#182: Growth | Building a Strong Brand, Embracing AI, and Leading a Marketing Team with Mychelle Mollot, CMO at Knak

In this episode, Dave sits down with Mychelle Mollot, CMO at Knak, a platform for creating, designing, and optimizing email and landing page content. Mychelle shares her wealth of experience, having led marketing efforts at IBM and various startups. She discusses her approach to leading marketing teams, scaling brands, and embracing AI in B2B marketing.

Dave and Mychelle cover:

• How Knak built a brand and captured demand in a space without a known category
• The balance between meeting short-term goals and dedicating some marketing budget to high-risk, high-reward experiments
• How AI is evolving from a standalone tool to being embedded in the core functionalities of marketing platforms

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Mychelle
• (06:08) - - Embracing Diverse Career Paths to Become a CMO
• (10:52) - - Leveraging Big Company Skills in Startups
• (11:43) - - Influencing Resources Without Ownership in Large Organizations
• (16:05) - - Weekly Team Meeting Tips
• (19:06) - - Mychelle’s OKR Framework
• (23:52) - - How Knak Creates and Captures Demand
• (25:24) - - How To Understand and Target Buyers
• (31:21) - - Having AI Discussions With Your Team
• (34:55) - - AI is Shifting from Core Component to Creative Assistant
• (36:17) - - Integrating AI into Core Tools
• (41:59) - - Sales and Marketing Alignment
• (45:21) - - Navigating Relationships as a CMO

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:01]:

Mychelle, great to have you on. Knak has been a supporter of Exit Five from the beginning, which is really cool. I see you doing a bunch of stuff. I feel like Knak is. Knak is everywhere.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:23]:

I saw you in Austin with puppies. I see you on LinkedIn everywhere. You're doing a nice job. You got a nice little studio set up, but you're a CMO. And what I want to dive in with you today is when I have a CMO on the show, sometimes we'll talk to, let's say last week I did a podcast with a woman who is an Instagram for B2B markers, and we went deep on that channel. I had a guy who did LinkedIn ads. So we'll either go super specific and tactical, but also we have a big audience of marketing leaders, current and future people who are doing what you're doing for the first time or want to be where you're at as a CMO. And so I haven't had a CMO on a little bit.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:58]:

I pulled up my old list of CMO questions. I'm excited to dive in with you and talk about your career and more specifically what's going on with marketing at Knak. But real quick, just so people can hear your voice and you can say hello. Can you give us a quick introduction?

Mychelle Mollot [00:01:12]:

Sure. First of all, I'm really happy to be here. My name is Mychelle Malo. I'm head of sales and marketing here at Knak.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:20]:

Okay. And for people that might not be familiar, what does Knak do?

Mychelle Mollot [00:01:23]:

Knak is a platform for creating, designing, optimizing, testing, and syncing emails and landing pages. All of that, the full process, soup to nuts.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:37]:

Cool. And just to give people that are listening a sense of who you sell to, like who are some of your typical customers or maybe marquee customers that you can talk about.

Mychelle Mollot [00:01:47]:

Okay. That's a little bit of foreshadowing for later on in the conversation when I'm sure we're going to dive into some challenges. But so our typical customer can be anybody. We have some small companies. We have large companies like Amazon, Walmart, Google Meta and everything in between. So that scope of customer base is a challenge for a marketing team. And I'll dive into that later if you want.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:11]:

I would love to. Yeah, that sounds great. Okay. And you've been at Knak for about four years?

Mychelle Mollot [00:02:15]:

No, no, no, no.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:16]:

Well, so your LinkedIn says four years. However, you were an advisor for three years.

Mychelle Mollot [00:02:21]:

That's right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:23]:

You've had a bunch of experience as a marketing leader in CMO in the past. Looks like you were doing a couple things. You're an advisor to the company. How, what led to you deciding to actually go and take the job and get off the sidelines as an advisor and get in there as CMO and head of sales?

Mychelle Mollot [00:02:36]:

I'd been with the prior company for five years, and that was winding down. And I was looking for what I was going to do next. And ive done everything from really large business like IBM to very small early stage startup like clipfolio, which is a dashboard startup. And I was trying to decide what size and scope. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, I love marketing. I love all things marketing, and what better place to be than with marketers selling to marketers. So it ticked so many boxes for me. I love this stage of a startup where you're big enough that you have some resources, but you're small enough that the world is your oyster and you can go anywhere.

Mychelle Mollot [00:03:17]:

So that's what led me to join.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:20]:

Did you have to find new muscles? In a way? Because your career is interesting. And you, I think at a time where a lot of the marketers that are coming up now, we're hiring people at Exit Five, you're hiring people at Knak. You see everybody's resume today, and I'm guilty of this, too, is like a year and a half here, a year and a half there. Two years there, two years there. Like, you came up. You spent 18 years at Cognos, right?

Mychelle Mollot [00:03:44]:

Yep.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:45]:

Which is, like today. I mean, that's unbelievable. So Cognos is interesting to me because I got my start. I worked at a tech pr agency in the Boston area called Lois Paul and partners.

Mychelle Mollot [00:03:54]:

I know them well. We used them. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:57]:

Okay. So I swear that this is wild to me. So I swear that, like, when I was there, Cognos was a big account. Am I right about that? And you're crazy, Mychelle. I didn't prep for this, so.

