Recorded in September 2025

Josh Leatherman: 0:00

Meeting with my CFO consistently, and frankly, because I'm with private equity, meeting with our private equity, our board of directors and our operating partners, making sure that they understand and buy in to my attribution models is critical because I can present marketing results, but if it's cluey to them or they don't know it, they don't buy into confused buyers, don't buy. The same with finance and boards of directors. Like you have to build the attribution model with them and they have to buy into it. And so the most successful marketers I've seen have a relationship with their chief financial officer.

‍Kevin Kerner: 0:37

Why do so many marketing teams feel stuck? They're drowning in random acts of marketing, struggling to prove their own value, and completely disconnected from sales and finance. What if you could change that? What if you could build a system, like a literal system, a scalable, predictable engine for growth? I'm Kevin Kerner, host of Tech Marketing Rewired, and that's exactly what my guest, Josh Leatherman, wrote the book on. Literally. His book, Scalable Acts of Marketing, is a playbook for reinventing the systems that make marketing work. And our conversation is a deep dive into his approach. He brings so much structure and logical thinking to the role, especially in how marketing must align with other organizations inside a company to actually work. This is something I think every struggling marketing leader should hear, and is an intelligent and empathetic approach to transforming marketing from a defensive cost center into a confident revenue-driving partner. It's one of those episodes that I hope will change the way you think about your job. But before we get into it, this podcast is sponsored by my company, Mighty and True, a growth marketing agency for tech companies that are ready to scale. If you're a tech brand that's having trouble building the systems that will help you scale, contact us at www.mightyandtrue.com. All right, that's enough. Let's get into it. This is tech marketing rewired. All right, Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Leatherman: 2:01

Great to be here, Kevin. Appreciate you having me.

Kevin Kerner: 2:05

Yeah, I was very excited to talk to you and thanks to you. Thank you so much for sending me the book. I really didn't reach out to you just to get a free copy of the book.

Josh Leatherman: 2:12

That wasn't. Well, my pleasure. My pleasure. I'm glad Amazon got it to you in time.

Kevin Kerner: 2:17

Yeah, it's actually very good. It's I and I'm very excited to talk about it. I I mentioned to you on the pre-show that I that um kind of ran businesses before without much systems and processes or scale. And then I learned how to build stuff with scale, and it it just really changed my whole perspective and changed the growth trajectory of our business. So anytime I see anything that's like scalable, like traction or emith or those type of books, I really want to get the word out there. And this is a I from just skimming through it, it seems like a great playbook for helping marketers scale. I'm really interested in um how you got to the book. Um you it seems like you have run a bunch of very successful marketing organizations. At what point did you say, okay, I this isn't a bunch of blog posts, I've got to put this into a system for people?

Josh Leatherman: 3:06

Yeah, I think, you know, first of all, I've worked with a number of different private equity companies, and private equity demands that predictability. And so you learn very quickly, especially in marketing, you learn, and by the way, the CMO is the least tenured role on the executive team. And it's because there are so many leaders in marketing who have not figured out how to big build scale. And scale is built by understanding a couple of things: people, process, technology. Like you have to really get those three three things right. And too often as marketers, we over-index on maybe one, like the technology side, but we forget the process and then we forget people that we have to have trained people on it. But what really made me cause me to write the book is I've been with private equity and I recognize that for an organization to scale, marketing has to do its job. At any given time, if you look at the total addressable market for any business, you know, four to five percent of the total addressable market is actually in the market. They're looking for your products or your services. And there's one team, there's one team who have the technology and the tools to identify at scale who those people are who are looking for your business, and that's marketing. And if marketing isn't doing that right, they're in dereliction of duty because a company can't grow if they're not capturing the demand that's out there or creating the demand that's out there. So, you know, as a part of private equity, I got to kind of move around and see many of the different portfolio companies, and I started to kind of teach a lot of these principles on building scalable marketing growth. And marketing should be a huge contributor to pipeline. Uh, and I learned that there was only one of me, and there were a lot of different marketers and companies out there who could benefit from it. And so I thought, what better way to kind of get some of that knowledge? What I learned through other beneficiaries who taught me. What better way to get that out there than to write a book and be able to just get it in the hands of as many marketers as I possibly could?

Kevin Kerner: 5:14

Yeah, it's really interesting. You say the there's the one department that can find this stuff that has the tools and systems and people to make to find the ICP, the 5%, is the marketing. Because I think just saying that, there's a probably a lot of back and forth in the in a company. It's like, is it the sales organization or is it the marketing organization? Like who owns this thing? Do you find that just by like saying that to people that marketing can find this 5% clarifies for people, okay, this is our job. We should be able to find this stuff. It's not saying it is sales to some degree, but marketing is responsible.

