From Strategy to Revenue with Joe Martin

What you will learn:

• Demand marketing strategies to drive revenue goals and growth
• Content distribution channels and demand generation strategies
• Product development messaging versus concept messaging

See the specific chapters below:

00:00 – Introductions

00:01:28 – SQLs vs. MQLs

00:03:36 – Impact of Lead Scoring Models

00:05:04 – How to Build Digital Marketing Strategy

00:08:46 – Marketing Strategies Worth Continuing

00:12:05 – Beginning of Year Strategies

00:15:59 – Data Necessary For Driving Demand

00:19:13 – Hard vs. Soft Marketing Tactics

00:22:31 – Building A New MarTtech Stack

00:26:20 – How To Leverage Data & Dem Gen Partners

00:32:37 – Personal and Professional Growth

00:00:00 – Introductions

Tricia Ruiz: Welcome back to the Accelerating Revenues Series, Season 3 Live. I’m your host, Tricia Wiles Ruiz. This is a series of transparent conversations with B2B marketing practitioners about the challenges that they are facing as modern-day marketers and what actions and tactics our guests are implementing to overcome them.

I’m so excited that you guys are here. Today we are speaking with Joe Martin. He is the VP of Digital and Demand Marketing at Scorpion, and we’re discussing strategy to revenue. Joe, welcome to the Accelerating Revenue Series.

Joe Martin: Hey, thank you very much. I’m excited to be here.

Tricia Ruiz: Awesome. Joe, this is going to be a fun conversation.

Scorpion’s got a bit of growth into enterprise. You’re able to speak to a lot of different levels of business today and I’m excited to have this conversation because it’s Q4. Everybody’s in that planning mode and so we’re all thinking about strategy, what’s going to happen next year and also how we’re going to end up this year.

So, we’re going to be talking about that and we’re also going to be talking about sales accepted leads in one of our questions. So, I’d love to hear first off from you. Let’s get that definition so that we can have this conversation today.

00:01:28 – SQLs vs. MQLs

Joe Martin: That’s such a loaded question, right? Everyone has their own kind of opinions on it.

And we’re actually going through this exercise right now at Scorpion, and we went through it at Cloud App before. Let’s take a step back before we do it, like an SQL and an MQL at its very basic level for me is anyone that raises their hand. To be contacted by sales, so that could be any sort of form fill.

An event, anything where people would expect to have a salesperson connect with them, that’s an MQL to me. After that, I think there’s a lot of kinds of lead scoring that you can put in place to get to that SAL or SQL depending on where you are and how you call it.

Lead scoring can be anywhere from, usually it’s like what you think a typical lead is going to look like when they close. At Cloud App, it was like a certain title or a certain industry that we worked with a lot that would lead into lead scoring. Scorpion were looking at a lot of different things since we’re in more small business, so we have to figure out company size or vertical, those types of things that lead to an SAL. But ultimately marketing wants to pass, leads that are going to close. And we want to do some filtering before we get to that, that SQL for them.

Tricia Ruiz: I like that a lot because you’re also talking about companies of different sizes and companies of different strength and team, right?

They’re going to score a lead differently than your neighbor, someone in your community. And identifying how you’re actually understanding the data, the information that’s coming in from your marketing efforts first, before you start getting into the strategy. I think that’s a big starter for those who have not taken the time to do that, or if you’ve done it, but then take a look back, see, hey, that thing that you built, that lead scoring model that you built a couple years ago, does that still pertain to your customers today?

Is that still relevant?

00:03:36 – Impact of Lead Scoring Models

Joe Martin: Those things many times are written once and put in Salesforce or Marketo or whatever it might be, and they are forgotten about. So, it is definitely something that should be visited once or twice a year and just make sure that it’s fresh. And like right now, Scorpion, let’s say Scorpion doesn’t work with retail per se, like small business retailers.

So, they wouldn’t necessarily be qualified lead. We’re working primarily with the legal home services, medical and franchise businesses. We don’t service that vertical but a year from now, maybe we do. So, we want to make sure that we keep those filters in place.

