Welcome And The Bold Rebrand Call

Michael Hartmann 0:25

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Opscast, brought to you by MarketingOps.com and powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo today. Today I'm joined by Michael Yehoshua, another Michael, chief marketing officer at Wise Stamp. Michael has built his career from BDR to CMO, not just once, but twice, across two different markets. He understands how marketing actually works from execution to strategy to leadership. But the reason for this conversation is a little more provocative. He walked into a $500,000 18-month rebrand and scrapped it. Then he rebuilt it in two months for a fraction of that 22K using AI. But that wasn't really from what we might think, generating more content, but by using AI to listen to customers at scale and apply that. And then he took it a step further, reverse engineering how LLMs surface information and reshaping their entire growth strategy around it. So if you're an ops, this isn't a tools conversation per se, but it is about decisions, how decisions get made differently now. So Michael, thanks for joining us.

Michael Yehoshua 1:33

Thanks for having me, man.

Why The Agency Concept Was Wrong

Michael Hartmann 1:34

Yeah, this is gonna be fun. It's been a while in the making here. Um all right, well, let's let's like just dive right in here. Like you walked into a nearly complete $500,000 rebrand. I've seen these kinds of things, and then you decided to kill it. Like one, like how did you make that decision to kill it? Because that's a bold decision early on. And what what was it that you saw that make you so confident that that was a wrong approach?

Michael Yehoshua 2:02

Very well. So uh a fantastic question. Um, and it looks like uh I'm not the only one who has done this in the past. Now, let me let me frame this by giving you a little bit more context. So it was it was about two and a half years ago, and YSTamp then under the previous VP of marketing hands of the CEO uh understood that it was time to do a rebrand. Now, the rebrand was um was done for a specific purpose, but the way that they approached it was was the traditional way you would do a rebrand. Here's what they did. They wanted to really make an impact. And so they went out and they interviewed the top three uh agencies that they can find. And the way they did it was they found the agency that gave them the highest price, and they said that's the agency that we want to work with. Really, they said, We're not going to, we're not going to half-ass this, we're gonna do the best that we possibly can, and really hat off to them. And they really did. They got the agency with the biggest logos, uh, with the most beautiful designs. And again, when I saw the designs, it was already very late into the process. It was a year and eight months in when I joined the company. And again, when I walk into the room, I saw beautiful concepts.

Michael Hartmann 3:30

I saw did you say a year and eight months into the project of rebranding?

Michael Yehoshua 3:35

Of course. So it oh my god. Listen, rebrands are very expensive. Think about companies like think about companies like Jaguar, who had uh a disastrous rebrand, although their logos were very nice. The new logo I thought was beautiful. I thought the colors were really nice, but the entire message was wrong, and that's why it backfired. Think about Cracker Barrel, right? They spent $700 million over the course of what six to seven years on that rebrand, and they lost $100 million overnight and then $262 million in value loss, because again, it's not about rebrands, they are not about just making a prettier logo. It's it's it's really not it, it's really not that. It's about the concept. And what I understood was that the logos are nice, but the concepts are completely wrong. And I asked myself the question why is the company doing the rebrand in the first place? The reason was it was because Y Stamp is a company that was moving up market. Bit of context, Y Stamp is a company that helps businesses manage their email signatures from a single place. And for many years, the first 18 years of Y Stamp, they were selling primarily, we were selling primarily to smaller businesses. Think about SMBs, small to medium-sized businesses. Now the company had built a lot of enterprise ready features, and now the security, the features, everything was built for enterprise. And now it's time for the company to move up market. And when I was hired, uh, it was during the company's rebrand, and I understood that even though the logos are nice and even though the colors are great, the concept was incorrect. And I did not want to be another one of those companies like Gap, like Tropicana, of course, like Jaguar, and like Cracker Barrel, who invested a significant amount of time and money only to completely flop afterwards.

Michael Hartmann 5:37

Yeah. That's crazy. So yeah, I mean, it's like the my my reaction to the year and eight months, it just that seems I I get that rebrands take time and effort and money, especially if you outsource it. But if I think my innit my visceral reaction to that, that time fine is that I mean, you're not a huge company, right? It shouldn't take that long to go through all that. So that's what I was reacting to.

