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Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. If you were a b to b or SaaS marketer in 2020 and 2021, it was like attending the best party ever. Digital transformation had massive momentum. People and companies were enthusiastically embracing online services, and venture capital was flowing into fast growing companies.
For marketers, it meant healthy budgets and the ability and freedom to invest in core activities, but also allocate money to experiments and nice to do projects. Well, today, the b to b and SaaS marketing landscape is dramatically different. Amid more challenging economic conditions and the venture capital taps being closed, many companies are pulling back on marketing. Budgets have been reduced. Employees have been cut loose, and every marketing dollar is being scrutinized.
Rather than big swings, companies want to fill gaps and focus on marketing that moves the needle. On today's podcast, I'm talking to Mitch Solway, a fractional CMO for start ups and a coach for senior marketers. Mitch's track record includes leading marketing at companies like LavaLife, FreshBooks, Vidyard, Clearfit, and FunThru. If anyone understands the ups and downs of marketing, it's Mitch, and welcome to Marketing Spark.
Mitch Solway: Hey, Mark. Great to be on the show again.
Mark Evans: As I mentioned in the introduction, many companies are cautious and hesitant about marketing due reduced venture capital, volatile economy, and slower sales growth. It's like they're afraid to do marketing, and at the same time, they're afraid not to do marketing. How do all the factors that we point to impact the b to b and SaaS marketing landscapes?
Mitch Solway: When I think about it, it really everything sorta starts outside of marketing because there's been been this big shift in everyone rethinking their business model. You know, a lot of CEOs, are going through a lot of change, and they're dealing with a whole new environment they haven't dealt with. And that's gonna ripple down to their leadership teams. It's gonna ripple down to each functional area. And I think the real thing that's changed more from marketing landscape was just the whole financial landscape has changed.
And so as companies start to rethink and readjust, for example, if I was planning on doing some kind of series a or series b in the next twelve or twenty four months, I'm probably I probably can't bake that in. And I'm actually hearing from a lot of companies now that are trying to figure out these paths to profitability, and that causes quite a, like, a seismic shift in how they're gonna operate and what the metrics look like. And when then it comes down to the marketing group, it can have an an equal sort of shocking factor for these groups. And now you have to really rethink how you're gonna build your entire sort of marketing model and practice so that it fits back into what the the company needs. And and that mindset is probably the biggest I'd say the mindset is probably where the biggest impact has been for people.
Just shocking them out of how they used to operate and then wrapping your head around. Okay. Now how do I reorganize all my thinking in these new models?
Mark Evans: Now I mentioned earlier that a lot of companies are looking at marketing, and they want anything they do to move the needle. And many companies are leaning hard into tactics. What's the balance between strategy and tactics at this stage? Strategy is obviously awesome. You plan the work and you work the plan, and you have a road map for success.
But some companies look at strategy and say, well, it's actually gets in the way of actually making stuff happen. And as a long time marketer and someone who's spends a lot of time focused on strategic planning, how do you see that balance? Is it a bit of a a fight between two sides? What's the perspective that many companies are taking right now when they look at these two levers?
Mitch Solway: In terms of strategy and and tactics. So I always like to say, you know, plans and tactics are just plans and tactics, and they're really the context is the strategy. And I think at the end of the day, I think what what is pushing a lot of companies and you actually mentioned earlier, and I don't know that I addressed it. My first answer is, like, they kinda wanna do marketing, but they don't wanna do marketing. And I think a lot of companies are because they have to rethink, you know, what is their you know, what's their path to win, and how are we going to win in the market that we're in?
And it's so funny, like, in these moments of truth, you know, you you go and you, you know, you you look to the skies, you look to the heavens, like, what am I doing? Why am I doing all this? And to be honest, those are more than strategy, more than anything else. It's, like, call it, like, touching the rock. It's coming back to, like, why did we start this business?
Who is it? You know, what was the problem you're trying to solve? Who really cares about us? What's meaningful for the market out there? Do we have something unique, different story, or some something unique to offer to the marketplace?