Tricia Ruiz: This is your friendly reminder to check those filters. It’s like your little warranty system. I’m like, hey, are your marketing strategies working out well?

Joe Martin: Exactly.

Tricia Ruiz: It’s like your warranty. I love it. No, it’s great for that planning. And then we’re going to talk about these marketing strategies that we get to plan. So, when you are looking at how you’re going to deliver these sales accepted, so that sales actually can get revenue so that marketing’s efforts have a purpose.

That we’re not just doing things to doing things. What are some of the key factors and identifiers that you’ve taken into account from this previous year? 2021. It has a little bit of question marks, ups and downs questions and how we actually do business. What are you looking at from last year?

These key identifiers to build out your strategy and plan for this?

00:05:04 – How to Build Digital Marketing Strategy

Joe Martin: Sure. I’m all in on digital marketing. There’s lots of I’m not necessarily an event guy or traditional marketing outlet, so I don’t necessarily look at those things. I let other people do those. But as far as digital goes, I’m also heavy into data.

I started my career as an analyst at Adobe and so I’m really heavy into data, so I look back, coming into Scorpion, like day one, I said I need Google Analytics access, or I need whatever analytics data we’re using. And I pulled like all web metrics for the last two years to really understand where I was standing and where I could put some really initial effort on.

Honestly, a lot of it is consistency. So, I think a lot of people bail on campaigns or like content marketing or something maybe a little too early. I like to get commitments from our CMO and our CEO over here. Hey, I need you to commit to six to 12 months or whatever it might be, of this plan that I have in place.

It may take some time, but it works. You just have to be consistent and focused. So, it’s a lot of like data, it’s a lot of not bailing on things too early and knowing how long things take. So, if we’re going to be a content marketing shop or we’re going to commit to SEO, we need to do that for 12 to 18 months.

And really. be aggressive and focused and that’s going to eventually lead to those wins.

Tricia Ruiz: And I like what you just said there of don’t bail too early. To me, this also says, hey, take a look at how long are you going to be running this for? What’s not just what can your marketing team do and what they, what can they produce for campaigns?

Like what kind of bandwidth and structure with anything else that comes in the company, right? Cause all companies have their own specific, hey, we’ve got our once a year this, that efforts need to be around and allocate it there. But you’re saying don’t bail too early because you’re also recognizing how long are you in the game for?

How long have you been doing this campaign for? And if you’re building these strategies now for next year, for 2022 looking at how long should you be spending these efforts so that you can communicate correctly to sales and say, hey, this strategy right here, it takes at least six months to see, said result.

Now here’s what I’ve known from said result. It’s going to help us in this way. But you have to communicate clearly.

Joe Martin: Yeah. Super important to get sales and other orgs on board, right? So, like the first thing I did obviously things were done a certain way when I came in and the goal is to shift those a little bit.

So anytime people reached out to me initially and were like, hey, could you help me with this or this? I had, charts ready and was like, hey, I’d love to help you. Here’s what I’m up against. Here’s what my team is trying to do. And that got people. Like a very, a visual of here’s what we need to do.

Here’s what we think we can do. And not just talking, but showing data was really helpful in getting people on my train and my teams train as we move forward with digital and demand.

Tricia Ruiz: I like that. Not just talking, but showing the data, Showing the proof in the pudding.

Joe Martin: Yeah, exactly.

Tricia Ruiz: So, let’s get specific too about this last year now in, in showing this data and showing what worked or what didn’t what have you observed from 2021 and the strategies that you guys implemented?

00:08:46 – Marketing Strategies Worth Continuing

Joe Martin: Yeah, 2021 was definitely interesting coming. 2020,

Tricia Ruiz: which was the question mark year.

Joe Martin: Which was such, yeah, such a weird year to look at as far as data goes.

But I would say it’s pretty, pretty strong. So, we definitely recovered. Scorpion does really well with like partnerships, events associations, connections and with events and all those things coming back, we definitely succeeded really well with. and we saw a little bit of uptick in digital as well.