Mychelle Mollot [00:04:08]:

No, I know them all.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:09]:

Yeah, you did Ar. So I was like, oh, my. Wait, I'm just literally reading this on the spot. You did ar there. So I'm like, you must have. Were you the client?

Mychelle Mollot [00:04:15]:

I was the client. So Steve Millmore was my pr guy. I don't know if you know Steve. Brilliant guy. And he worked with Lois and Paul. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:23]:

That's amazing. Unbelievable. What a small world, Mychelle. Holy cow.

Mychelle Mollot [00:04:28]:

It is a very small world. Very small world.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:31]:

So you go from there, which is a totally different doing ar and comms. To running marketing, maybe before we get into the Knak, what was the inflection point of your career? Going from like, these are kind of all related, right? Product marketing, comms, ar, strategic comms. But that's a much different muscle than today. You're running sales and marketing. What was the tipping point in your career? And I'm asking this question because I want to paint the picture that any cmo, I've been interviewing cmos for five years now. Everyone I've talked to comes up from a different background, and I want to give that context to like encourage future cmos that like, I think people obsess over specializing. And if I am in this one area, can I still get to CMO? But it's like I talk to cmos. The time this one came up through PR, this one came up through product marketing, this one came up through Ar.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:18]:

I'm talking to you right now, who's done a similar thing. I'd love to hear about that kind of point in your career.

Mychelle Mollot [00:05:23]:

Yeah, look, I think it comes down to willingness to be a newbie again, willingness to learn and dive deep. So to me, it doesn't matter where you come from as much as what you're willing to do to get to the next step in terms of learning. So, yeah, most of my background, I actually started as an engineer. So I was doing engineering, geophysics, gold mining exploration in the Yukon, literally the Klondike.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:48]:

There's so many layers to you, I'm going to have to unpack it.

Mychelle Mollot [00:05:52]:

And then I went from that to, I had a catastrophic knee injury, mostly related to a ski accident, and I couldnt do field work, so I needed a desk job. That led me to Cognos. My first jobs, there were more technical, what would now be probably called product management. We were defining market requirements, we were building out technical systems and then product marketing. So youre right. I was mostly in that kind of strategic market strategy realm, but I was always around the campaign. So we would define what the campaign needed to accomplish, all the messaging, positioning, the AR PR that surrounded it, and then we'd work with the campaign team. So I was always around it, but I never owned it and I never dove really that deep.

Mychelle Mollot [00:06:37]:

And then when I went, when Cognos was acquired by IBM, Dave Laverty, the CMO of Cognos, was moved to a different division. And then at that time, they promoted me into the CMO role for the business analytics division at IBM. And that's when I went back to school. And just then I had to dive deep in all the other areas that I wasn't familiar with. So I did. And then when I left IBM six years later, I went to a tiny startup and that's when I had to dive deep into SAS because IBM had its toes in SAS, but they didn't have a lot of SaaS offerings. So I had to learn SAS. I went to Saster.

Mychelle Mollot [00:07:15]:

I read every blog and listen to every podcast that I could to learn this whole new realm. So I think for me, you get to CMO by being continually a learner. And every day I feel like I'm learning something new. And I've been doing this for, I don't know, I'm not even going to tell you how many years.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:33]:

I love that. I love the mindset of diving right in and saying, like, I got to go learn this. I actually, the podcast that we put out this week when we're recording this was my interview with Jason Lemkin from Sastre. And he went on this rant, which is like basically summarizing. He's like, the thing that drives me out today is the CMO of a $2 million startup needs five people, and each one of those people needs an agency, and each one of those agency needs a budget. The real way to learn is to actually dive in. And to hear you go from massive company 20. If you take IBM plus Cognos combined, that's 20 plus years.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:10]:

And then to go back and relearn it all and say, like, I'm going to go dive in. I'm going to go to Sastra. I'm going to learn this stuff. It's awesome to hear that. Also, though, don't you feel like the more you know now there are the timeless? I feel like we've skewed too far in the other direction of, like, people obsessing. Like, I'll see people. Like, not someone says, like, oh, I can't. I'm not going to join Exit Five because it seems like you only talk about B2B sass and what? And I'm like, no, there's.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:34]:

We want to share, like, the timeline. It's almost like there's this wave of coming back around is like whatever technology comes and goes, there are these timeless marketing principles that are going to be around forever.

Mychelle Mollot [00:08:45]:

I couldnt agree more. In fact, one of my bibles is the whole Jeffrey Moore take on positioning. Define your bowling lane, define your pins. Get across that chasm in specific ways of meeting all the needs of one buying community. To me, that holds true today maybe more than it did before even. Yeah, I agree with you. The fundamentals of marketing have nothing changed. The tactics, the tools, they've changed, but the fundamentals are still the same.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:15]:

Do you look back on your time at big company now that you're more in the startup and SaaS world? Do you look back on that and see that it helped shape you figure out how to work? I was at a big, not IBM size, but for me I started my career in a 1500 person company and I see a lot of people now come up and I don't think we know how to work and I think work inside of a company. And I think that if you only have early stage startup experience, you don't know how to like run effective meetings, how to set agendas, how to plan, how to all that stuff. I think at the earlier point in my career I would roll my eyes at, but now I've progressed in my career, I'm like, man, I learned a lot about how to work at a bigger company and I'm curious to hear with 20 years at Cognos and IBM how you think that helps shape the way Mychelle's operating system works.