Michael Yehoshua 6:06

When you work with large agencies, uh, this is usually what happens. These are very slow, drawn-out conversations. Obviously, they bill by the hour, but uh but even so, thinking of concepts, just even if you if you look at like even Walmart's rebrand, which was again a tremendous rebrand that cost them so much money, and all they did was they made the sun like from this big to like this big, and that was the whole rebrand, and it cost them so much money, and everyone wondered where did all the money go? But think about all the countless of meetings and all the millions of ideas that were pitched, and that that costs a lot of money. And again, this was the top agency in the country working with a brilliant CEO and a brilliant VP marketing who who really knew what they wanted, but unfortunately, unfortunately, uh, the way I see it, because I come from the world of enterprise, and I've been in cybersecurity for a decade. Uh, I see things very differently. And the benefit that I have was I had the outside view still when I joined the company. And tremendous uh kudos to my CEO for believing in his new CMO and giving me the opportunity to make that call because think about the sunk costs into this rebrand. Almost two years, think about the half a million, and then comes this new hotshot CMO who says, Yeah, we need to scrap it. Uh just just think about the level of confidence CEO must have had and tremendous respect to him for allowing me to make this change.

Michael Hartmann 7:39

Well, I mean, the part that I like is that you you brought up sunk cost, right? It's um this is a this I can there's probably some term for this, but one of the things I learned in a in a in a course I took one time is this it's there's a sunk cost, I think it is sun cost fallacy, right? Like, oh, we spent this much money, we need to keep going, right? Uh rather than realizing that it's not going to go where you want to go and you can't get that money back, generally speaking, right, without like legal action or something like that. So I think that's that's the I see that so often, or I've seen that so often, where people could like continue to put m time, money, effort into something that is for the most part obviously failing, but they don't want to admit it. You know, and so I think that's it's good to see that there are people and organizations that will do that. So so coming out of that though, you you you were basically said you had 22k. Um, because it wasn't like you could give up on the rebrand, right? So what'd you like how how did you figure out what to do? What did you do differently? And maybe what did you not do, right? And then ultimately how did that end up working out?

Customer Visits Before Any Design

Michael Yehoshua 8:48

Fantastic. So you mentioned that 22k. So 22k was basically it was basically the last bill that basically that was all I had left. That was all I had left for the project. That's how much the that's you know, the agency took their money, though sort of the last payment. Uh, we notified them that we would be moving on from them and we would not be using this concept. And they said, Well, you're not gonna get your money back. Uh, but that last payment of 22k, you can keep the change. And so my CEO told me, Well, if you think that you know what you're doing, well, that's all you got. And so I said, You know what? I think that'll be more than enough. And here is what we did. Uh, you see, many companies want to sell what they want to sell, but they fail to understand that they can only sell what customers want to buy. And so instead of sitting through more of these endless meetings that are just, you know, going around in circles, uh, I decided it's time to do something different. I got on a plane and I flew out and I met my customers from coast to coast, from California to New York City. Uh, I am very fortunate that at Y Stamp we have one and a half million customers. So the number of customers I can speak to is very wide. Uh, but I mapped out the most strategic, the largest, most well-known brands from coast to coast, and that's who I set meetings with, along with my customer success team. And I got out there, I met them in person, I sat with each one of them for an hour, and I asked them very specific questions as to why they purchased why they purchased us in the first place. What value do we give them as a company? And what are things that today they cannot live without once they started working with us? And I'll explain why in in further questions, why I've done it this way. But really understanding what your customers would like, really understanding the value that you're giving your customers is the most important thing you can do in marketing. And that's the most important thing you can do in building a brand. And so before I ran a single campaign, I went out, I met with my customers, and I learned exactly the values that they need. Again, these are the customers that I met, were the largest, right? In their words, right, but it's from the segment that the company is now growing into. Now that the company is selling chiefly to enterprise companies, I met with our customers who have uh, you know, 10,000 employees, uh, 5,000 employees, and so on and so forth. Instead of meeting with the smaller mom and pop shops who again get tremendous value from us, but a different kind of value. And so that was also very important to understand.