So, people were starting to seek us out on digital channels versus that great kind of in person awareness that we have as a brand. So, my team is just going to try and focus on improving that even more and building off some of the wins that we got in 2021. And the first step was us, for us, was revamping our website.

And making it really focused on helping our customers find educational tools they need to grow and making it very easy to find us and contact us. And that’s, one of the first things that my team focused on is, the website’s, the center of the digital marketing universe for now.

And that’s something we put some effort into.

Tricia Ruiz: Yeah. Did you observe anything when you put that effort into your website? Let’s talk about that, that digital marketing universe. If there’s this strategy that somebody’s listening to and they want to go down that path, did you observe anything that changed the way that you did your strategy? From what represented on the website where, I thought people were really going to love our case studies this year, or love this section, but instead, something else just was where the data showed what actually people were engaging with.

Joe Martin: Jury’s still out on that. It’s pretty fairly new as far as the launch goes, and I’ve only been here for nine 90 days now, so pretty fresh.

So not enough real sample data to understand that quite yet, but I would say we are starting to see an increase in some of the, we added a lot use case pages and so we’re understanding how people are finding us and where they’re being directed to how we are and that I think that will help us to know what to add to our product roadmap and other things guiding other strategies of …people really care about our website management, or people really care about this, live chat tool that we have.

So those are some things that we can learn and not just influence marketing, but also product and development.

Tricia Ruiz: I like that you’re thinking further than just. Just marketing itself. I love that you said you’re thinking about product and development. I think that’s part of it as, as marketing practitioners, there’s actions we are taking and we are connecting with the whole company and that our initiatives and things don’t just affect sales, they affect everybody else too.

We’ve got a question in the chat here specifically. What are your plans for quarter one? They want to know about 2022 planning. Are you going to keep the same pace as Q4? Was there anything shifted at the end of this?

00:12:05 – Beginning of Year Strategies

Joe Martin: Yeah, I think we’re going to keep a pretty quick pace. We got to ramp up on a lot of our content, so we’ll be front loading, Q4 and Q1 with a lot of content campaigns and starting that ball rolling with, the consistency that I mentioned.

I’ll be interested to see what Q4 looks like. At Cloud App and a lot of other tech companies I talked to last year coming out of 2020, like it was normally you’ll see like a lull from like mid-December on where it’s just dead. But last year, like it was Thanksgiving through like second week of January where it’s just abnormally low as far as like digital metrics go.

So, I’ll be interested to see if it’s similar to where people are. Burned out from the year again. Want to hang out with their families and take some vacations and, aren’t necessarily looking for solutions to help them. But then, Q1 was really strong for Cloud App and some other tech companies I know last year, it’s like Q4 maybe slow, but it’ll come back in Q1. So, I’ll be interested to see how that kind of phases with the data.

Tricia Ruiz: Yeah. And it’s also interesting that if the digital side and people are getting tired and burned out of that at the end of the year, which makes sense. Hey, we’re humans.

We got the life that goes on around time, right? You have got to plan for your holiday things. I’m curious that if we’ve looked at that as marketers, if we’ve looked at, okay, if this, if digital is the way we communicate with our customer and digital is the way that we understand whether this lead is sales accepted or not, right?

And it is actually ready. And they have work to do. How do we communicate that well to make sure that in that quarter you’re speaking to the work that the marketer is doing, you’re speaking to your customer in the position that they’re in so that you can actually continue on with business and it’s not just this cold, dead zone of nothingness.

Joe Martin: Yeah.

Tricia Ruiz: Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s an interesting challenge that we have as marketers.

Joe Martin: Yeah. Because it wasn’t just, I was with Cloud App last year, but like some of our keywords, like keywords that drove a lot of traffic, those Google searches were down. So, it was like overall volume was down, which meant it affected us.

