Podcast appearances and mentions of mike volpe

Maggie Sullivan (Morgan Kohan) is a star neurosurgeon who seemingly has it all, until her business partner is indicted for fraud and she finds herself charged with negligence. Looking to distance herself from the fallout, Maggie decides to leave Boston and return to her childhood home of Sullivan's Crossing, a rustic and remote campground set against the stunning coastline still run by her estranged father, Sully Sullivan (Scott Patterson). There, Maggie rekindles old friendships and builds new ones with the local residents, including a handsome newcomer, Cal Jones (Chad Michael Murray), who only serves to complicate her life further. As Maggie works on clearing her name and reputation, she is forced to confront her painful past, as she attempts to reconnect with a side of herself she had long forgotten. From executive producers Roma Roth and Christopher E. Perry, the team behind the hit series "Virgin River," SULLIVAN'S CROSSING is executive produced by Reel World Management in association with CTV and Fremantle with Roth also acting as showrunner. Mike Volpe and Mark Gingras serve as producers. For Fremantle, Michela Di Mondo and Hilary Martin are executive producing.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.

Maggie Sullivan (Morgan Kohan) is a star neurosurgeon who seemingly has it all, until her business partner is indicted for fraud and she finds herself charged with negligence. Looking to distance herself from the fallout, Maggie decides to leave Boston and return to her childhood home of Sullivan's Crossing, a rustic and remote campground set against the stunning coastline still run by her estranged father, Sully Sullivan (Scott Patterson). There, Maggie rekindles old friendships and builds new ones with the local residents, including a handsome newcomer, Cal Jones (Chad Michael Murray), who only serves to complicate her life further. As Maggie works on clearing her name and reputation, she is forced to confront her painful past, as she attempts to reconnect with a side of herself she had long forgotten. From executive producers Roma Roth and Christopher E. Perry, the team behind the hit series "Virgin River," SULLIVAN'S CROSSING is executive produced by Reel World Management in association with CTV and Fremantle with Roth also acting as showrunner. Mike Volpe and Mark Gingras serve as producers. For Fremantle, Michela Di Mondo and Hilary Martin are executive producing.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

In this episode of Turpentine VC, Erik sits down with Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. They discuss the evolution of venture capital–the transformative changes in the VC landscape since 2008, the rise of seed capital, multi-stage asset aggregators, and the professionalization of venture firms. Mike also shares Index Ventures' unique approach to building relationships with founders and fostering a strong company culture. The conversation also dives into challenges of building an open source business model in AI and the potential for smaller models and alternative architectures. 

I'm honored to introduce to you today: Father, Marine veteran, author and writer, Family Court victim, whistleblower, and absolute warrior in a battle for his children: Jim SiscoJim was referred to me by podcast regular and investigative journalist, Mike Volpe, and has an incredibly harrowing and ongoing family court case he is going to present today. He has been in a 2-year custody battle with his ex-wife who currently has full custody of his 3 children. As you've seen many times on this podcast, the proceedings in Family Court take advantage of good parents at the expense of children and rulings oftentimes - and horrifically - go in favor of abusive parents. Mike Volpe's work on ‘The Imagination' and in his own time over the past decade has showcased time and time again how the court treats children as human commodities and how the court system as a whole functions as a child trafficking racket and criminal enterprises. Although there are many answers to ‘how' children are often trafficked through Family Court and CPS, there is no reason more widely used across the board than a judge ruling ‘parental alienation' as a means to an end for parental custody. And if you watched the episode I did with Mike on Parental Alienation, you understand how this is essentially a blanket term that has no true quantifiable definition. The scary part about Parental Alienation is how liberally it's thrown around without any consistency and how everything and the kitchen sink can be labeled as ‘parental alienation' when it comes to parenting - even a sarcastic comment to an ex as you'll see in Jim's case. The court rulings to strip Jim of access to his children has all but torn apart his life. The last two years he has suffered immeasurably emotionally, financially and physically - including having a stroke as well as having to dish out over $200,000 in legal fees. James was and is a loving and caring father. Every parent that has found the courage to speak out about their custody battles in court is a hero and Jim is no exception. He may be a retired Marine, but he's a warrior through and through. We are going to be talking about his case today to both educate and ask you for your support. I ask that you please put away everything you are doing and give Jim your full attention. Before I finish introducing today's guest - I wanted to give a couple reminders and updates: If you'd like to be on the podcast as a guest or share any information privately with me, please email me at imagineabetterworld2020@gmail.com. You can also use this email if you'd like to be a part of my new book series featuring written survivor testimonies. You can find the video with all the details on how to submit YOUR testimony on any of my podcast channels. And lastly - I'd love your support on Substack where I'm taking up investigative journalism as an outlet for me personally to share about my podcast, guests, and advocacy work and you can Subscribe to me there at www.emmakatherine.substack.com. All my links are in the show notes and I'd love your support across all platforms! Thank you all for caring so deeply about survivors and for helping to make this the safest space on the internet for survivor disclosures!CONNECT WITH JAMES: TikTok: (97)Jim Sisco (@comment.sense) | TikTokPurchase James' Book: Amazon.com: The War Journal: A Young Marine's Discovery of Critical Life Lessons from Desert Storm eBook : Sisco, James: Kindle StoreSupport the show

Maggie Sullivan (Morgan Kohan) is a star neurosurgeon who seemingly has it all, until her business partner is indicted for fraud and she finds herself charged with negligence. Looking to distance herself from the fallout, Maggie decides to leave Boston and return to her childhood home of Sullivan's Crossing, a rustic and remote campground set against the stunning coastline still run by her estranged father, Sully Sullivan (Scott Patterson). There, Maggie rekindles old friendships and builds new ones with the local residents, including a handsome newcomer, Cal Jones (Chad Michael Murray), who only serves to complicate her life further. As Maggie works on clearing her name and reputation, she is forced to confront her painful past, as she attempts to reconnect with a side of herself she had long forgotten. From executive producers Roma Roth and Christopher E. Perry, the team behind the hit series "Virgin River," SULLIVAN'S CROSSING is executive produced by Reel World Management in association with CTV and Fremantle with Roth also acting as showrunner. Mike Volpe and Mark Gingras serve as producers. For Fremantle, Michela Di Mondo and Hilary Martin are executive producing.

Maggie Sullivan (Morgan Kohan) is a star neurosurgeon who seemingly has it all, until her business partner is indicted for fraud and she finds herself charged with negligence. Looking to distance herself from the fallout, Maggie decides to leave Boston and return to her childhood home of Sullivan's Crossing, a rustic and remote campground set against the stunning coastline still run by her estranged father, Sully Sullivan (Scott Patterson). There, Maggie rekindles old friendships and builds new ones with the local residents, including a handsome newcomer, Cal Jones (Chad Michael Murray), who only serves to complicate her life further. As Maggie works on clearing her name and reputation, she is forced to confront her painful past, as she attempts to reconnect with a side of herself she had long forgotten. From executive producers Roma Roth and Christopher E. Perry, the team behind the hit series "Virgin River," SULLIVAN'S CROSSING is executive produced by Reel World Management in association with CTV and Fremantle with Roth also acting as showrunner. Mike Volpe and Mark Gingras serve as producers. For Fremantle, Michela Di Mondo and Hilary Martin are executive producing.

Joining us this week is podcast regular, Family Court whistleblower, writer, podcast host, and investigative journalist extraordinaire, Mike Volpe!At this point, Mike truly needs no introduction as he's been on the show numerous times, but for those of you who are new here, Mike has devoted over a decade of his life to investigating, researching, and reporting on issues and stories not covered by MSM and some of his most prolific work has been in his work exposing corruption within the court system.  This time around, Mike will be presenting a plethora of explosive cases he's been working on that are going to blow your mind. From Missouri adoption horrors, to teenagers taking on social media to speak out where the court refuses to hear them, to a Parental Alienation racket in Maricopa County, you will hear these cases and more on this week's episode!  In addition to being a guest on tons of incredible podcasts, Mike also hosts his own podcast on YouTube under his channel, ‘Michael Volpe' as well as on his subscription-based Substack platform called “Michael Volpe Investigates” at www.MichaelVolpe.substack.com. Before we dive into today's episode I wanted to give a reminder that if you are a survivor or whistleblower who wants to share your story on the podcast, email me at IMAGINEABETTERWORLD2020@GMAIL.COM! I also just started a Substack that you can support at (1) Emma's Substack | Emma Katherine | Substack DONATE TO MIKE'S CAMPAIGN:Time To Hold California Courts Accountable | GoGetFundingSUBSCRIBE TO MIKE'S SUBSTACK:Michael Volpe Investigates | SubstackCONNECT WITH MIKE:Twitter: @mikevolpe - (1) mikevolpe (@mikevolpe) / TwitterEmail: mvolpe998@gmail.comYouTube: Michael Volpe - YouTubeFacebook: Michael Volpe | FacebookMIKE'S PLAYLIST ON THE IMAGINATION:Mike Volpe Playlist - YouTubeMIKE'S ARTICLES / VIDEOS FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE:1. Michael Volpe Investigates Special Report: Missouri adoption horror (substack.com)2. Suburban Chicago teenagers hope social media will save them from court nightmare (substack.com)3. The parental alienation racket in Maricopa County (substack.com)4. Michael Volpe Investigates Podcast the Impromptu: Episode 69 an Interview with Jared and Megan Bass (substack.com)5. Explosive lawsuit puts controversial father's rights firm in spotlight again (substack.com)6. CT v Paul Boyne: Landmark First Amendment Case Should Land CT Family Court in National Spotlight - Frank ReportCONNECT WITH 'THE IMAGINATION': All links: Your Profile (direct.me)Support the show