Josh Leatherman: 5:47

Yeah, and you you think about it, right? Can sales do search engine optimization to make sure that buyers who are looking for your service are getting to your website in an efficient and highly visible way? Is sales using those intent data aggregation websites and leveraging digital intent online? And there are many tools that do this. Is sales able to do that? They're not. Is sales doing artificial intelligence keyword optimization and content optimization so that ChatGPT and Perplexity and all of these other tools are making sure that your company is represented well. They're not. Only one team can do that. It's marketing. So marketing has got the tools at their disposal. And the talent, frankly, is out there. You know, it's our job as CMOs to be able to harness the tools, the talent, and build good processes so that we're able to capitalize on them.

Kevin Kerner: 6:44

Yeah, yeah, really good. Before we get into the specifics of the book, they get me thinking about the incentives, the underlying incentives behind why you don't get this scalable stuff happening. And, you know, what do you see as the underlying incentives yet like board pressure, bonus structure, fear? Like what drives the short-term sort of unscalable loop that happens in some of these companies?

Josh Leatherman: 7:08

I think frankly, there is a talent shortage amongst marketers. Like there are a lot of kind of older school marketers or less sales prone marketers, marketers who are not prone to be great partners with sales, meaning they're going, they're they're going to sales meetings, they're participating in sales calls, they're listening in on sales development calls, they're getting in front in front of customers. I think there are too few marketers who are actually prone to doing that. And so what happens is organizations kind of fill their teams with people who don't do this. And then marketing just doesn't have a seat at the table. And people sit back and they question. And marketing has got this reputation for like, hey, we pour a lot of money in over here, but we really don't know what we get from it, right? And it's because we've just not been thoughtful enough about bringing in just a few key people who are prone to be in the sales organization and understanding the buyer and the buyer's journey and all of that. I think that's probably one big reason.

Kevin Kerner: 8:13

Yeah, interesting. Do you think that's the reason for a lot of growth roles showing up now? I've seen GTM engineer and growth manager and all this stuff. But I wonder if those are under, actually under people, those people should read your book. I wonder if the growth what I get from the fable that I read in the first part of the book was this is a different type of animal in this growth role. The woman hires Andrew, who's the and I, by the way, I love the the book is great. It's kind of like Jim Lancioni's books. Um there's a fable involved, so it really gets you in the game fast, but the growth role is really a different type of person.

Josh Leatherman: 8:48

It is. And the growth role is a systems person, it's somebody who understands systems, right? And many marketers come in and they tend to be jack of many trades, master of none. And what I've found is I like to bring in growth marketers who get certified on the tool that they specialize in. I like to make sure that they have accountability metrics so that they know if you're going to be a growth marketer, you have to have goals and there has to be performance measurement, just like we have in sales and sales dev. I want them to understand what their goals are and be charting out what their performance is. And by the way, one place that I've found is a great kind of growing field for growth marketers is sales development. It's such a great field where we bring in what are kind of green people within 12 months. They have more conversations with buyers than our than sales reps will the rest of their years. So they get to know the buyers, the language, the objections very quickly, right? And they become masters at tools when it comes to dialers, CRMs, sales cadence technologies, what works in sales emails, like they become masters of these tools and strategies. And so what I what I like to do is those who kind of show a proclivity towards, you know, getting into marketing, I love while they're in the sales development role, getting them in front of the marketing team, sending them out to some of these trade shows and conferences that we go to, and teaching them how to use some of the tools and systems, uh, partnering them with a marketing mentor. They're they're just such in they are they understand pipeline generation, they understand sales qualified opportunities, they understand the language. They're not sitting in sales development, they're not sitting in leads or marketing qualified leads or form fills from the website. All they know is they get comped off of sales qualified results. Yeah. And we need more of that in marketing. We need less of like, hey, I've performed this way because of X number of leads or M2Ls. Like nobody cares about that. At the board level, private equity shareholders, they don't care about that. They care about sales qualified results.