So like people weren’t searching for certain things, in Q4. So yeah, it’s, maybe it is like adding wrinkles of traditional marketing in Q4, like having a direct mail campaign that’s pretty common, right? Where you like, send a gift to your customers or try to connect end of year with people.

Maybe there’s having that in the mix. If it looks like digital is going slow.

Tricia Ruiz: That’s interesting and I love that for thinking for 2022, looking back at this past year saying, Okay, when do some of these strategies work? And then we get to go overarching of the whole marketing strategy and say, Great, when do I get to lean on my events or my marketing buddy?

Somebody else, a part of your team. I love it. Yeah. You actually talked about data being your first thing. I like that when you come into a new job and just say, let me collect everything. Let me like the state of the company and what’s going on. That’s a great point for anybody. When you start a new job, just say, first ask, what am I walking into?

So, talk about the data insights that companies should consider when implementing demand marketing strategies to drive ongoing revenue. What those data points that you mentioned, I’m sure that some of them, after a while you recognize Oh, I actually don’t really need that one anymore.

And other ones were like, these are my ones, these are my buckets. This is how I’m getting my information and understanding how to make moves and where to go to next. Can you talk a little bit about that?

00:15:59 – Data Necessary for Driving Demand

Joe Martin: Yeah. I think it’s important, and I definitely learned this being a CMO for three years learned this a little bit more to look holistically.

But it’s important to recognize that different things affect different other things. So, before I went into being like the lead at Cloud App, I saw like awareness metrics as fluffy wasn’t leads, it wasn’t pipeline, it wasn’t revenue, it wasn’t really all those bottom-line things.

There is an element of having a team that’s focused on, time on site and social engagements and not just like those hard revenue metrics, because those have that lkelike halo effect affecting leads. It’s usually slower, right? But it builds a community. It builds a channel If you’re looking at social, that can influence your content strategy and build that awareness for later on. So, I think it’s good to have a campaign basis. So, some campaigns are lead-focused and revenue or pipeline-focused. And then other campaigns are like, okay, this is purely for like social engagement even. This is a Twitter campagncampaign.

We’re really only focused on Twitter engagements, talking about our community, that type of thing. So, I think it’s good to have a mix of both as those kind of all affect demand either immediately or later on.

Tricia Ruiz: Yeah, I like that too. And I, I don’t know if you meant to say it or not, but just having different teams, right? Yeah. Or having individuals focus when they go into the data and take a look, focus on that. Either that high level or the soft metrics, or the hard metrics as you use to describe it. The ones that are more social, more engagement, more impressions as the softer ones, but then the harder ones, the revenue, growth, all these tangible numbers.

Yeah. And I’m curious. Looking at that from a holistic standpoint. I know as a user myself in the B2B space, if I’m engaging with a customer and I, if I’m engaging with somebody that I’m actually trying to buy from, right? Like I’m trying to buy a solution that’s helpful to market needs initiatives, and I get some sort of friendly social engagement, that’s a reminder, right?

I might not that they’re aware that I’m going through that by and jury and I’ve. But do they know that I actually appreciated it, responded to it, like how I felt about it, because there was no actual engagement that I did. I might have just seen it in passing. And I’m curious if that’s on that, that sales conversation side, if you connect with sales and that and have that conversation and say was there anything that, we reached out to you or you, all of us, that surprised you, that encouraged you to understand some of those soft and hard metrics a little bit better and build that strategy better?

00:19:13 –Hard vs. Soft Marketing Tactics

Joe Martin: Yeah, absolutely. I think getting feedback from the customer as well as from the sales teams, any data you can gather because it’s a messy journey.

We talk about customer journey a lot in marketing, but it’s not always…We were actually having this conversation yesterday here at Scorpion the attribution talk, which is always another one of those like pipeline conversations of like, how do we attribute leads and how do we attribute things?

But yeah, it’s like I may end my journey on Google or Facebook, but I probably read a blog post and I may have read like an eBook, or I may have seen a cut, a review. About the company. And then I was finally like, “Okay, I’m ready.” And I go to, I type in Scorpion, I find the website and I sign up for, get a demo or talk with us or whatever.

