In this episode of Marketing Spark, Blaine Mathieu, a seasoned CEO and marketing leader, shares his unique perspectives on the evolving relationship between CEOs and CMOs in the B2B SaaS industry.
He discusses the challenges of balancing short-term results with long-term brand building, fostering effective collaboration, and navigating the impact of AI on marketing.
Blaine's extensive experience in both roles provides valuable insights for aligning expectations, embracing innovation, and adapting to the rapid change in the marketing landscape.
Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: Welcome to Marketing Spark. Here's a troubling industry statistic. The average tenure for a chief marketing officer is forty one months or just under three and a half years. This number has steadily declined in recent years amid pressure for quick wins and results, the ever changing marketing landscape, corporate realignments, and often the volatile relationships between CEOs and CMOs. It's a problematic trend for senior marketers. It's like walking on eggshells when they should be taking a short and long term approach to marketing success. For CEOs, it leads to a lack of confidence in marketing and its ability to make a difference and drive growth. This episode of Marketing Spark will explore what makes for a strong CEO, CMO alliance and how both roles can be structured to drive immediate and learn drive immediate and long term success. I'm excited to have Blaine Matthew, who has a wealth of experience as a b to b CEO and marketing leader. I'm looking forward to Blaine sharing his insights on how the roles of the CEO and marketing leaders have shifted over the past decade, especially in the fast paced SaaS sector. I'm also looking forward to hearing about his experience and how he navigated challenges as a CEO and marketing leader. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Blaine.
Guest: Thanks, Mark. Great to be here. I've been listening to the podcast and following your email newsletter for years now, so great to finally get on the podcast.
Mark Evans: Thank you for being a loyal reader and listener. Why don't we start by having you give a quick overview of your experience as a CEO and marketing leader? It's an interesting combination because often, you don't get marketers becoming the CEO. I'm originally a Canadian like you, although I live
Guest: in the San Francisco Bay Area now and have for the last twenty five years or so. As you mentioned, through my career, continually flickering back and forth, between CEO roles and CMO roles primarily. Although in many cases, when I was a a CMO, I was also a CPO or in charge of product. Started my first company. My first CEO gig, I guess, you could say when I was 12, started a software company in Canada that wrote and sold fixed asset management and accounting software to large enterprises across Canada. After spending most of my teenage years sitting in front of a computer writing computer code, I realized it was actually on the marketing and sales side that I was more interested and excited by versus spending the next twenty years writing computer code. Did an undergrad degree and eventually moved to Silicon Valley when Gartner brought me down. Was one of as one of their first Internet analysts at the sort of the dawn of the the Internet revolution. Did that for a few years and then moved to Adobe in San Jose, ran market intelligence and strategy for a few years. And then since then, as I mentioned, I've been primarily at early to mid stage SaaS software, b to b software companies and bouncing back and forth between CEO roles and, CMO, usually CMO slash CPO roles. Currently, I'm CEO at a early stage industrial focused software startup. And given my heavy marketing background, I'm actually I do have a marketing associate helping me with some tactical execution, but I'm actually wearing both hats today. I'm wearing the CEO hat, and I'm wearing, the CMO hat. And maybe one other because it's very hard to put these hats down once you've started wearing them. And just one other thing about my background, through that career that I mentioned, I've been both at, as I mentioned, early stage startups all the way to larger SaaS companies like Adobe. And one of my previous CEO gigs was actually as a public company CEO of a NASDAQ listed company as well. So I've been the entire gamut back and forth, and that's my story in a nutshell.
Mark Evans: So let's go off script here. I had a list of questions I was gonna ask you, but you threw a a spanner into the works when you mentioned off the get go that you started a software company when you were 12 Yep. That you were selling software to accountants. I cannot let you continue with this interview without stepping back and saying, so what's the deal there? Tell me about what you did and how a 12 year old comes up with a software product, and how did you turn it into a business, and what happened to that business as you got older? I used that term pretty lightly.