Mychelle Mollot [00:10:06]:

Yeah, I think that last word you said is the first thing I talk about is the operating system and you need an operating system, you need a management system, you need a cadence of meeting and you don't want it to be overly burdensome, but you need to manage, you need to hold the team and yourself accountable in specific ways. And that you learn in the big companies, that's what they do really well. You also learn that nobody is soup to nuts, responsible for anything. I had multiple bosses, we had very matrixed organizations at IBM. So you get comfortable with this view that you don't have to own the resources to be able to influence the resources and you shouldn't. I think when you're in a smaller company, as the company grows, people tend to get a little bit of a view of this is my realm and I can only control what's in my realm. When you get to these really mega companies you realize, no, look, you're going to have all kinds of resources that you're going to have to influence, but you don't own them. And I think that learning is amazing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:06]:

How do you do that? I've always struggled with pushing people to do that unless they were incentivized to do so. Like do you need to, how do you match the incentives to that? It's easy to be like, come on, be a good teammate, even though that's not your job. Go and do it. If you have some type of comp that's tied to like company performance and there's like a bonus or something tied to that, it makes it easier. But do you feel like there has to be some type of incentive there or will people just go and do it?

Mychelle Mollot [00:11:31]:

I wish I could say they would just go and do it, but I think I've only ever seen it work when the, they weren't called okrs when I was at IBM. But when we all had the same goals, you have to have the same top level goals and then the next level down has to have the same common business goals and then you can say, okay, to achieve that we're going to have to do these things and that's going to require that you're playing over here for this and you're playing over there for that. And I think it works well. But when they're mismatched goals, it's brutal. It just never works.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:01]:

Let's talk about the operating system at Knak. People love to dive in with a CMO. So first I'm just going to ask a bunch of kind of organizational questions. So yeah, can you share the marketing team? Let's talk specifically about marketing. First, the marketing team at Knak. Can you share like the breakdown of roles and responsibilities and roughly what the chart is? You don't have to list out everybody on the team, but I think what people like to know is like, oh, we got this, we got product marketing, they do this, we got web, they do this. Right?

Mychelle Mollot [00:12:28]:

Yeah. So we have product marketing, they do this.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:32]:

Thank you. Thank you. Check, check. Next question.

Mychelle Mollot [00:12:35]:

So we have the three big areas. We have product marketing, we have growth and inside of growth, we have digital, social and events. And then we have a design in house design team and then we have a couple of other single contributor roles. So we have a customer evangelist sort of creating what we're calling the Knak nation.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:57]:

Oh, I like that. Nice.

Mychelle Mollot [00:12:59]:

And then we have some efforts on the partner marketing side as well. Those are the basic areas of marketing. Web. For us, the content of the web gets defined mostly by product marketing. The call to actions get built out mostly by the growth team. But the web developer sits within our sort of our it. We have a small it function, but they're very much part of the broader marketing spectrum.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:27]:

Right. But product marketing, this actually just came up in our community last week. So I want to. Product marketing owns the website. There might be a technical owner of the website different than product marketing, but product marketing owns the how it looks what you say?

Mychelle Mollot [00:13:40]:

I would say less how it looks.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:43]:

Okay.

Mychelle Mollot [00:13:43]:

More what we say, the core positioning and messaging. And then we have a brand design team. They really own the look as long as it doesn't change the message.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:54]:

And then do all those. Are there team leaders of each? Like, what does your reporting structure look like?

Mychelle Mollot [00:14:00]:

Yeah. So there's a head of growth, the head of product marketing, the head of our design team, as well as our head of customer marketing all report to me directly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:10]:

Did you say product marketing too? Is there a head of product marketing?

Mychelle Mollot [00:14:13]:

Mm hmm.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:13]:

Okay.

Mychelle Mollot [00:14:14]:

Yep. Head of product marketing. Yep.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:16]:

So those people all report to you. How often do you meet?

Mychelle Mollot [00:14:19]:

I meet with them every week and we have a team meeting every second week with the whole team.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:25]:

What does that weekly meeting with your direct reports look like?

Mychelle Mollot [00:14:28]:

So first of all, I'm a big evangelist for the tool called fellow, fellow, so fellow app. It's a meeting management tool and that is our way of co creating the agenda. So status for the week gets just put into that tool so that I can see stuff that can be done offline. And then we decide on what are we going to talk about. So throughout the week, I'll, I think of, oh, I really want to go through that with them. In the next call, I'll put it into the fellow agenda and then they do the same thing, things that they need me to either help them think through or issues they want to resolve. So that's generally the agenda. It's not a fixed agenda every week.

Mychelle Mollot [00:15:12]:

It's always basically problems, challenges, opportunities. And then the status stuff is more at the bottom that I can read. And if I have any questions about it, I'll go through that in our one to one.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:24]:

Nice. I like the idea. I think it was high output management. Andy Grove's book. He talked about this concept of, I forget what he called it. I don't know if it's like an icebox or a file or something, but like the idea of you have this standing meeting, let's not bother each other with all the stuff like in slack or however you communicate. Let's put this away. And so I like the idea of you and the team using Google Doc or fellow whatever.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:46]:

I'm not familiar with it, so I don't have a ton of experience. But you throw it all in there and let's save that. There's something liberating about that. Right. First, like everything then becomes urgent and you can save it for later.