Michael Hartmann 11:43

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. So these were like actually you like when I met in person with these customers.

Using AI To Mine Sales Calls

Michael Yehoshua 11:50

You can't you use it. So that's right. So that that was the first part. Now, obviously, I cannot scale, you know, I cannot scale myself, you know. I I can't have 500 Michaels going to every single one of those customers. And so that's when I needed a force multiplier, and that's when I needed to use AI.

Michael Hartmann 12:11

So, so walk through like what did you what does that look like? Because that so, I mean, were you recording the meetings? Were you just taking lots of notes? And then like, how did like what what from a tactical standpoint did you do that where you I assume you then took whatever you captured somehow, fed it into we'll call it AI, but it probably an LM, right? And use that to to do some analysis. I mean, I I think I but I don't like how did you go through that process if it wasn't I mean if you were literally in person sitting across from people, like how did that go?

Michael Yehoshua 12:46

Okay, so obviously the meetings that were in person were different than the meetings that I analyzed. Now uh so uh I'll tell you what people do today. Today, a lot of people use AI to talk, which is you go it all, you go on LinkedIn today, you'll see that around 85% of all the content is is AI slop, right? You'll see the same generic emojis, you'll see the same bullet structure, you'll see the m-dashes everywhere. And that's what people are doing today, and they don't understand that AI is really good at analyzing data and lots of it. And so one of the things that we did was um we went on uh our sales calls. By the way, uh, for those of you who are listening here, I recommend you turn off this podcast and go listen to your sales calls. That'll give you much more value on the way to your office than this podcast.

Michael Hartmann 13:43

Then come back, then come back and finish the podcast and listen to that. I I could I couldn't agree more. I think I think it's an under for marketers who especially marketers who I said this before marketers who have a uh disdain for their sales counterparts. Like one, you don't know what it's like, but two, like there's a lot of value in hearing how they talk about the value of your product and hearing what the customers talk about. I think um I think it's so I I agree with you that they should go listen to it.

Turning Nice To Have Into Must Have

Michael Yehoshua 14:13

So it's not just that, it's also you hear what kind of questions they ask. Absolutely. So you hear what kind of questions they ask, you understand what the current needs are in the market, and then you, as the marketing leader, can go to your product team and say, uh, you need to add this to your roadmap. And again, uh this is something that really helps you to develop as a marketing leader. Now, let's let's go back to your question. So we analyzed those sales calls, we analyzed lots of them. Um, in addition, we also analyzed uh customer success calls with customers. So when customers were call and have issues, we wanted to analyze what parts of our product are actually not uh meeting our customers' uh expectations. Because A, we need to know what it is that custom potential customers are asking, and B, we need to know what existing customers are complaining about. Uh, because if we're going to go and do this big rebrand and our product is still half baked or we're not meeting the needs of the market, then we are basic well, then we are basically going to be a big failure, and it's not something that I could afford. And so the holistic view of trying to understand what the customer needs were, that was the center. And until we didn't have that right, I wasn't going to spend a penny on graphic design.

Michael Hartmann 17:05

Okay. So I love this idea of listening and using AI to analyze it. I've used that, done that myself with meetings, and um it's kind of what turned me on to if you've if you use Notebook LM? Oh yeah. I love that. Um where it generate it generates like a podcast, like audio of of content. It could be a transcript. Um so when you analyze those calls, I mean it's interesting to see me. You you were you um were you analyzing the actual audio, the transcripts, both? Like what were some of the big um what were you looking for, listening for? Like how did you direct the the AI? Because it's because it's interesting to me. I think when we talked before, I was thinking this is all just about input into brand and marketing. Um, what's the aha for me right now is oh, you also use this to feed back into the product and product roadmap.