Guest: As I got to 18 even. Yeah. It's an interesting interesting story, and I won't make that. I'll tell you the short version because the long one is also even more interesting over a glass of wine. But but, basically, this is at the dawn of the PC revolution in the early eighties. I ended up through luck, and that's the longer story. It's one of the first Apple two computers actually in Northern Alberta where I was from originally. And even before I got that computer, I was writing computer programs on paper before I had anything even to type them into. I was I've been a computer geek since almost before computers, one one way or another. The town that we lived in, the local accountant, also was an early computer geek, and he got some of the first IBM PCs that were ever produced into his office. And he literally called me down. And I rode my bike down to his office, and he said, Blaine, I got these two PC things. What could I do with them? Because I was the town's computer geek. Right? And I looked up on the the wall, and I saw these giant sheets of paper that he recorded his client's assets on. These are literal spreadsheets. This is where the concept of a spreadsheet came from. And I said, your computer could do that, I bet. And so he gave me one of the computers to write the first application on. And, of course, with feature creep and everything else, we ended up with a pretty rich, system, which I then took to market and and sold to large enterprises and accounting firms all across Canada all through high school and into my undergrad degree. Actually, put me through my undergrad degree, and that really began my my focus in business, entrepreneurialism, marketing, sales, and and was based on my my geekness, I guess, you might say.
Mark Evans: So you must have been quite the salesperson and marketer because I'm you're it sounds like you're a 13 year old, a 14 year old, a 15 year old, and you're selling to adults working at enterprise companies. Did your accountant act as your sales front, or did you do the sales yourself? How did that sounds
Guest: I don't know.
Mark Evans: Sounds like an incredible story.
Guest: No. I did it my myself, and the funny thing was, of course, this was before the Internet, before you had web pages and order forms and where you could do all this sort of remotely. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Right? This was before the Internet. I took out print ads in the Financial Post and the Globe and Mail and national publications that Canadian, business people would read, little $3.04, $500 tiny print ads with my home phone number on it. These accountants and executives would call my home. My mother would answer the phone and say, Blaine, it's somebody about the fixed asset management system. I'd run down and and go take the call, get the person's info on the phone, mail them this set of floppy disks along with an invoice. They'd mail me back a check, and that was literally the pre Internet days of doing, sales and marketing, I'll tell you.
Mark Evans: So whatever happened
Guest: to the business here now?
Mark Evans: At the end of the day, what happened to the business?
Guest: If I the let's say the code base started to get pretty aged by the time I was in high school and or by the time I finished my undergrad degree. And at that by that time, I saw that another thing was just starting to come on, this Internet revolution, which was the next level, you might say, of the PC revolution that my first business was based on. I saw that the Internet revolution was gonna be something that was gonna make a huge difference to the world of business and marketing and everything else. And so I ended up creating a website. It was really a blog before blogs existed called killerstrategy.com. The latest analysis of what businesses could do on the Internet, these new emerging business models. Used to do a lot of writing about amazon.com back when they were just beginning. And in the same week, I got a call from the head of marketing at Amazon, actually. They only had about a 100 people at the time asking me if I wanna move to Seattle to work for Amazon. And I got a call from Gartner Group in San Jose asking if I wanted to go and be one of their first Internet analysts working for Gartner, and they were getting killed by Forrester and Jupiter and some of the, analyst firms that got the Internet. And I said to my wife, so Seattle or San Jose, what do you think? She said, absolutely. We're not gonna live in the rain. And the other there was another reason to it. Being a PC geek and an Apple computer accolade from the early days, actually moving to Silicon Valley was certainly always one of one of my goals. Move to San Jose, and and the rest is history.
Mark Evans: Let's get back to our regular programming. We're here to talk about the dynamic relationship between CEOs and marketing leaders. Given your and I would say, I'm probably understating your background, but your unique experience as a CEO and market leader. Can you share your insights on how the roles of CEOs and marketing leaders have evolved in the b to b and SaaS industries over the past decade? Because certainly, there seems to be, if not antagonism, there's an interesting dynamic. It's whether you wanna describe it as volatile or ever changing or I don't know the the word, but there seems they marketing leaders and CEOs seem to be at war with each other as opposed to being allies and partners. So I'm very interested in your taking your perspective given the fact that you've done both roles at the same time and you've done both roles separately.