Beyond strategy, I think strategy and tactics will still fail if you don't really have that kind of stuff locked in. And then once you've got that locked in, to be honest, in my experience, the strategies and tactics just fit together. It's like, okay. Now okay. Right.
Remember what we're trying to do. We may have fewer resources to do those things, but if we reground ourselves in, you know, what are we in business for, how are gonna win this market, who are gonna win it with, what really matters, we can then look to strategies. I for me, like, the strategy sort of just come and say, okay. Well, this is what we're gonna do. These are probably instead of the 10 things we're gonna do because we can't do 10 things anymore, these are the four things that we're gonna do that fit within the financial constraints, but also line up to, you know, the the the winning formula, and then the tactics sort of play out of that.
I think if you start, though, at the end with the tactics without the the bigger framing in mind, you just we're seeing a lot of companies sort of spinning as they're trying they're taking this agile approach approach to testing and iterating, but they're not really it's not really anchored in this bid winning formula and and how they think they're gonna separate themselves from everybody else.
Mark Evans: I was gonna ask you about brand positioning later during the podcast, but the fact that you mentioned the importance of focusing on the fundamentals and truly asking yourself, why do we exist? Who do we serve? What's the problem that we're solving? And how do what we do align with what customers want. Do you think positioning is a place where many companies should focus on, maybe take a step back and answer those questions, revitalize or refresh or rethink the way that they position themselves in the market in terms of how they serve customers and, as important, how they compete against bigger and smaller players.
Mitch Solway: It's been a core tenant of how I've approached it with when I was full time VP marketing and even with a lot of the fractional clients. Just but I would even say you should always be doing that, and I don't want I know we wanna cover a lot of ground here in some sort of tactics and strategies, and people aren't buying into strategy. All I'm saying is it doesn't even need to be this big thing, but it's just revisit. I'll give you a specific example where just a quick revisit of, like, what are we doing when in a shocking moment back when I was working at at Clearfit. And, like, Clearfit had two main capabilities.
One is it could automatically publish job postings to multiple job sites. So and then bring all the responses back to one place. But then we had what was unique is we had this ability to rank and sort the candidates based on who is most likely to succeed. And we were we were running I was very successful running these radio campaigns, and things are humming along really, really well. And then ZipRecruiter announced a big fundraiser.
At the time, was probably, like, $80,000,000. And they were also from radio, and we're like, oh my god. What what are we gonna do? Because these guys actually started outspending us 10 to one on radio. So, you know, whereas it was a little bit even more even before, and they're telling a story about, you know, finding and hiring the right candidates and all that kind of stuff.
So what was happening was our message was getting lost, plus we were getting just outnumbered, you know, into an outspend. I don't have any more budget. You know? You know, I've got commitments to revenue. I'm like, oh my god.
What am I gonna do? We just I just took a moment, take a beat, and go, well, what could I be doing here? What is what what's my winning formula? Where am I gonna win versus ZipRecruiter? Because I we still believe we had something.
And what we started doing was they said, well, you know what? How can I leverage their massive spend now to my advantage? So they were out there promoting how many resumes they could get in your inbox, like, that quickly. We went back and completely rewrote our ad campaign, and our ad campaign talked about posting job boards and and finding the right candidates and organizing things, but we completely focused on the key point of difference where all of a sudden our radio ads went from saying, you know, nobody likes hiring to when it comes to hiring, the last thing you want is a huge stack of resumes to pile through. So we reframed the problem from it's really hard to hire people and the whole process is broken to saying, well, how do we recontact set against this big competitor now and create some differentiation?
So we're saying, like, the last thing you want is ZipRecruiter because they're gonna fill your inbox with, like, a thousand candidates, and now you got a stack of resumes to go through. While we did say, of course, we're gonna find you lots of candidates, but we're the only platform that will automatically let you know which ones to follow-up with, which actually was ended up being a much better framing for our product, and it actually performed much better than our previous campaigns. So here's a situation where we didn't really need to change anything, but there was a a shock to the system that that forced us to really come back and rethink where we're gonna win, what makes us different, and we're able to reframe our message against a really big competitor and sort of leverage their message to say, actually, this is the last thing you want. What you really need even more is what we bring to the table and end up being really successful. So I think that's what I think a lot of companies need to work through.