Practical AI Advice For Ops Teams

Michael Yehoshua 18:04

So, okay, so one of the things that I really wanted to discover was what makes the customers tick. Now, I'll tell you why this is. When I came historically from the world of cybersecurity, it was very obvious why customers are buying our product. It's because if they don't secure their network or their endpoints, they're going to be in a lot of trouble. There was an obvious need. Yeah. If I asked you a few months ago uh about how important it is to have email signatures, just be honest. How important would that be to you? For many people, it doesn't even show up, it doesn't show up on their list of priorities. And what I needed to understand was I needed to help to turn a product which was seemingly nice to have into a product that's a must-have. And I'll tell you why that is. Because when times get tough, think about it, oil prices are going up, the economy is starting to go down. Businesses need to focus on efficiency. And what do they do? They cut out the tools that are nice to have and not a must-have. And so one of the things that I needed to focus on, and I really needed to hone in on is how to turn Wystamp into a into a platform that's a must-have and not a nice to have. And that's what I was able to figure out using a using AI with those aha moments. The way I did this was I analyzed uh the voice transcripts for um the pitch starting to get elevated. Because when a pitch starts to go up, you hear either levels of excitement or you hear levels of frustration. And I really wanted to understand what causes a baseline voice to go from, hmm, okay, this is interesting. So you know what? You know what? Like you see, you like you see the tone starts to go up. Those are the places that we started to analyze. And I discovered something fantastic. Now, I didn't know this as a use case, but turns out that uh there was a very big cybersecurity conference uh a few days back called RSA. Okay, and a lot of my customers in cybersecurity, uh, what they want to do is they want to have their sales reps and their marketing reps who are at that conference, they want them to book as many meetings as possible. This way they can measure the ROI. Now, one of the things that we understood was that when a sales leader or a marketing leader asks their reps or their sellers or their SDRs to update their email signatures with, hey, meet us at RSA with like a little banner, and then you click on it and it takes you to a landing page. Uh, when we asked our customers if their employees do that, everyone said nobody listens. There might be one or two people who listens. The rest of the people are still using a banner from a few months ago. And we understand that they need to go to those conferences and they need to book meetings. That is critical. And when you give one person control over every inbox in the company and they're able to, with one click, have everything updated, that is something that's a must have. It's not a nice to have. This is one example. Another example is in the world of uh medical or uh uh medical or education. If a teacher or a doctor decides to add their political views to the bottom of their email signatures for a political cause which isn't aligned with either the university or the hospital, this causes the hospital or the university to lose reputation. That means investors are backing out. Uh, the teacher needs to be publicly fired. It creates unnecessary backlash for universities, hospitals, legal, and some other uh fields. And so companies need to protect their brand, they need to protect their brand identity, and they cannot allow people, which again we're all human at the end, to make rogue decisions that are contradicting with the brand. And so now we give our customers full control over every inbox in the company. Everyone looks aligned, and nobody can add things that are not approved. And so you're basically what we're doing is we're helping those businesses or organizations gain full control of their brand, and this saves them a lot of money and reputation damages and legal issues, and to fire teachers. And again, it's it's a tool that you probably wouldn't think about is something that's so uh it's so necessary, but we turned it in from something that's a nice to have to a must-have. And now when oil prices are going up, we're actually continuing continuing renewing customers and we're not going through churn because we were able to explain the value to our customers where many of our competitors have failed to do so. And I only got that information from analyzing this information through these aha moments.

Michael Hartmann 23:09

Yeah, I mean, I think that's you know that's one of the I think that's one of the downsides of things like I've because I've run transcripts through, and I think um I think I've like now that you're saying this, right? I inherit I think I implicitly knew that it was missing the I'll just generally call it body language components of it, right? Like video would have been like, oh, are you leaning in? Are you leaning back? Is your voice going up? Is it going down? Are you looking somewhere else? Right. All these things are are um Like, you know, we all learn these by through you know normal life. And it's the one piece that's been missing, I think, from from the transcript components. And the transcripts the ones are I still think are pretty good when I get summaries and things like that. So so this is interesting. Um, so you know, as you know, most of our listeners, viewers are uh in in ops space, whether it's marketing ops, web ops. Um so I think this is probably a little bit different. I mean, we've talked about AI, of course, in lots of different contexts, and I think of it in a couple of different buckets from an operator standpoint. But what like if you were to you know tell marketing ops team people like, how should they be thinking about this element of leveraging AI, right? For capturing and using data from calls and things like that.

