#193: Growth | From Comms at Zoom to Marketing Leader at Neat, with Priscilla Barolo, Head of Marketing at Neat

In this episode, Dave is joined by Priscilla Barolo, former head of comms at Zoom (for nearly 10 years, including the pandemic) and current Head of Marketing at Neat, an Oslo-based video tech company. Neat’s tech is used around the world from major enterprises like Atlassian to the White House. With a decade-long career at Zoom, including during its hypergrowth through the pandemic, Priscilla is a expert in communications and B2B marketing leadership.

Dave and Priscilla cover:

• The path from communications to marketing leadership
• The unique challenges of marketing a physical product in the B2B tech space
• Building and scaling a global marketing team at a high-growth, remote-first company

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:08]:

What does it take to be a great marketing leader? Can you be a great marketing leader if you didn't come up through demand gen? Well, yes you can and we're going to tell you all about that today. My guest is an amazing marketing leader who came up through comms and PR and now runs marketing at a 500% person tech company and manages a 30 person marketing team. Priscilla Barolo is head of marketing at neat. NEAT is an Oslo based video tech company taking market share from industry leaders like Cisco and redefining what our post Covid working environments and meetings both look like and sound like. Neat's tech is used around the world from major enterprises like Atlassian to the White house to the LA Clippers. Priscilla was the 11th person hired at Zoom and she spent eight years there running comms. We talk about her comms lessons, how and why to hire a PR agency and we dig into running marketing at NEAT and selling a physical product in B2B.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:12]:

Here's my conversation with Priscilla Barolo. Priscilla, thanks for coming on the podcast here. Where are you based here in California?

Pricilla Barolo [00:01:19]:

I am in Carmel, California, about an hour and a half south of the Bay Area.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:23]:

I love the decorations behind you. I actually just moved in so I have all of my kids artwork and stuff over here on the floor.

Pricilla Barolo [00:01:31]:

I'm a mom.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:32]:

Yeah, it's great. I have it all in here and I need to put it up in the in this new office because it makes me happy to have some of that stuff in here.

Pricilla Barolo [00:01:39]:

So me too.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:40]:

Let's dive in. So first, can you maybe tell people who you are? What do you do and what is neat?

Pricilla Barolo [00:01:46]:

I'm Priscilla Barolo. I'm the head of marketing and communications for neat. Neat makes really beautiful and I would say deceptively simple video conferencing devices. So for people having Zoom in, Microsoft Teams meetings. So when you think of like that all in one audio, video bar or board or purpose built device on a desktop that you have your meetings on. That's what we do.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:09]:

Cool. So you are selling a physical product.

Pricilla Barolo [00:02:12]:

Which is a first for me. Yes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:14]:

Yeah. Okay, that's exciting. And then I want to talk about that and then just give people your background. What did you do before this?

Pricilla Barolo [00:02:21]:

I started my career in nonprofit programs and fundraising and that was interesting. But gosh, I made almost no money and I was living in a big city and I was like this, this is hard. So I went to business school and then out of business school I met someone who was one of the early employees at Zoom. And so I joined Zoom as an intern and like, I guess the 11th person there. And started as a sort of a generalist, literally the very early stage, like, and no experience going, okay, let me Google how to make a data sheet. Let me order a trade show pop up banner for our little tabletop booth. And then took. Became sort of more focused on communications and took the company through its IPO and sort of hypergrowth stage, the communications end of that, and then through into the COVID era where there was even more growth and a lot of strategic communications requirements.

Pricilla Barolo [00:03:15]:

And then I left in 2022. I spent a year and a half, took a sort of a half step back and consulted and sort of kept myself fresh. And then I started at NEAT about 13 months ago in my first full marketing role.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:29]:

I like that. It's like parents of a child. You know, my, my kids are now seven and five, but until they're like two, you refer to them, they're like, oh, she's eight months or she's 13 months. It's like, you know, exactly when you started at need, it's 13. I'm the same way. I'm like, yeah, I've been doing this for, for two years and two weeks and three days.

Pricilla Barolo [00:03:47]:

I'm like, I was going to say.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:48]:

Year, and I'm like, nope, nope, I'm taking them. I'm taking that month. Wait, so that's crazy. You, you were the 11th person at Zoom. Y work there. Holy cow.

Pricilla Barolo [00:03:57]:

It was just all 10 guys in a room. Just. They were. Half of them were cold calling, half of them were coding. And then there was me who was doing. Also I did like plan the holiday dinner or order the office supplies or all this kind of stuff. So kind of did a little bit of everything.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:14]:

Were you like, I, I went to business school to order office supplies a little bit.

