How Data Can Be A Marketer’s Secret Weapon with Theresa Kushner

Actionable data is the lifeblood of modern B2B marketing. But without common definitions and standards, data loses its value. And you might be surprised to learn that marketing can be an organizational leader when it comes to setting such guideposts.

Data Analyst Theresa Kushner says true data quality begins at the collection stage, where siloed groups often cultivate stats and data points that suit their objectives, but not those of the entire organization. She recalls a conflict between a company’s sales and product team over late shipments. Turns out, the product team was simply changing the schedule to ensure “on-time” deliveries, regardless of when orders actually shipped.

Experiences like these led Kushner to conclude that marketing can be the “glue,” as she puts it, to help develop and maintain a core set of standards about how data defines your business. This begins with the most fundamental of definitions – exactly who is your customer? The answer is not as clear-cut for many businesses as it should be, she says.

What you will learn from this episode:

• How CMOs need to focus on creating a single, clear personal entity that accurately combines all the various data and representations they collect about each individual buyer.
• Why marketing can be the “glue” that ensures everyone, from sales to customer success, is working from the same definition of who the customer actually is.
• Why marketing needs to expand its view of data beyond basic demographics and transactions to understand the real cost and opportunities of serving customers.

Theresa Kushner, Consultant, AI/Analytics, NTT Data.

Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theresakushner/

00:00:00 – Introductions

00:03:38 – Difference Between Internal & External Marketing Data

00:07:26 – Marketing Is The Organizational Glue

00:10:19 – Internal Data Improves Customer Satisfaction

00:11:12 – Who Should Lead Internal & External Data Management

00:13:33 – Areas of Data Management That Need Investment

00:19:22 – What Is The True Definition of A Customer?

00:21:22 – Should the “Cost To Serve” Model Change By Customer Definition?

00:23:32 – When Should You “Fire” A Customer?

00:26:34 – Customer Definition Creates a Different Buying Group Lens

00:29:45 – Personal and Professional Growth

00:32:36 – Content Is Data

00:00:00 – Introductions

Tricia Ruiz: Welcome back to the Accelerating Revenue Series Season Three Live. This is a series of transparent conversations with B2B marketing practitioners, that asks the question and unpacks the challenges of the modern day marketer. I’m your host, Tricia Wiles Ruiz, and today we have a very special guest. We’re speaking with Theresa Kushner.

She is the Data and Analytics Solutions Lead at NTT Data Services, quite a title and a role, and Theresa has been so kind to join us today to speak about how data can be marketers secret weapon as we look towards the end of the year and into this next one there. Theresa, thanks for joining me today on the series.

I’m excited for this conversation.

Theresa Kushner: Thank you, Tricia. It’s good to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

Tricia Ruiz: Absolutely. You are such a gift and a blessing over at the summit that we had earlier this year. Learning from you in the small ways about how you look at data, how you’re with your career journey and unpacking what that’s done for you.

And you have something that you’ve said that quote data,” The data is being used intentionally and unintentionally to manage and often disrupt our lives.” And I took a pause when I read that, that was something that was important to you. And I was like, my goodness gracious. Absolutely yes.

It can disrupt or it can manage our lives. So, I’m excited to unpack that here today.

Theresa Kushner: Yeah, that’s a really interesting thing. I think we’ve just come off of, or hopefully we’re coming off of, a pandemic where data played a part in every minute of our lives. How many people are in the hospital?

How many people have it? How many people are dead? And you’re starting to see that. People are starting to pay attention to data. I don’t think that they quite understand yet how, what an impact it has on our business as well, because it affects every part of everything we do, and we have to be able to understand it in order to be able to use it effectively.

So, there are, sometimes you can use it in the right way and sometimes you can use it in a very wrong way. We see a lot of that.

Tricia Ruiz: I’m excited to get into those specifics today and looking at what is right and what is wrong, and how we can prepare ourselves to be good marketers, how we can prepare ourselves to use it well in business so that we’re not stuck with something unexpected.