This week you are going to meet someone who was referred my way by podcast regular and investigative journalist and reporter, Mike Volpe of ‘Michael Volpe Investigates'. Introducing Gus Zucco - a man who's story Mike Volpe quoted as being ‘Stranger than fiction'. Joining us as well today is his amazingly supportive wife, Hillary. Spouses are the unsung heroes of survivor stories!Gus's story adds to our plethora of stories that take place in and out of the court room and shows the vast corruption that takes place from the top down targeting innocent individuals. In the words of Mike Volpe straight from his Substack at www.michaelvolpeinvestigates.com "In 2007, Gus donated a kidney to his then wife, Tracy Simms. Because he wasn't a match, he donated his kidney to a stranger which started a chain ending with Tracy getting a kidney.She was so appreciative that months later- while he was still recovering- she asked for a divorce.That's only the beginning of the madness. In their divorce settlement, she only received a token alimony payment: $1 per year for five years."In this week's episode, we are about to dive into Gus's harrowing story and fight for justice in his case. I ask that you give Gus your full attention as he walks us through his unique situation - it's important that we understand how these ‘INjustice systems' work and all the ways they can work against us. Gus's story has been ongoing for many years and it's time for his voice to be heard so that he may receive the justice he deserves after so many years of suffering and healing. Before we jump into Gus's story - I wanted to give a reminder that if you are a survivor or whistleblower who wants to share your story on the podcast or wants to share any information privately with me, you can now email me at IMAGINEABETTERWORLD2020@GMAIL.COM! Please send me a briefing of who you are and how I can support you whether it's through podcasting or sharing information. All of my social media and donation links are also in the shownotes. Your support across multiple platforms and financially make a huge difference in what I'm able to accomplish with reaching more people and having the means financially grow this podcast.CONNECT WITH GUS AND HILLARY: GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/299a2dceRESOURCES: Mike Volpe Investigates: Michael Volpe Investigates Podcast the Impromptu: Episode 66 an Interview with Hillary Styer and Gus Zucco (substack.com)The Frank Report: Man Who Donated Kidney to Save Wife's Life Threatened With Jail Based on Legal Trick She Played Over $1 Dollar a Year Alimony - Frank ReportCONNECT WITH THE IMAGINATION:Email: imagineabetterworld2020@gmail.comBuy Me a Coffee: Emma Katherine is Artist (buymeacoffee.com)All links: Emma Pietrzak on Direct.meWebsite:Stand By Survivors - Everyone Has A Story...SXS Merch: https://my-store-c980d5.creator-spring.comSurvivor Store: Survivor Store (standbysurvivors.com)Support the show

The Doc Washburn Show, May 25th, 2023 - Episode 387  Journalist Mike Volpe Tells Us How Easy It Is For The Government To Take Your Kids Away - Especially If You Disagree With Them On The Transgender Issue - On This Special Edition Of The Doc Washburn Show!!!

Joining us this week is podcast regular, Family Court whistleblower, writer, podcast host, and investigative journalist extraordinaire, Mike Volpe!If you're new here, Mike's work on exposing the corrupt Family Court system has been recognized and esteemed internationally for over a decade. I'd argue to say that there's very few people in the entire world who truly understand the court system like he does and the number of children and parents he's given a voice to is astounding. Mike's been on the show numerous times and has covered everything from Parental Alienation to the ‘wrongfully accused' to how Silicon Valley executives get preferential treatment in court. If you've missed any of his episodes, I'll link his playlist below in the show notes for you!This week, Mike is going to talk about a subject matter that is becoming increasingly more prevalent and concerning in the family court systems: The Transgender Agenda and how it's being monetized and manipulated in court at the expense of our children. This is a hot-button topic and it's more important than ever to make ourselves aware of the dangers facing our children and the biases happening in favor of the abusive parents. If you are listening on Spotify or iTunes, you can check out either my YouTube or Bitchute channels to check out the visuals Mike prepared for us to see today during his presentation.This is not an episode debating transgenderism in fully developed adults who can make their own decisions - it's about the dangers this movement places on our most vulnerable population: our children. In true Mike Volpe fashion, you will be learning a lot in a short amount of time, so grab a pen and paper and give Mike your full attention!DONATE TO MIKE'S CAMPAIGN:Time To Hold California Courts Accountable | GoGetFundingSUBSCRIBE TO MIKE'S SUBSTACK:Michael Volpe Investigates | SubstackCONNECT WITH MIKE:Twitter: @mikevolpe - (1) mikevolpe (@mikevolpe) / TwitterEmail: mvolpe998@gmail.comYouTube: Michael Volpe - YouTubeFacebook: Michael Volpe | FacebookMIKE'S PLAYLIST ON THE IMAGINATION:Mike Volpe Playlist - YouTubeMIKE'S RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:Articles/videos from this show:1. Appearance Alert: on The Pro America Report (substack.com)2. Washington State Bill Allows Shelters to Hide Children From Parents Who Oppose Gender Change - Frank Report3. Michael Volpe Investigates Update: An Interview with Joanna Rivera (substack.com)4. Michael Volpe Investigates Special Report: An Interview with Erin Paranzino (substack.com)5. Shocking Child Custody Hearing in Illinois May 2022 - YouTube6. California Transgender Parent Claims He is Parental Alienation Victim (substack.com)CONNECT WITH THE IMAGINATION:All links: Your Profile (direct.me)Support the show

Joining us this week is someone who has become quite a regular on the show - back for his 5th time, please help me in welcoming independent investigative journalist and reporter, whistleblower ally, and arguably one of the loudest and most important voices in the world bringing awareness to the corruption taking place in the Family Court system, Mike Volpe! If this is your first time hearing Mike, I'll link his playlist in the show notes where you can find all of our past shows detailing topics such as ‘Parental Alienation', false accusations in court, how and why Family Court actually functions as a child racketeering pyramid scheme moreso than a place of justice, and soooo much more. I encourage you all to learn about this topic and share with everyone you know so we can be empowered as a society to make the best decisions possible for our children and not be blind-sided by people who see them as human capital. This week, Mike is going to do a deep dive into a very relevant topic: How Silicon Valley Executives Get Preferential Treatment in Family Court. I say ‘relevant' because I think one thing the last few years has exposed is how high-level executives tend to get preferential treatment in AND out of court and Mike's work is an important piece to this puzzle that really shows the ramifications these preferential treatments can have on our most vulnerable population: Our Children. I also encourage you to subscribe to Mike's Substack - it is jam-PACKED with information on exposing Family Court corruption and is so affordable. We need to resource our creators who are out here giving so much of their time and energy for free so they can continue doing this work for all of us to learn from. If you're looking for a place to put your money where your mouth is, I always encourage listeners to directly fund my guests so you know exactly where your money is going!DONATE TO MIKE'S CAMPAIGN: Time To Hold California Courts Accountable | GoGetFundingSUBSCRIBE TO MIKE'S SUBSTACK: Michael Volpe Investigates | SubstackCONNECT WITH MIKE:Twitter: @mikevolpe - (1) mikevolpe (@mikevolpe) / TwitterEmail: mvolpe998@gmail.comYouTube: Michael Volpe - YouTubeFacebook: Michael Volpe | FacebookMIKE'S PLAYLIST ON THE IMAGINATION:Mike Volpe Playlist - YouTubeMIKE'S RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: Articles/videos from this show: 1. Making Divorce Pay: Making Divorce Pay - Capital Research Center2. Michael Volpe Investigates Special Report: Silicon Valley and the courts: Michael Volpe Investigates Special Report: Silicon Valley and the courts (substack.com)3. Former Google executive throws his weight around in California courts: Former Google executive throws his weight around in California courts (substack.com)4. Big Tech executive uses courts: now one child may be transitioning: Big Tech executive uses courts: now one child may be transitioning (substack.com)CONNECT WITH THE IMAGINATION:All links: Your Profile (direct.me) Support the show

So much of sales is about solving existing problems. But category creation is about something new entirely. Joining this episode of Demand Gen U is a panel of experts, including Sydney Sloan, Executive in Residence at Scale Venture Partners, Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, and Mike Volpe, Senior Advisor at Silversmith Capital Partners. Together with Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata, they break down exactly what category creation is, the different phases of it, and when it's necessary, plus much more.Find out:What category creation isWhen category creation is necessaryThe different phases of category creation0:00 – 4:24 Introduction4:24 – 8:54 How to define category creation8:54 – 15:05 Signs that a company should create a category15:05 – 16:50 The different phases of category creation16:50 – 22:11 Working to a playbook and why analysts are so important22:11 – 27:30 How you can remain the leader after category creation27:30 – 33:11 Potential costs associated with category creation33:11 – 34:18 Outro

Joining us this week is someone who is making their 4th appearance on the show and honestly needs no introduction at this point as his work speaks for itself, Mike VolpeIn case you missed my last few episodes with Mike, he is an investigative journalist who has pioneered reporting alternative news on topics such as immigration reform, police corruption, politics, and what we've mainly focused on in this show - corruption within the family court system and how and why child trafficking is able to ”LEGALLY” happen under the noses of society. This week, we are going to discuss a very controversial and important topic: Parental Alienation. If you've been following my podcast and have listened to Mike's episodes or any of the parents who have been on my show alleging the Family Court trafficked their children to their abusive parent, the words ‘parental alienation' come up rather frequently. This topic is controversial in the sense that the definition is so poorly and vaguely defined that it leaves a lot to be desired in how it's interpreted and by whom. Mike's work is recognized nationally and internationally and it's been an honor getting to share snippets of what he is working on around the clock on this show. He's someone I look at with certainly as an authority on the family court system and it will do you well to listen to him. Whether it's you or someone you know dealing with the court system - knowledge is absolutely necessary when you enter the court - especially when it involves our little ones. I also highly recommend you subscribe to Mike's Substack - it is absolutely jam-packed daily with information on cases like what you will hear today - and more - and it's an invaluable tool to further your learning on these subjects. All the resources we cover today along with his Substack can be found in the show notes!CONNECT WITH MIKE:Twitter: @mikevolpe - (1) mikevolpe (@mikevolpe) / TwitterEmail: mvolpe998@gmail.comYouTube: Michael Volpe - YouTube Facebook: Michael Volpe | Facebook MIKE'S PLAYLIST ON THE IMAGINATION:Mike Volpe Playlist - YouTubeMIKE'S RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:Subscribe to Mike's Substack: Michael Volpe Investigates | SubstackMIKE'S PLAYLIST ON THE IMAGINATION: Mike Volpe Playlist - YouTubeMIKE'S RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: Subscribe to Mike's Substack: Michael Volpe Investigates | SubstackArticles/videos from this show: 1. Making Divorce Pay:Making Divorce Pay - Capital Research Center2. Texas PA case: Michael Volpe Investigates | Substack3. Harris, TX case: Parental Alienation Alleged in Another Harris County Case (substack.com)4. Utah case: Utah judge sends kids to abusive dad (substack.com)5. Utah case video: (4) Utah Commissioner {Junior Judge} Catherine Conklin rants and raves in October 2022 hearing - YouTube6. Rucki case video: (4) Samantha Rucki describes abuse at her father's and courts hands. - YouT Support the show