Pricilla Barolo [00:04:18]:

I think because I knew that I was coming in, I was making a career transition, that I was like, okay, look, this is going to be a little rough. And I think similar to now where it's sort of, it was a company's market or whatever. So I was like, where can I get in? What can I do? And then also I think for me, I saw this, I didn't know that much, but I knew this company's growing all the time. And every time I meet with a customer, they'd go, how can I help you? What more can we do to get more people on this platform? Because I've tried everything and nothing works. And they were just Obsessed with it. I thought this is like, I don't know a lot, but I know that these are. Maybe if I hang out here for a while, this could be pretty good.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:59]:

That ended up turning into an eight plus year run. @ Zoom, which in the tech world is like a whole career, people are often at companies like one to two years maybe. Let's rewind to some of, like the early Zoom marketing strategy and marketing lessons. And I say that because I think one of the things that comes up the most on this podcast are see with founders today. And I'm especially curious from your view as a comms leader, the number one thing companies struggle with is like differentiation. Right. And Zoom comes out. And since I can remember the beginning of my career, we always had some type of video conferencing in some form.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:37]:

Right. What was the messaging strategy to get Zoom to land? Or was it quite literally like, this product is just better and we just need to tell people it's better?

Pricilla Barolo [00:05:46]:

Yeah. Part of this was the freemium and just try it. Like, I just say that to people that trade it. Just try it. Because the product was that much better. And I do believe, marketing communications, that you're. You can only do so much. The product has to be really good.

Pricilla Barolo [00:06:03]:

So I think even before we started marketing in earnest, like beyond what I was just doing with my, okay, let's try to make a deck kind of thing, there was already a lot of virality among, I'd say, like your itav people. Like, they were all telling each other because it is sort of a small ish industry. And then the other thing I think was we, we did come out early with some pretty boldish messaging. Like, it would be at these trade shows and people would go, we use this brand and it sucks. How is your. How are you any different? And the first thing I remember, well, it doesn't suck. And then, you know, you'd get it. So we went to go do our billboards.

Pricilla Barolo [00:06:40]:

We were video conferencing. It doesn't suck. And that was totally wrote. And we put the URL and it was really simple and did a bunch of imagery and all this stuff. And I've actually seen it now. Everyone, in a while, I'll drive up in the Bay Area and I go, they're using something that doesn't suck. I'm like, I think I did that first. But that got some attention.

Pricilla Barolo [00:06:54]:

And there were people, a couple people who were like, that's grass or something. But it got attention and it resonated because people really felt like Their experience sucked before. And then as we sort of evolved the brand, we moved into this like, meet happy, huddle happy kind of thing because it just. It more matured it as we got closer to our ipo. But I think we started out a little bold and we literally were just like, get on the platform. Just try it once. And that was sort of all we really had to do.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:20]:

How many of the lessons that you took from Zoom are like, embedded in your DNA as a marketing leader now?

Pricilla Barolo [00:07:28]:

Basically, everything I learned, I learned at Zoom. So a lot of it. I mean, in terms of when I got here, I'd say I looked at the marketing mix and thought like, okay, this needs to be more rounded out, because I think of the customer journey as sort of more messy and more people come in your business all different ways. And I was like, we need to diversify this, for example, or a real focus on things like third party validation, which was really important at Zoom. Especially when you're talking about differentiating your product. You can say it till you're blue in the face, you need someone else to say it. And then the importance of brand awareness. And everyone wants brand awareness, but people get really nervous about paying for it because it's one of your more expensive and harder to define the ROI on it.

Pricilla Barolo [00:08:07]:

So knowing we had to do that, like, those kind of lessons I think were really important. But also I did, I would say, have to come in and eat some humble pie, because it's much more complex to, you know, as we talked about getting sell a physical product on a global scale. Like, I had never heard the term homo ligation before I started here. Like customs and inventory manufacturing and all that kind of stuff. And then also it's a channel forward sales motion here. So when you think about, like, the layers of relationships you have to build with the channel and trying to understand their programs and all this kind of stuff. So there was just a lot more complexity to every decision I was making. I was like, oh, have you thought of this consequence or that consequence or this factor or that factor? So I think I was able to take these sort of like, big picture things I learned, but also go like, these people have been running their business for four years and they're pretty damn good at it.

Pricilla Barolo [00:08:58]:

So let's try to listen also and make get the right people in the room.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:03]:

I've seen this as the other side. Like, I've been a marketing manager and they brought in a VP of marketing over me, and they brought in someone who had an amazing resume and they thought that they were going to be awesome. And I've seen this happen multiple times, where as great as your experience was at Zoom, you can't just take that playbook and copy and paste it and put it into the new company. And so it seems obvious to be like, oh, I gotta listen and learn. But it's like, no. How can you take those lessons and then, like, apply them to this new business? But there's so much nuance, and I think it's one of the challenges of marketing. I think on the surface, marketing is actually pretty simple. It's like, what's the company strategy? What's the company goals? What should marketing do? But then you start to dig into that, and it's like, there's so much nuance.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:44]:

Well, what does the market look like? What is the budget? What is it? What is the company? Where do they want to go? Who can you actually hire right now? Which channels are saturated or not? There's so much in there. I do want to talk about what you're doing at neat. I want to talk about the team and how you run things over there. But I just want to go back to the Zoom piece for a minute. Can you just talk about your role as head of comms? Like, what is. What is ahead of comms? What was the purview of your job there? And what were you responsible for driving and measuring? And I'm asking because I think PR and comms is something that traditionally founders and marketers have a hard time measuring. I've seen companies invest in this role when they really have the right person, and it's awesome, and it's a huge value add. But I've also seen companies say, we need a head of comms, we need a PR person, and then what are the goals? Like, why are we doing this? So what.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:31]:

What were the big things that you were focused on at Zoom?