So, thanks for anybody who’s going to be listening today on the LinkedIn Live. If you have questions for Theresa, please put them in the chat. We would love to hear your perspectives as we move forward in this conversation. Specifically with this first one, Theresa, I would love to note your opinions on the difference between the difference of data tracking between internal marketing efforts and external marketing efforts.

You just said it very well that we’ve seen data be used to tell a story. And there’s internal things that may happen and external, what’s your opinion on how we should viewing in that lens?

00:03:38 – Difference Between Internal & External Marketing Data

Theresa Kushner: Let’s first of all, define what we’re talking about by internal and external. I look at external or those campaigns that you executed, your rates of engagement, how many clicks per view you have based on how your customer is responding to your message.

Internal efforts are things like project management numbers and team collaboration efforts or creative workflow tracking. And the problem with both of those metrics is that we sometimes look at them in silos and we shouldn’t because just as it’s important to know how many leads you generated with your marketing. It’s also important to know if your project management is on task in order to get that campaign out the door.

But when you look at them separately, you don’t get the value of having it across, of having, of being able to say,” I know if I’m effective in project managing my activities in marketing and they move to sales in an effective way, I’m going to generate revenue.” And I think that as marketers, we tend to think that our only metric, the only way we’re going to look at data is whether we got a lead.

And I have a very. I have a thought about, it’s not the leads that count, it is selling those leads and making those leads turn into dollars. That makes a difference. So, marketers who think they’ve done their job by turning over a lead to sales are not doing, they’re doing 80% of their job, not the 100%.

Tricia Ruiz: It’s really great to put a number to it. It’s not 80%, not a 100% of their job, and it’s not just leads that count. I know that was an introduction into B2B, one of my first thoughts of what’s the results of the marketing efforts, what’s the results of what we’re doing?

Great. Did it turn into something that sales can use, that can help the journey? But what you’re talking about, those internal things, I recently have come across those processes that have been broken on my team specifically, and having to look at that and look at the end result of watching the productiveness during the work and then seeing also the result of what is that content doing on the external side?

Theresa Kushner: Yeah. I once worked for a company, and this is my favorite story about data and people collecting it against their own objectives instead of against a company or a customer objective. We were shipping products at a particular company and the sales force was complaining, oh my goodness, complaining that they weren’t getting the products that they needed, that they were being held up, or that customers were being delayed.

They were just absolutely beside themselves and products said, but I’ve shipped everything you told me on time, it’s out there, it’s on time. And then what we discovered was that the product side of the house, they were shipping it on time, alright? But the deadlines that they set for themselves in their own workflow process were changed when they didn’t make the deadline.

In other words, if it was due on December 15th and I knew it wasn’t going to ship, I just moved the deadline in the system till December 18th and it shipped on time. According to me.

Tricia Ruiz: Still on time!

Theresa Kushner: Sales was just complaining like nobody’s business, that nothing was shipping on time to their customers. Of course, it wasn’t, and I think that’s what we learn when we start to look at, and you and I talked about this the other day, the context in which marketing exists.

00:07:26 – Marketing Is The Organizational Glue

Theresa Kushner: I think that marketing has an opportunity as the organization within a company to be the glue between all the different organizations. I have a pet peeve in all the companies I’ve worked for. I have never been able to see or convince the company to effectively look at what they’re doing in marketing from a customer perspective and use that same information for when they support the customer.

Because usually support and services systems are totally different from sales and systems that go out and generate revenue for the company. If you don’t pull those together to look at it, you don’t have an opportunity to sell your best customer, which is the customer that just came in and complained about your product, you solved their problem, and now the opportunity to sell them something different and new is there, but you have to go to sales to do that. And that’s a different system, right?

And so, by using data, you can begin to see how many transactions the customer is not getting through the system so that you don’t send a marketing effort to a customer who has just reported 15 issues with their support. You don’t send a brand new product introduction to a customer that has just bought the product, which is something that we do all the time.

Marketing doesn’t seem to always check on who’s got the product. Who’s already installed, what is the stage in which you’re actually learning to talk to them? And the data can help you do that if it’s in the right place and it’s accurate and it’s accessible to the marketers themselves.

Tricia Ruiz: I love it that you’re making me think more than just internal marketing structure and workflow and that great example of shipping something on time, right?