Michael Yehoshua 24:37

So, uh, like I mentioned before, uh, listen to your sales calls, learn what attracts new clients, right? Listen to customer success calls and prevent shurn uh and learn more about customer retention. And on the upside, try to connect all that data either to Claude or to Notebook LLM or to some of those AI tools in order to analyze that information, because you will be surprised by the amount of tremendous insights you can learn from just being a fly in the wall in those conversations. Today, we are very fortunate that almost everybody has these kinds of tools available. And again, use any tool that you want. The ones who record those calls, right? Uh, on customer success, obviously they're recorded for sales. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not, depending on the client. But you should have those and you should be able to connect it to a centralized place. Again, I personally love Claude, but I also work with Gemini, I work with ChatGPT, uh, I work with uh uh Notebook LLM, I work with some of the others. Uh, use any platform that works for you and analyze that information because that's where the treasures are hidden.

LLM Search Tracking And Reverse Engineering

Michael Hartmann 25:47

Um would you so in my mind, like a lot of this should feed into if there was like a product marketing type function, right? Is you know, because they're gonna be I ultimately I think it should feed into how do you communicate to your customers, whether it's through website, pitch decks, whatever. And um typically, I don't think this is a space that ops people have been involved with, right? So I mean, would you recommend to people listening if you're in ops to go like, hey, I think we should be doing this, right? We should be going and and taking advantage of all these sales calls that are being recorded. Um, customer success is one I hadn't really thought about, but it's a great one. Like, would you recommend that was something they should like like encourage them to take the take that as something to push forward in their organizations?

Michael Yehoshua 26:38

For sure, because if you're an ops, you should have access to those tools. And if you go ahead and do this kind of stuff, you would be considered as a forward thinker. Uh, you would get a lot of appreciation from uh from either your manager or the one above your manager. And uh, it's a very, very good way to uh jump forward in your career. Um again, I had my ops people, my uh product marketing people come to me with some of these ideas as well over the years, and uh those are the ones who got promoted. So the ones who really thought a step further, it goes a long way.

Michael Hartmann 27:14

Gotcha. All right. So um so ultimately, right, this helped fed into stuff that you had to then take out into the marketplace, whatever, right? So how did you how did um let's call it distribution, right? Um how did that how did you start to take that and turn turn it into content? How did that affect? I think I at the top of this we talked a little bit about uh when I introduced you, talked a little bit about search versus LLM-based um I guess search. But like how did how did you how did that feed into what you did from a content standpoint? Um, especially thinking about how you were um discoverable, I guess.

Michael Yehoshua 27:59

Okay. So this was a very, very big challenge for us. So uh in early 2025, uh after many Google core updates, we started seeing that there were some drops in SEO. Now, those drops in SEO, we didn't know this at the time, but this was basically Google preparing the world for AI mode, where that was sort of going to be the new way that Google was going to search. And so while we were dropping in while we started seeing drops in search, um, and obviously the LLMs were starting to rise, we decided that we're going to build a tool in-house to try to learn about how LLMs think. So here's what we did we built a tool that maps every single query where our brand was mentioned per week, and then we went ahead and analyzed the results. So anytime the name Y Stamp was mentioned by any LLM, uh, we checked Chat GPT, we checked um Gemini, we checked uh I forgot. There were there were there were a few others that we checked. Um basically what we did was Yeah, yeah, basically what we did was we mapped every every single time that our brand was mentioned, we wanted to see what it was ranking us for. We wanted to see uh which pages it was pulling the answers from. And so what we wanted to do is we wanted to make sure that we are ranking number one consistently across every single LLM for our new positioning. And uh it looks like uh it looks like we hit gold.

Michael Hartmann 29:51

So um you say you built this in in-house, like so. Is this kind of like um, I mean, there's been a couple of tools out there for search, like understanding what search terms were used for your like brand-related terms and all that. Is it something like that, but looking at the activity that's going on in the LLMs? Is that kind of what you're talking about?