Pricilla Barolo [00:10:34]:

It's funny, the more comms people I talk to, the more I see that that org can be structured in all kinds of ways and encompass all. It could be everything from I'm a PR person to I own GR and all. I mean, think of like. Like the head of comms are for meta, for example, who does all these things?

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:49]:

Like, essentially, marketing. Is comms also at the same time?

Pricilla Barolo [00:10:52]:

Yeah, exactly. Whereas I just sat on the marketing leadership team, but I had my very specific purview, which was pr, internal comms, content, social, strategic comms, which could also, I mean, effectively be crisis comms. And then there's something else that I am forgetting. So, you know I'd say like a moderate comms scope and measurement depended on the function. I would say that there wasn't a huge focus on measurement for me. Some pr, you kind of feel like it's going well or you don't. So we kind of actually made our own homegrown metric of like number of feature pieces where we were really, it was about us. Then I had like something called like a meaty mention, which was like a paragraph or two with a quote, things like that.

Pricilla Barolo [00:11:40]:

And then I'd have just like mentions and we'd set a target based kind of on what we knew we were doing that quarter. And. And a lot of it came from like, well, what's the business going to give us? But then also, what are we going to drive ourselves? So. So trying to hit a mix there. But it was like our own thing that we made up. And tracking is always really hard too, because it's especially at a global scale. And then when you get to the level of PR zoom was getting and then you also have your agencies going, we've got a lot of PR this month. I'm like, yeah, but like, that's because the pandemic hit and 10,000 articles were written about us.

Pricilla Barolo [00:12:09]:

Did you generate, you know, so.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:10]:

Oh man, that's so good. I came up in pr. My first job out of school was a PR internship and I worked in PR for like three or four years coming out. And later when I hired for PR as a marketing leader, that was one of my biggest things. I'm like, hold on, hold on. You all. I cannot take credit for this.

Pricilla Barolo [00:12:28]:

This is.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:28]:

Came in inbound to me and we responded and we got.

Pricilla Barolo [00:12:32]:

Yeah, thanks for setting the meeting. No, and I am, I would say probably the hardest driving. I'm just sidetracking. But like with PR agencies is like, I tend to go for like boutique.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:42]:

I can imagine working for you.

Pricilla Barolo [00:12:45]:

I'm like just picking at things they send us because I'm like, oh, yeah. Or, you know, I had one when I was freelancing, where the person sent. They sent in their report, it had like their press release. They wrote about getting this client as their client. And I was like, is that. That's the PR you're. So anyway, social might be share of voice, might be engagements and all those kind of social metrics, views, all that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:07]:

Okay, here's a good one. Here's a good question for you that I just thought of. Who should hire? Like, let's talk about hiring a PR agency for your company. Okay. I would say most of the people listening to this are not at the scale of zoom. I would say like our sweet spot of listener is probably between a 10 and $100 million company. So they're, they're not at like the massive public company levels of PR. I run marketing at a startup that's doing like 20, 30 million ARR.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:32]:

We want to invest in PR. What would Priscilla do?

Pricilla Barolo [00:13:35]:

So first of all I'd want to figure out what the, like we talked a little bit about like what the business can bring the pr. Are executives willing to engage and put time into things like interviews or reviewing contributed content, things like that. Do I need some education internally on what's the value of this and what you're going to need to do? Do we have products we're pushing out, things we can talk about, growth metrics, all that kind of stuff. Then I never want to be someone's smallest client. So I will look for boutique agencies, particularly with like a really good geographic focus.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:10]:

So why is that by the way?

Pricilla Barolo [00:14:12]:

You're just going to get their C team. If you go to these big agencies, you're not going to get the people who pitched you. That's always one of my questions when I'm interviewing these agencies. Like so who on this meeting is in my team my day to day? Because often it's like oh well you might see this one person every three months at your qbr, but otherwise it's these three.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:32]:

Yeah.

Pricilla Barolo [00:14:32]:

And maybe they are fantastic and really hard driving and great. But I want to know there's a senior person who has the relationship sus who's in every meeting. So like I work right now with 6 Eastern in the US which is Emily Gerber's agency and they're, it's probably like less than 10 people in that agency work with Mike Worldwide in the UK they're a little bigger. But like that's sort of the level that, that I'm working with right now. And I think also you have to set the expectations internally of like these agencies. Depending on the geography we might be able to get them for seven or $8,000. But that's more like a freelancer. It might be more like 12 or $14,000 because I think people.

Pricilla Barolo [00:15:08]:

And then when you do that in your annual budget you're like we're spending over $100,000 a year in PR. So like you have to make sure people internally are comfortable with that and what kind of metrics you can drive. I think the other thing I run into with these agencies is they'll have a Couple like big ideas. But then when you ask them, okay, well like is that included? And often it's like, no, no, no. This is like a $30,000 research project we need you to run and then we could use that to pitch. And then that never really manifests. So it's also like really ask a bunch of tough questions.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:35]:

I'd say, okay, this is good. People are going to love this topic. Also those two agencies are going to get something inbound after this now.