Joining us this week for the 3rd time is international whistleblower and investigative journalist, Mike Volpe! Mike's work spans from covering topics such as politics, immigration reform, police corruption and everything in between, but I believe his greatest work is what he's doing to expose the corrupt Secret Family Court and the child trafficking racketeering taking place globally within and throughout Family Court and CPS. Mike's work covering the most explosive stories in the world surrounding these corrupt systems has been recognized globally and he continues to be on the forefront of the movement to save our children. If you haven't listened to the first two episodes I've done with Mike, I'll link those below in the show notes and highly recommend you listen to both as each time he's been on, we've covered a different and valuable topic related to corruption in the court and he is arming us with the tools we need to understand the innerworkings of these complex systems.*I do apologize as there was interference with the audio at some parts - we tried to work quickly to fix it (the first time it happened, my dog was barking and I had to wait until he stopped!).This week we will be covering what I believe to be an extremely important topic - wrongful convictions. This is a topic that I am grateful he's bringing to the forefront of conversations because if you've been listening to my podcast and have eyes to see and ears to hear, you will see that it's not a stretch to say that people being accused of crimes they did not commit appears to be something we can see happening all over the world today more than ever. Mike's consistent deep dives into researching hard topics such as this are what I believe sets him apart from many standing on the front lines in the fight for justice in the court systems and for our children. He's covered stories all over the world in his work and has proven time and time again that corruption in the courtroom is not random NOR is it uncommon. Get a paper and pen because you're going to need it for this one! CONNECT WITH MIKE:Twitter: @mikevolpe - (1) mikevolpe (@mikevolpe) / TwitterEmail: mvolpe998@gmail.comMIKE'S PLAYLIST ON THE IMAGINATION: Mike Volpe Playlist - YouTubeMIKE'S RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: Subscribe to Mike's Substack: Michael Volpe Investigates | SubstackThe 6 cases from this week's show: 1. New Evidence Puts Raar Conviction Into Even More Doubt (substack.com)2. Did Chris Wray Put an Innocent Man in Jail (substack.com)3. The Provocateur: Man Convicted of 1995 Double Murder May Indeed Be Innocent (theeprovocateur.blogspot.com)4. This Celebrity Prosecutor Has A Perfect Record Of Convictions, And A History Of Withholding Evidence | The Daily Caller5.Did Robert Reynolds Get Set-Up - Michael Volpe Investigates (substack.com)6. Has a Bogus Lineup Kept a Michigan Man in Jail Falsely Over Thirty Years (substack.com)CONNECT WITH THE IMAGINATION:Your Profile (direct.me) Support the show

Connor Gross doesn't just talk marketing, he lives it. Meet the ultimate entrepreneur who, when he's not scaling eCommerce brands, is building his podcast empire. Marketing success can be summed up in one word: consistency. But playing the long game  requires patience. Connor Gross can tell you  exactly why it pays off. Daniel and Connor get into conversation on what it was like learning from great marketers like Dave Gerhardt and Mike Volpe, what not to do when starting an eCommerce business, and why every marketer needs a side hustle. You'll also hear about Connor's latest venture creating ready-to-race car artwork, why he's investing in Self Storage, and his podcast: The Next Generation, where he talks to entrepreneurs and other highly successful people all in their 20s. Dive in and meet the entrepreneur and marketer who turns side hustles into money spinners. Follow Connor: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-gross-104360109 (linkedin.com/in/connor-gross-104360109) Twitter: https://twitter.com/c_gro (twitter.com/c_gro) Keep up to date with the latest news from The Marketing Millennials:. Follow Daniel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dmurr68 (twitter.com/Dmurr68) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-murray-marketing (linkedin.com/in/daniel-murray-marketing)  Sign up to The Marketing Millennials newsletter: https://workweek.com/brand/the-marketing-millennials/ (workweek.com/brand/the-marketing-millennials)

This week I am back with international whistleblower and investigative journalist, Mike Volpe! Mike's work spans from covering topics such as politics, immigration and everything in between, but perhaps his greatest work is what he's doing to expose the corrupt Secret Family Court and the child trafficking taking place globally through these court and CPS systems. Mike's work covering the most explosive stories in the world has been recognized globally and he continues to be on the forefront of the movement to protect our children. In this episode, Mike exposes and discusses racketeering and child trafficking in the Secret Family Court, reveals 'The Minor's Councel', and how the Family Court system essentially feeds on itself.  He backs this up with some of the most prolific cases in America that he's been currently reporting on and investigating. What I love most about Mike is his deep passion for what he does and his resilience to withstand all the obstacles put in his way no matter the cost. He gives a voice to the voiceless and hope to parents and children all over the world, and one of the most important things he's done is to allow innocent parents who lost rights to their children to know they aren't alone in their fight and that there are people like him who care enough to do something about it. Mike has a blog and podcast on Substack that I highly suggest subscribing to learn more about the topics we'll be covering today and more - and he also works with investigative journalist, Megan Fox, on her podcast as well on YouTube and other platforms. We really need to lift up survivors and whistleblowers with resources so they can continue to do what they do, and in this case, your financial help for Mike also helps finance the astounding costs associated with being an independent journalist. All links are below! Mike is a hero and one day I know his work will be regarded as some of the most important of our time with what he's had the courage to cover and UNcover in a day and time when 99.9% of other journalists shy away from hard topics such as child trafficking.  CONNECT WITH MIKE:Subscribe to Mike's Substack: Michael Volpe Investigates | SubstackTwitter: (1) mikevolpe (@mikevolpe) / TwitterFB: Michael Volpe | FacebookEmail: mvolpe998@gmail.comMike's Book: "Bullied to Death: Chris Mackney's Kafkaesque Divorce and Sandra Grazzini-Rucki and the World's Last Custody Trial" - The Provocateur (theeprovocateur.blogspot.com)Megan Fox YouTube Channel: Megan Fox - YouTube NOTEABLE ARTICLES:-Minnie Gonzalez takes on judicial accountability in Connecticut | Al Día News (aldianews.com) -The Provocateur: Deep State in Missouri Reveals Itself: "This threatens to take down the entire system," one says. (theeprovocateur.blogspot.com)- Making Divorce Pay - Capital Research CenterCONNECT WITH THE IMAGINATION: Join our NEW Patreon! - Patron Checkout | PatreonWebsite: Stand By Survivors - Everyone Has A Story... Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/theimaginationpodcast?fan_landing=true)

Today, I welcome back author and investigative journalist Mike Volpe to discuss wrongful convictions and their prevalence in the judicial system.  Live on Critical Disclosure Radio, hosted by Brighteon Radio.    Show Links and More: https://libertylinks.io/jimslinks E-mail: NWLNews@protonmail.com

Today, I welcome back author and investigative journalist Mike Volpe to discuss the prison system in America on Critical Disclosure Radio, hosted by Brighteon Radio.    Show Links and More: https://libertylinks.io/jimslinks E-mail: NWLNews@protonmail.com

This week we are joined by whistleblower, Mike Volpe, who has been making waves for years with his investigative research and education on the relationship between the secret Family Court and child traff-icking. Mike's extensive research and revelations have covered everything from immigration to politics and everything in between, yet the standout of his work is in a topic that very few will dare to cover: child abuse. Mike is highly educated in and makes palatable the breakdown of how something as horrific as 'trafficking' is able to happen in CPS and Family Court and brings extensive research he has done to the table on cases he has personally worked with and real life examples of parents who have and who are currently fighting for their children. Mike's research has included former podcast guest,  @Samantha Baldwin , who is referenced frequently in Mike's examples (see Episode 27 for Samantha's testimony on 'The Imagination' for additional context). Not only is Mike bringing awareness to the systemic corruption woven into these systems, but he is giving a voice and HOPE to parents and children all over the world who are or who have been silenced. Mike is a hero and I am thrilled to have him on the show so you, too, can be equipped with the knowledge of how something like 'traff-icking' can happen within the systems we know and trust to deliver justice. We need to begin asking questions and the person leading the way in asking these hard questions is world-renowned researcher, angel for the children, and voice for the voiceless, Mike Volpe. I hope you learn as much as I did and ask you to share far and wide if you find value!CONNECT WITH MIKE: Twitter: @mikevolpe - https://twitter.com/mikevolpeEmail: mvolpe998@gmail.comWebsite: https://michaelvolpe.substack.com/Mike's Book: "Bullied to Death: Chris Mackney's Kafkaesque Divorce and Sandra Grazzini-Rucki and the World's Last Custody Trial" - https://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2021/06/silver-bullet-technique-executed-in.htmlMegan Fox YouTube Channel:  @Megan Fox - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9XP_Ax4_vTi1IqSSRD9ORQNotable Articles: Mike's Research on the St Louis FC Corruption Exposure: https://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2021/02/deep-state-in-missouri-reveals-itself.html"Making Divorce Pay" - https://capitalresearch.org/article/making-divorce-pay/Notable Interviews Mike Has Done: Megan and Mike Discuss FC Corruption: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY3RcLukS-Y&t=1668sInterviews with Samantha Baldwin: Part 1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dG_hCz-mFMPart 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLMQuXVMU18&t=11sSamantha Baldwin's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SamanthaBaldwinLDSamantha Baldwin's Podcast with The Imagination:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYhk68XAT9k&t=701sCONNECT WITH THE IMAGINATION: All links in my Direct Me: https://direct.me/theimaginationpodcast Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/theimaginationpodcast?fan_landing=true)

People are the hardest part of building a company.Think about it - when you're building a company, your people are the company. And if you're terrible at finding great people, hiring great people, and keeping great people, then your company is going to fail.Mike Volpe is an excellent example of someone who is great at all three of those. Currently the CEO of lola.com, he was able to put together one of the most all star marketing teams of the past couple of decades during his time as the CMO of HubSpot.In this episode of Protect the Hustle, Mike walks us through his methodology for recruiting, hiring, and retaining stellar team members that allowed him to build the marketing department at HubSpot into what it is today.This is a ProfitWell Recur Studios production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.