They changed it to work for their own entity, their own department. And now you’re taking it a step further and saying it’s still internal, but it’s internal connected to customer success. What a great example of somebody who had 15 problems and then your company solved it and they solved it like nobody else.

And that customer is now incredibly happy. You now have this incredible win of this massive problem, this national massive pull and dissonance of, I want to work with you, but it’s not working. It’s not helping me do my job. And so that internal communication of looking at the data, looking at how many touch points, looking at how much that communication can go forward.

To me, marketing is really messaging as well. And every person in a company is part of the message. Every time that you have a conversation with a customer or somebody external, you’re representing that message that is marketing’s job to really push it out there. And so that’s part of internal as well.

I haven’t thought about that before.

Theresa Kushner: Yeah.

Tricia Ruiz: Thanks for that.

00:10:19 – Internal Data Improves Customer Satisfaction

Theresa Kushner: It is. And I think one of the other things that we forget about is that we are all very conscious about taking customer surveys. Everybody does customer surveys, and you want to know whether the customer’s satisfied. More importantly, will they recommend you?

When you look at employee satisfaction, the number one thing that employees usually complain about is the lack of processes internal to their companies. And if you fix that, employee satisfaction is directly related to customer satisfaction. Happy employees make happy customers. And so, I don’t think we’re really yet connecting that kind of information as well, or that kind of data.

What are we doing with our customers, with our employee side that is affecting our customer satisfaction and how do we look at those things across the organizations?

00:11:12 – Who Should Lead Internal & External Data Management

Tricia Ruiz: That’s awesome. And that goes right to my next question, is that the role of CMOs, is that who should lead that data management?

Theresa Kushner: Yeah, I think it should be because marketing is an internal and an external, just like you said, it’s internal and external.

So, you have to market internally what you’re doing so that, because let’s face it, your best marketers are the number of people that you have in your company. At NTT, it’s well over 10,000. So, if we tell all of those people about what we’re doing from a marketing perspective, look at what they can talk about. And this is the season you do it.

You go to a cocktail party or a Christmas party and someone asks you what you do. You want to have at your fingertips exactly what marketing said your strategy is.

Tricia Ruiz: Yeah.

Theresa Kushner: And that’s important, that means you turn everybody in your company into a marketer.

Tricia Ruiz: Man, it’s in, you’re creating that social proof as well, and you’re giving the language.

I think that I struggle with that as well. Always trying to find the right language on how to communicate something. These lives have helped with that. It’s live, the language is going to be there. But that work that, that is on marketer’s responsibilities of are you preparing everybody internally, for what that message is so that when they’re also talking about it in their personal times, at their cocktail party, as you mentioned, or Christmas time, it’s at their fingertips. But also, when they walk into a new situation, if they’re in sales with a customer, if they’re in operations trying to move things down the line you have that small but understandable statement about what is the purpose and the why of what we’re doing in the company and internally that can affect the work that’s happening as well.

Theresa Kushner: We always talk about elevator pitches. You know what, if you were in the elevator with your prime prospect, what would you tell them in the time it takes you to get from 1st floor to 10th floor?

And that’s not very long of today’s elevator. So, what is it that you say? How do you get their attention?

Tricia Ruiz: I love it. So besides that, notion of what CMOs can doing to make sure that they’re a part of this messaging and throughout the company. What other areas of data management should CMOs be looking at for next year?

00:13:33 – Areas of Data Management That Need Investment

Tricia Ruiz: I thought about this one for a long time. Data management. If I were CMO today, And looking at what we have to do in 2022, I would look at where the skills are on my team and who has the ability, not necessarily to understand everything about data, but has the ability to understand why it’s important and to actually be able to have conversations with the CFO and the CIO and the people that are actually managing the data or helping the marketing department to use the information.

I would pay attention to making sure that those people help provide the glue between sales and marketing, between services and marketing, between HR and marketing. How are we actually communicating with the information that we have? It’s almost like I, they probably shouldn’t put one in place, but it’s almost like marketing usually is the first place people go to when they think about customer information.