Pricilla Barolo [00:15:42]:

Great.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:43]:

Which is great. So in my experience in hiring a PR agency, I think I did the wrong thing, which is maybe I'm wrong about this. But is it also one of those things that like you, not just the executives, but you have to be willing to invest in this because there are so many things that like they don't own or they don't know. And so I always was like frustrated because it's like, okay, hey, we're going to do this. I'm like, great. And then like, and we need this from you. And we need this from you. And we need this from you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:08]:

Is there some level of like you need to be willing to invest and help the PR agency succeed?

Pricilla Barolo [00:16:14]:

Yeah. So things like what are our talk tracks? What executives could talk on those. Okay, I'm going to set up those meetings and make sure that you've kind of got the download from them so then you can go out as you see, you know, rapid response, you know, like, oh yeah, that guy Rick, he's really good at talking about that. They need to be able to connect those dots as you have like product announcements, bringing them in early so that they can understand all, you know, having to explain, explain both here's the product and here's why it matters and here's the customer that care about like you have to really explain all this stuff to them. And then you do have to be willing to I poo poo on research reports. But are there in some markets I'm thinking of that are like a little tougher than others. You, you might need to be willing to do things like contributed content and pay for play a little bit to support some of the earned media. And so yeah, I do think you, you have to you, they need care and feeding to be successful.

Pricilla Barolo [00:17:06]:

So it's definitely a two way street.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:08]:

It's almost like hiring, hiring any agency. It's like the better brief I can write and the more I can invest in like what I want to get out of this, the more success we're going to have together. I think anytime I've been like, oh, we should do events. Let's hire an events person. Where it's like, no, we should, like, internally do this event on our existing team for like a quarter, and then, like, see how that goes. And so maybe there's some element of, like, let's start to do a little of things in this PR playbook. And then, like, as we start to find some pockets of success, maybe then we go hire an agency to, like, really blow this thing out.

Pricilla Barolo [00:17:40]:

Yeah, I think that could definitely make sense.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:42]:

And then how do you think about the media landscape? So that's the other thing about PR that is tricky to me in that, like, when I started. So when I worked in PR, it was like 2009, 2010. Like, TechCrunch was in its heyday, VentureBeat. There were so many blogs and publications. And now we've kind of seen this not only consolidation of media, but what I think of as PR has a lot of it has shifted to social media. And so just as valuable as getting that earned media coverage in a publication is like having a founder with a strong presence on LinkedIn. And that can drive a lot. And I just was a founder friend of mine that I've been doing some advising with.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:23]:

They just announced their company and they're working with a PR company, and they needed to wait two weeks because they were doing this exclusive with TechCrunch, and I was getting so frustrated. I'm like, man, you have 70,000 followers on LinkedIn. Everybody knows who you are. They've been waiting for you to announce your next company. Like, you quite literally need to say, we're now open for business and, like, the floodgates are going to start. But you get where I'm going with this. It's like, we want to put our executives, like, we want to get them press in CNBC and New York Times, but, like, those outlets are so. They're so hard to get in.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:52]:

The fundraising thing has gone crazy. Everyone's talking about AI venture capital. You know, raising $100 million is not and is not a big deal anymore.

Pricilla Barolo [00:18:59]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:59]:

How do you balance that? What is meaningful coverage now?

Pricilla Barolo [00:19:02]:

It is really, really hard to be successful if your brand isn't already big in pr. Because literally, in my experience, journalists is like, oh, this company. Okay, then I'll write about it. Or I've never heard of your company. Like, you better be exactly targeting something I'm already really interested in, already writing about. And, like, the best coverage we've gotten was literally from the PR person being, like, personal friends with the journalist and just pushing it over the finish line in a way that I don't think we would have necessarily been able to otherwise. So I do think this is where setting expectations appropriately internally, because you will have these senior people who are like, well, this is big news to us and it's big news to our customers. Why wouldn't this be on cnbc? And it's like, because it's not big news to them.

Pricilla Barolo [00:19:48]:

So I think this is where getting a steady beat of press in your trades, like people who cover your really specific areas. So, like, for us, it's like AV integrators or UC today or these kind of things and having that always. That kind of beat there, running and making sure we kind of care and feed for those. And also analysts because they kind of operate in that space of both social media and they will often write for these sort of trade publications. I think that's kind of where I set the expectations. And then we just try to work with. It's almost like, try your best some of these other ones and rely a lot of relationships and try to find the angle and get lucky. And then also we've relied on partners too.

Pricilla Barolo [00:20:30]:

Neat. Did this early on when I was working at Zoom, they relied on Zoom for some media. And then as I was rolling out with the Clippers and now I'm working on another partnership, I turned to the Clippers and I said, I don't know, sports journalists. Like, help me out.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:41]:

So what do you got?

Pricilla Barolo [00:20:42]:

Yeah, exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:44]:

That could be a thing for like vetting a pr, a proper PR agency. It's like you almost might. Sometimes it's. You're paying for the relationships. And so you have this agency who has these publications. Right.