Michael Yehoshua 30:11

That's correct. So um Hrefs uh also has a tool that does this. I've seen a few other really cool AI uh mapping tools that do this kind of stuff. So we again we pulled a lot of uh we'd like we got a lot of ideas from there. And this was something that we slowly developed over time, but ultimately it really, really helped us to map out what was missing on our website, right? What content was missing on the website? Um, what websites should we invest in for backlinks? Think about it. A lot of times the information that's written about your company online is going to be cited. Whether that's true or not, see LLMs work a little differently than Google search. Google search is very focused on getting the most accurate information. They do they do a few tests on it, uh, and then Google decides how to rank it. Uh, LLMs don't think that way. They want to give you answers and they want to give you answers very quickly. And the way that they do things is different than Google does. And we wanted to understand if we do certain things, how will that impact the LLMs? And so every so when we started seeing the list of websites that were being cited or sourced by those LLMs, that's how we knew where to put our content, where to sponsor our content, where to purchase backlinks from. And so we sort of did it backwards, and um, and what we saw was everything that we wanted the LLMs to say about us, that's how that's how it did it, because we knew where it was pulling the information from. Now, granted, this did become more complex over time. Uh, and even today, with all these updates, they continue getting smarter, and we need to continue outsmarting the system. Uh, but with having that holistic view and understanding how they think, and each one thinks a little bit differently. Yeah, uh, we need to know how to do that. Uh, over time, we moved on from the agency and brought in a full team in-house to handle this. Uh, but that's one of our biggest bets. And I really think that this is going to be a tremendous difference maker for us.

Michael Hartmann 32:25

Yeah, it's interesting. So um maybe challenge this a little bit. So when I I've done like a lot of search stuff in in my career, and one of the things I got to the like beliefs I have is that um trying to chase the latest algorithm change, right? And do all these kind of crazy things is actually a losing battle, and that like you should focus on just having high quality content for humans that is easy to consume and um, you know, is broken up into chunks that make sense so the the algorithm can or the crawling site, right? It's looking for specific stuff, even if that means breaking up something that could be one big piece of content, right? Just to give it more uniqueness. Is it are you are you finding that it's a similar similar approach that you would do for content for LLMs where you just focus on the content? I I know you talked about backlinking, and I'm sure that is important. Um or or are you like making fine-tuning adjustments on a regular basis?

Michael Yehoshua 33:31

So you're definitely right. Always create the highest quality content and things that other people cannot do. So, again, today when everyone is writing with LLMs, you write with an actual person, and all of a sudden you sound different than everybody else. What a novel. So, so there's always that. However, um you need to understand that you need to be playing two games now. Uh, SEO, as much as people are saying that it's dead, it isn't dead. Uh, people are still searching on Google, but people are also searching on LLMs, and so you don't just have a strategy of creating the best content, you also need to create the best content, and you also need to create content that LLMs are interested in. And so it's not about just trying to focus in on one thing. You need to now branch it out. So those are two separate departments. You need to focus on this side of the business and you need to focus on that side of the business because that's the only way you're going to win today. And yes, there are a lot of guesses and there are a lot of mistakes that you need to make along the way, but I would rather have mistakes with conviction than sitting down and raising our hands and saying, well, we can't wait for the latest, uh, for the latest algorithm change. So we just will we'll just write good content. It it just doesn't work that way. You need to try, you need to fail, you need to try again. Eventually, you'll outsmart the system.

Content And PR For AI Discovery

Michael Hartmann 34:53

And did you did you or do you still use that analysis from sales calls and customer success calls as input into the kind of content that you're you're initially, let's say you're initially creating some new content or updating a substantial portion of content. Is that a big part of how you go like approach that now? And then, you know, the language, the terminology is right, matching customer language, all that.