Okay. Very first place. However, at one of my last companies, I remember my very first conversation with the CFO was a question about how many customers do we have? If you don’t have someone on your team who understands that’s a very important question. But it deserves a definition. What is a customer?

Is it a person who’s bought from you once? Is it a person who buys from you regularly? Is it a person who you thinking about having purchased or you’re communicating to? What is a customer and is a customer a person or a company? And we had this discussion with the CFO who said, oh my God, I didn’t realize that was an issue.

Yes, it is. And so, I can count customers for you in any way you want, but the definition of a customer has to come from marketing has to say, this is a customer. This is how we’re looking at it. This is a new prospect. This is an old customer. This is, Definitions you give it. People have to understand what you mean when you say we have 10,000 customers.

That makes a difference a lot of times.

Yeah. I’m amazed that you said that because the definition comes from marketing. Are you saying that as well when you’re looking at data, whatever department you are in, let’s take marketing practitioners as this is who our audience is. It always comes back to, what’s the definition?

the data that’s important, right? What’s the story that’s being impactful? What can I take this information and actually take action on it? So instead of just saying, oh, customers, it’s a customer, but you’re asking those 10 questions and you’re giving that description of all those examples that you gave.

The customer, have they bought or have they not? Is that part of the process to understanding that management of the data too? Taking the time to define the customer?

Theresa Kushner: Yeah, it’s, that’s what, and that’s what CMOs need to be aware of too, is that it doesn’t just happen. You have to consciously say, yep, I need that.

I need the ability to sort through my customers and decide which ones are important to me. We talk about customer segmentation all the time, but how are you going to segment a customer? Do you have the information to segment it? In other words, do you know how big the customer is, what industry they’re in?

It used to always mess us up because we would look at General Electric, for example, and General Electric. What do you think they are as a company? Because they have 11, 14 different divisions, all of them are in different industries. How do you look at it? And so, the definition of a customer becomes very difficult to have.

Sales has a definition of a customer, and the sales definition is the customer, the people that I am given to go sell. That’s my customer. But and I’ve had this happen a lot, is that sales will say, don’t go talk to my customer. And the customer will be somebody like AT&T. Okay. Who in AT&T are you selling to?

I’m selling to AT&T. No. You can’t say you alone. I don’t care how big your sales team is, we cannot sell to all of AT&T. Tell me which divisions you’re concentrating on, and we’ll help you in other areas. It’s an it’s a constant battle sometimes to have them understand that customer is not just, the name that’s on the outside of the building, it is usually an individual that’s associated with who’s going to make the decision for your product, and it’s a decision maker who’s part of that particular customer list.

It’s an influencer, it’s a recommender. All of those people are part of your customer base and how you look at them in your data makes a very big difference as to how you orient your marketing message. How you deliver your marketing message has all kinds of implications for marketing.

00:19:22 – What Is The True Definition of A Customer?

Tricia Ruiz: I love that just from a definition of customer, you can go and look at this whole way that you’re communicating internally with sales, with other departments about what a customer is. And this very data is a secret weapon for these marketers. I love it, Theresa.

Theresa Kushner: And I’ve, and today in today’s world too, you probably have internal to any company as individuals, you have at least three to four representations of an individual. Their company email, their personal email, maybe they’ve got a side business email. There are all these other things that are associated with an individual getting to the entity called a person or the entity called a company is a very difficult data problem and you have to have people who understand that and who are working with you to make the systems reflect what you want to know in order to be for it to be important.

I’m not sure CMOs spend as much time on that as they should.

Tricia Ruiz: Yeah, and that’s a great example too, as we’re watching and we know that it takes multiple buying decisions, buying, buying individuals to make a decision that if that individual has three separate entities that create out their individuality, that’s going to influence their decision making, whether that be through, on my end, their content consumption on their downtime. Just as one, one piece of it that I know that is a whole other ballpark as well, because now you’ve got these individuals that have this identity itself and making that decision together. This was great, Theresa.

We got some questions in the chat, so let’s keep going. Oh, good. I want to see from Marissa right here. She has asked how should the cost to serve model change when you have a better understanding of the real value of your customers.

This is a heavy hitter.

00:21:22 – Should the “Cost To Serve” Model Change By Customer Definition?