Kevin Kerner: 10:59

Yeah, it's kind of a more of a shark with a technology bent too. You know where else I hear that a lot is in ABM. Like a really good ABM marketer is real close to the sales organization. Like they're not afraid to go to the sales organization versus go. I think that's I think the talent thing is super, and it goes back to your old school marketers that weren't brought up. They were made they're maybe like vibe marketers in some ways, more creative, but also weren't weren't brought up with the tools or the sales bias for things. Completely. Um, okay, so I wanted to get into the book some because I've s I I think that um I read the fable, and in the fable they talk uh the Andrew, the your um growth manager brings in. The first thing he does is he writes on the board these six things. And and I I wonder if you could just walk without giving away too much of the book because people want to read it. I wonder if you could just walk through those critical fundamental systems that are put in place by this growth individual.

Josh Leatherman: 11:58

Yeah, so for me, um, you know, tip of the spear is talent. Talent is everything. Your ability to attract and keep and harness and uh remove barriers for the right people in your organization as a leader is critical. And so one of the first things that Andrew focuses on is talent, making sure not only that he has the right talent, but he's got the right talent in the right seat. And after he's done that, he's looking at technology. Too many companies, I've seen this as I've gone to different private equity portfolio companies. Too many companies think, you know, they're gonna get into growth marketing because they have the right technologies. A tool, a fool with a tool is still a fool. You've got to make sure the technologies work for you. You've got to make sure that you have people who are certified in the technologies, wrapping it around your sales process. And then you've got to make sure the tools are integrated with real well. And that's not easy. And so if you have the right people with the right certifications, they're gonna get it done. And so technology is critical. And then ideal customer profile, buyer personas, like we talk about it all the time, but a smaller niche and really understanding who are the buyers that have a need uh that you can solve, right? What demographic, technographic, whatever, whatever, whatever that those requirements are, really understanding and being uber focused on that ICP is critical because I've seen too many marketing organizations, they have one budget, right? They have one pie, which is their budget. And I see them spread it way too thin across 80,000 accounts when they probably have 15,000 accounts that they should be really focused on. And it's kind of, I'm a big believer in the Pareto principle, 80-20 rule. You are going to get 80% of the pipeline and revenue from 20% of the customers. So focus on driving as much of your marketing budget to those 20% of customers that ICP is possible. And then he talks about buying signals. That is all over digitally, that's all over the place right now. People show intent, digital intent online. And there's all kinds of different resources that marketers have at their fingertips. And I mentioned it at the top of this podcast. If marketers aren't leveraging that, they're in dereliction of duty because you can drive, you can capture intent at scale if you know where to look for these buying signals. Sales can't do it, finance can't do it, you know, sales development can't do it. Only marketing can do it. And so marketing has got to have the tools to do that, and they've got to have people who are actively looking for those buying signals. Then Andrew talks about process. Process is so important. I mentioned it earlier. A lot of CMOs love to collect technology and tools, like they're shiny objects, but they forget to build the tools so that they wrap around their sales process. And the tools work for the way their buyers buy and their sellers sell. So process is critical, and then you are nothing. The sixth is you are nothing if you do not have good data. Data, right, whether it's your ICP and making sure you have all that data in your CRM, or you've got a great marketing attribution system in place, or I really like to say pipeline or revenue attribution, making sure you understand where the pipeline or revenue is coming from, the cost to acquire customers, the return on invested capital for marketing. You're not going to get a seat at the table if you don't have the data to show that the money you're spending is getting a good return. So those are kind of the six concepts that Andrew writes on his whiteboard and begins to really build throughout Scaleworks, which is the uh company that that uh he joins in the Fable.

Kevin Kerner: 15:46

It's really a transformation exercise, right? You're transforming the whole growth um system inside a company. I mean, obviously that takes some time and needs to be explained to the executive leadership team and others. Like, what's the best way to if you if you were interested in these things, putting these things in place, what's the best way to begin to make sure that you have support across the rest of the organization?

Josh Leatherman: 16:13

Yeah, the it actually doesn't begin when you have your team in place. It doesn't actually begin in marketing. It begins, you know, if if you if you are a CMO, you should be super connected first to your either chief revenue officer or chief sales officer. Like you should be tied at the hip. You know, the I the way I always present my teams is my team is a pipeline team. We are responsible for driving pipeline. My CRO's job is to convert that pipeline into revenue, right? And so he can't do that if I'm not doing my job, and I can't do my job if he's not converting, right?

Kevin Kerner: 16:48

Love that idea.