Mychelle Mollot [00:15:56]:

Exactly. And that, I really kind of encourage that because I don't. We need. Think time we need. And if you're constantly, all day just being interrupted by things that could wait till the end of the week or whenever you're meeting. Yeah, it just makes it smoother.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:12]:

So do you review what's in fellow before the meeting and then decide the agenda, or is that you all dave.

Mychelle Mollot [00:16:18]:

On a good week? Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:21]:

If you had time. If you had the time to do that.

Mychelle Mollot [00:16:24]:

Yeah, I actually put in every morning. I put time on my calendar really early to review what I've got on the books for one on ones, because I like to be more prepared for them. But there's some weeks where you're really flying fast that it's literally five minutes before the meeting. But I. I try to. I try to.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:43]:

Yeah, it's sometimes like yesterday, Dan sent me like 50 slack message, not 50. I'm just. We don't work in an office together. And so I just picked up the phone and I called him. I said, hey, let's talk through all the stuff you sent me in 25 minutes. We went through all of the stuff. It can be hard to. It can be hard to keep up.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:02]:

And I found that the more you trust your team and the more you have the systems to stay organized, the less you feel like you have to be caught up on everything. And when you have these weekly routines and rhythms, you're like, okay, I know I'm going to get caught up with so and so at this time. So I like that. So you use fellow and is there like, do you have guiding, do you have goal? Like, what do you use for goal setting for a team? You mentioned OKrs before. Do something like that for the marketing unit.

Mychelle Mollot [00:17:29]:

Yeah. I'm not particularly religious about being a firm OKR, but that's roughly the framework that we use. We need things that are measurable for things that can be measurable. We don't try to force fit things into the OKR framework if they're not measurable. But yes, we define what we wanted to do over the year, which was more broad based goals that matched what the company was trying to achieve. And then every quarter we break it down. We start with the must haves, we look at the should haves, and then we look at the nice to haves, and then we make sure that everybody's aligning on the should haves so we don't have a mismatch across the teams, because that's been one of my biggest learnings in my career, is that you can start at the top and everybody agrees on what you need to do. And then when you break it down into the sub tasks, not everyone prioritizes in the same way.

Mychelle Mollot [00:18:23]:

And then sometimes you have somebody who's downstream, who needs to be part of your project, who hasn't prioritized your project into that should have category. So we use that as a way to make sure that the objectives get blown down or peel the onion back to the point where we can actually make sure we're all truly working on the most important things.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:43]:

Yeah. Or there's things that conflict and.

Mychelle Mollot [00:18:45]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:46]:

Okay. This team has this goal. This team has this goal. This is where, I think this is what gets hard about management in general, is like, this is why goals matter. And another, this is another example of something that as a younger employee, not a manager, I would roll my eyes at the exercise of goal setting and planning. But when you have conflicting priorities, like teams are going to do what they're incentivized to do, and then you peel back the onion and you realize, like, oh, Mychelle's incentivized to do this, Dave's incentivized to do this. So that's why they're not working together on this project. And it just creates a lot of internal conflict.

Mychelle Mollot [00:19:19]:

Exactly. Plus some of the more meaningful projects take multiple quarters and a lot more effort. So sometimes those get deprioritized by the easy stuff. Right. So it's kind of always pushing forward the most impactful stuff. That's hard for people to do sometimes because it's the heavy lift stuff that they have to dig into a little deeper and it's harder.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:45]:

So at Knak, and feel free to share as much specifics as you want, or if you want to make them more general, you don't have to share all the stuff, but like those goals for the year. Yeah, I want to hear how you think about them.

Mychelle Mollot [00:19:56]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:57]:

How many are there? What do they sound like?

Mychelle Mollot [00:19:59]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:00]:

Yeah, because, and here's why I'm asking, because I found that the exercise of goal setting, I think we always want to have these perfectly, like, increased website traffic, this percentage, like, there are some very measurable ones. But then there's also, like when I was at drift, for example, one of our big goals for the year was establish drift as the leader in conversational marketing. Right. And that is, there's measures to that, but it's more of a guardrail for, okay. This needs to be one of our key priorities. So I'm curious to hear how many are on the list and how do you classify them.

Mychelle Mollot [00:20:28]:

Yeah, we have five to six big goals, they're totally classified by, I would say, the classic marketing awareness. We have an awareness goal, but we've broken it down into not just general awareness in the market. We are very focused on a specific segment of the market, so we want to be everywhere. Our Persona is in that segment of the market so that they feel like we're everywhere. But in reality, we can't be everywhere because everybody can use Knak, which is a blessing and a problem, right. For a marketer, because you can't be everywhere. So you have to focus. So we focused.