Sienna Heard discusses the shifting landscape within labor and employment law- including COVID vaccine policies and exemptions, the #MeToo movement, and more, with special guest Mike Volpe, Esq. from Venable LLP. Want to get ahead of the pack? Joining the D.C. Bar Law Student Community (LSC) can get you there. Your LSC membership will provide resume and skills boosting opportunities and one-on-one access to local practicing attorneys. To learn more, click here. Please note, the positions and opinions expressed by the speakers are strictly their own, and do not necessarily represent the views of their employers, nor those of the D.C. Bar, its Board of Governors or co-sponsoring Communities and organizations.

 JB:How’d you get into sales? RS:Always fun to reflect on how you got here as you extrapolate out your careerWhen I finished school- got a shiny piece of paper and asked Now what? You feel proud, excited, that you have enough and pretty quickly can become deflated trying to get your career startedI probably sent out hundreds of applications - had the fortunate timing graduating in 2008 during the recessionI figured out how to learn different skillsTraveled for almost 2 years after school, I found work, worked in Nicaragua for a few months teaching econ and learning SpanishI remember calling my bank to check my balance and told me I had $25 left, I was PUMPED!I had $25 to start my career journey, a lot of problem solving and skills I learned from traveling on how to get from here to there.Grew up in New Hampshire and had a friend hiring for a sales role selling merchant accountsI had no idea what I was getting into, day 2/3 I knew it wasn’t the job for me but decided, If I’m in this I need to figure out how to be GREAT at something. So I stayed there for 1.5 years.I figured how to connect with the customers, the flow of a sales call. I would set goals for myself to see how quickly I could close the dealsIt wasn’t the most sophisticated sale but I decided I wanted to gain a higher degree of mastery Reached out to Forrester research - some of the best experiences of my early sales career- Thrown into the deep end with tech buyers who had been purchasing tech & research for decades!Thought I knew what I was doing as this junior guy and I stumbled my first few monthsHad a great leader who was a great motivator and great coach, Michelle AllenPut me into an underperforming  territory of Chicago and she bet on me to turn it around!Ended up #1 in the company in sales, got to fly private with the CEO Could see the impact I had on businesses, thought it was amazing and wanted to see what’s next?!Heard about HubSpot and never had any research on them, but hadn’t been covering the market for HubSpot Found a friend as a recruiter at HubSpot, wanted to learn SaaS and engage with these higher level buyers, and follow a great leadership team. It gave me an opportunity to learn something new and I was struggling my first 4-5 months and I couldn’t figure out why?Why aren’t my playbooks that had worked time and time again working, I realized I needed to be open to learning and bringing my history with me. Don’t just bring your old playbooks but look to learn and be curious.A lot of great people from HubSpot alumni are doing great things NOW! Was able to step into my time as a leader at HubSpot, you think you’re taking off in your career and you stumble and fall, but hope to FAIL FORWARD. When I first stepped into leadership it was incredibly humbling, you have to stop and reflect, What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? How can I reach out to peers and mentors to improve and find guidance?VirtueDen- reached out to build their go to market, 2 guys with an awesome tool that didn’t have a big sales background. I love building things.  I love figuring out how to get from here to there!Got to dive into the inner working of the machine which opened up the Compass opportunity, it’s adding all of these pieces together from my past experience.  Going from how customer learn shop and buy to align in an industry I haven’t worked in before. Connect with people across the entire organization, each new role is more challenging than the last and has been great, great to celebrate heading into the public market with the team of course. JB: What an awesome sales journey over multiple years with the past view into being a young grad and traveling that all culminates to give you a unique perspective on leadership.  Multiple times struggling and failing forward with new challenges each time.   RS:I'm so grateful for the experience. There’s nothing to make a career easy.A Career is a hard thing to buildI remember Mike Volpe coming in saying “ when you look back at your career it’s going to look like this steady up and to the right, but when you’re in it it’s going to feel like a staircase”  You figure something out you go up, and plateau a bit, then do it again It’s so hard to wrap your head around when you’re in the trenches everyday. It’s really important that you don’t give up on yourself, developing yourself and leaning into being better everyday because it compounds.  JB: Compounding tiny changes is so powerful over a career to move into a leadership role. Everyone is making things up every day along the way you need to be open to learning, to feedback to continually improve.  So much motivation and inspiration  RS:Hitting quota for the month/year, the great note from your manager are all so fleetingIt can be exhausting to reach for those milestones. Reaching for those milestones is important, it’s a part of it but there has to be more, you won’t find joy/pleasure if you’re just shooting for the number.milestones it will lead to burnout JB: How do you think about setting goals and defining the bigger goals? RS:Every year at the start of the year around Christmas to the start of January I take 2 weeks off, totally disconnect and spend time with family.I take that time to reflect, used to journal now on apple notesI focus on the bigger things, more macro level and step back because one bad day shouldn’t get me downExample:  Buy a new house this year. Read x  numbers of books in a year.  Then I can take my next step to find books and then they sit next to bed and I read them throughout the yearPersonal goal setting is super helpfulThe business stuff will come through the cadence of the specific organization and understand the Northstar to understand WHY I’m doing the specific things everydayIf you miss out on WHY you’re doing the calls, the emails, etc. Your customers also get a terrible experience when you don’t think about the why. You miss out on the ability to slow down to think “why am I sending this message to this person at this time?” It takes the connectivity between the end goal and the day to day activities that don’t feel transactional JB: Everyone will have their own unique system that works for them. You mentioned setting goals but struggling many different times. How do you bounce back from the tough months/weeks? RS:“I can accept failure, I can’t accept not trying” - Michael JordanThe failure piece is bound to happen!Did Fail Fast Fridays at Compass for a year to share the things that we failed on over video that would be highlighted.You have to be of the mindset, especially if you’re doing something new, you’re going to fail and if you’re uncomfortable trying new things or something, you get stuck there more than anything!For me, I tend to not take myself too seriously, if you get overly caught up in the emotion of the outcome you’re aiming for.  You become reactive vs. proactive- as soon as you get reactive, you are dooming your future because you stop focusing on pipeline creation while you are too nervous about closingIf you’re working for leaders where they are emotional to all of the reactions and make decisions from an emotional state vs. what are our options to refine to a better path/outcome next month or quarter. You can work for those leaders that make decisions objectivelyI want to know I’m going to show up to the same person everyday whether the business is running well or not and be in a safe spot where I try to be a steady northstar. JB:  How do you manage yourself daily? What practices do you have?RS:Exercise is a good thing. I would always go to the gym on my travels or in the morning.  Last year I was reeling a bit through the pandemic. Was in Boston in Q2 and couldn’t do that normal routine. This last year was tough.  Are you just going to grip the wheel and grind it out or look for something new?Typically it was running, cycling and some weights stuff. I ended up getting into yoga over the last year. Going into a classroom doing yoga wasn’t going to be possible in 2020. In the past I was doing long runs, trail runs, century rides and I would mix in yoga. But I forgot about the mental piece as much as the physical stuff is really centering. You forget everything around you when you’re in it. I would wake up early AM, roll out the yoga mat and go to the office and take a long walk 40 mins to the office. Then I’ve been looking for new hobbies to occupy my mind and separate me from work. Reading. Got into fly fishing and I’m terrible, getting caught up everywhere and LOVING IT. I’ve added 2 new things of Yoga and Fly fishing to my routine this year that have helped. JB: I’ve talked to a lot of people that have been struggling, burned out, gripping the wheel tighter and still haven’t found the ability to find something new and get past the first few challenges where you find new opportunities and leverage a growth mindset to find the best in what’s going on now. The first key to mental health is physical health.  It’s really challenging to have mental health if you don’t take care of your physical health. Talk to us about some of the Top qualities in Reps? RS:How do you find the common denominator?Lots of people go to Grit and tenacity, persistence and those things matter. But there are some unique qualities you find. The best reps tend to be incredible educators.  It’s hard to test for when interviewing. When you sell a product it’s important to know how to help people learn the product and go through the process. The folks that are excellent at educating the process and the why it matters of the product, tend to do very well.They will get you 80% of the way there, still need to drive urgency, can talk Sandler & Challenger and all these things. If it’s confusing for your buyer to understand the process for evaluating and WHY this purchase matters to them, you’ll lose every single time.  JB: Love winning or hate losing more? RS: Never been asked this question, heard it many times and never able to just answer it. I love winning more than I hate losing, it’s rooted in my belief that losses are an opportunity to win next time. You may have taken my pawn, but we still have an entire game left.  JB: Top qualities in leaders RS: Great coach, I want to learn from whoever I work with. Teach me how to do what you’re doing and help me be better than who I was starting today. I want to know they’re invested in me. JB: How do you be a great coach? RS:They need to know you’re authentic. New manager goes right to call shadow and giving feedback. If there isn’t a consistent culture of feedback across the team. Feedback can start to feel punitive.  You have to create an environment of learning across the team before you push into coaching. Maybe bringing the team together to talk about what it means to inspire this culture of feedback, who you want to be and your investment in helping them. You need a starting point to initiate the coaching.  It can’t just happen every now and then, it needs to be consistent. Continue, start, stop doing. Build a framework to make it easy to receive.  When you inspire those things across the team, I’m always getting feedback, everyone is getting it and still working here! It’s an investment in me and my future JB: To see coaching as an investment in myself and my future self. Learning how to get from here to there. All of these experiences help you go from where you are today and where you’re headed.  RS:LinkedinInstagram @Rpspillla