Josh Leatherman: 16:48

You know, the the and I see way too many marketers, it's just crazy to me. Way too many marketers who just sit apart from the CRO. They say they're close, but then you talk about you know shared metrics by which they're both measured. They don't have them, they can't articulate them. They can't talk about contribution to pipeline, contribution to revenue. They're not sitting in a customer calls, they're not meeting consistently with the field sales organization to learn what's going on. And so that's number one. Number, and then number two is finance. Too many marketers, for me, meeting with my CFO consistently, and frankly, because I'm with private equity, meeting with our private equity, our board of directors and our operating partners, making sure that they understand and buy in to my attribution models is critical because I can present marketing results, but if it's klugy to them or or they don't know it, they don't buy into confused buyers, don't buy. The same with finance and boards of directors. Like you have to build the attribution model with them and they have to buy into it. And so the most successful marketers I've seen have a relationship with their chief financial officer.

Kevin Kerner: 18:04

Yeah, wow. Those are really good, that's really really good. But that you know, there people are listening to this, CMOs are listening to this, and they said, number one, they don't have a great relationship. Number two, they they are maybe worried about going to them. What do you think? What what would you tell them about like how do you begin to have these discussions? Because I know what at first what maybe the better way to ask is like what's drive what's driving them not having these discussions, and then how would you sort of uh recommend that they at least start?

Josh Leatherman: 18:35

Yeah, what's driving them is they have felt like they've been on the defense with these people for far too many years.

Kevin Kerner: 18:42

Yeah.

Josh Leatherman: 18:43

Finance is constantly questioning you know what organizations spend on marketing and what we're getting what they're getting in return. And sales is consistently saying, hey, I don't have enough pipeline, I don't have a great partnership with marketing. And so what prevents marketing from proactively building these relationships or having a seat at the table is they feel like they've been on the defense for too long. And so there's a few small things marketers can do to start to be proactive about this. Listen, the the CFO is fairly objective, I've learned, in an organization. If you can come to the CFO and go, hey, I have a way for us to get more revenue, they're gonna be, you're gonna get a seat at their table. They're at least gonna hear you out, right? And so if you approach the CFO to have a conversation around a marketing plan and not just presenting it out, but getting feedback, bring an analyst with you. I'm a big believer in revenue operations, right? You have the CRO, you have the CMO. I believe that revenue operations is Switzerland. Too often we hear about, right? You you see it in the fable in my book. You know, the head of sales talks about I'm tired of all these leads, they're tire kickers, they're they're people who are looking but they're never buying, right? And so you have this constant friction between sales and marketing about, hey, I drove this many leads, but they're not good leads, and all kinds of other areas, right? So revenue operations is Switzerland, like they that's an independent group that should be have technologists, data scientists, analysts in it who understand what's going on and can give a perspective. And so getting in front of like a CRO and a CFO with an analyst in data instead of just a feeling or a strategy or a marketing plan, uh, a really well-thought-out strategy that has forecasted ROI, here's our spend, here's what we expect to get in return. That's a conversation starter, and that's an energizing conversation to have as opposed to presenting a plan and just getting shot down and feeling like you're out you're on the defense.

Kevin Kerner: 20:55

Yeah. And I suppose in those conversations, too, there's probably been a lot of vanity metrics over time. They've just been like, hey, here's the here's the metrics. This is the metrics I'm showing you, but they just really don't move the needle. And there's kind of a dopamine hit, I guess you get from some good vanity metrics. Like we got a really good open rate, or we have a lot of the form fills or whatever. And that feels good at the time and then until you get nailed by it doesn't really matter. Are there one or two key metrics that that a scalable marketing team should really be obsessed with, like completely obsessed with?

Josh Leatherman: 21:28

Obsess with anything sales qualified, right? If I'm if I'm reporting out on the success of my own team, there's bias there. And even if there's not bias, even if I have great intentions, I can tell you the board of directors, the shareholders, the CFO, others are looking, going, how do we trust that number? So reporting out on MQLs, leads, form fills, never a good idea for marketing. To me, there's no question, like sales qualified opportunity creation is for me the number one thing I look at. You know, it's like mark, a marketer reporting out on leads is like the fox saying, I didn't steal any eggs from the hen house, right? Like the fox shouldn't be reporting on how many eggs he stole or didn't like go ask the hen. You know, you should ask sales, are these qualified leads? And so a marketer could send through a thousand leads and get 900 qualified opportunities, or they could send through a thousand leads and get 10 qualified opportunities, right? We should be looking at sales qualified pipeline and opportunities. What is the efficiency of what we're driving? So those are that that would be number one for me. And then I'm a big fan of not influenced, but sourced revenue. If you have a good attribution model in place and you know how much pipeline and qualified opportunities you're driving, you can follow that all the way through to closed sale. And so marketers should be reporting out on marketing sourced revenue. And we found in our business, we found that marketing sourced revenue was the deals were always two times greater. They had 50%, it was 50% the sales velocity. So they would close in three months versus six months if sales had sourced it, two times the revenue and about eight percent higher closed rates with a sales team. So it was more efficient, much more efficient. And so, of course, our shareholders said if we can get more of those, like we'll invest in that. If we can get more of those, we'll invest in that.