Mark Evans: That's a a really interesting story because I think it illustrates a couple of things. One is the idea of agile positioning, the I that you respond to what competitors are doing and you do it in a very rapid way rather than taking a huge step back and then thinking, well, we have to go through this whole positioning exercise. The other thing that it suggests is that differentiation doesn't always have to be dramatic. It's important to stand apart from the competition, but you don't have to stand a mile apart. You could be a foot apart.
But as long as you can rally around what makes you unique, that's one of the keys to success.
Mitch Solway: Yeah. Again, it comes back to my point about, like, how are we gonna win here? And in some cases, it could be around support and service. Like, you know, the last thing you want when you do this, you know, you go buy a car, the last thing you want is, like or whatever. You buy a piece of software, there's no one there is is there to answer and help you out.
So whether it's support, but it's really important to know what your difference is. And here's an example. We didn't change our positioning, and our messaging was a little bit tweaked. But what we just we just changed the context in which we're delivering the message to be hyper hyper relevant against the competition. So it made it easier for people to know why you actually should reject them, and we were close enough to our customers to also know that they hated everything with hiring, like dealing with a ton of resumes.
Like, lot of them didn't even care the fact that we were ranking them in terms of quality. They just like that something was there to say, talk call these 10 people first. Right? We just really leaned into that. But, yeah, it doesn't have to be a big thing, but you also have to create mental space for yourself to think these things through.
Because if you just react, react, react, react, and then I think the most important part of my message earlier was to take a beat. Take a beat. Take a breath. Get out of the the the craziness that you're dealing with, and and maybe you go for a walk, take a couple days, figure it out. You know, I think you can find a a really elegant solution a lot of times and just sort of lean into what makes you different.
Mark Evans: From the outside looking in, when I look at how b to b and SaaS companies are doing marketing right now and how they're pulling back on marketing, some of it feels like panic. And the idea that their world is falling apart. And the other sort of angle is that they look at marketing as low hanging fruit or an easy target. So when times get tough, the easy place to start is by hacking away at marketing because you don't wanna hack away at sales or product development. Wondering about what you see as some of the common mistakes that companies make when they do pull back on marketing.
Mitch Solway: I don't know that there's common mistakes. I mean, it's just the diversity. I don't even know that's a mistake. Like, I think the mistake is before they make the cuts. The mistake is that somehow maybe marketing hasn't demonstrated.
It's not clear within the organization the value that marketing's bringing to the table because sometimes it's just not a mistake to cut marketing. Like, what do you get? Like, we cannot cut marketing and we can run on the money. You know? So, I mean, you know, there was a time I think the toughest part about the making cuts is making the cut, is deciding.
And then, you know, most of my experience has been working as part of the leadership team. And a lot of times, like, I'll sign up for making cuts, and then maybe we need to let some people go or maybe we need to, you know, find a way to to just, you know, I gotta turn back whatever. You know, when is it Lavalife for spending $20,000,000 a year in marketing? And I was told, okay, Mitch, we're gonna have to cut your budget in half. And for me, you know, where a lot of the shock happens is, like, I think a lot of marketers experience that.
My first reaction is like, what? You know? Is it possible? I can never make it happen. And then the mistake is just getting stuck as a marketer in, like, getting stuck in all the negativity and and rather than saying, okay.
Look. There's maybe mistakes before I didn't do a good job enough job. Or maybe I did a great job explaining marketing's value, it just needs to get cut. So mistakes could be that the company doesn't understand the value of marketing in the first place, and so they're just in a bad situation, and they don't know what to do, so they're just gonna cut it. But whatever you're left with is still about picking up the pieces and saying, okay.
Well, if I only have half the budget and half the team, again, it comes back to my point earlier about the the biggest shift. I think the biggest biggest challenge now is just refactoring your own brain to say, now what am I gonna do? You know, at Lava Life, I had been thinking about our mix between actually print and television sort of dates it. We had a heavy, print investment, and it was just steady, steady, steady. And at that point, I'm like, you know, again, you take a beat and then got over.