So, it’s a messy journey and it’s recognizing that it’s not as clean cut as, “Hey, Joe, the plumber was just deciding they wanted to increase their marketing today. And so they just found us.” That happens, but for the most part it’s other things that lead to that ultimate end, lead sign up.

Tricia Ruiz: Absolutely. And that example is perfect, Joe, the plumber. Like I was driving on the road recently and I saw Arizona Plumbing, and if you would search Arizona Plumbing. He’s going to pop up. It’s different in that space that we exist in for B2C and in B2B, we have to work harder.

We have to, there’s just no other way to face it that it absolutely is messy. I love that you’re talking about that from a perspective of data, I wonder what kind of data we get to look into after the fact, right after sales and sometimes get someone who says, “Hey, I’m ready for a demo right now.”

And they say, absolutely. Raise their hand. You’re like, Great Sales Accepted Lead. Push ‘them along. What did they do to get there? What was their messy journey? So that we can continue to refine our strategies in marketing because they got there, but also do we actually have the knowledge behind that?

Which is great.

Joe Martin: Yeah. And you use that like I’m at a big company again, I didn’t have this at Cloud App, it’s nice to have the resources again. Having a market research team that’s like analyzing that enrich data, like if you’re using like zoom info or something to enrich the data.

And then obviously talking to the customer and really honing in on what’s, what customers are working, what channels are working, and then you can put more campaigns into that area.

Tricia Ruiz: Awesome. As you all know here, we’re at the Accelerating Revenue Series with True Influence.

Joe Martin is our guest today. He is the VP of Digital and Demand Marketing at Scorpion. If you have any questions and comments, please put them in the chat. Joe, I like what you said there, and we actually have one question for you. Terry has asked, could you talk a little bit about the Marketing communication stack.

Marcom, excuse me, as I’m reading shorthand and how you’re generating and qualifying leads to get them to sales, can you talk about your stack a little bit?

00:22:31 – Building A New MarTtech Stack

Joe Martin: Yeah, that’s definitely another thing that we’re actually having conversations about right now too in that do we have the right stack in place?

Scorpion, we actually have built a lot of our own tools that we produce, so we actually sell them. So, we’re using a lot of our own tools. We built them for SMB though not necessarily, a company of our size. So, there is like a build versus buy a conversation. And do we,

Tricia Ruiz: Oh, that’s a good one.

Joe Martin: Do we just make our own products more robust so they can handle all the things that we’re trying to do as a, midsize company versus a small business? Or do we invest in a Marketo or HubSpot or Salesforce? I think there’s definitely a point at a company where you should look at like a, an Adobe or Salesforce investment.

Obviously, I’m partial to Adobe. Because I think they have some of the best products and I was there for such a long time.

Tricia Ruiz: Those colors run deep.

Joe Martin: Yeah. Adobe Live. So yeah, I, I think there, as far as like a MarTtech stack. I think you’ve got to first of all have the analytics in place.

You want to have that kind of automation tool. You want to be able to have that content hosting tool like the CMS. Programmatic ad buying is definitely a big thing right now where if you aren’t using a tool like Scorpion has a, an AI tool for programmatic ad buying then you’re going to not be ranking as well as your competitors.

There’s like the data management piece, like the CRM like a Salesforce or HubSpot. And then lastly it is like interaction. Using Drift or Intercom as well as your customer support, Helpscout or ZenDesk, yeah. Using those types of tools can be really helpful.

I know I talked with a bunch of friends when I went in to being the CMO and was like, “Hey what’s your best source of demand gen?” And a lot of people would say, eBooks or our website. And then a lot of people would say those like interaction tools, so like Drift or an Intercom where it’s like a chat bot, but it’s run by an SDR.

And they can engage customers and get them right at the point of sale. So yeah, I think there’s lots of things to consider. Obviously based on the size of your company you can get buy with Google Analytics and like web flow for CMS or WordPress, but kind of understanding your needs with the size of your company and your budget. That’s super important.