Theresa Kushner: That’s a really good question. First of all, I think, first of all, I think understanding the real value of your customers is a very important thing to do.

We used to do the total, we used to do total lifetime value for customers. Problem is that lifetime value doesn’t really give you a good feeling today of over a lifetime, how on how much this customer is going to bring to you. But I still think it’s a very valuable to be able to understand who buys the most from you, how often do they buy and are they loyal, will they recommend you?

. I think the cost to serve those customers has got to always be part of what you do. It always, what is the ratio nowadays, I believe, is that it’s it takes seven times the amount to get a new customer, as it did, to keep a customer.

I often think that the companies that I deal with a lot individually don’t understand that losing a customer is a very, very negative thing. So, the cost to serve becomes you have to add up. I’ve served that customer for 20 years. I’m losing them. My goodness. Did the revenue I get for the last got for the last 20 years justify that loss?

I think that’s a very, the cost to serve model becomes very important. When you look at, am I serving new customers, old customers, and are they valuable? That’s where, by the way, that’s where your support information comes in. Because if I’m spending more time serving a customer who’s calling my support hotline every 10 minutes, then I am a customer who calls only once a year, what am I actually, what am I actually doing? How am I, how is that valuable to us?

Tricia Ruiz: I like the questions that you asked too, of who are the buyers? What do they buy? But also, are they loyal? Are they understanding that real value of a customer? And then taking a look at is it worth it or not?

00:23:32 – When Should You “Fire” A Customer?

Theresa Kushner: And are they good- loyal.

There are some customers who are loyal, you’re spending all of your money taking care of them all of the time. And, it’s also that’s where sort of the sales and marketing conflict comes into because marketing sometimes can identify customers that you really need to fire, that you need to get rid of. But I know that’s not a very popular thing for either sales or marketing to consider. There are customers who take more of your cost and time than they should for a disproportionate amount. Yeah. And at least if you can identify them and set up programs to manage them differently, it changes their cost to serve model drastically.

Tricia Ruiz: Understanding that information, understanding the data that comes back, right? Imagine if you did have just an experience and marketing came to sales and say, you need to fire this customer. That brings in X amount of revenue. Of course, sales are going to go, what? X amount of revenue? What are you talking about?

Theresa Kushner: No way. Exactly.

Tricia Ruiz: I’m saying you are crazy. But if you came saying, hey, I have an internal program that understands the cost that it takes to serve this customer from the efforts that we have and what’s happening here with also all the communication and touches, take a look at this. This doesn’t weigh to your revenue. That’s a different story because you have backing it up.

Theresa Kushner: I have a great story to tell about that because sometimes too, it’s not just the revenue that the account brings in the individual. But I worked for a software company once where we had an incredible individual, it was an influencer in the industry, but I spent more time on the phone than I really should have probably spent talking with this customer, keeping him engaged, making sure he had all the support he needed.

I really wished I had a way to measure the engagement I had with that customer because over time he turned out to be a really valuable influencer. He didn’t spend a lot of money, but man, did he bring in people who did. And so, it became how do you identify those people who are going to be the people that you can count on over time?

Tricia Ruiz: And that question of, it’s not just the revenue, but it’s the revenue that’s enacted because of the actions that someone is bringing in because of the influence that they’re bringing. Man, there’s so many great things we get to know by looking at the data so thank you for bringing these to our attention, Theresa and joining us for the Accelerating Revenue Series Live, we have a few more questions on LinkedIn and I do want to get to Mr. Terry Arnold. Mr. Terry asks, when you look at the definition of the customers that you provided, does that also create a different lens for the buying groups associated with those groups, the company versus people example? That was a little bit earlier in our conversation.

00:26:34 – Customer Definition Creates a Different Buying Group Lens

Theresa Kushner: It definitely creates a different lens, which means that you have to create a different messaging strategy, in some cases.

You need to make sure that you have an overall messaging strategy that appears to what you’re trying to pro position for your company and your product. But it does give a much different lens to who you’re talking to. For example, if your message is to sell marketing systems, for example, to a company and you are selling to the marketing operations person, the message that you’re taking to that marketing operations person is far different than the message you might take to the CMO.

