Don't forget to tell a friend. All of this marketing goodness shouldn't be kept a secret.

Outsource the Bottom 10% of Your Job

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