Guest: It's it is very interesting. And I think, first of all, when I you said the stat earlier about forty one months being the average tenure of a CMO, I was shocked it was that high. And I think that's because, as you see, my background is mostly in earlier stage companies, not the big giants, big large enterprises where tenures do, I think, tend to be somewhat longer and they're more stable. I come from a background where these things, think, are these tend to be less stable and much shorter. In fact, I've rarely had job in my life that was forty one months, in in ten years. That was I I I think the reality, especially in a lot of tech businesses and small to medium sized startups, is actually much shorter than that in in my experience, in fact. And maybe we'll get back to this, but one thought that immediately occurs to me is I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Okay? Because it could be characterized as a war, the CEO and the CMO at war, or it could be characterized as you have to have the right skill set at the right time and the right place for the development of the company that you're working at. Maybe in a large enterprise that's evolving very slowly, there's not much there's not that much evolution happening. But in the startup world and in the technology world, that evolution is happening at breakneck speed. Right? And it's very possible that the CMO and this doesn't just apply to CMOs. It could be CROs and almost any executive, including the CEO, is not the right person for that time and place. If you can get two or three years of really good valuable service from that person, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Having said that, I think what we have to answer your question, what we've seen over the last couple of decades is and I assure you, your listeners know this as well as anybody, is a just a massive rapid advance of technology penetrating marketing. The Martech stack is becoming more and more complex, and marketing over the last twenty years, really, or so has moved out of the area of opinions and egos and moved into something that can be productized and systematized in a way that it never could before. We'll probably talk about Gen AI later, but that's a whole now that's even gonna go to another level. So that has really been, I think, the overall sea change as CMO, CEO relationships have evolved. You've got this whole an underpinning of technology, which is evolving rapidly around it.
Mark Evans: Do you
Guest: agree with that, Mark?
Mark Evans: Well, I I certainly agree with that, and I see it, and I feel it when I work with b two b SaaS companies. But a side conversation here and picking up on your comment about why short tenures for CMOs may not be a bad thing. In the last year, certainly the last six months, we've seen the rise of the fractional CMO, and there's many reasons why this is happening. Among them are marketing professionals being laid off and reinventing themselves as fractional CMOs as opposed to marketing consultants, which is certainly not as sexy. But I think the one of the the interesting threads is that a fractional CMO can be they can come in different shapes and sizes. They can have different skill sets, but it gives companies the flexibility to get the right type of marketing leadership at the right time without any commitment. So you can work as a fractional CMO for three, six, or twelve months. After you've taken a company from point a to point b, they can shift gears and hire another fractional CMO or a full time CMO. And it just gives them the flexibility to scale and to get what they need when they need it. And I think that may tie into your your hypothesis about why CMO tenures can be short and not be a bad thing?
Guest: Thank you for reminding me about the fractional CMO thing because I was one of those as well. I went through a three year period where for about a year and a half, I actually started my own sort of sing single shingle fractional CMO, service. And then I gradually realized, over time that that's tough because you're spending all your time marketing and selling yourself while also trying to work for clients. It's a it's a tough business. So I ended up actually joining one of the national fractional CMO organizations also for a year and a half. So I spent about three years doing exactly that business. And I agree with you is given, again, the pace of change that's happening right now, I think it's a very viable option that a lot of companies should consider, again, especially if they know they're they're in a space where they're gonna be undergoing so much change. The odds of having the right person two years from now that they hire today is low. So they might wanna consider that option absolutely, and I'm considering it actively for my company now, in fact.
Mark Evans: As I mentioned earlier, many b to b and SaaS companies, there seems to be a tension. I described it as antagonism between the CEO's need for quick results, especially in this environment where leads and sales are front and center, and the marketing leaders need the time and the runway to experiments and build long term brand value. What are your thoughts in terms of balancing these seemingly conflicting goals? Because on one end, you've got a CEO who wants results right now. On the other side, you've got a CMO who's trying to structure you know, trying to build a marketing mix that, yes, focuses on short term results, but also builds long term value. How do we balance the two?