Tricia Ruiz: That’s a great conversation too of whether build, whether buy, taking a look at that stack and understanding if you have those different pieces. I do like that you said analytics first. It’s just nice when you know that that’s one of the main core ones, right? Yeah. We got to know what we’re doing with all of our efforts and taking a look at those different ones, but seeing if it’s the programmatic buying, if it’s the data management or those interactions, like what do you need?

That’s a question that can be asked. I like the fact that you brought that to the. We have another one in the chat that I just want to get to really quick from Drew is that, how can, he wants your perspective, how can you leverage data and demand gen partners to fill performance gaps or enhance your efforts without spreading your team too thin?

00:26:20 – How to Leverage Data & Dem Gen Partners

Tricia Ruiz: Ah, the dreaded my team cannot handle the workload.

Joe Martin: Yeah.

Tricia Ruiz: Which we have all felt in our careers.

Joe Martin: Yep. No, no one ever has enough resources. I’ve said it a few times, but Adobe, when I left, was a 10 billion ARR company. And we didn’t have enough resources for my team, right?

Everybody struggles with that. Everyone’s fighting for headcount, fighting for budget. It doesn’t change. So, I think it’s really helpful to I love partnerships, so mostly on the, I focus mostly on the content side, so if I can like, guest post for an association, or like I write for HubSpot, I write for a few other places and then they, can write for me.

That creates a nice relationship where you’re exchanging high quality content, you’re changing audiences, they’re distributing it to their audience. You’re eating those links for SEO. So, I’m a huge fan of partnerships when you can find them. Demand, I think. I think one thing is making sure that there’s a clear outcome.

So like, the same, where there’s not enough resources, there’s also more people that want to partner than you’ll have time for. So, there’s an endless amount of people that will. “Hey, we would love for you to speak to this huge crowd” and, or “we’d love for you to write a big section for this book or write this, curriculum for this class or whatever.”

What’s the outcome for us? Is this an awareness metric, which I may not be okay with in that situation? Or do we get do we get the attendee list, which is a little bit better? Do we get. Do we get to blog on your site and get some links back? Or do you distribute this eBook to your contact list?

So that we get some leads there. What’s the clear outcome versus we think it’s going to be good, and this is a one someone we really care about. Like I, I want more of an outcome than that.

Tricia Ruiz: I love that though. If you’re talking about filling those gaps, right? We’re filling those performance gaps.

That’s a great question, Drew, because it’s looking at partnerships and it’s looking at the way that we do our jobs but asking us to make sure that there’s strategy around everything. And so, filling those gaps with actual strategic people in place because the value is the human right, like the information that we get to either learn, teach, grow and then share.

I love that. But actually, challenging your partners too to have that outcome versus just, we think it’s going to look cool. And I know there’s so many shiny things we just talked about the stack, right? There’s so many shiny things and shiny tools that you can put in that you think it’s going to result in something great.

But if we are we taking, are we taking the time to look at the outcome of these marketing strategies and how they result back? Whether that is, you made great things about this for demand, whether that’s supposed to be awareness, whether that’s supposed to be that registration list and that partnership, whether we get to do guest blogs together, where we get to create more content together and actually share our own message.

Those are some great insights.

Joe Martin: Yeah, and it’s going to depend on the size of your company, right? If you’re a small business, even a mid-size business, you’re going to be like, oh man, we got to do all lead gen. Like we can’t do any of this fluff stuff. We can along the way because we wanted to build our brand, but like Adobe or Salesforce or whoever, big tech company, Google, like they have teams that their whole purpose is speaking.

Like they’re evangelists or whatever of the product or the company and all their purposes is to go to events and speak and bring awareness. But if you’re like a smaller company, you can’t have someone you’re paying a salary to, you’re paying for their travel. You’re probably paying to in some cases, have them speak at this event or whatever, sponsor the event.