Kevin Kerner: 23:31

Yeah, well, a business owner wouldn't. It's our board wouldn't. It's like just bring it on. You mentioned attribution, and we get I get a lot of questions around attribution. You have people that are like, don't use it at all. First touch, and it's such a complicated method. Do you have any opinion on attribution, how to use it correctly, how to view it correctly, maybe?

Josh Leatherman: 23:50

Yeah, listen, there's there's two ways I view it. One is first, first touch attribution doesn't give you the whole story, but it tells who got the person to the party, right? Yeah. It's so critical when you when you have whatever your number is, you may have 30,000 accounts in your addressable market in North America. 30,000 account accounts who are not clients yet, right? It is so critical that you understand how you are getting them into the sales funnel. Marketing has a big responsibility there, and so first touch attribution tells you how they're coming to the party. But then marketing has a responsibility beyond just getting them into the party. So that you have to have some kind of multi-touch attribution model. My recommendation is you know, you can give different percentages to first touch opportunity creation, proposal, whatever those numbers are. Just get in front of private equity, your private equity group or your shareholders or your CFO and come up with a shared definition that everybody agrees to and everybody can buy into.

Kevin Kerner: 24:56

I that's a great idea because I don't think I think attribution from marketing to the CFO is probably told, it's not asked. And there's no there's no real agreement, so it all looks kind of skeptical, and the sales leader's like, yeah, I don't know about that. And so it's a really good advice to get some at least some agreement. And no one has the exact right answer. So getting to the getting to the at least something that's a semblance of agreed upon answer is good. It's so interesting the the service mentality that you have to have in this system of yours. It's like a it's like a humility and service because you're serving the company back to the CMO, but it's also with the sales organization. Do you think humility is a big part, like a trait that a CMO needs to have in in this stuff?

Josh Leatherman: 25:41

Absolutely. Too, too, too often I see, not just, you know, it just in business in general. Too too often I see people coming in feeling like to be a strong business person, you have to have a strong point of view, and you have to be right. I'm a huge believer, Patrick Lancioni has a book called The Ideal Team Player, and I'm a huge believer that everyone on the team has to have three critical attributes humble, hungry, smart. All three, right? To be the ideal team player, the right person, they have to have all three. Humble simply means, and marketers especially have to have this. Humble means you don't have all the answers. The reality is marketers are using tools today, often time, oftentimes didn't exist just a few years ago. And there are tools being built, you know, right now that we're gonna have to get into there that are gonna kind of take over. So we have to be humble, we have to be curious, we have to be learners, and we have to be accept feedback because we have to be good partners to the business, whether it's finance, sales, shareholders, the CEO, we have to we have to receive feedback and be able to improve on that. So that's humble. Hungry is we have to have this insatiable desire to kind of perform, to do, right? Not sit back and receive, but to be proactive and go learn about the new tools, go understand what attribution is. So they have to be hungry and then they have to be smart, right? And this is not just IQ, smart with the tools, smart in their discipline as marketers. They have to have great EQ as well, emotional intelligence, because marketing, more than just about any other team in an organization, marketing works across almost all teams: product, finance, revenue, service, client success. Marketing is working across to all those teams. And so you've got to have, you've got to be approachable. You've got to have teams who are smart, and that means emotional intelligence as well.

Kevin Kerner: 27:38

Yeah. I mean getting all this in place, it's kind of a you know, it's an entirely new system. It's a new way of thinking. You got to get past the crisis of confidence that a lot of marketing teams have right now because they're just you know so used to being on the defensive, maybe. Maybe not sharing as much or learning as much from the other parts of the organization or being being uh communicative with them. I would imagine they have to unlearn a lot of old habits. So how do you what's the single hardest habit that marketing teams need to unlearn when they move away from this sort of random act thing? Or is there a single one? What are some of the ones that they move away from?