I let it all out. I was like, oh my god. It can never happen when you guys are crazy. But I had to say, okay. I understand why we need this.
And I ended up, you know, dramatically shifting our mix in media out of print and more into television. We ended up doing just fine. It actually be end up being a great thing for us. Print was on its way out, and this is just sort the kick in the ass that I needed. I'll say, as good as I was, you know, we're all pretty good at what we do, but there's all kinds of blind spots that we had and and moves that we don't make that unless a gun is to our head.
And gun comes to your head and you're like, it's really gonna force you to make some really important decisions, whether it's a competitor like ZipRecruiter coming in and and outspending it like crazy or getting your budget cut. I think the biggest mistake is just panic and just getting still being stuck in the woe is me state. And it legitimately, if there's nothing you can do and you really feel your hands are tied and you can't be successful, then, you know, go find another place where you can be successful. At the same time, just like, you know, a founder will tell you their journey is crazy. It's full of ups and downs, there's win big wins and big losses.
You know, as a marketing leader, use this as an opportunity to come back and tell a story of how my budget was cut in half, and we figured it out. Or a competitor raised a ton of money and was outspending us, but we figured out a way to make it work. Because inevitably, you're gonna face these things. So remove the emotional component or get it out of your system and then come back and bring your smart marketing self back to solve the problem.
Mark Evans: It does illustrate the reality that change is hard. We get stuck in habits and what we've done, we think that we'll always do. And sometimes change is self motivated and sometimes it's forced upon you. And I think that's a really good perspective. Amid uncertain times, companies often think short term.
When I look at what CEOs are talking about, the focus is on leads and sales, leads and sales, leads and sales, they're not terribly interested in building brand or brand awareness. I do wonder how b to b and SaaS companies can use marketing to position themselves for long term success rather than focusing on their immediate needs. And, admittedly, that's a challenge because when you're a entrepreneur or CEO and you've gotta pay the bills every month, you need money coming in the door, and you need to do things that move the needle, that attract customers, that expand your business. But at the same time, you also have to have that long term perspective that there is more to business than the here and now. And what you're trying to do is make sure your business is well positioned so when the tide turns, you're ready for it.
You're prepared, and, hopefully, you've done a better job of outflanking the competition or making sure that you're ahead of the competition in terms of of getting ready for what's next. What are your thoughts in terms of the balance between the short term and the long term?
Mitch Solway: If you're being asked for short term results, you know, you you need to understand why. You need to make sure you're clear because, again, sometimes it's just survival. Right? It's like we need we need to generate revenue. Like, if if it's there's demands and there's necessities.
Someone is demanding that you get more short term results, then that's a different conversation. It's like like, why do we need this? Like, listen. If we're hitting our targets and we're doing whatever, like, either I can get you more today and less tomorrow, or would you like enough today and more tomorrow? That's one conversation.
But if it comes down to the business just saying, you know, hopefully, you've got a leader or someone that says, look, Mitch, here's here's the thing. It's like, I know you don't we don't like to think short term, but we need to generate this amount of revenue in the next twelve months in order to sometimes long term success is getting through the short term markers. We need to survive or we're gonna have to let a whole bunch of people go, and then you're gonna have to rethink all over again. So I think understanding once you come to terms again, so much is mindset. Once you come to terms with what it is you're really trying to solve for, sometimes it's not about short term results.
It's about I'm solving for a bigger issue. I think that can be helped. That can certainly help. I think where also marketing can help is marketing is usually just one part of the whole machine. So there's been so many times when in order to get short term results, we've had to ramp up change in process.
Maybe we've tried to push more more sales through our customer service team. You know, at Clearfit, we again, another example where we had a short term need to drive revenue, and we're like, what do we do? It's like, well, you know, someone came up with the idea of selling bundles. We had a lot of customers that would buy these job posting us, like, one at a time. Like, let's just, like will they buy five at once?