Mychelle Mollot [00:21:04]:

So awareness, we have a lot around awareness, and that's where our sponsorship with you falls. Right. Frankly, we want, who influences the people that we want? Who are our buyers, right. So we mapped out the types of places they would go to get information, where do they learn, and that's where we're trying to be. So on awareness, that's a big part of it. On the event, we have an event goal, and on the events, our goal is twofold. One is to focus on the events that we can make the biggest bang with and not be at too many events, because we want to go big where we go. So Adobe Summit was a big conference for us.

Mychelle Mollot [00:21:44]:

We put a lot of effort, money, time, creativity into it, but then we've chosen not to go to some other events where, frankly, some of our buyers will be. And we just made that hard choice. So we have a big events goal. So that's one side of it. The second side of it is we want to create our own presence in the market from an event perspective. So we hosted the marketing productivity summit. Meta was gracious enough to allow us to use their campus. So that was our first foray into our own event, and we'll be doing more of those.

Mychelle Mollot [00:22:15]:

So those are the two big event goals. We have a demand creation goal because we don't have, the category that Knak falls into is not a known category. You can't go to find a forester wave or a magic quadrant that says email and landing page creation platforms. It doesn't exist. So that means that there are people out there who don't know that they can solve the big problems they have with what we do. So we have to spend a lot of our capital in terms of time and energy on creating that category. And then lastly, the bread and butter is the capturing demand, sort of the demand gen. And there we are really focused on intent, and we're big users of 6th sense and creating more warm community for us to be going after Trey.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:07]:

So when I hear you talk through those goals. I don't just hear like a laundry list of things you want to do and very tactical things. I feel like this is the job of being a marketing leader, is you have to be able to have a strong opinion and articulate the marketing strategy for the company, and you can't go do everything like you've said. Right. And so you got to pick some, you have to have some ideas. And this is what I love about marketing. It's art and the science of it, right?

Mychelle Mollot [00:23:33]:

Absolutely.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:34]:

Let's look at the landscape. Let's look at our budget and our competitors and the market and where we're trying to go and the vision from the founders. Okay, how do we think we can do marketing and then, like this year, what are the plays we're going to run? Is that something you can relate to 100%?

Mychelle Mollot [00:23:47]:

I mean, that, to me, that is the difference between great and good marketing, is when you can do that because everybody knows the same tactics. It doesnt take a lot to learn the tactics. What it takes a lot of time to learn is how to develop a point of view on the market, even things like where are buyers on the technology adoption curve? Because we have a very strong point of view that the buyers are just now coming into the early majority that a lot of the customers that I talked about at the beginning, these are buyers that are innovators and early adopters of technology. Theyre not risk adverse. Theyre people that really are the first at the door when somethings new. But when you move into the early majority, those are people that have less resources, theyre more risk adverse. So you have to have different strategies for them. So first, understanding where your buyers are, who your buyers are, what you want to focus on in any given period of time, because it doesn't mean that you're never going to go beyond them, but it means you have to start somewhere and you got to pick that, make a bet and see it through.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:55]:

I love that, what you said, start there, pick that, make a bet. I'm a big believer in, like, there's lots of possibilities and that's great. And we could go in circles for days talking about the possibilities. But like you and I were talking about before we started recording today, we wanted to do an event this year. We had strong demand from our community to do an event. We spent like four weeks talking about the event, and I was like, let's just, okay, well, it's too soon to do it in June. We want to do it in Vermont. We can't do it in October because it's.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:22]:

October is crazy tourist season because everybody's like, leaf peeping summer. Nobody's going to travel in the summer because they got families and kids and whatever. September. Okay. Boom. First week is Labor Day. Second, how about September 11 and 12th? Great. We picked a date.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:37]:

I am such a believer in picking a lane and going, and you can just spend so much time going in circles trying to, like, get something done. You got to make some decisions and be okay with, like you said, here's what we're not going to do.

Mychelle Mollot [00:25:48]:

Right? Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:49]:

We have some bets, and we're going to go make them, and we're going to adjust. And then I like how you mentioned that you have this annual plan, but each quarter you're revisiting and saying, like, does this make sense? Should we still be doing this thing? What has changed? Right.

Mychelle Mollot [00:26:00]:

Right. If you achieve your goal, then you need new goalpost. Right. You got to keep on the pushing forward. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:08]:

All right, so you have your team meeting. What do you. What do you get out of that every two weeks? Whole team meeting. This is something I've always struggled with as a CMO. I'm like, man, does my team hate this meeting. Is this boring? Like, how. How do we make this whole team meeting valuable for people? So I'm wondering if you have it figured out.

Mychelle Mollot [00:26:24]:

You know what? I wish I could say I'm 100% sure I do, but I have it figured out, but I'm not. I think it's. It requires that the team engage with the setting of the meeting agenda, too. And by team, I mean my direct leaders. And what I usually do is I always have an update. I think it's really important for me to share what's on the mind of the leadership team with my team. So that's how I always start. Here's how we're doing with some of the big deals.

Mychelle Mollot [00:26:50]:

Here's what the leadership team is thinking about. Here's what's changed. Here's where we're thinking things might not be working, that kind of thing. I always start with that, and then we move into things that I think need focus for everyone. So it might be a new, like today, for example. We just had a team meeting today, and one of the things that I was talking about was more experimentation. Part of our strategy is to allow 10% of our budget and our time to be used on true experiments where we really don't know. It's not sort of, oh, well, we're going to call this an experiment, but we know that it's likely going to be performing fairly well.