Michael Yehoshua 35:23

100%. This is it's been a very, very big emphasis for us. It's not just the content that we write, it's gonna be the white papers that are gonna be coming out. The specific research that uh we're gonna be coming out with is very interesting. I can't talk about it yet, but you'll see it in in a few weeks. Uh, all of that we were able to pull based on conversations we based on conversations our sales team had with prospects. So a prospect would say, you know what would be really interesting if there was a study on X, Y, and Z. And that's basically what my LLM told me. I got into that call, I listened to what the customer had to say, I ran it through with my marketing team. I said, guys, what do you think? Is it possible? And then they said, Yes, it is. And we rented all the necessary equipment for the study. And um, now we have the data and now we're putting it all together. Uh, we would not have known about this had we not uh heard this from a customer. Sure. Uh that's one of them. But also uh the blog posts that we continue to write. I know no one read no one reads blogs anymore, but you'd be surprised. There are people who are on the bottom of the uh bottom of the sales funnel, and they're very interested to see what the customer, what the what the company they want to purchase from is writing about. What are things that they care about? And those are things that are very interesting. And so uh, like you said, using the words of the customers has been very, very important with our rebrand. And um funny enough, when we launched the rebrand, it was uh we actually launched the messaging in May of last year, and we launched the uh the the design in September. Uh it's funny to see that every single one of our direct competitors uh copied our messaging, which was really, really funny. And it really and it really shows that we're on to something. So uh thanks guys.

Michael Hartmann 37:25

Yeah. What is it? Uh anyway. So uh it's interesting that you you bring up blog posts, and I know we we hadn't planned to talk about this, but it there's a part of me, you mentioned it sort of bottom of funnel, but I think I what I've what I think might be going on is is I think about like a typical buyer journey now, right? I think the old model of a very like stepwise funnel is for a long time not been the reality, right? I think there's a lot of stuff happening where we have no idea beforehand. And it feels like maybe blog posts with LLMs now, if people are using that to do, hey, I want to look at people in this space, what are they, you know, it may be more important now than it was when it was just sort of quote, just pure search. Where because your point, right, the goal of the search was to get the most correct, accurate answer. Uh, where LLMs feel like they're like I use LLMs a lot for doing that, like research, whether it's a personal thing or and like vlogs. I I actually think I've always thought like press releases were an underrated marketing tool. So I mean, you is that sense you get too like some of these things that have maybe fallen off as important pieces of content are starting to pick up because of how they can be used.

CMO Playbook Start With Customers

Michael Yehoshua 38:46

That's correct. So for many years, for many years, press release was like a very expensive part of marketing that people would only do or companies would only do if they had extra budget. Today it's a pivotable, it's a pivotal part of our business. So uh we work a lot with the press. We always try to get our information out there because having your information at many in as many places as possible with the correct context, with the correct messaging really helps for positioning, not just with SEO, but also with LLMs. And it's a very, very important part of the business. Uh, I've seen something fascinating that some companies are starting to do. I will experiment with that shortly regarding PRs. And if it works, I'll tell you about it in another episode.

Michael Hartmann 39:37

I love that. I love it. Um okay, so maybe let's sort of had to wrap up here, but so maybe this is a little more for people who are kind of on the track for CMO. Um if you were, if you if if you were or you were someone who's stepping into a new CMO role today, where it comes to you is like, what uh what should I be doing? What should I be thinking about in terms of AI to drive impact? I mean, I think it's it's been interesting to me to see this sort of a I don't know if it's hyper, but like it feels like the big marketing impact from when like it was really Chat GPT that exploded, what, 18 months ago? That it was going to be the thing that replaced all these content writers. And I just I I never thought that was gonna work that well for a variety of reasons. But so, but your story is interesting because you used it in a different way. Like, what would you recommend like as a starting point for them walking into a new organization? And maybe does it matter the size, right? That that might have an impact too.