Pricilla Barolo [00:20:52]:

I want to hear specific ideas with specific names of journalists and specific publications when you're coming to me with a pitch.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:59]:

Love that. That's our ROI on this episode right here. We're going to help you. That's what you need to look for. Okay, one more PR thing and then we'll. We'll move on. You mentioned developing talk tracks. That's something that comes up at a lot of companies.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:10]:

Any. Do you have a framework for that? Do you have a process for that? You might just know a couple interesting things and they feel. Right. How do you develop talk tracks so.

Pricilla Barolo [00:21:20]:

Well, I think more about like a core messaging framework for the companies. If you're a comms person, I do think that you own this and it doesn't necessarily have to track into everything everyone does because your whole company is communicators and you can't control that. But, like, when I got to neat, one of the first things I did was sort of sit down and try to be like, okay, what is this company in one sentence? What is in three sentences? And then, like, what are the pillars? What are the things? Is it simplicity? Is it sort of future of work? Is it these different kind of pillars? And then from those you go, okay, then what's the two sentences on that? What's the five sentences on that? What's the proof points? And sometimes this is just literally like going and looking for public data on things like, you know, work from home trends or whatever, until you have this sort of pyramid built out of messaging themes and pillars, right? And then you track that through. But honestly, that comes from going back to our early discussion, like, a lot of conversations with people who all your product people and your engineers and your PMMs and those kind of people, and what are they seeing? And revenue people and what do people care about and all that. And then trying to connect that all in. And then that can lead to talk tracks. But I also think it's a little bit executive by executive when we're talking about pr, because some of them are just brilliant and they have great talk tracks. And it's really about going, like, tweak this, tweak that, align this line.

Pricilla Barolo [00:22:39]:

That better be sure to hit these three things about this announcement. And then some of them, it's like, we're going to go Full Media Training 101. Here's your contracts.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:48]:

Some founders and execs, you're just like, man, she's awesome. We just want to let her freestyle a little bit on this one. And that's where the good stuff comes out.

Pricilla Barolo [00:22:56]:

That's my CEO right now.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:57]:

I'm just like, oh, how great is that?

Pricilla Barolo [00:22:59]:

These two things. Have at it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:01]:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, what was interesting about Zoom, I also think a big ingredient here is, like, the founding story, right? And so, like, Eric at. At Zoom, wasn't he, like, a big engineering leader at WebEx or something like that?

Pricilla Barolo [00:23:15]:

WebEx, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:16]:

And I'm sure with Neat Now, I'm sure the founders, you're doing hard tech, you're doing physical products. I'm sure the people that started this company weren't like, hey, we have an idea to make lots of money. There's probably some interesting backstory there that makes for a great pr, right?

Pricilla Barolo [00:23:30]:

Well, yeah, and I think a lot of that's connecting it to back to your pillars of, like, quality and things like that because at least for neat, there's this thing in Norway called the Video Valley. It's like the Silicon Valley in Norway. You have this like deep, deep expertise in hardware, video conferencing. So like Tanberg and pepsic and Econo and all those companies came out of Oslo, Norway. And so those same people who built those went and founded neat. So it's almost the same idea of people who have a ton of experience, which was the same thing as Eric Yuan and then going, we're going to take all that, but then we're going to just build something new from scratch from the start without all this legacy code or whatever's holding us back or. So, yeah, I think it's this. And it really just.

Pricilla Barolo [00:24:15]:

Yes, it's nice if it appeals to a journalist, but the important thing is that it appeals to a customer. Because that's what you're looking for.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:20]:

Yeah, that's right.

Pricilla Barolo [00:24:21]:

At the end of the day anyway.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:22]:

If everybody's buying my product and sales are great, but we're getting no press, it's fine.

Pricilla Barolo [00:24:27]:

Yeah. Actually really agree with that Solves all problems.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:30]:

All right, let's talk about neat. So LinkedIn tells me the company has between 201 and 500 employees. But maybe before we talk about marketing, let's level set and talk about size and stage of neat and then tell us about your marketing team.

Pricilla Barolo [00:24:43]:

NEAT is at a really fun size and stage. So I don't know the exact number, but it's between 400 and 500 employees. And the company was founded just a few months before the pandemic. So it is a very remote workforce because we sort of hire people everywhere based on what we needed. There's. There's an Oslo hq, but people are all over and Stage is fun. It's like my favorite stage because you're like, you're funded, you're growing, you. You have what you need to succeed.

Pricilla Barolo [00:25:10]:

When I consult, I work with some companies where it's like we're growth hacking and we're trying. We have what we need to succeed, but it's still like a four and something people. So we. I know everyone's name and if I want to get something done, I can get it done. And it's not, oh, well, in six months. Put this in a PowerPoint presentation. Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:27]:

You gotta have a meeting about the meeting about the meeting.

Pricilla Barolo [00:25:29]:

Yeah, exactly. So I would say it's, it's at the kind of pre IPO growth stage and it's really, really fun. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:36]:

So 400, 500 people and then what's the marketing team look like?