Josh Leatherman: 28:17

Well, first of all, I'd say the leader has to build a culture of learning, right? Where in Andrew Miller in the book does a great job, kind of demonstrates what this looks like in Scaleworks. In fact, one of the concepts Andrew Miller in the book talks about is called RD, which stands for not research and development, it stands for rip off and duplicate. He encourages his team to get to other organizations who are doing things real well, to get out of the insular company, right? The the group that they're working with in and to have their minds expanded by getting into other companies who are doing things well and ripping those things off and duplicating them. You don't, marketers don't have to invent the wheel. There are other companies who did that. When I was the CMO of a $100 million company, if I wanted to be the CMO of a billion-dollar company, I had to get in front of CMOs of $1 billion companies to learn how they did that. That was my shortcut to success. And the way, by by, by the way, that was the way in which I was able to get beyond the three-year tenure of the average CMO because I was building scale in myself by developing myself. And so the biggest ethos that that leaders have to make sure they're promoting in their organization and they're hiring for is learning, right? And learning velocity, making sure they're filling their their bench with people who want to learn and they've got, you know, fast learning velocity.

Kevin Kerner: 30:00

Marketing organization, there might be pushback in other places. What would you expect? What are the typical pushbacks that you might get as you're implementing something like this from your own team and then from externally from the team? And how do you handle it?

Josh Leatherman: 30:11

The biggest pushback most marketing teams are going to get is investment dollars. Right? Um, tools aren't cheap. So technology isn't cheap. And headcount these days with AI and people believing that AI is going to take over and we need fewer people, like getting investment is without question the biggest obstacle that I would say any business person has, any business leader has, but marketing in particular, because there's with generative AI and all of that, it's just difficult to get what you need. So again, having that relationship with a CFO and building out the right thing for business to do is to push on a CMO or a marketing team if they want to buy a new technology and go, have you really thought through this? What do we get from this? It causes them to think deeper. It causes them to partner with the technology vendor going, you know, you know, to help them build a case for bringing for spending the money, an ROI model for spending the money. Uh they've really got to get good in their ability to articulate what we're gonna get for making the expense. But no question, budget, getting budget is the the biggest obstacle.

Kevin Kerner: 31:26

Yeah, and I would guess the if you're if you're needing to add the growth role too. I hear a lot of a lot of CMO friends that are just frustrated at headcount and being able to get additional headcount and shrinking. So I guess you'd have to make sure that you're able to articulate what this growth system would get you, and then you need to hire someone to actually run it.

Josh Leatherman: 31:44

Well, you you you know what I found? They're the CMOs who are partnered with the CRO, the chief revenue officer, or the head of sales, and they view the entire GTM, they don't view the marketing team as separate from the sales development team, is separate from the sales team, is separate from the client success team. They don't view that. They go, hey, where can I pull dollars? Because there is just about no good CMO or uh chief revenue officer, head of sales that I've met who, if a marketer went and said, I'm gonna hire this growth marketing role and we're gonna be able to increase your sales qualify pipeline by this. I can't tell you how many times I've been able to get headcount that way. And we've been able to do that. We've seen that in other organizations. It doesn't have to be simply added spend, right? When you look at the entire growth organization from marketing to sales to client success, typically you can find those trade-offs. If if if we need more pipeline, marketing has an obligation, and so we should be able to look at pulling those budget dollars somewhere else. But that requires a head of marketing to be a good partner with other parts of the organization and to build credibility and to get buy-in.

Kevin Kerner: 33:01

Yeah, I suppose it also means you need to articulate the most the primary role of the growth manager, growth leader, like Sabrina did in the fable. You need to be able to articulate that in a way to get to the sales leader that they're like that they get jazzed about it. They're like, Yeah, let's do this. Sounds great. How do you see that conversation typically going? Like play that out. Like, what would I say to my what would I say to my sales leader? Yeah, well, for me it was teaching, right?

Josh Leatherman: 33:25

Like there were critical books. Um there was one called Driving Demand, there was one called Predictable Revenue. Aaron Ross, who wrote the book Predictable Revenue, he endorsed my book as well. You know, I I literally bought that for my CRO and I said, this was like this was paradigm shifting for me. And I think we can build something here. Uh, would you read this and then let's have a conversation about organizational design around it? And learning with my head of sales was critical and teaching my head of sales, not just asking, but teaching my head of sales what the new model looks like and what the promised land looks like. Yeah. Getting them to buy into that vision, like that was really inspiring for them. And they became partners in it as well.

Kevin Kerner: 34:13

I'm curious, I want to pivot a little because I'm curious. You know, you you do this a lot and you're you've you've seen the sort of marketing channels and tactics and things change over the last you know number of years. How is your go-to-market shifting to be successful, or is it at all? Like what where are you putting your money? What type of tactics are you most excited about? Like, how are things changing or not changing for you?