And, like, we went out and we we fixed it, and it had nothing to do with marketing. But and it our customers loved it. It's you know, we gave them a a price break. We got the money upfront, and we started, you to put the cash into our bank accounts for our business, and that really helped. Another time, I'll use Clearfit as another example, because I came in at a time where they were just spending gobs of money and they weren't getting anywhere, and so much of it wasn't marketing.
You know, we had a a sort of trial motion where you would one out of every three candidates you could see. And what we're finding is they're getting so many candidates that if I got one out of every three, I didn't need to pay for anything. So we shifted from this free sampling model to a money back guarantee. It wasn't a marketing solution, but we looked at the business. So we we looked at other areas of the business that where we were losing money and maybe try different things.
And what happened is when we shifted away from one model to another model is we saw a dramatic increase in conversion rates to purchase. So we were subsidizing a lot of folks. So I think you can look at all areas of the business. If you're a strong team, and this is gonna be my final point that I'm gonna get to. If you're a strong team, you're gonna look everywhere to see because you're kinda in this together.
And if it's just everyone's just looking at marketing to solve the problem, I don't think that's fair, and I don't think that's right. I just think it's irresponsible. Even if you run marketing, just to stay within your walls of single, what's possible, what we can do what can we do? You know, you're gonna talk to sales. You're gonna talk to product.
You're gonna talk to customer success. Are there opportunities where we can work together? Because, really, you're all in this together to find revenue. And the last thing I think you can do, to be honest, in terms of long terms of success and and versus short term, it's still at the end of the day, long term success is gonna come down to having really good leaders and really good people, you know, at your company. At FreshBooks, there was a scenario where we had expected a fundraising to come in and almost last and we were set to hire a whole bunch of people.
We had all of our plans built, and we actually had hired a bunch of people, and the the funding fell through at the last minute. Like, what do we do? Like and it was a moment of truth for us. And we just sat down and we said, what are our principles? It's like, we wanna keep all of our people.
We have some real a really great team and really good people. And we all just kinda came together as a group and sort of calmly mapped out our priorities and figured out a way to keep all our really good people in place and happy and productive, and we cut down some plans. We reworked our plans. But at the end of the day, if you don't have the right leaders, you don't have the right people in the right roles focused on the right things, you're never gonna get long term success anyway. You know, I think those are those are three things to think about in in particular.
And and and I think, again, get your mindset right, understand what is the problem you're solving. Look everywhere in terms of the short term results because every little every dollar matters. I talked to someone the other day, and they're gonna have to do some layoffs. I said, look. There's probably already people on your team that were halfway out the door anyway.
And she was saying, yeah. And there's probably a couple people on my team that weren't as good as they could be. So, again, it's a kind of thing to catalyze some action that you probably should have been taking anyway and to sharpen your pencil.
Mark Evans: The theme, if there's an undercurrent to this conversation, is that change is constant. And sometimes change is something that you can embrace and make happen, and sometimes change is forced upon you. And I think a lot of companies have had a marketing recipe that they followed for many years, and it's a marketing mix that has generated leads and sales and established them as leaders in their marketplace. But the landscape has changed, and customers want different things, and there's new competitive threats. What are some of the things that companies should be doing to pivot their marketing strategies in response to changing market conditions while at the same time maintaining a consistent brand image?
I think about the idea that that you may have to do, like, as you mentioned, entirely different types of marketing. Like, Lava Life, you abandon print for television. What's that mindset from not only the market leader, but the management teams in terms of thinking and saying and doing, we have to operate differently, and we have to make it happen. How do you how do you make that happen when when change is so hard sometimes?
Mitch Solway: Well, you need a good, you know, you could need a good CEO, and that it I'll be honest. Like, that also key to long term success. Marketers will come and go. Right? It's gonna be a a strong founder, particularly in startups, a strong founder or cofounders that are gonna have the fortitude to they're gonna be locked in to what matters and what's important.
And I'll get back on track, but I know founders are getting a lot of slack for a lot of flack for all the layoffs and things that they've done. But, man, these are tough decisions for them to make, and they just have to if you're them, you're gonna have to make the same decision. You can hate them for for laying off these people, and there's really no good way to do it. And maybe there's nice ways and better ways, but there's just a lot of tough decisions that that you need to be making. But overall, in in these kinds of conditions, change is hard.