In our sixth episode, Gil Allouche talks category creation with three B2B pioneers who changed the game when it comes to customer success, inbound marketing, and journey orchestration. Panelists for this episode include Michel Feaster, CEO of Usermind and instrumental in creating the Journey Orchestration category, Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight and the primary creator behind the customer success management software category, and Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com and CMO of Hubspot from 2007 to 2015, who was responsible for bringing the term "inbound marketing" into the mainstream. You'll walk away from this episode with an understanding of what to do when the market finally starts converging to validate your product, why sincerity and vulnerability are some of your most powerful tools as an evangelist, and how Gainsight's early investment in CS leaders shaped how tech companies approach customer relationships today. BONUS! Mike Volpe recalls why the county fair might not have been the best location for a first date, and Michel recounts how she inadvertently made a unique impression on the CEO within her first three weeks working at Mercury Interactive.

At the start of 2020, Lola was a high flying startup that made booking and expensing business travel a breeze. Then the pandemic hit. Lockdowns and travel restrictions grounded airplanes across the globe. Tools that helped businesses work remotely soared in popularity while the hospitality and travel industries collapsed.Lola lost 97% of its business within two months and was forced to lay off most of its staff. Mike Volpe, the newly minted CEO, needed a plan that would help save the company from bankruptcy. This is the story of how he did it.

I’ve known Mike Volpe for well over a decade, going back to his days as HubSpot’s first chief marketing officer. And I’ve spoken with him a few times over the years for the series, the last time being when he became the new CEO of Lola.com a little over two years ago. As a refresher, Lola.com is focused on making business travel easier for the travel manager and the traveler. Being that business, it’s not surprising that the pandemic has had a major negative impact on Lola. But even that would be an understatement as the company lost 97% of its revenue when travel basically came to a screeching halt overnight at the beginning of the Covid-19 shutdown. 97%! Knowing the industry that he was in, I remember checking in on Mike at the onset of the pandemic via email. He told me that I should check back in a couple of months because they were working on a plan. And roughly five months later, Lola just announced a new service offering called Lola Spend, that helps companies to track expenses and manage spending. And the new offering was actually in part a collaborative effort from the same Lola customers who stopped traveling.

After spending more than a decade in finance, Mike changed course entirely in his professional career and became a freelance journalist. Since 2009, he's been published both locally in Chicago in newspapers and magazines like New City, Times of Northwest Indiana, Inside Booster, Welles Park Bulldog, Chicago Reader, and Chicago Heights Patch. He's also expanded into national stories. On the national level, his work has been published in such places as the Daily Caller, WND, Counter Punch, Crime Magazine, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Newsletter, Front Page Magazine, and Big Government. In 2009, Mike's expose of Dr. Anna Chacko led in part to her termination from the Pittsburgh VA. His expose of Dr. Chacko also received coverage in the Pittsburgh Tribune as well as the radiology website, Aunt Minnie. In October 2012, Mike published his first book entitled "Prosecutors Gone Wild: The Inside Story of the Trial of Chuck Panici, John Gliottoni, and Louise Marshall." In 1993, once powerful City of Chicago Heights mayor, Chuck Panici, was convicted, along with co-defendants John Gliottoni and Louise Marshall, of a number of corruption related charges, including RICO charges. This book revisits that trial and exposes the corruption perpetrated on the court. The book proves that all three defendants were innocent and victims of a grand conspiracy perpetrated by ambitious prosecutors and desperate criminals. His second book The Definitive Dossier of PTSD in Whistleblowers was published in February 2013 and his third book Bullied to Death was published in August 2015. https://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2020/09/judge-uses-arbitrary-and-capricious.html https://www.twitter.com/mikevolpe https://www.twitter.com/ontheroadwithJ3 https://www.instagram.com/ontheroadwithjimandcasey

Recently we asked Mike Volpe, former CMO for HubSpot, about what skills and attributes he looked for in hiring modern marketers as he helped grow the firm from 5 people to over 900 people. He shared that in the beginning they hired generalists, people with a broad base of skills. But as HubSpot started to scale they started to look for specialists, people with a deep level of expertise in a specific area. They also looked for what he called “T shaped people”. These are people with a deep level of expertise in one area, but also a broad understanding of marketing. For example, in hiring a pure content person, or a PR person, they looked for those people to be well versed in what a funnel looks like, and how the various stages of the funnel relate to each other. Mike Volpe is a successful entrepreneur and startup executive with expertise in marketing, business development, strategy, and lead generation for Cloud, SAAS and B2B software. Mike is currently a member of the Board of Directors of both Attend and Repsly. Previously he was CMO for HubSpot where he joined as employee #5 and grew the company to over 900 people. He also grew the company from around a dozen beta customers to over 15,000 customers in over 90 countries and $100 Million in revenue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael is an accomplished author, key note speaker and recognized top business content and social media marketer. He is a passionate evangelist for customer centric marketing that drives real business results. In this episode, Michael examines several topics, including how the role of content is dramatically changing as it relates to driving demand and how it is forcing brands to really think about how to utilize content to effectively meet the needs of their audience as proposed to meeting the needs of their business. Michael also discusses how he encourages CMOs to address one of their biggest challenges, finding the right people who have the talent and the modern marketing skills for their marketing organizations. Part of what CMOs are struggling with are finding the folks that can do both right and left-brain thinking. The thinkers and doers, art and science, engineers that can also paint pictures.  We can do creative programs and also demonstrate the measureable success of those things. Or as Mike Volpe, former CMO of Hubspot calls it, “D.A.R.C”, the digital analytical people who understand reach and conversion with content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After spending a decade in finance, Michael Volpe has been a freelance investigative journalist since 2009. His work has been published locally in the Chicago Reader, Chicago Crusader, Chicago Heights Patch, and New City. Nationally, Volpe’s work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, Crime Magazine, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Newsletter, and Counter Punch. Volpe has been recognized by whistleblowers as leading the charge in getting their stories out. His first book Prosecutors Gone Wild was published in October 2012, his second book The Definitive Dossier of PTSD in Whistleblowers was published in February 2013 and his third book Bullied to Death was published in August 2015. https://www.facebook.com/michael.volpe.560 https://twitter.com/mikevolpe https://www.amazon.com/Bullied-Death-Mackneys-Kafkaesque-Divorce-ebook/dp/B0149ERBBI https://www.facebook.com/ontheroadwithjimandcasey https://www.instagram.com/ontheroadwithjimandcasey https://www.instagram.com/guitaristjimbo https://www.instagram.com/caseyschearer80 https://www.twitter.com/ontheroadwithj3 https://www.twitter.com/caseyschearer80 https://www.twitter.com/guitaristjimbo

Select the best approach to entering the marketplace: A) Category creation B) Building a better mousetrap The answer? Both. We sat down to discuss market strategies with one of HubSpot's co-founders and current CEO of Lola.com, Mike Volpe. Mike has been involved in both ends of the spectrum: category creation and building a better tool to serve an existing category. He gives FMF co-host John Rougeux the lowdown in the first of four #TakeoverTuesday episodes focused on category creation. *More about John Rougeux*John is the founder of Flag & Frontier, a marketing consultancy that helps B2B startups stand out in crowded markets. ----------- Join me for weekly special LinkedInLive sessions where I interview your favorite guests like Pat Lencioni, Seth Godin, Whitney Johnson, and Kim Scott — LIVE. Here's the one-click invite: https://evt.mx/mSGV4Ka8

This podcast is brought to you by Lattice. Learn more about how Lattice can help your business stay people focused at https://lattice.com/

On today's episode we're talking with Jeanne Hopkins. We first met Jeanne when she was a VP of marketing at HubSpot. Over the years she's moved around, landing at her current gig as CMO of Lola.com. We explore who Lola.com is and how it started, what experience looks like at this travel startup and more. Jeanne is also working alongside her former colleague Mike Volpe, a former CMO now in the role of CEO. So it makes for an interesting “experience” for users, partners and employees. Links: Lola.com | Jeanne on LinkedIn | Jeanne on Twitter