Mychelle Mollot [00:27:29]:

No, these are things that we don't know. And frankly, the spring conference fell into that for us. It's not our mops audience. So that was an experiment. So I talked about experimentation and then we have spotlights where we try to make sure that everybody has visibility into what's going on across the team. That's where the team leaders engage and they say, okay, for my team, here's some things that we're going to, we're going to show you we've been working on or we plan to work on. And then lastly we finish it with just sort of an open. Are there any challenges that you want to put forward that you think people can help with? You know, that kind of thing? So we try to leave a little bit of time for that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:06]:

Do you feel like you get open discussion from the team during that? Or does it happen more in one on ones and smaller kind of breakouts?

Mychelle Mollot [00:28:13]:

You know, every once in a while that magic happens where we do have a discussion, we had a pretty open discussion about AI in a team meeting where people were kind of expressing some of their optimism and then concern and caveats on where it was working, where it wouldnt work, that kind of thing. And that was a pretty engaged, open discussion of problems. But yeah, sometimes it is. Sometimes people are not as comfortable with that. And I really try to create a culture where people would feel comfortable, but it takes time for people to understand that you're not there to judge their comments, you're there to help them maybe have a breakthrough. So expressing a challenge is not going to be viewed as a weakness because I think there are some cultures where that's the case. So. Takes time sometimes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:03]:

Yeah. You got to be able to, you hire smart people and you have a team you want to be around. Not everything is going to work.

Mychelle Mollot [00:29:09]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:09]:

And you need to be able to lean on each other.

Mychelle Mollot [00:29:11]:

What if it is? You're being too safe.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:13]:

Way too safe. Love that.

Mychelle Mollot [00:29:14]:

If it's all. You're being way too safe. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:17]:

I like how you mentioned that you have some time and budget carved out for the tests and experiments. This is one, as a first time marketing leader, this is a mistake that I made, which is you're so focused on the short term goal and hitting the plan now because you want to keep your job and keep everybody happy and keep the company growing. So you do things this quarter, this year, but then all of a sudden the company wants to grow 40% next year. Right. And all of a sudden your marketing channels have to grow. And I just would like drag the spreadsheet and say like, all right, now we need 50% more traffic from this channel. And they're like, wait, where's that going to come from? And if I could do it over again, I wish I carved out more time and resources for the team to be finding the new channels. So then when we need to grow, we can like, hey, yeah, we've already tested LinkedIn ads.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:08]:

We've spent low thousands of dollars on it. Like we would feel good about spending 100, 200, half million dollars in this paid channel. We feel like it can scale up verse. If you have to try to figure that out in year, it's going to be too late. Right, right.

Mychelle Mollot [00:30:22]:

And if your 90% doesn't encompass your 100% of your goal, then you can't do that 10% experiment. Right. So that's a core part of it. Yeah. You have to be comfortable that you can get, you can make your numbers just on the 90%.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:37]:

Okay, tell us about, you mentioned people love this, so I'm asking you this question. You mentioned some tools that you use to run marketing. You mentioned fellow app, you mentioned six sense tech is just such a big part of doing marketing today. What are the key tools in your tech stack?

Mychelle Mollot [00:30:53]:

Yeah, so the website, we recently went from a WordPress website to a headless. So we're using sanity. So that's one thing. We use Knak, of course, for building of our emails and our landing pages. So anything that has a form on it, we build a Knak. We use chili piper for scheduling, we use lean data for routing. What else do we have? We have a lot. We use user gems for identifying people who've moved to different companies.

Mychelle Mollot [00:31:22]:

We use Vimeo on the web, we use hotjar for seeing where people go on the analytics side, snowflake as our warehouse and tableau. Google Analytics, of course. What other category have I left out here?

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:40]:

It's pretty good. You won't offend anybody. And what's your latest on where do you see AI fitting in the tech stack?

Mychelle Mollot [00:31:47]:

Yeah, it's interesting because if you had asked me that, I would say in the fall, I probably would have answered it this way. I probably would have said, I see AI as a core tool in my stack, but now I see it a little bit differently. And the reason is all of the tools we're using, so we're using gong and we're using all of them have an AI capability. So a lot of the things that back in the fall, I was thinking, well, we're going to need to use AI, not just in terms of helping us be better creators and writers, and that's a no brainer. We're doing that and we'll always do that, but we're going to have to use it almost like an integration capability, being able to use it to do better routing, do smarter this and that. And now all the tools we're using, they have their own AI embedded doing that. So it's really changed my viewpoint. I think AI is going to be more of a creative help for us than it will be a core component of our stack, if that makes sense.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:49]:

That's a great take, actually. I listened to Kieran and Kip, who are at HubSpot and have the marketing as a grain podcast. They had a great interview with Gary Vaynerchuk and they were all talking about how exactly what you said, which is basically there's not going to be one AI tool. It's like all of the products that we use are going to have AI component that makes their core function better.

Mychelle Mollot [00:33:09]:

Exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:09]:

Like if you're creating ads on LinkedIn, right? Actually, no, LinkedIn will be way behind on this adoption curve. But like meta is going to have all the things you need to create better ads. You're not going to use a separate AI content creation tool. It's just going to live there. And Gong is going to have that. HubSpot is going to have that. That's interesting. So it's less about is there a separate AI tool? And more like these core tools that we're going to use are going to have this baked in, right?