Like you can’t have that type of budget. So, it’s like finding the mix of we want to do some awareness, we can’t be Google sending, everybody around the world.

Tricia Ruiz: I bet that’s a great perspective too, to challenge us as users, when we see all these awareness campaigns, when we see them from these big names, and we see that their marketing department is doing it right?

I now watch commercials and I’m like, who in the marketing department may came up with that? That’s what it’s gotten to for any of this awareness or display that I see, or even sometimes these big, whether it’s content that’s being pushed that I received through email or other forms.

That is a great challenge for us to look at the size of your company, look at what you can do, compare yourself to these big. And see, do you have the bandwidth to do those awareness campaigns? Is that the right decision to make? Because it is the world of the shiny object.

Joe Martin: Yep, exactly.

Tricia Ruiz: Awesome, Awesome.

We are going to get to one more question here with Joe, but before we do any of those, joining us on live with LinkedIn right now, thank you for being here. We get to be here every Tuesday at 11:00 AM Eastern. Next week we’ll be talking to Ray Estevez. He’s actually the Chief Information Officer here at True Influence, and we’re discussing one of those big names about Apple and their new privacy policy when it comes to.

So, if you’d like to join us, the link will be in the comments below and you can get yourself registered and save it on your calendar. And join us for that conversation. Jump into the chat and dialogue along with us.

So, Joe, thank you for talking about all this demand strategy right now as we’re looking to the end of the quarter, as we’re looking to everything, it’s been great to have this conversation with you. And the last thing is learning is happiness here at True Influence. So, I’m curious about what you have learned in this past year that has shaped the way that you’re going to be looking to next year in either your professional or your personal.

What have you got going on?

00:32:37 – Personal and Professional Growth

Joe Martin: No, it’s, it was, it’s funny how so I’ve been in digital marketing for around 15 years, and I think it’s taken me this long to really feel, decide what I really actually enjoy about marketing, and I’ve liked my move to Scorpion was really doubling down on what I really love.

No, I enjoyed leading for a few years and learning. I learned a lot about products, and I learned a lot of things that I’ve mentioned on this chat. But I also learned that where I like to feel the least, the least amount of tension, the least amount of like stress, and where my happy spot is really just like content creation.

And kind of demand, like all those things that enhance, digital marketing. I don’t want to manage events like that. I don’t want to do all that other stuff. Like I’m still young enough in my career that I just wanted to like, just focus on what I really love and that gives me more energy for being at home with like my little kids and having that kind of making sure I don’t miss out on that.

Like I can be a CMO again when my kids are older, and I’ve got 30 more years of my career.

Tricia Ruiz: That’s awesome.

Joe Martin: I made that decision of hey, I want to just focus on what I’m really good at, what I really love, and I can influence other things while I’m here. But letting someone else carry that torch as the leader.

Tricia Ruiz: You don’t, if you don’t mind me asking, how was that conversation? You had that with leadership, and you were looking for your new endeavor to double down on what you love. How did that change your approach to it?

Joe Martin: So, this was more Scorpion approached me and plucked me away.

And it was mostly because I had a lot of, yeah, I had a lot of Adobe friends that came over here. And so that kind of influenced me. They kind. They, they know what, that I’m good at content. They know I’m good at demand and kind of digital. And so, they were behind the scenes before they even talked to me.

They were like pitching me as this leader here for this role. And so that kind of led to the conversations. But it’s never easy to leave a role. When it was the way, it was presented to me no was really attractive with where I was at and my head space of, hey, I just want to do something that I really love to do that I know how to do, that I’ve got a great playbook for, and just focus on that.

Tricia Ruiz: Yeah. Double down on what you love, what a great piece of advice, Joe. And also, how your friends and your colleagues understand who you are. And so, they can recommend, they can speak about you to other people that they know as well. Double down on what you love. I love it, Joe. All right. Thank you so much for joining us for the Accelerating Revenue Series, and we’ll be back next week.

Thanks, Joe.

Joe Martin: Thank you.