Guest: It's a great question. I guess one one initial reflection is I've always tried extremely hard not to ever set up an an an antagonistic relationship with my boss, with the CEO, but a collaborative relationship. And maybe it's because I'm a Canadian at heart, and we're always trying to get along, with people. But I I do think that's really important. And one of my mentors long time ago, a very extremely successful global executive from companies you guys would all know, retired now, said he he was second in command. And and he said, what you gotta do every once in a while is get in the bear cave. And what I said, what's the bear cave? In the bear cave, there are no titles. There's no, there's all there is just the truth. Because the only way you come out of the bear cave is if you're really, you know, lay lay it all out there. And I've taken that to heart and used that as a a method to ensure that I'm aligned with my boss, in this case, the CEO. Now it's a similar thing with my chairman and some of my board members, but in this case, when I'm CMO collaborating with the CEO. So we go in, and we're not I make sure we're not in a mindset where I feel like marketing is competing for organo organizational resources, and the CEO is the decision maker, and sales is gonna get it, or marketing is gonna get it, or product's gonna get it. No. In the bear cave, I'm actually not the CMO, and he's not the CMO. We're the CEO. We're just two people who are what are we gonna do to make this business successful? Okay? And I've been in bear cave sessions where we cut the marketing budget down by 20% because I I honestly believe that was the right thing to do. Right? I've also had, you know, bear cave sessions where the CEO left with a a much clearer understanding of why are we doing this. Why are we engaging in this blogging initiative and doing this, business on the edge video series? It's very hard to prove ROI. What's and and and often what I find is CMOs, they do a lot of things hoping that it'll be recognized by the CEO as the right thing to do because they can't prove it. It's very hard to get metrics around a lot of this. Mhmm. And that hope is almost always dashed. Eventually, the CEO comes up and says, I've let you I've let you run with this thing for six months now. It's a waste of time as far as I can tell. Move on to something else. And that can be avoided if you and the CEO really find a way to have a mind lock on the things that are hard to validate and prove. And then, of course, for the things that are validated valid validatable, have a set of metrics that your success metrics that you agree on. And if it doesn't work out, don't be defensive. Don't it's not about failing. Right? It's about the organization's failing, and you have to come up with a new approach. And so, anyway, I packed too much into that answer, but that's one way to think about it.
Mark Evans: I often say that one of the keys to success between the CEO and the CMO is creating partnerships from the get go where you're both aligned in terms of goals, expectations, how things are gonna happen, when they're gonna happen. I'm interested in your experience as a CEO dealing with marketers or as a marketer dealing with your CEO. How do you make sure that that both parties are in lockstep? Because expectations can be different. Priorities may be different. The CEO is obviously worth worth growth and valuation. CMO has their own priorities. But how do you make sure that when you come to the table, when you move forward, you can move forward together and that, well, success is always a good thing that there's room and latitude for experimentation and failure because marketing as is sometimes things don't work, they can be spectacularly unsuccessful, but that's how an organization can optimize and move forward. What are the dynamics? What are the key success in making sure that you've got a partnership as opposed to these people who are grinding together and being maybe it's almost like a a competition in a sense or a rivalry in a sense.
Guest: That's another lesson I've learned in my career a few times would've would've been wearing my CMO hat on is I've had some spectacular failures, wasting millions of dollars in marketing budgets that weren't that big on crazy ideas. And I learned some real lessons there from my CEOs who didn't just immediately fire my ass. And because we had we had a a a level of trust and a level of collaboration and understanding, and we knew that some of the things I did were gonna be mistakes. Now now after one of these egregious mistakes, he said, Blaine, you owe me a really nice bottle of wine after this one. And and I I did give him a very nice bottle of wine because I probably should've had my my butt fired. But but if you have that level of trust and then you said another thing, which I think is important. I make sure whether I'm the CEO or the CMO, doesn't matter who's, but the mindset needs to be you're only gonna hit 70%, maybe 60 to 70% of your goals, of your targets, of your objectives, okay, for in your go to market. If you're hitting a 100, then you're not trying hard enough. You're not doing the innovative things that need to be done to really move your company up the inflection point. So if you're happy with slow growth and steady as she goes, okay. Set goals that you need to hit a 100% of. But if you wanna hit an inflection point, then you have to assume there's gonna be failure there. And I make sure that's not the unspoken truth between the c level executives. That's the blatant stated objective. We're gonna have a scorecard, and seven out of 10 of those things are gonna be read at the end of the quarter. And if they're not, then we didn't try hard enough, right, in setting these things. I I don't wanna lose this one other point you brought to your question brought to mind. We're talking about CMO, CEO collaboration and effectiveness. But, of course, we all know there's the third dancer in that party and chief revenue officer or chief commercial officer or whatever you wanna call it. And that relationship is just as important for CMO success and for company success as the CEO relationship is. And depending on where the CEO's mind focus is, because some CEOs are very go to market focused. In that case, CMO needs to be really aligned. They may some in some cases, they're more product or technology focused, especially in startups. But the the CRO, CMO collaboration, I wish I know it's not the topic, but it's just as important because if that's not aligned, then you know who really has the CEO's ear. That's the person who holds the sales quota, who keeps the CEO from getting fired when you go into the next board meeting and the CEO either hits or doesn't hit her number for the quarter, that's where the rubber really hits the road. So make that collaboration really effective as well.