Change is inevitable. And I think you just need you just need to to you can't get lazy. You just gotta keep pushing. Good marketing leaders and good marketing organizations. I always say, you know, the CEO is always asking me to do things.
I'm going like, what are you talking about? I can't do that. Like, they're way more bold than I am, and my team is like, Nick, you're you're way bolder than we are. And then but we're not unreasonable. If you create an environment in your startup where there's always some level of push, there's always some, I'll call it, positive stressors and pressures for people to continue to continue to drive and strive for better results.
And if you combine that, to be honest, with creating good collaboration and the right people and a good culture and environments where people are encouraged to do that and supported to do that. This is where success can happen. Like I said, change is always going on. It's just the degree. Sometimes there's these big sharp changes.
But if you're not changing and you're not advancing and you're not rethinking all the time I think I wrote a post on LinkedIn once that said, you know, at least once a quarter, I would sit down and and I'd ask myself two key questions. It's like, is what I'm doing does is what we're doing still make sense? Right? Because I knew it made sense when we decided to and then and then what are we not doing? You know, what looking for ahead for the next year or two years, what do we need to be doing now that we're not doing yet?
And you gotta keep asking yourself these questions. You're just gonna get caught behind and caught chasing. I think that that kind of mentality in creating good cultures, good environments, having a good strong fan and group and leadership team that will keep pushing in a positive way will always put you in a position to have more resiliency when when when things come up.
Mark Evans: In some b to b and SaaS organizations, there's a tension between marketing and sales. Sales says to marketing, you're not doing the right type of marketing. You're not generating leads. The leads that we're getting aren't properly qualified. Marketing turns around and says, you're not using our sales and says, you're not using the collateral and assets.
You're not telling the right story. You're the ones who are dropping the ball. So, obviously, in well run organizations, marketing and sales alignment is critical. How can b to b and SaaS companies ensure a partnership and and seamless collaboration between these two functions to drive revenue growth even when they're facing economic challenges?
Mitch Solway: Yeah. It's so funny how many times when you, particularly in my fractional roles when I come in and, you know, lead the marketing group, and I'll hear whoever, maybe the CEO or the founder or some other leader, maybe VP revenue saying, oh, by the way, and can you help us product and marketing aren't getting along, or sales and marketing aren't getting along. And, like, can you help us with that? I'm like, of course. Almost every single time that sales and marketing aren't getting along, I say, you know, it's broken at the top, broken at the bottom.
It's some misalignment, or it's it's about those who's ever leading marketing and leading sales not being in alignment. It's just unfair to expect your team to figure it out on their own when the leaders haven't got it figured out. It just it's just inverted. The reason I say, yeah, we can figure that out because it almost always happens in a conversation. Marketing and sales have to wanna work together in order to be working together.
Again, this is another mindset. If you have this underlying resistance to working with sales or for sales to work with marketing, then you can't fake working productively together. Because I work with a lot of early stage companies so much for my time, I I like working at the beginning when we're just building because there's nothing to go and untangle. Right? It's not like we've been doing this for for fifteen years and it's a mess, come in and untangle it.
I've had a couple of those situations. You can you can start to build those foundational elements. And one of my fractional clients, when I was building the marketing team, one of the cofounders was leading sales, and she was building the sales team at the same time. We decided together that she'll build the sales team, I'll build the marketing team, but we want those teams to actually work together as one growth team. While I was looking to hire for the marketing team, part of the criteria in the interview process was looking for people that had a bias, a positive bias for working with sales.
It's like, yeah. I love working with sales. And the same thing on the sales side is, like, I really enjoy working with marketing. So we were able from the beginning to find the cofounder myself. We're already like, hey.
Let's build a know, you we're gonna have to learn really, really quickly, and we we need to understand what's happening through the sales process to figure out marketing and if marketing's any good and what is sales learning and marketing learning. And and so we just need to work together. So it starts with the decision at the top to say, you know, let's work together. And then, you know, how do you organize your people around that to make sure that it works? And and even internally, sometimes if you have to untangle things, it's just having a conversation with your team and making sure that everybody can just get all negative baggage out and is just, like, clean and clear to move forward.