Or to the company overall if you’re trying to engage them as a partner with you in some way. So, I think that lens is very important. It creates a different lens and the different buying groups that are associated with that need to be treated differently. But that’s where you look at, okay, this is the company and here are the individuals or the people that I’m going to deal with.

That’s the most important thing that you have to work on.

Tricia Ruiz: It’s a very important question to work through as well. I like the approach of it too. Knowing that it’s not going to be just one answer. It’s not just straightforward. There’s a lot of work to do to understand these customers and these buying groups.

Theresa Kushner: Exactly. But you have to also collect that information. I’ve seen a lot of marketing organizations want to do that, but they go back to the systems where they get their data, which are primarily transactional systems where people have bought things from them, and they have no way of getting that information out of the system.

Because it never was collected to begin with. So, I think there is a real value to marketing, working with whatever organization they need to internally to have a data strategy about what it is I’m going to collect. Why would I collect that? How would I use it? What am I going to do with that data over time?

Because that’s going to be really important too. And I, that’s something a CMO should really be directing.

Tricia Ruiz: See, that was my next question. Therea there any pieces of information that CMOs are not paying attention to, things that they should be tracking that they’re not? Yeah, so put you answering that right there.

We’ve come up to almost the half an hour mark here on the Accelerating Revenue Series Theresa, if you’re good for one more question, I would like to know learning is happiness here at True Influence, powered by Merit B2B and so I’m curious for yourself, what have you learned in this past year that has changed the way that you approach your professional or your personal.

And anything that you have learned whether it be in the professional or in the personal life, what would you like to share?

Theresa Kushner: The question’s not on my list!

Tricia Ruiz: It’s learning is happiness at the end!

00:29:45 – Personal and Professional Growth

Theresa Kushner: I can’t believe it. Yeah. What have I learned this year? I think the thing that I’ve learned that sort of put me back a little bit is, I’m, I always assume that people understand data and that they understand why it’s important.

And from this year, because of Covid and the things that have happened for data’s been on the forefront, I’ve learned that’s not necessarily the case and that I need to, before I just jump into telling people that data’s wonderful, I need to ask them how they feel about data and the data that they have to use in their lives or their work.

So, I’ve become a little bit better at making sure I understand where they’re coming from. It’s one of Steven Covey’s number one, number one, steps to highly effective people. Seek first to understand.

Tricia Ruiz: Seek first to understand. I feel like you have done that well over the course of your life and you’re still doing that to this day.

Thank you for, I know that you asked me questions when we came up for the pre-interview. That’s my job. I’m supposed to ask you questions.

Theresa Kushner: So, what do you, here’s a question for you. So, what do you see that marketers, what are their biggest challenges that you think they’re going to have in 2020?

Tricia Ruiz: I really think one of the biggest challenges for marketers is choosing the way that they are trying to communicate with the actual members of the buying group.

Because I’m recognizing for myself that there are spaces where I’m part of the buying group, whether that be solutions in my role, and that’s just part of it, and now I’m watching it in the way that we consume content. LinkedIn actually came out with a short form TikTok video about the way that they are hiring and the way that process goes.

And that was huge for me, to say this professional network is choosing to engage and showcase- this is a way of communication to customers that’s taking a whole new look at it because people are working from home, people are working with their dogs beside their office. People are working with their families, they’re working with their children, they’re working in their neighborhood.

They see the people around them much more than they do in the office. So, in turn, it’s changed the way that they approach the work, and they change the way that they approach their job because they’re surrounded by these other ways of communication and being connected. So, I see that as a challenge because it’s not clear cut.

It’s not going to be a clear cut until, I think this wave of how we’re creating content and communicating is really come to an over, I think it’s just ramping up and it would probably take about two to three more years in this real product space.

00:32:36 – Content Is Data

Theresa Kushner: I love that because I want to talk just a second about something I think is really important that CMOs think about too, and that is, content is data. We don’t think of it that way, but we should, and we should be managing that content with the same rigor and professionalism as we try and get people to manage their data.