Mark Evans: Of course, I I need to talk to you about AI. And but before we move on from that, I did want to ask you about the dynamic in which a marketing leader is trying to build brand, trying to establish the company as one of the options in for consumers. But you've got a CEO who is demanding quick wins and quick results. They're impatient. They want the CMO to be doing things that move the needle, and often there's conflicting priorities when it comes to who wants what to happen when. Yep. How do you navigate long term growth goals and plans with I need to see leads right away? Because I see it all the time. In every one of my engagements, there's an initial honeymoon that probably lasts a couple weeks, and then they're saying, okay. What are you gonna do to to get me leads and sales? And I'm like, I just started. I just trying to build a plan of attack. And this obviously happens when you're dealing with a full time CMO. So as a CEO, what are the rules of engagement when it comes to making sure that both sides get what they want and there's no disappointments along the way?
Guest: A couple things come to mind. I've been in this situation multiple times as a CMO. Every new CMO gig gets the same thing. You've got a window of a honeymoon where you can update the website and start a new blogging initiative and do some brand building stuff. And then then all of a sudden, the sales CRO goes to the CEO and says, I'm gonna miss my number this quarter, and every everything starts to be about leads. Right? Leads. One way you can do it is to implement an account based marketing program, and that'll distract sales for about six months while you think you're really collaborating tightly on a joint effort, and then you can keep doing whatever you want in the background while you're distracted by ABM. That's one method, but I probably I've I've tried that a few times. It doesn't work in the long run. It works in the short run, but doesn't work in the long run. I would I I do recommend ABM, but I don't recommend it as a distraction tactic. First of all, I think if your near term tactics are not also aligned with your longer term brand building, then you've got a problem. You're not thinking about this the right way as a CMO, and you're gonna have a hard time justifying this kind of work to the CEO. I and that's one thing I've learned over the years is the ground cover and the air cover or the ground war and the air war should not be thought of as two different wars. Okay? They are the same war. They need to be supporting and and with each other, and your CRO and your CEO need to believe and understand that. Like, the reason you're holding this podcast video series is because you're specifically leveraging that content in your lead gen campaign, which is then used to increase your conversion rate from 1% to 3%. K? Mhmm.
Mark Evans: If you
Guest: can't tie these things together, then you're gonna have the problem. Eventually, the honeymoon is gonna wear off. And I I think that's probably the the main piece of advice I'd I'd given that these cannot be thought of as you got this brand stuff here, and you got this lead gen stuff here. They need to be understood. It needs to be understood how they are connected to each other, and one makes the other one more effective and vice versa. The lead gen stuff contributes to the brand equity, right, and your evolving brand. They're not two different things.
Mark Evans: When we started thinking about this conversation, I was not gonna talk to you about AI. Everybody is talking to everybody about AI. But I wrote a LinkedIn post this week about whether AI would replace content writers and got an email from you talking about the post, and you had some thoughts in terms of how AI is impacting not only marketing, but business. Perhaps you can elaborate on your thoughts and how a CEO these days can navigate the impact of AI or or get the organization thinking about the impact or ready for the impact of AI because everything is obviously gonna be disrupted, and I can only imagine the challenges are enormous.
Guest: I have I'm this conversation a lot lately because of my my I've got a large network of marketing executives and mid tier marketers as well and a lot of sales executives and CRO colleagues and former sales colleagues who who are all dealing with the same thing right now. And one thing I've learned from talking to them recently and some of your listeners know no doubt, it's a very tough market out there for sales and marketing professionals that are looking for opportunities. There are jobs posted on LinkedIn that have 500 marketing or and or sales leaders applying for them. That was it's a sea change from what is it what it was a few years ago. And there's a lot of things in that, raising interest rates, higher cost of money, push toward profitability. There's many variables. But from talking to other c level executives and CEOs, there's no doubt in my mind that this upcoming AI, generative AI revolution, and and transformation is a big part of why companies are becoming conservative in hiring right now. They've realized that smart the smart leaders are realizing that the the kind of people they used to hire, the kind of practices they used to implement, the stuff that got them there that were successful, the things they did before, and the people that did them, that is not the way they're gonna be successful in the future. It's gonna be done a totally different way. And maybe some of your listeners have heard about this campaign IBM Adobe did recently where they use generative AI to to instead of creating one image to be used in an ad campaign, an online ad campaign, they created a thousand different versions of that image, Generative AI did because no human team could ever do this in any reasonable amount of time, and they increased the conversion rate by over 50% for that campaign. That's just the beginning, the tip of the iceberg of the change that's coming to marketing and go to market in general, sales and marketing, not just marketing. And so this is causing a lot of paralysis by hiring managers in the market. They're scared. They they know for sure that what they did before is not gonna be the thing that does it in the future. They don't know how, and they know most of the people they're talking to don't know how either. They're not even beginning to try to figure out how. And this is what I'm telling the people that I talk to giving career advice is become a prompt engineer. Figure out develop a thesis on how Gen AI is gonna radically change your job. And then the next time you go to talk to a CEO or a CMO or a COO, tell them your thesis. I mean, nobody knows what the right answer is, but everybody knows something's happening, and we've gotta get ahead of it. In my current company, we are not only not only that CEO who's trying to figure out how to use AI in our go to market, but we're actually creating applications based on generative AI. It's part of our solution set.