Subscribe to Modern Selling on the App of Your Choice! Building a healthy sales culture is becoming more and more important in the modern selling context. It impacts everything from career paths and the success of team members to retention and churn to recruitment and even to landing big deals. This conversation touches on many of the things sales leaders need to consider when it comes to building a successful team culture within their organizations.  The main point is this: the healthier your team culture, the more powerful your organization will be across the board. Join me and my guest, Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com for this episode of #ModernSelling. This episode is sponsored by XANT, the enterprise leader in sales engagement. Xant has authored the Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence. Get your copy at www.SalesCadenceGuide.com Building A Healthy Sales Culture Includes Clear Career Paths One of the things I love about the way leadership at Lola.com has boosted the morale of their team is that they outline clear qualifications for advancement. This especially applies to their sales and software engineering teams (the two largest teams within the company). They want to make it simple for all team members to understand the skills, experience, and competencies they need to possess in order to move into the next position on their career journey. Similarly, the path to moving into leadership within those departments is clearly defined. That way, those with the drive and motivation to excel have clear goals and a destination in mind. But Mike makes it clear that the leadership team should not feel responsible to hold the hands of those who need to grow or who seek to be promoted.  Instead, they should encourage continuous development but leave it to the individual team member to own their career and take responsibility for their personal advancement. Healthier Culture Can Slow Team Member Churn There are many reasons team members leave a company. However, sales seems to have a higher than average turnover rate. Why? I asked Mike to share his insights and he provided a handful of helpful observations: Team members sometimes leave because they are not a fit with the culture of the company. Some are impatient with the long road to success and think jumping to a different team might shorten the process. At times, leadership is lax in providing clear guidelines for success and advancement. If team culture is poor, we can’t expect team members to feel enthusiastic about staying. Mike has years of experience both as a manager, and now as CEO of Lola.com. He’s seen and experienced the challenges of building a healthy sales culture. Listen to learn how you can be instrumental in improving the culture of your organization. Remote Team Members Require New Approaches To Building A Sales Culture  Relationships are never easy but are easier to manage when you work in the same office. That means the advent of remote work and remote teams adds a layer of complexity to the cultivation of healthy team cultures. Our team here at Vengreso is 100% remote so we’ve experienced our share of challenges when it comes to this issue.  Mike says that we have to work extra hard at creating and finding ways to connect team members to each other, even across departments and disciplines within the organization. We discuss how chat tools, video conferencing, leading by example, and creative onboarding techniques can be utilized to build a thriving team culture in spite of distance and geography. Inclusion And Diversity Figure Heavily Into Company Culture Modern selling requires an awareness of modern-day issues. Therefore, leaders must recognize the importance of diversity and inclusion to make them a top priority. Mike points out that intentionality in this area enables a company to be more successful in many areas, including recruitment and hiring, retention, leadership, and even landing multi-million dollar deals. Listen to hear how one company lost a record-setting contract solely because the company’s leaders had not paid enough attention to the issue of inclusion and diversity. You'll also receive Mike’s advice on how you can be instrumental in making your team culture a more welcoming and affirming place for all people. This episode is sponsored by XANT, the enterprise leader in sales engagement. Xant has authored the Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence. Get your copy at www.SalesCadenceGuide.com Outline of This Episode [2:45] Mike Volpe’s experience and background that’s led him into sales leadership [8:35 ] The preparation for your future sales career may require years of experience [10:33] Some of the reasons for team turnover in the sales profession [12:05] Many companies are doing more to map out a sales career progression [17:08] Encouraging team members to own their own growth  [25:53] Culture and the integration of digital and remote teams [37:30] The vital necessity of creating a diverse and inclusion oriented company culture Resources Mentioned Mike Volpe on LinkedIn Mike on Twitter: @MVolpe www.Lola.com- where Mike serves as CEO Mike’s all-time favorite movie: The Terminator SolidWorks Hubspot Meeting Owl - video conferencing tool Modern Marketing Engine Podcast - Bernie Borges Connect with Mario! www.vengreso.com On Facebook On Twitter On YouTube On LinkedIn Subscribe to Modern Selling on the App of Your Choice!

Episode Summary: Our Boston founders series kicks off with guests Paul English, Cofounder and CTO of Lola.com and Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com. Hosts Rob May and Matt Hayes visit Lola's headquarters in Boston to learn more about the founding of Lola (Paul's 5th company to date), and how Mike and Paul's different work styles provide a well-balanced leadership approach. Uncovered in this episode: Fun facts most people don't know about Paul and Mike Why Paul English transitioned from CEO to CTO and how they made it a smooth and successful transition for the Lola team Hiring at Lola.com; making it fun to come to work; and building a culture around collaboration and learningWhy vulnerability is important to discuss and how implementing one simple practice has helped both Paul and Mike drive stronger managerial relationships List of resources mentioned in episode: Hiring Religion by Paul English: http://paulenglish.com/hiring.htmlLearn more on Lola: http://www.lola.comAbout Mike Volpe: Mike Volpe is the CEO at Lola.com, the corporate travel SaaS platform that helps companies stop wasting time and start saving money on their business travel program. He has been asked to speak at numerous conferences on sales, marketing and growth, as well as people operations, leadership, hiring and culture and is a strong advocate for building great teams with a wide range of talent.Previously Mike was CMO at Cybereason, a cybersecurity SaaS company, where he helped the company increase its sales pipeline by 650% in a single year and grow revenue by five times during his tenure. He was also part of the founding team at HubSpot, where he spent eight years growing the company from five people to over 1,000 employees, $175m in revenue, and a successful IPO.Mike is well-known and active in the Boston SaaS and startup communities as a member of the board of directors of Validity and Privy, and as an angel investor in more than 30 startups. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA from Bowdoin College. Check him out on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.About Paul English: Paul English is the CTO and co-founder of Lola.com, where he oversees product strategy, definition, design, and development, working closely with customers to make sure that Lola's newest features are well received by users, and that they become “must haves” not “nice to have”. He also makes sure Lola's products are innovative, fast, and beautiful with the objective of completely shattering the soul-sucking experience today's business travelers must endure when planning travel.Paul was previously the CTO and co-founder of Kayak (took public then sold to Priceline), and he also co-founded GetHuman (ongoing), Boston Light (sold to Intuit), and Intermute (sold to Trend Micro). Separately, Paul is an investor in dozens of startups, and he sits on six nonprofit boards. You can read more about Paul at PaulEnglish.com.

Interview with Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com

At the the Inbound Marketing UK conference that I wrote about in Inbound marketing is about content and context, I was able to catch up with a couple of the speakers for interviews for the blog. The first was with Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer of Hubspot, and you can check it out here: Inbound and content marketing may make up 80% of all marketing in the future. Following on from the interview with Mike, I was also able to catch up with David Meerman Scott, the keynote speaker at the conference and author of several books on marketing, most notably The New Rules of Marketing and PR with over 250,000 copies in print in more than 25 languages. In the interview, we talk about inbound marketing, the impact on traditional marketing, what your inbound and traditional marketing ratio mix should be and newsjacking. This interview makes up number thirty-eight in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping create businesses that customers love.

Based in Chicago, Mike Volpe is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Daily Caller, Front Page Magazine, Washington Examiner, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Newsletter, Crime Magazine, and Counter Punch. Mike investigates judicial misconduct and corruption, has written three books, and joins Lisa to explain precisely how fathers who sexually abuse their children invoke “Parental Alienation” as their defense in Family Court.

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com, a SaaS platform disrupting the $1.3 trillion business travel market. As the former CMO at Hubspot, Mike provides an interesting perspective on growth since he now oversees all of the key growth levers in the business. Initially, Lola wasn't focused on the B2B market. The founder previously helped build Kayak.com so he has a strong background in the consumer travel space. But by studying their early passionate customers the Lola team realized their product was resonating most with business travelers. Given Mike’s background growing B2B SaaS companies, he was an ideal CEO to recruit to help lead the company into this opportunity. Mike credits Lola’s rapid growth to having a fantastic product serving a very large market. Lola provides value to both travel managers and road warriors. For travel managers, Lola helps them save significantly on their travel expenses and gain better visibility and control over their corporate travel. For road warriors, Lola helps improve the overall travel experience. As CEO, Mike believes an important part of his role is to keep the overall team aligned and pulling in the same direction. One of the most effective ways he helps to drive this alignment and cross-functional collaboration is through a monthly full-day meeting between the functional leads. By carving out a full day, they go beyond surface level reporting to actually working with each other to achieve the company objectives. Another key part of Mike’s role as CEO is to ensure that the company isn’t just growing quickly but it is maintaining strong unit economics as it does so. He explains that the B2B travel space has attracted so much investment capital that it would be easy to pursue growth at any cost. He believes that it is critical to take a more sustainable approach to growth. Learn more about CEO Mike Volpe at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevolpe Learn more about Lola at www.Lola.com

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com, a SaaS platform disrupting the $1.3 trillion business travel market. As the former CMO at Hubspot, Mike provides an interesting perspective on growth since he now oversees all of the key growth levers in the business. Initially, Lola wasn't focused on the B2B market. The founder previously helped build Kayak.com so he has a strong background in the consumer travel space. But by studying their early passionate customers the Lola team realized their product was resonating most with business travelers. Given Mike’s background growing B2B SaaS companies, he was an ideal CEO to recruit to help lead the company into this opportunity. Mike credits Lola’s rapid growth to having a fantastic product serving a very large market. Lola provides value to both travel managers and road warriors. For travel managers, Lola helps them save significantly on their travel expenses and gain better visibility and control over their corporate travel. For road warriors, Lola helps improve the overall travel experience. As CEO, Mike believes an important part of his role is to keep the overall team aligned and pulling in the same direction. One of the most effective ways he helps to drive this alignment and cross-functional collaboration is through a monthly full-day meeting between the functional leads. By carving out a full day, they go beyond surface level reporting to actually working with each other to achieve the company objectives. Another key part of Mike’s role as CEO is to ensure that the company isn’t just growing quickly but it is maintaining strong unit economics as it does so. He explains that the B2B travel space has attracted so much investment capital that it would be easy to pursue growth at any cost. He believes that it is critical to take a more sustainable approach to growth. Learn more about CEO Mike Volpe at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevolpe Learn more about Lola at www.Lola.com

In Inbound marketing is about content and context, I reported back from Inbound Marketing UK. However, whilst there I was able to catch up with Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer of Hubspot, who was speaking at the conference. In the interview, we talked about inbound marketing, where people should start, how much of their marketing should be inbound/content focused and a bunch of other things. This interview makes up number thirty-seven in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping create businesses that customers love.

Investigative journalist uncovers CPS corruption. Mike says law enforcement can handle cases of abused/neglected children.