Because content can be configured in a lot of different ways for different audiences, you have to tag it appropriately. You have to make sure it’s accessible. You have to make sure it gets revised on an ongoing basis. Most companies are not used to looking at content as data. They’re looking at content as knowledge, and they’ve got it in knowledge management systems, which doesn’t help a whole lot when you’re trying to connect it on your internet or make sure that you, it’s part of an email that you send out.

You’ve got to have a different way of looking at content.

Tricia Ruiz: And that content, as you’re saying, needs to be revived. I’ve watched it be looked at as just, it fills the bucket. Like it, it fills the, oh put some content there. And then are we asking the question what’s going on inside the content? What is, what are the few sentences that are being said?

If it is a programmatic podcasting ad, if it is a display out in a banner, yeah. That goes across, those are the nitty gritty questions of what’s working or what’s not. And how does data show, showcase the internal parts of this content, what makes it up to then actually be used as part of the whole ecosystem that you’re talking about?

Theresa Kushner: Yeah. I’m waiting for the same sort of technology that I’ve seen associated with HR. HR has, there are a couple of companies out there that can take a resume and look at your resume and all the words you used in it and decide if you’ve got bias, if you’re going to, what, if it’s actually going to attract the people that you think it will, and more importantly that it fits your overall company directive and structure and culture.

I’m looking for that kind of technology to be applied to marketing. Think about it. Cuz then what you could do. Yeah. Then what you could do is you could have the words that you think are most important to communicate to certain audiences always come up as possibilities when you’re creating content.

Yeah. know, So I’m looking for that capability.

Tricia Ruiz: Man, and putting to what you just talked about earlier, about what you learned this year what about those words are, is everyone using them? Because if everyone’s using them, that word has a very different effect now, if I’ve heard that on the newspapers, the national news in my small town, and there’s a few buzzwords I’m sure everyone can think of right now, that they’re like, I never want to hear this word again, but we all use it.

And that is part of the data that shows if this is oversaturated, you’ve got a problem. But how do you know that it’s oversaturated? Because the data’s going to show. Yeah. All right. Marketing technology people start building that thing. We’ll be your beta testers over here.

Theresa Kushner: Oh goodness.

Tricia Ruiz: I love it. Thank you so much for joining us today, Theresa. I appreciate the conversation and I appreciate and look forward to learning from you more. I know that you’re working on a lovely book with Ruth Stevens as well. And remind me, is it the marriage between sales and marketing? What is the working title that got going on?

Theresa Kushner: The working title is The Marriage Guide for Sales and Marketing. One of the things that we’ve thought about is that for the last, Ruth, and I’ve been in the business for 25 years or longer, and one of the things we’ve noticed is that there’s constantly sort of a tug of war between sales and marketing.

It’s sort, we’ve called it, B2B marketing’s Afghanistan, because nobody knows how to get out of it. Nobody knows what to do with this situation. Divorce is not an option, what do you do when you’re concentrating on that? And so, we’re looking to, are people who have great experiences where they’ve made that work or experiences that we can learn from where it didn’t work.

And so, if you if you can, send me a note and let me see if there’s people out there that can give me great examples.

Tricia Ruiz: Yes, absolutely. So, we’re going to put Theresa’s contact information in the chat, so if you have any of those ideas because as you said, divorce is not possible. So, what can we do to solve it?

And I’m sure that we all have stories that we think are inconsequential but could be great additions to your story with Ruth together. So, we’ll put that link in the contact information in the chat. Great. And we’ll be back next week as well at 11:00 AM Eastern. Kathi Gray from Open Text, we’re going to talk about digital marketing.

She’s a digital marketing manager and how to expand that digital audience. So, I’m grateful to speak with her as one of the last episodes before the new year.

Theresa Kushner: And you should ask Kathi about whether she’s got a tool for that open text content management thing that we talked about.

Tricia Ruiz: You know what? I will say Theresa Kushner wanted to know about this tool. I love it. Give me context.

Thank you, Theresa, and thank you everybody for being here and participating. We so appreciate having a live audience to join in with the chat and make this an actual conversation.

So, we’ll see you back next time. 11:00 AM Eastern. Theresa, thank you so much today.

Theresa Kushner: Bye.