Michael Yehoshua 40:45

Not necessarily. Um, this was when when I finished graduate school, uh, I sat with my professor who I was very, very close with, and I asked him, Hey, can you please give me a little bit of advice? I'm stepping into a new role as uh VP marketing. Um, it was my second time as VP marketing, but it was after after a break, uh, where I worked my way up from BDR all the way to VP marketing, and I asked him, Listen, I have all these amazing ideas. Like, how am I supposed to begin? And my professor looked at me and said to me, Before you do a single campaign, I want you to take your whole list and I want you to throw it in the trash. I want you to get on the bus, get on the train, get in your car, and go out and visit your customers. I spoke about it uh earlier in the podcast. Your customer holds all of the answers. And so you go to those customers and you ask them, why did you purchase us in the first place? Uh, what other companies did you consider during this uh buying cycle? Uh you learn about the values that the customers are using, you know, they're using your your product. Uh, are they using your product in an innovative or in a new way? Uh so uh there's a lot of things that uh again, a lot of things that we have today products, uh consumer products, uh software, they started off as one thing and they ended up something else because customers used it in a specific way where it turns out that it actually gave much better value elsewhere. So you need to have all that information. Once you have all that information, uh connect everything to Claude. I'm kidding. Uh, but you need to analyze lots of data. The truth always is where the data is and where the money is. So listen to your customers, understand where you're spending money, right? Understand, right? You again, you're probably going to have uh a growth marketing, you're gonna have a brand marketing, you'll have a demand generation team, uh, you'll have uh uh email automations, you'll have you'll have a lot of different avenues in your business. You have to understand where you're spending the money, where you're getting ROI. Uh, are you getting more ROI from events than from uh digital marketing? Like you'll need to have all that information. And based on that information coupled with the knowledge that you're getting from your customer base, that's how you will know how to lead your business going forward. That that would be my advice.

Michael Hartmann 43:20

Yeah. I mean, this is it's interesting because like it was nothing about technology, it was all about getting out there and and listening, asking good questions and listening, which is I I think it's interesting that your background is you were a BDR to start with, because I think that's one of the most important parts of being in that kind of I I ran a team. I had to build it, so I did that first in a new new company, new industry that I didn't know anything about. And I just had to figure it out. And it was always interesting to it's funny how in those early stages and something like that, where you get questions that are not really the question, because let's say they fill out a form on your website. It's not the question they actually have, right? But they feel like they have to get something in succinct, and so you have to ask additional questions to kind of get them to draw it out, whether that's your email or a call. And so I think that's a skill that more people should develop, right, is asking good questions and then keeping their mouth closed.

Where To Connect And Closing

Michael Yehoshua 44:22

Right. But it's it's not just that. Like when I moved up from BDR to you know marketing manager to uh you know, head of uh content to head of marketing to VP marketing, like these were uh I needed to sort of do every single step in the marketing and in the sales journey to get to where I am today. And so I have really a deep appreciation into basically every stage of the marketing funnel. Uh and today I'm able to, you know, lend a helping hand uh and not only to be strategic, but today, as you know, as you move on in your role and go into higher levels, you have to be more strategic and less hands-on. And you need to entrust the people on your team to make a lot of those uh to make a lot of those decisions and to do a lot of those things. And so uh you have to always be asking the right questions and you have to ensure that you're steering the ship in the right direction because that's what's expected of you. It's less the hands-on and more of the thought. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann 45:25

Yeah, yeah. No, I it's it's a sk again, like it's a skill that I think is um people will talk about it as a soft skill, and I just it's to me it's just a skill, right? And you you some people kind of come into this world with sort of more natural gifts towards. That, but it can be developed, right? You can become competent in it, but you have to you have to work at it. For sure. So well, why don't we wrap up there, Michael? This has been a lot of fun. I mean, this is a fascinating story to me about how how AI has was used in a very different way than what I see a lot of stuff talked about, right? Um, so thank you for sharing that. If folks want to continue the conversation and add to your your LinkedIn slop or something, like what's the best way for them to to to to connect with you on that?

Michael Yehoshua 46:16

Well, add it to my LinkedIn slot. Or really, you could just follow me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. Just write my name, Michael. You'll do while I'm there.

Michael Hartmann 46:24

All right, perfect. Well, Michael, again, thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. I'm glad we got to do this. Thanks again to our uh our audience out there. We appreciate your support. As always, if you have ideas for topics or guests, or you want to be a guest, you can reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we would be happy to get the ball rolling. Until next time. Bye, everybody.

Michael Yehoshua 46:44

Thank you so much.