How do you market a company that is selling something fundamentally new and different? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, John Rougeux of Flag & Frontier talks about category design. It's not a tactic for every company, but when used strategically, category design can drive truly remarkable marketing results. John digs into who category design is right for, how long it takes, what a category design go-to-market plan looks like, and how to gain organizational support. He also shares examples of companies and marketers who've successfully created new categories. Highlights from my conversation with John include: John is an experienced category designer who has also owned and exited a business. He says that compared to traditional inbound marketing strategies, category design requires a much larger lift when it comes to educating the market. Every business has a choice to either compete in an existing market or create a new market.  If you're creating a new category, you have three choices: 1) try to fit your product within an existing category; 2) ignore category in your marketing and focus on the product's features and benefits; or 3) create a new category. John says options 1 and 2 don't work. When considering whether category design is right for you, you need to honestly evaluate your product and determine whether its simply a niche within an existing category or something that has truly never been offered before. If its the latter, then category design is really the only logical solution. Category design takes time. John says you should expect to spend six to nine months just designing the category behind the scenes, and then once you roll that out publicly, it can take another few years before it really takes hold. Category design needs to be a business initiative, not simply a marketing strategy, because it affects product roadmaps, sales and more. When executing a category design strategy, it is critical to focus marketing messaging on the problem that your audience is experiencing and the outcomes that they will experience as a result of your solution rather than how the product itself actually works. The companies that have been most successful at category design have evangelists whose job it is to go to market and talk about the problem and why there is a new solution. Its also important to build a consistent conversation around your new category. That might mean holding a big event (like HubSpot's INBOUND or Drift's HYPERGROWTH) or building a community, like Terminus's FlipMyFunnel.  If your company is venture-backed, it is also important to get your investors on board with the idea of category creation so that you have the funding to support the strategy. There are examples of category design all around us. Some of the bigger and more visible ones are minivans and music streaming services. The category wasn't created overnight, and in many cases, people don't even realize its a new category, but we see it is as fundamentally different from the status quo, and that is what successful category design looks like.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Flag & Frontier website Email John at John@FlagandFrontier.com  Visit John's personal website Purchase a copy of Play Bigger Listen to the podcast to learn more about category design, when it makes sense, and how you can use it to dramatically improve your marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is John Rougeux, who is the founder at Flag & Frontier. Welcome, John. John Rougeux (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Thanks for having me on. John and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah. I'm really excited to have you here for completely selfish reasons. I am deep, deep into the weeds, trying to learn everything I can right now about category creation because it's something that I'm kind of working on for a little project at work. And I stumbled across your name. I think it was in a LinkedIn post mentioned by Sangram Vajre at Terminus, and he mentioned you as somebody who's doing a lot of work on category creation. And I immediately thought, oh, I need to have him in on the podcast. And here you are. I am so excited, so welcome. John: Thanks. Thanks. I actually want to come back to something that you said a minute ago. You mentioned this was a little project for you, so I'm going to pick your brains about why it's not a big project. Kathleen: I think I might just be downplaying it. John: Okay, all right. Kathleen: It's a huge project. John: All right. Kathleen: Yes, yes. It is a giant. In fact, it's probably bigger than I think it is. No, it's- John: Well, Sangram told me a few weeks ago. He said, "If you're not doing something that scares you a little bit, then you're not setting your sights high enough." So I think you're on the right track there. Kathleen: Yeah, no, I think my whole career has been a succession of choices that consistently terrify me. So hopefully, that means I'm on the right track to somewhere. So you have an interesting story. You started out or your career really grew in B2B tech, and you worked in some companies that were looking at category creation as a potential strategy and it seems that that wet your appetite and led you to where you are today. Can you just talk a little bit about your background and how it got you to where you are now and what you're doing now with Flag & Frontier? About John Rougeux and Flag & Frontier John: Yeah. Yeah, happy to. So the thing that I like to tell people is that I always wish that I knew about category design earlier in my marketing career. I think it would have helped me be more successful and make better choices and think through the strategy of what I was working on at the time a lot more thoroughly. So the reason I say that is in 2013, I co-founded a company called Causely. And I won't get too far down into the weeds of what Causely does and the business model, but we were basically using cause marketing as a way to incentivize people to take action. And specifically, we were looking at incentivizing referrals on social media. And at the time, I was looking at marketing through a fairly narrow lens, like a lot of people do maybe when they are kind of earlier in the middle of their marketing careers. We were looking at things like you know how do you improve the performance of an advertising campaign? How can you write a better better blog post? All of those kind of tactical things. And I didn't realize at the time that what we were doing was something categorically new. People didn't have context for what that meant, what they should compare it to, what value they should expect, what things should it replace or not replace? And so we had a reasonable trajectory. We scaled the business to a few thousand locations. It was acquired. But when looking back on it, I know that if we had had this lens of category design of how do you describe something when it's different than anything else out there, I think we could have gone even further. And so when I joined a company called Skyfii in 2018, I had started to kind of understand what that meant, so I had read Play Bigger. I read some, the works by Al Ries and Jack Trout that talk about how if you can't be first in a category, design any category you can be first in. And at Skyfii, that business, it's a publicly-traded SaaS company out of Australia and they found that they were participating in a fairly commoditized space. Or I guess to be more accurate, the perception was that they were a competitor in a fairly commoditized space. And their business had evolved past that and the product did all sorts of other things that were much bigger than the category the market thought they participated in, but they didn't really have a framework for talking about that. And so we went through a repositioning exercise where we defined a new category that better reflected what they were all about and and how people should kind of relate to that. And that was a really, I think, powerful and challenging exercise to think through.We've got something new in the market, but how do we describe that? How do we tell the right story? How do we tell the right narrative so that people know how to relate to it? Why category design is a fundamentally different approach to marketing Kathleen: This is so interesting to me. There's so much I want to unpack here. I guess, starting with something that you kind of started with, which is that there is this typical marketer's playbook, right, where people come in and they think, "Oh, we need to top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. We need to create content and attract people," this and that. And when it comes to category creation or trying to market something that is different than anything else people are used to, that playbook doesn't really work. Because as I'm quickly learning, especially looking just at the top of the funnel, traditional top of the funnel marketing, it's like well what is that problem that people are having and they start to look for a solution. And the challenge you have is that if the solution you're offering is something they've never heard of, it's such a steeper climb to try and gain their attention. It's like they don't know the right questions to ask even, if that makes sense. John: No, that's absolutely right. And I always like to mention a really thoughtful post that Mike Volpe, the founding CMO of HubSpot wrote a few years ago because it lays such a great groundwork for any discussion around category design. And the blog post simply says that look, every marketer has two choices on their strategy. They can pick an existing category and try to carve out a niche within that category. Maybe they can dominate that category. But basically, they have to pick a space and then do the best they can within that space. Or they can try to design a new category. And when you look at kind of the underlying product or business model and you really take a close examination of what it is and whether it's different or whether it's something better, you almost don't have a choice. If you're doing something that is new that people don't have a framework for, you really have three choices. So I want to pack these for you. So choice number one is you can try to shoehorn this new thing you've built into an existing category. And we'll come back to why that doesn't work in a second. Number two is you can just talk about the products, like features and benefits but not really think about a more underlying narrative for that. And then number three is you can design a new language, a new framework, which is called category design. And so here's why number one and number two don't work. So again, number one is if you try to shoehorn something new into an existing category. The reason that works against you is that people will make the wrong comparisons for what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to be priced, how you deliver value. That just works against you. Secondly, if you just try to talk about the product itself but don't provide a larger context, you're not giving people, you're not giving them really any framework, and it makes it difficult to understand what you're all about and why they should be interested in you. I'll give you a great example. A friend of mine works at a company and I won't mention the name of the company, but they combine two different categories kind of in an existing platform. So one of these is VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol communication software, very established, known space. The other thing they do is they have these marketing automation functions that they add to their software to at least in my view very disparate types of software, but they combine them together. And so far, they haven't really given their buyers a context, a category for what this thing means. And so they're basically letting people to their own devices to understand and come up with their own conclusions about what that is. And that just puts a lot of work on your buyers when they have to think about who they should compare you to when they need to think about what department is this even for, or what products does this replace or not replace? That's generally too much work for people when they're trying to understand something new. And like you said, Kathleen, if you're not telling them what questions they should ask, then chances are they're just going to be too confused before they'll even really be interested in having a conversation with you. Kathleen: Yeah, and there's two other aspects to what you just said that I think are really interesting, which I'm beginning to appreciate more with the work that I'm doing. One is that human nature is such that people want to slot you into something that they already understand. They don't want to have to think outside the box. So when people hear about something new, that their natural inclination is to try and categorize it in with things that they already know. And that's a hard thing to battle because you are literally battling human nature. And the second thing is if you do allow yourself to be put into a category that already exists that maybe isn't really truly what you're doing and you are actually successful in selling your product, you will wind up having a lot of problems with churn once you do sell it because people are still going to be thinking that you are like that other thing that you're not actually like. And they're going to be looking for your product or your service or whatever it is to solve for them in the same way that other thing does, when in reality your thing does not solve those problems. So it's like you're setting yourself up for a very long horizon of failures that you might not see at the outset, but it's kind of a you're failing before you've even begun. John: Yeah, that's a great point. And yeah, people do... They tend to... The world is so complicated, and there's so many things that we have to deal with and try to understand that we use this rule of thumb of categorizing things. Sometimes we do it explicitly, like smartphones are a great example of a category we all know about and buy them and we know why they're different than a mobile phone. Sometimes we just do it implicitly. We don't necessarily have the language or the terms to describe that category, but we know that we try to group likes things together because it makes it easier to understand the world. Kathleen: Yeah or we use analogies. So many times, you hear things like, "Well, that's