Mychelle Mollot [00:33:34]:

Yeah. And really incredible additions to their tools. I mean, I've been blown away by some of the things I can do now with the AI capabilities of the tools we've been using. It's impressive to speed.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:46]:

So a couple of years ago, I had this podcast called before this was before I went back to drift, I had this podcast called B2B marketing leaders, and I would hammer cmos on all these very specific questions, and I'm just trying to see if I missed anything. So you mentioned a bunch of tools. You mentioned tech. Do you do anything with agencies? Do you have any agencies on retainer that you work with in addition to the team?

Mychelle Mollot [00:34:04]:

We do have some agencies on retainer for PPC. So we do, it's an agency called search warrants, and they've been doing our PPC. They do some of our $0.06 ads through the display network for $0.06. But we're pretty internal in terms of our marketing. You know, we have, we haven't really used many agencies to date.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:27]:

I like that. There you go. Jason Lemkin. Listen to that. Listen to Mychelle. She's got a team. No agencies, just AI. Yeah, AI and a bunch of good people.

Mychelle Mollot [00:34:36]:

Well, having creative in house is one of the things that I absolutely love. I love it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:43]:

Yes, 100%.

Mychelle Mollot [00:34:44]:

We have a brilliant creative team and it just, I think it's everything for brand.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:49]:

Can you articulate that? Like, why? What difference does it make having that person on your team versus at an agency? What do you think it does?

Mychelle Mollot [00:34:57]:

Because, I mean, to me, the brand is not just the color and the logo, and it is the essence of everything we do. So when they're part of the team, you don't have to spend as much time or any time. You're just expressing all of the things that go into creating your look for every asset and every ad. And they just know. So when you say, here's the content, they can create what they know the brand needs in terms of supporting creative.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:26]:

Also, just like having them embedded in your company and like at the company, meet, like real understanding, all the rhythms. I think when you just have an outside design resource, it's very, it's much more transactional. Like, hey, make this page and make it blue and white and have this button on it.

Mychelle Mollot [00:35:40]:

Exactly. Yeah. They are deeply embedded in the team. In fact, the guy that was here helping with the setup, he's on that creative team. So it is. I love it. I love it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:51]:

Okay, here's the last question. We'll wrap on this one. This is. I haven't asked this one in a while. I'm curious to hear the answer. If you had one wish and could solve any one marketing problem, what would it be? This is like something that's come up over your career that just has never been solved, right?

Mychelle Mollot [00:36:05]:

Yeah. No, I mean, for me there's a lot of things, but the number one thing is being able to measure the value of branding, the branding work.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:14]:

Oh, and when you say branding, what does branding mean to you?

Mychelle Mollot [00:36:17]:

Yeah. So, okay. Our sponsorship with you, any activity that we do purely for visibility, for awareness. I'm fortunate at Knak in that the founders of the company are all marketers. So I don't have to justify the investment in brand. They get it, they believe in it to their core. But sometimes when you're the CMO and you're working with either technical people or sales driven people who don't necessarily understand the value of building a brand. I would love to be able to wave a magic wand and just be able to measure it.

Mychelle Mollot [00:36:53]:

You obviously can do things. You can measure certain things like web traffic. It goes up. Well, is that due to the awareness work? Yeah, you can probably make some arguments, but there's no definitive proof. I'd love proof. That would be amazing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:09]:

Oh, dang it. We don't have nearly enough time to do this. But I forgot to ask you this. People were going to beat me up. You also are responsible for sales.

Mychelle Mollot [00:37:16]:

I am.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:16]:

You run the sales function at Knak. What is a bad question is broad on purpose. Like, what is that like? Because we often hear on chatter about marketing reporting into CROs, sales and marketing misalignment. How did it happen that you are responsible for the sales team at Knak and I. What has that relationship been like?

Mychelle Mollot [00:37:36]:

Yeah, it was really simple. Pierce said, hey, can you take over sales for it may not be a permanent state, but for our current state. And I said, sure. To me, I have been beside sales my whole career. I love partnering with sales and I've been an executive sponsor. I've been on a gazillion sales calls. So I have a strong point of view on how sales and marketing should work together. And I do think that now more than ever, there is.

Mychelle Mollot [00:38:05]:

It's just a blur in Knak. We don't see it as a throw lead over the transom and sales takes it. It's just, no, we see this as a continuum. It's a conveyor belt. And there's just at one point in time, there'll be different people interacting with that prospect on the conveyor belt or that customer once they become a customer. But it's the whole team, soup to nuts. At all points pre during post, everybody's involved in different aspects of interacting with that customer. So I'm having a ball with it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:36]:

Okay, I'm glad to hear that. So you see it as a founder said, can I take this on for a little bit? As opposed to like, you're going to run sales for the rest of your life.

Mychelle Mollot [00:38:44]:

Yeah, I mean, I think at some point we're going to need ahead of sales because we plan to grow.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:51]:

Don't you feel like a lot of. Doesn't it for the interim, though, like clear up a lot of nonsense, like you're not sweating credit and attribution, you're just trying to hit the revenue number. Yeah, that is the one part of that argument that I do love is the alignment between sales and marketing. Like, if we didn't have to worry about who got credit for what. Or we could create the right incentives and goals to do that. With sales and marketing, your goal is revenue, and how you get there is this team plus this team equals revenue.