If you wanna work together, you just just work together. It's it's not that difficult. We just need to get ourselves out of the way. We're usually the people of the problem. Right?
It's not sales and marketing. Have some empathy, but also have some leadership in there. And and if people won't change, and sometimes people will resist, is if you can't work with the other group, then they're just not gonna be there anymore. And just start to replace people that won't work together with people that will work together.
Mark Evans: Again, it's all about change. Some of it is painful, but but always necessary. I like to wrap up podcasts with a rapid fire round. Are you ready for this? Are you ready for for short answers to some very short questions?
Mitch Solway: I will do my best for short answers.
Mark Evans: So a couple of years ago, I rebranded myself as a fractional CMO. You're a fractional CMO, and I was waiting for the the bandwagon to really start rolling, and I've only just started to see it. What's your take on fractional CMOs and one of the biggest challenges facing companies when they're looking at hiring one?
Mitch Solway: Yeah. There's just so many now that that doing all kinds of different things. It's just like any recruiting process. You gotta have a good understanding of what you need so you make sure you hire the right fractional CMO at this point. There's the good news is there's so much talent doing so many different things.
The bad news is you need to think, you know, with so much choice, you need to be a little more clear on what you need to make sure you're hiring someone that solves the specific problems that you have.
Mark Evans: Twitter, otherwise known as x, and whether it still matters to b to b and SaaS companies.
Mitch Solway: Probably. I've been off Twitter for at least six or seven years now, so I don't know. I'm, just not it's just not part of my lifestyle, but it it matters if it matters. If you don't know if it matters, then it probably doesn't matter. Right?
And there's only so much you can do. If you're worried that it's gonna go away and you've got a lot of business there, then you just need to figure out where those people are going to next.
Mark Evans: Facebook threads, which a couple weeks ago was the bell of the ball, and I guess more than a 100,000,000 people signed up. Any thoughts on that?
Mitch Solway: Nope. I haven't downloaded the app. I'm not on it. I mean, it wasn't on Twitter. It wasn't on threads.
It's just not it's not where I spend my time and where I'm gonna add any value, and I don't really thrive there. LinkedIn is my platform, and that's where I I thrive, and that's my community. Maybe it'll be something one day, but it's just not really registering for me right now.
Mark Evans: We talked a little bit about it earlier, brand positioning and its value amid difficult economic times and fierce competition.
Mitch Solway: Yeah. I'll go back. We we talked about it earlier. Whether it's it's repositioning or coming back and reaffirming how you're gonna win in the market is always critical, especially critical to really ground you again if you need to retool and rethink all your strategies. Just go back to first principles of, like, how are gonna win this market?
Who are gonna win it with? And what makes us different? And that will that should everything everything will just magically fall into place.
Mark Evans: And finally, content marketing and the impact of ChatGPT and generative AI.
Mitch Solway: So all I would say here is, you know, good marketers are good marketers. Good marketers find a way. So if I'm in content marketing and I know what I'm doing, I'm just gonna figure out how to use ChatPT ChatQPT to be more successful. I think the people will figure it out. I don't know that that the AI is gonna figure out the people.
I think it's gonna be the other way, and I'm just gonna trust the really smart people that sort of lean into it and are really curious to find their way to use ChatQPT to your best advantage on content and not destroy brands, but actually enhance them.
Mark Evans: Good job on the rapid fire, and great job on answering all my questions about the volatile, fascinating, interesting b two b and SaaS landscapes. Where can people learn more about you and what you do?
Mitch Solway: I mean, the best place is on LinkedIn. Just look for Mitch Solway, and you'll find me. You can go to my website. There's really not a lot there @thinkmitchthink.com, but LinkedIn is the best thing. And don't be shy.
Feel free to connect. Send me a message. You know, I love meeting new people. It's probably my favorite thing to do. Feel free to reach out if you've any questions.
Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a b to b SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. You can reach out to me via email, mark@markevans.ca. I'll talk to you soon.