Pricilla Barolo [00:25:39]:

The marketing team is. I have BDRS too. So it's 30 to 40 people in the. In the org. I don't know where we're at right now, but that includes a dozen or so of bdr. So I'd say it's still fairly lean team, but again enough to get things done.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:53]:

Yeah, absolutely. And what are the key roles on the team? And I'm sure you have your like org chart just kind of looking for like the buckets, you know, product marketing, brand BDRs.

Pricilla Barolo [00:26:03]:

Like I have a bucket that's like I would call field channel campaign bucket. You know, the people are out there all over the world making it happen. And then I have a BDR bucket and then I have folks that I call my like subject matter expert marketers, writers, web, digital ops. Those. Those kind of people. Interestingly, design and PMM actually sit in separate orgs. They were already in their own orgs when I got to meet and I was like, well, I'm already taking on all this marketing stuff. I'm happy for those to just sit in Oslo.

Pricilla Barolo [00:26:31]:

So those are more cross functional relationships.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:34]:

What's it been like going from running a comms team to managing a gaggle of BDRs?

Pricilla Barolo [00:26:40]:

Luckily I have a fantastic BDR leader, so it is a lot of trust and saying, okay, explain that to me. And then saying, okay, explain it to me like I've never run a BDR or before. And then he re explains it to me.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:54]:

You're laughing about that. But like there's so much value in that. I do think sometimes we get so caught up into like, oh my gosh, I read this thing on LinkedIn and it said like the ratio of BDRS needs to be this and they need to do that. It's like, yeah, if you just explain this like very simply to someone who doesn't know this world. Oh, they're trying to reach out to people to get them interested in our business or follow up on inbound. Okay, how do we make that more efficient?

Pricilla Barolo [00:27:16]:

Exactly. And I think that's where the like asking questions on questions comes from. Because you might say, okay, well this is the ratio. And then if I've been googling, I might go, but actually the reason that ratio is that way is because it's an international segment. Right. And so they need more management or whatever it is. Like you do need to sort of. And I would say this is true of all the sort of marketing expansion I've had to do is you do have to just hire really good leaders and then ask them a lot of questions and then trust them and advocate for them.

Pricilla Barolo [00:27:40]:

And so that's, that's how I've been running a BDR function.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:43]:

I guess it's a great lesson. So a lot of people that listen to this want to be marketing leaders or are current marketing leaders or aspiring ones. And I think I've done so many interviews with CMOs over the years and myself coming up, I would have this. I still do, obviously. I'm sure we all do this imposter syndrome of like, oh my gosh, I don't know pr, I don't know demand gen, I don't know bdrs. But your job as a marketing leader is to like, know how to find the right people. You're not a solo consultant. You have a team of 30 to 40 people.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:11]:

You're not supposed to be doing this job all by yourself. And so isn't it about understanding? It's cliche to say it's all about the people, but when it comes to building a team, it kind of is. That is the way, right?

Pricilla Barolo [00:28:21]:

It is. It's at least all about, I'd say those first couple levels of management. Who's running your region, who's. Who's running your function. And I think, yeah, tons of imposter syndrome. But Janine, who's our CEO, who was the CMO of Zoom, she's always talked about this where it's like, marketing is a really broad discipline. So you're going to have a product marketer who becomes the same, or you're going to have a comms marketer or brand marketer or a hardcore demand gen marketer. One of them, they're always going to have stuff that they don't, they're not as strong at and don't know about.

Pricilla Barolo [00:28:53]:

I think the also the other important thing is just leaning into it. I got here and I was like, lead handling. I can see my common sense and whatever experience. I had a marketing leadership team, this is a problem. I'm going to sink down into this world. And part of that was just like, get the right people in the room, book the meeting, take the notes, create the slack channel, send the action items. Like, I don't have to be the expert, I have to be the person who pushes on it. And I'm doing it again now with another project where I'm like, I don't understand this, but I'm just going to make the meeting and pull the people and make sure it happens.

Pricilla Barolo [00:29:28]:

And then. And Then lo and behold, it happens. Like someone has to be. It can feel like, oh, you know, should your head of marketing be project managing? Yeah, actually sometimes when it's really important that you have to sink in and do that and then you learn it as you go. So I'd say not only is it great people, but I've paid a lot less attention to PR this year and I've just doubled down in other areas because I know when I need to do PR, it'll come back to it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:50]:

I think naturally we want to gravitate towards the areas that we know really well and really strong. And so it would actually be easy for you to like over index on PR and not dive in deep. But you know that area better so you know where you got to, you know, dive in deep. Take me into Priscilla's rhythms and routines. As a marketing leader, what do you like to do with your team? One on ones, team meetings, that type of stuff.

Pricilla Barolo [00:30:11]:

So I'll say because we're almost completely remote, I've put structure around this in a way that I don't know that I would, would have to if we were all sitting in a room together.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:22]:

So does everybody on the team have your product, by the way? Do they all use neat for all of their video?

Pricilla Barolo [00:30:27]:

Oh yeah, we, when you come on, you get a neat frame, you get a neat bar, you get a few neat devices. And then we now have a San Jose office and all our offices are totally outfitted too. So that's what we're doing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:39]:

Team rhythms, routines.