Mychelle Mollot [00:39:19]:

Exactly. I mean, it is impossible. There are so many touches. It's impossible to say who should get attribution. Somebody goes to a trade show, two years later, they interact with your website, three months later they inbound, or three months later, a sales rep bumps into them at a trade show again, and then, oh, is it a sales driven lead? Who cares? Collectively, you have brought somebody into your universe, which is, everybody should be celebrating that together.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:50]:

Cool. Okay, Mychelle, last question is for you to ask. Is there anything that I should have asked you about being a CMO? Your love of marketing, what you're doing at Knak? Before we wrap up, I think the.

Mychelle Mollot [00:40:00]:

Only question you should have asked me is, should everybody want to be a CMO?

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:05]:

Ooh, good question. Very good. You're hired. Hired? Heck yeah. Let's answer that. Should everybody want to be CMO?

Mychelle Mollot [00:40:13]:

Yeah, I think that is really important thing for people to think about because I actually struggled with it in my first CMO job, because when youre CMO, you dont get to play every day in the area youre most passionate about. Right. You get to dive in and then you have to come back up. So I think some people dont understand that and they just view it as well. All progression is good progression. And then ive seen some people become extremely miserable at that level of their career because they're not, they don't have that passion anymore because that passion was coming from that day to day activity. So you have to be sure that you really want it, that you're really ready.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:52]:

But what else? I've often said that, are you sure? It's like, are you sure you know how much people management and internal conversations that you're going to have to have? Yeah, there should almost be some type of, like, test you have to take. Like, are you sure you want to be CMO? And like, you have to go through this assessment and it says 68%, like you could, but here's some things you gotta be, gotta be aware of.

Mychelle Mollot [00:41:13]:

Yeah, no, I think that's a really important point, because I think you have to truly love coaching and mentoring people, and you have to be prepared to have hard conversations, and a lot of people just aren't. It's hard. It's hard to have hard conversations, but when you come into them with the intent of making somebody better at what they do, then it changes how you view the hard conversation. But some people, even with that knowledge, would find it hard to be a leader of a team where day in, day out, you have to have hard conversations. Jeff.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:42]:

Yeah. It's like, I only can relate to this now that I have children, and my kids are six and four and they're still little but growing, I start to see more of the things that when I was a kid, I thought my parents did because they were nuts. I'm doing them, and it's like, no, I see it now. Like, I'm sorry. Like, sometimes I want to just text my parents, be like, I'm sorry. Like, I get it now.

Mychelle Mollot [00:42:05]:

I'm becoming my parents. I remember that going through my head. Like, oh, my God, I just said something that my mom would have said 100%. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:13]:

But it's hard, you know, and, like, especially if you came up on the team and then, like, get promoted into CMO. Like, I remember feeling like I had a lot of close personal relationships and people who we were friends with. And now all of a sudden, it's this weird line between, like, man, this is going to be tough because, like, I got to have this hard conversation with this person who, like, we haven't really had that level yet. And you can't do things like, you got to kind of play this role of. You had a very private conversation with the CEO. They told you one thing. You got to go back to your team, share a message with them. They can't know all the context.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:46]:

It's like you're playing this weird game of messenger. Ultimately, your job is to serve your team, but you also have the management team and the CEO, and there's a lot of nuance. You can't be rolling your eyes in company meetings. You can't be gossiping anymore. Sometimes you just have to take the direction and be like, you wish you could say this to your team. Like, hey, why are we doing this? I want to just say, like, because we just have to. The CEO told me to. Right.

Mychelle Mollot [00:43:06]:

But I.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:07]:

But I can't necessarily say it in that way. There's just so much nuance in there that I think it's a great.

Mychelle Mollot [00:43:11]:

Yeah, that's a really important point. The last one you said, because that is part of leadership. Right. You. You can disagree with some of the strategy or some of the tactics, but when you're representing it to your team, you are 100% on board. Otherwise, you can't lead effectively. So, yeah, then that's hard. That can be hard sometimes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:30]:

All right, Mychelle, thanks for hanging out. I'm glad we finally got to hang out and do this.

Mychelle Mollot [00:43:33]:

Yeah, me too.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:35]:

I hope I can see you in person at some point soon and hang out with you and the team in Vermont.

Mychelle Mollot [00:43:40]:

In Vermont?

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:40]:

In Vermont. Yeah, let's do that.

Mychelle Mollot [00:43:42]:

We'll go skiing next time.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:43]:

Okay. Yeah. Wait, can you still ski? You said you had a catastrophic knee incident.

Mychelle Mollot [00:43:47]:

Oh, yeah, no, I got it all fixed. Yeah, no, we actually just did our leadership off site at Whistler's and we had a day of skiing, so. Yeah, I can ski. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:54]:

All right. Great to see you. I got a wrap. I got a kid running in off the bus. Great to see you. I'll talk to you soon.

Mychelle Mollot [00:43:59]:

All right, great. Take care. Bye bye.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:01]:

All right, goodbye.

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