Mark Evans: Mhmm.
Guest: And I will tell you that our engineering team and and some of these guys are true, like, guru level engineers in in AI for a long time. Nobody can keep up with this. The level of change is happening so fast. The technical development that that the engineers on my team that are trying to build systems and solutions based on it, One week later, everything they did is now out of date because there's a a new radical new approach that's 10 times better. So back to marketing. If you're a marketer, I highly advise to think through your hypothesis for how your job, whether it's content marketing or campaign creation or event management or whatever it is, is gonna be impacted by this. And then develop a thesis, begin to learn to use the tools and technologies. And I your blog post was right. Today, we're it's not like AI is gonna come in and write every blog post and create every website from scratch and terminate all these people. That's not where it's not there today. But when I see the rate of change that things are happening, I'll tell you, two years from now, within the next two years, it's all it's gonna be marketers and salespeople who understand these technologies that are gonna gonna survive the the transformation that's coming.
Mark Evans: I Yeah. There's been a been talk for a long time, especially with the ups and downs of the market and how marketing departments expand and contract, that marketing departments will be heavy on strategy, critical thinking, creativity, trying to come up with ways that companies can outmaneuver the competition. And a lot of the tactical work, especially the grunt work, the the stuff like a lot of the grunt stuff that you hire people for, you have low cost talent that does it. Increasingly, you use Fiverr and Upwork to make it happen. A lot of that stuff will disappear. So you have small, smart marketing departments strategically thinking using an army of contractors, freelancers, and, of course, AI. Is that the future of marketing within companies?
Guest: That's gonna happen. It is happening. As you said, AI is replacing some of that tactical tactical execution work. But in my honest, perspective, like, I use GenAI every day, ChatGPT primarily, and a few other tools. And for me, it's almost all on the creative side. It's helping me come up with ideas, create go to market plans. I'm giving I gave a speech in Stockholm last week that I it it would have taken me two hours to think through the ideas, the the points that I could have made, and the thoughts that ChatGPT gave me in five minutes. Now so to some degree, it's the opposite. It's gonna be a while before a robot is able to stand up on the stage and give it an engaging presentation like I gave in Stockholm last week. But could AI think of the key points in much more quickly than I would have done it?
Mark Evans: There's no
Guest: question about it. So I I don't I would not assume that it's only the tactical execution that AI is gonna take over. I obviously, it is doing some of that, and it's having a big impact on the creative side of marketing as well. So both ends.
Mark Evans: It's a volatile, exciting, challenging marketing landscape. You and I both, have our hands full trying to navigate it. But this has been a great conversation. Love the idea that you've been an entrepreneur since you were 12 years old. Love the idea that you've been in the CEO seat and as a CMO, which gives you a unique perspective of the marketing landscape. Where can people learn more about you and what you're up to these days?
Guest: Please do reach out to me on LinkedIn and and connect with me. And, mention that you heard me here because I'm not the kind of guy that just links in with anybody. But if you listen to this podcast, you're probably the kind of person that that I would want to be connected with. And also check out my company, protects.com, to see if our solutions might be relevant to what what you're doing today.
Mark Evans: Thanks, Blaine, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it, subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and, of course, share via social media. If you're a b to b SaaS company with 1 to $5,000,000 in revenue and you're looking for traction and to scale, we should talk about how I can help you as a fractional CMO and strategic adviser. Reach out via email, mark@markEvans.ca. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.com. I'll talk to you later.