Pricilla Barolo [00:30:40]:

Yeah. So we have a weekly leadership meeting which is pretty, pretty broad because I don't just have my directs in it. I have people who are like responsible, like I said, for a region or a function, who their opinion was really important in there. And then I do monthly, I do a full staff meeting all the way, including like my bdrs or and anyone who's in the org and then I do one to ones. But the cadence varies by like seniority and complexity and how closely we need to be aligned. So like the person who runs my entire field and channel and campaigns org, she and I meet every week. Whereas my BDR guy who's like just on and he'll slack me if he needs something, we meet monthly and then all the way to like there are some, you know, junior employees where I meet them twice a year and then sort of people who run a country I meet every quarter. So that's how I've done it.

Pricilla Barolo [00:31:30]:

Just because, I mean, if I filled up my calendar with one to ones every week I would get nothing else done. And then I do a QBR with my team but actually I like to think in sort of halfs. So sometimes the QBR is kind of a check in at the quarter points and then big. A lot of big planning in like July and sort of December timeframe. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:49]:

So do you not do a lot of one on ones?

Pricilla Barolo [00:31:53]:

I would say probably my in a week I might have four or five but two of those are cross functional with our CRO and our PMM leader. And then I also do one to ones with like our America's leader and our international leader. And so I would say that I more rely on kind of group meetings and asynchronous. I actually have a PowerPoint that I make my leaders they're upgraded it they'll say that it's the only thing I'll say. I try to get asynchronous updates because often I'm like traveling or something. I'm like what's going on in Emea or something? Or I'll just shoot people messages or start meetings with them but I don't know why I'm.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:31]:

Yeah, I was reading Brian Halligan who's the founder of HubSpot wrote this thing with Sequoia like a week or two ago just kind of lessons from the HubSpot days. And I think this is maybe different as the CEO but he said he used to do one on ones all the time and be super involved in the day to day and then more as the company growed. He was like we don't do them as much, we do more like he said he used to share feedback privately in one on ones and then over time it just became like let's do one bigger meeting and let's work on the hard stuff together. And obviously there's some things that you have to communicate on a one to one basis but I've kind of always had this love hate relationship with the one on ones because when you do them all the time it does kind of open up. It's like opens this door to just like let's have a meeting where we just complain about all the things.

Pricilla Barolo [00:33:18]:

And I was gonna say they're kind of complain fests or. Yeah, we're not aligned across and I have to be the person who's aligning everyone versus like just getting the team together for an hour, an hour and a half each week. I think also I try to think about also people will hold things off till they're one to one and I'M like, oh no, this is something you should have brought to me a week ago. And they're like, oh well, you know, I knew we were meeting. So I do try to with the one to ones. Yeah. Personnel. Any kind of thing they have with their team that we can't talk about in a big group when they start getting into blockers and stuff.

Pricilla Barolo [00:33:49]:

My questions, I'm not impatient but I'm like, okay, here you are here the context. Like is this something you're solving right now and you just want to keep me aware of it or is this something you need me to go shake some trees and send some slacks? What do you want me to do here? And just sort of try to keep it. To keep it productive. I guess.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:07]:

I like having people do more work up front and so hey, you need to fill out this doc. But I like the idea of like let's handle all of the business stuff. The status updates on projects and goals and key milestones and then we can handle that asynchronously. And then if there's something that we really need to talk about, let's then have a meeting. I think it's very easy to slip into meeting culture meeting for this meeting for that right now. It's so different for me now I run a remote company. There's only five of us. But like we have basically two meetings a week and we can run the entire business in slack.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:37]:

And I think more of that can be possible today.

Pricilla Barolo [00:34:39]:

Plus they just get pushed off and canceled anyway. So I give when you have it as move, move, move and then suddenly exactly your monthly one to one you have two in the same week because you moved it three times and yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:52]:

Anything that I should have asked you about marketing and running marketing at neat?

Pricilla Barolo [00:34:56]:

No, I don't think so. I mean I think one thing is there's also the presentational cadence like the cross functional cadence.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:02]:

Oh, I was actually going to ask you that. A common question is like how do I marketing is doing all this. This is a great question for a former comm leader. I guess we still are but like marketing is doing all this stuff. What's the right way to communicate all of that with the rest of the company? How do I not share too much but how do I get people to pay attention and care? So that's. I'm interested in hearing your answer to that or what you all do.

Pricilla Barolo [00:35:24]:

So first of all, I do think this is where like a good relationship with your. Your CRO can be any. Because like I have now a set place at our like revorg yearly kickoff, the, the virtual one, the in person one. And then like the half year kickoff is like, I have a good 20 minutes and I work specifically with him on what do your people want to hear about? Here's what I'm doing. Does this make sense? So I think collaborating with him has been important. I would say my all hands updates are more like ad hoc. Right. It's like, oh, hey, we're announcing.