Josh Leatherman: 34:37

Yeah, there's a few things that are changing, and it's so funny. There are a few things that have stayed the same for so many years. I think certainly the things that are changing is we have to be really thoughtful, you know, at the risk of sounding uber redundant. We have to be really thoughtful about what the role AI plays in our business. We have tools like Salesforce, some use HubSpot. We've got tools like Marketo, Sixth Sense, and we've used them for years, but we forget to turn on or educate ourselves on the AI component. Salesforce is a great one, for example, right? The thing that is changing is making sure, like that Salesforce now offers Salesforce AI certification. So you can get your people certified in the AI parts of the Salesforce tool. I can't believe how many market, and this is free. I can't believe how many marketing organizations don't have it turned on and aren't even looking at this within their CRM. But the thing that's changing is our ability to be able to use AI. And I'm a big believer, we've heard it said ad nauseum, like AI is not going to replace all marketers, but it will replace marketers who don't use AI. I can't have people on my team as a CMO. I cannot have them on my team if they're not looking at ways that we can make either our organization more efficient or our sales process more productive through AI. And so my expectation is that everybody is looking at AI and understanding how that works in the business. So that's a big change. And I think with the proliferation of, you know, our phones, the internet, um AI devices, AI assistants, you know, buyers are are exhibiting buying signals more than they ever have on the internet and digitally. And our ability to, you know, quickly get in front of these new platforms or ways where we can uncover, and they're doing that before all of our competitors do too, and it becomes saturated, like that is something we have to be at the forefront of. So, and then I would say the one thing that doesn't change is our proximity to the customer. I can tell you one of the biggest predictors, determiners of success for any marketer, I can tell you it's their proximity to the customer. How well do they know? Have they just defined an ICP and a buyer persona and that's it? Or are they in talking to customers? Are they listening into sales dev meetings and understanding what's going on in their business? That is something that has not changed and it's not going to change. And I think more marketers just need to do it.

Kevin Kerner: 37:20

Do you think um there's anything about the B2B buying like buyers that are actually changing, like their habits? Have you seen anything that's different now than it would have been, you know, a couple years ago?

Josh Leatherman: 37:30

No question. AI. No question. Yeah, I think um I do it. You know, I I I used not to, but I do it. When I go into score stores, I will take a picture of something very quick. I don't Google it anymore. I take a picture and AI tells me everything I need to everything I need to know about it, right?

Kevin Kerner: 37:48

Yeah. AI mode now is so I'm using it so much more now that I it's easy to get to on the Google screen on your phone. Just the easiest thing to get information from.

Josh Leatherman: 37:58

And it's so easy nowadays, right? Like just to come start to compare without talking to any salesperson. It is so easy to compare different organizations' products and services and their reviews, and by just going into Perplexity or Google or ChatGPT or Claude, you know, just by going in there, like, and so, you know, marketers have to be on top of like understanding how the different AI LLMs are are pulling in their data. And it's a little bit of a murky thing right now, but there are breadcrumbs that help us kind of understand what each are doing.

Kevin Kerner: 38:34

Yeah, some of the web logs you can see that stuff from. And you can get a little bit of it through your analytics. Um, it's really interesting though. We might be seeing buyers much later in the pro. They were already real late in the process because they were doing a bunch on the web, but there might be a lot more going on than we can actually see. You know, maybe the signals will maybe Google will eventually give us up more signals on the on the AI side, but yeah, it's really, really wild time for how buyers are actually searching for and evaluating products. Super interesting. If I was a um CMO that was very interested in the in the system that you've described, what's the first thing I should do tomorrow? When I if I read the book, I'm like, okay, I want to do this. What's the first thing?