Pricilla Barolo [00:35:54]:

When I announce the Clippers partnership internally or when we shift a big process or I'll do something like, I'll just take a piece of marketing, go like, I don't think people know enough about our case studies. Where do we find them? Here we go like, and we'll just do them more ad hoc. I think the one thing is whenever I do the presenting is I put a ton of work into that. At least earlier in my career. There's this feeling of like, I just want to do the work. Why do I always have to go out and like educate people and try to get people on board? Like, why can't they just let me do my work? And it's like, I think once I leaned into like that is the work, that is the job is this trust building and that I think once I was able to lean into it, take it really seriously, especially when you're representing other people's work, I think then I became more successful at it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:35]:

If the product team just was like, don't worry about what's on the roadmap. You'll know when it comes. You'd be like, what the heck, I can't work like this.

Pricilla Barolo [00:36:42]:

Yeah. So I do try to lean into it, but I'd say it's more, I more push doing it to our revenue org because I do think they're probably our most important stakeholders. And then I go all company for like big, big news. I also do a lot asynchronously, like, it doesn't have to be presentations. It can be putting something in the general chat of just like flagging. Like, we've got a ton of press lately and I was trying to have like a cta, like, you guys should, you know, share these with your networks or something like that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:06]:

Yeah, yeah. I think you gotta understand the audience and your audience in this case is internal people. How do you get them to care? Right.

Pricilla Barolo [00:37:12]:

What's it for me? The sales guys?

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:15]:

Yeah. Okay, this will be my final question, but we can, we can wrap on this. Tell me about what's different about selling a physical product than selling software.

Pricilla Barolo [00:37:24]:

I do think so.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:25]:

We talked about marketing the marketing mix. Yeah.

Pricilla Barolo [00:37:28]:

But I think with the marketing mix, I think first of all because it's a physical product. And then also this goes to like the B2B relationship based industry is like we're quite heavy in in person events, trade shows, partner events, even our own hosted events. I would love it if there was a more cost effective time effective way to do this. But like I do think to some degree you do build that strongest brand one person at a time. And then also people need to get there and touch the product and ask questions specific to their situation and understand how this video conferencing bar is different from that video conferencing bar. Like that's hard to get necessarily just from a data sheet or spec sheet. Right. So I do think in person events are a really big part of our mix and that's where looking at like getting more rigorous around things like payback analysis and metrics and what exactly came from one event has been important because they're, they're expensive.

Pricilla Barolo [00:38:18]:

And then channel marketing, because in B2B a lot of the physical devices come through, go through, you know, distribution and channel. So running a lot of programs with them, putting a lot of budget towards that. And again it's like it's not a shortcut thing. I'd love to sign a partner and then I'm just top of mind forever. But it's actually it's the continuous relationship building and co marketing together. So those were both running when I got to neat. So I think what I've done is optimize those and make sure we're doing the right things but then also build more of a marketing mix around them. In terms of stuff.

Pricilla Barolo [00:38:50]:

I have a lot of comfort zone in things like webinars and email marketing and all that and brand marketing. But I think that reliance on getting people physically with your technology and building those channel relationships has been something really, really different. In key with the physical product are.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:07]:

Events a thing or is like everything through channels and distributors? Like are you ever, do you ever have like a big trade show and like you have your product on display and.

Pricilla Barolo [00:39:15]:

Oh yeah, we do. I'd say probably like half of what we do is with and to the channel. Right. And so then the other half would be like either something like Infocom or ise, those big trade shows or our alliance partner like a Zoomtopia or Microsoft Ignite or we also just host, we'll host them ourselves and do like a road show, just bring it on the road and Especially we can partner with an alliance partner or a technology partner or a channel partner to bring more new business to those. So, yeah, all kinds of events. You name it, we've tried it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:47]:

I said last question, but I lied. I didn't realize this, but, Janine, your CEO was the CMO at Zoom. Yes. Is it good to work for a former CMO as CEO?

Pricilla Barolo [00:39:57]:

The best.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:01]:

I knew that was going to be the answer.

Pricilla Barolo [00:40:03]:

Having spent time consulting you have. When I'm Talking to tech CEOs who came out of engineering, which is like most of them, I think it's a lot of explaining, a lot of justifying and those kind of things. And with her, it's just like, this is working, this is not working. We're doing this, we're doing that. And she's like, yep, got it. And then also, I think when you take, like, a big swing. We did with say that the Clippers partnership, that's the kind of thing where, like, you're a small company and you're going to go spend a bunch of money on something like these brand programs to have it be in partnership with your CEO and not something I had to sell and then bank my career on. I think that I'm really lucky in that sense because I know there's a lot of challenges for CMOs where it's like, you've got to be bold or you're not going to stand out.

Pricilla Barolo [00:40:47]:

But if you're bold, you're really betting your career on it. And I feel like I have a partnership and a mentorship from her that in all aspects of my work that I can rely on. So I wouldn't want to do it any other way.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:58]:

Yeah, well, you got somebody who speaks your language, and I bet there's so much, like, nonsense that you don't have to get into because she just gets it.

Pricilla Barolo [00:41:05]:

Yes, exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:06]:

Cool. All right, Priscilla, you're a treat. This was an awesome episode. Thanks for coming and hanging out with us on my B2B marketing podcast here. Go and follow Priscilla on LinkedIn. Check out what Neet is doing, and thanks for listening to this episode, and I'll talk to you later.

Pricilla Barolo [00:41:19]:

Thanks, Dave.

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