Josh Leatherman: 39:20

Yeah, one of the first things I would do if you know, well, one of the first things I would do is educate myself, right? There's a lot of good resources. My book is certainly one of them. But I will say that, you know, if you're a CMO who uses Salesforce, HubSpot, Sixth Sense, Marketo, sometimes we think, you know, interaction with those companies or just interacting with a sales rep and then they're gone. Man, they have client success teams who will come in, like they'll bring an army in to make sure that they stand up their product. That's a wonderful thing about I think marketing and just marketing and sales SaaS is they will send armies of people in to help you out. And if they don't have the resources, they'll help you find somebody who does because they are invested in making sure that their product's not displaced. And the best way for them to do that is to make sure the marketer is happy. And so, first thing I would do is make sure that I and my team are educating ourselves, doing that rip-off and duplicate, getting with our vendors and making sure we are leveraging other people to make sure we're set up for success. But I really look at my team too. I'd look at my team and I'd go, is every individual on my team, because there's no overhead anymore. There's no one person who can fly below the radar. Organizations and budgets have shrunk. Is everybody humble, hungry, and smart? Do I have the right people? Do I have the right people certified on the tools? If I'm a gross marketer, marketing leader, I better make sure that I've got somebody certified, not just in Salesforce, understanding how the sales team is using it, providing feedback when they interact with clients, providing feedback so I get signals and I'm able to create content and send it out, very relevant content. If sales dev reps are interacting with prospects clients, man, sales dev reps, they speak with hundreds of clients every month. Hundreds. And too many marketing teams have not built in these feedback loops so that they understand what is important or what's going on within every single account so we can build content and plans to be able to get in those accounts, right? And so I'd be doing that as well. I I think those are probably a few thoughts.

Kevin Kerner: 41:33

You know, I really hope people, some of my friends that are marketing leaders listen to this because the thing that comes the thing that is most obvious to me after talking to you is you've said the word revenue and sales so many times through the conversation. I mean, it's like you're I would if I if I wouldn't have known that you were a marketer, I would have thought you were more of on the salesperson or on the sales side of things, or very closely aligned to sales. It's almost like it's just a mindset shift. It's it's probably more than anything else. It's a completely different way of looking at marketing. You have to look at it as a creative and uh you know messaging and all the things that you need to do in the marketing side. But golly, there's just such a close alignment with sales in your model. It's really uh a different way of thinking. It's the right way to think.

Josh Leatherman: 42:20

Good. Yeah, I think I think tail sales is table stakes. Like you have to kind of do that. I hire good people on the brand side of things, but yeah again, because of the direction, you know, in the in the way buyers buy nowadays, marketing has an obligation there. And so it's such a for companies to grow, marketing has got to get it right. And in five more in five five years from now, if if marketing teams aren't getting it right, like the companies will start to dry up and die because the marketing has the capabilities in other teams don't.

Kevin Kerner: 42:51

Fantastic. Okay, well, um, I um I wanted to ask you, do one more thing with you. I have this thing I do called AI roulette at the end of these podcasts, is where I put a question in perplexity and it it pops out a super interesting question, the probably the best question anyone's gonna hear on this podcast today. So I'm gonna do that. I put in your uh your LinkedIn bio and a couple other things. Um so let me hit uh send here and see what it gives me. But I do like perplexity, it usually does this pretty good. A common platitude in our industry is that we need we need to be more data driven. What is the unspoken organizational dysfunction that this phrase is most often used to cover for?

Josh Leatherman: 43:31

Yeah, uh, no question. Here's what it is. We have so much data in this world that it's paralyzing. And so it used to, yeah, data driven, I feel like used to be the term. I can't tell you the number of people who come to me with data. They show me dashboards, they give me, you know, 80 slides full of data, but there's absolutely no analysis, there's no focus. Like the world is so focused on data, but we have so few people who are telling us what the data means. We have so few answers. And so I've learned to surround myself with people who look at the data for me, and then they're able to analyze it, and they're able to come to me with here are the one or two things that it's saying, or here are the one or two things that we need to execute on because of the data. They're not just coming to me and dumping a bunch of data on me because you know, Power BI and Salesforce, like they can do all that. They can dump the data on me. I need people who are able to make quick and sound decisions based on the data.

Kevin Kerner: 44:39

Yeah, really good. Like data analysis and storytelling, getting the data, the raw data. It's like, yeah, who cares? And there's data everywhere. Really good. Man, Josh, this has been great. I I mean, this has been really good. It's a masterclass and this stuff, and I'm so glad we met. I know people are going to want to get a hold of you after this. I follow you on LinkedIn, and there's always great stuff going on there. But is there are there other ways that people can get a hold of you?

Josh Leatherman: 45:02

Yeah, LinkedIn is a great way. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there. You know, have many conversations with people, with people there. You can find out more at joshueleatherman.com. You can figure out how to buy the book there or learn more about me. Happy to connect there as well.

Kevin Kerner: 45:18

Yeah, and I'll put a link to it in the podcast stuff. Really great. I think people are going to get a ton out of this, Josh. I really appreciate you doing it. Thanks for putting the book together. And I don't know if you'd ever write another one, but I'll be looking forward to the second uh fable that you come up with. I don't know what that would be. All right. Well, thanks, John. Yeah, thank you so much.

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