just the Uber of," and then they list a different industry. Or, "That's the Airbnb of something else." John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: And so we're constantly trying to put these things into comfortable mental frameworks, which I think is fascinating. So you mentioned there were three things. The first two, I think you covered. And then the third is really designing a new category. John: The third is designing a new category. That's right. That's right. When does category design make sense? Kathleen: So how do you know... I guess the first question is how do you know when that's the path you should be taking? John: That's a great question because I've heard from some people that they have this idea that every company should try to design a category, and that's really not the case. It applies to some companies. But for many other companies, like if you're developing a CRM, a better version of a CRM, don't try to build a new category around that. So yes, so the way you would look at that is there's no formula you can put into Excel and calculate and churn all this out, but it really comes down to does the thing that you've built, does it solve a problem that has not been solved before? Or does it do so in a way that the world isn't familiar with? So is there a new business model behind that? Is there a new delivery mechanism behind that? It really comes down to those two things. And maybe if you want to look at it at a more fundamental level, you could ask yourself do the existing categories that my market is familiar with, do they accurately capture the type of thing that I'm offering? If they do, then one of the reasons you may want to choose to carve out a niche in an existing category is that people are looking for established products in established categories. People are looking for marketing automation software, they're looking for smartphones, they're looking for video communications tools like Zoom, like we're using today. And so, if you say, "Hey, we have the right tool within this category for this specific market or for this specific need," that can be very powerful. And arbitrarily forcing yourself out of that category just because you like that idea of category design is going to work against you. Now, that being said, again to kind of flip it around, if you find that the categories and the language that are used to describe existing products your market is familiar with just don't capture what you're doing or they limit it in some way, then ultimately you need to find a way to break out from that and that's what the process of category design is all about. What does it take to create a new category? Kathleen: Now, one of the things that I've come to appreciate just the more I look at this is what a big lift creating a category is. As you said in the beginning, this isn't a little project, right? I would love it if you could just talk a little bit about sort of expectation setting. If somebody is listening to this and they're thinking this really sounds like it could make sense for me, from your experience and what you've seen and you've talked to people who've been involved in category design, how long does it take before you can really expect that the market will recognize a new category? John: Yeah. It's a pretty long-time horizon. And so I mentioned Mike Volpe at the beginning of the call and I'll mention him again and Kipp Bodnar, the following CMO of HubSpot mentioned the same thing I'm about to tell you. And they told me that when they first started talking about inbound marketing, it was like standing in the middle of a town square on a soapbox just shouting into the wind with nobody paying attention. And that was the case for two to three years before that phrase really started to work its way into the lexicon of marketers. Salesforce, they pioneered, not so much CRM but cloud-based software. And even today, they still talk about other applications to cloud-based software that's 20 years later. And another example might be... So at Terminus, they talk about the account-based marketing gospel. And maybe this kind of hints to the challenge of how difficult it is to build a category. Sangram used to be there, I think he was their head of marketing if I'm not mistaken. He's definitely a co-founder, but his role is chief evangelist. And so they recognize that to really get people to be aware of and to understand and use this terminology around account-based marketing, they've had to invest very heavily in evangelizing that market or that message out in the market. Kathleen: Yeah. The other story that I've always found interesting... I followed all the ones you just mentioned really closely. And then the other one that's been fascinating to me is Drift because they came on the scene. And if they're listening, they may take issue with what I'm about to say, but look. A big piece of what their product does is live chat, website live chat, and then they have chatbots. Well, those things have been around for a while. That was not anything new, but they were really smart and they coined it as conversational marketing and they really focused more on, not so much the how and what the technology does, as what it enables the business to do, and kind of wrapped a methodology around existing technology in a way that made it feel fresh and new. And it was pretty genius. And I feel like they actually moved really quickly by comparison to a lot of the other examples I've seen. So it's interesting to me why in some cases, businesses are able to gain traction faster than others. John: Yeah. I would have to think that a lot of it has to do with the culture and how quickly or rapidly that business has gone through change in the past. And the other thing we should probably discuss is just the timeline of everything that happens before you share your new category with the world. I was talking with... There's an interview I did with, let's see, Anna and Cassidy at a company called Narrative Science. And they expected just the category design process itself to take about six to nine months. This is before they released language out publicly. And at Skyfii, that was our experience as well. And for that situation, that company, I think they were founded in 2012 or 2013. So they were five, six years into the business and there had already been a lot of discussion around the space that they started in, which was Wi-Fi marketing or Wi-Fi analytics. And so anytime that you're going into a space where the culture already kind of thinks and has a mental model for what their business is, the process of reworking all of that and getting everyone on board, especially the leadership team and perhaps even investors, getting them on board with that new message in a new way of thinking about the business, it takes time. And I would argue it should take time. Because if you rush the process and you ask your team to start using maybe even radically different language about what you do, people need time to really think through that and maybe they need to push back or challenge you a little bit or ask questions or provide suggestions. There's just this change management process you have to go through. And if you rush through that, people are not going to feel like they're a part of that process. And then ultimately, that's going to undermine your efforts in years one, two, three and further as you're asking your team to help you share that message. And at Skyfii, Skyfii is publicly traded in the Australian market and so they have investors and they have a public... They're very thoughtful about the message they put out into the market. And so they really wanted to take the time to make sure that message was right and that it made sense. And so, yeah, it took us, I don't know exactly how many months, but yeah, around six to nine months to really start that discussion and then get to a point where we were comfortable with the category name and the underlying narrative to support it. Why category design needs to be a company-wide effort Kathleen: Yeah, and I think there's... To me, one of the most important things is consistency because you kind of said if everybody is not on board and everybody isn't speaking from the same playbook, all it takes is one or two people to diverge and talk about your thing and language and terms that puts it squarely back in with all of the other things out there that... And it destroys your effort. John: Yeah. Well, and this is probably a great segue into another really important point about category design, which is that it's not a marketing project. Sometimes, it can be spearheaded by marketing, and marketing will often do a lot of the legwork, but it's not something that's relegated or exclusive to marketing. It has to be something that that CEO is involved in. It affects the company vision and is affected by the company vision. They kind of play off of each other. It affects the product roadmap. It affects what the sales team says. It affects what you might tell investors. So if your CFO is in charge of investor relations, he or she, they have to be on board and educated on the message. That's another misconception I heard a few times and it was... Personally, I thought it was a marketing initiative when I first read about it. But the more I dove deep into it and the more people I talked to, I realized it's actually a bit more of a business initiative, more so than a marketing one. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point. Having that buy-in top to bottom, it's really important. John: Yeah. What's been your experience at Prevailion in kind of leading your team in that discussion? Kathleen: So it was interesting because I came in really excited to make this a category design play. And shortly after I came in, we hired a head of sales, who also had some experience with category design and saw that that was a really strong play for us. He and I had both read Play Bigger, and we just kept talking about it until we basically beat the rest of our leadership team down into buying copies of the book. They've all now read it. They're all super excited about it, and it's great because it's given us a common language and framework around which to talk about what it is we're doing. So we're still really early stage, but I think we have that excitement and that buy-in in principle at least is there. And now, we're at the stage where we have to figure out our plan. What does a category design strategy look like? Kathleen: So along those lines, let's talk a little bit about somebody who's listening and they think, "Yep, this makes sense for me. Okay, I'm going to set my expectations. I understand I need to get top to bottom buy-in." What are the elements that you've seen in your experience from the companies that you've studied that have done this that contribute to successful category design efforts. In other words, what would be a part of a company's plan if they were looking to move forward with this? John: Yeah. So I'll mention two things that come to mind. So one I touched on a moment ago, but it's making sure that the CEO and the leadership team are involved and to the extent that they feel like they have a stake in the success of the project. What I mean is it's not enough for them to say, "Sure, that sounds great. Category sounds great, Mr. or Mrs. CMO. Go for it. Let me know how it turns out." That's not sufficient for getting buy-in. So getting them to be a stakeholder and have a real level of participation, that's absolutely key. And there's an interview I did with Chris Orlob of Gong.io, where we talk about that in more depth. So if you want to link to that, I'm happy to- Kathleen: Yeah, that would be great. I would love that. John: Yeah. The second thing is category design, it's all about talking about a problem that you're solving and less about the product. And so one thing I always like to say is that problem... Let's see, so your solution, your product. Solutions don't exist without problems, right? And then problems don't exist without people. And so you have to go back and understand the people that you're trying to work with and serve, and understand the problem you're trying to solve and the language they use to describe that problem, and the context for which they're trying to solve that problem or maybe they're not even aware that it is a problem or they think it's unsolvable. The point is you have to really understand the problem first and use that to lead your messaging. If your category is all around, here's why this specific product is so great and it's called this category, you're kind of missing the point. When you look at the language and the marketing that companies like Drift, for example, do, 80% of it is on the problem. Drift likes to talk about how the buying process has changed. Buyers are not interested in waiting hours or days or weeks for someone to respond to them. They want a response now. And you even see that word, "now", used.  Kathleen: Yes. That word, that one word... I went to HYPERGROWTH. I think it was not this year, but the year before. I went this year too. John: Okay. Kathleen: The year before, their whole keynote at HYPERGROWTH was all about the one word, "now." And it was so powerful, the way they distilled that down I thought, really, really simple but effective. John: Yeah, yeah. And they've written a book around conversational marketing. If you've used Drift products, you can kind of see some tie-ins but it's really about the problem that they're trying to solve. And people smarter than me have said lots of times that if you can articulate that you understand the problem better than anyone else, then people will assume you have the best solution. You don't have to work so hard to talk about every single little feature or benefit that you offer. Showing that you understand the problem creates empathy with your audience, and then again, they'll assume that you have the best solution to address that problem. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting that you talk about that because I think that's a really easy mistake for marketers to make, which is to say that, especially when you talk about B2B technology, it's really easy to fall into the trap of talking a lot about what the product does, how the product works. And I think many times, that's facilitated or even encouraged sometimes by the customer asking, "What does the product do? How does it work?" John: Right. Kathleen: And yet, I think the challenge as a marketer is to try to really get ahead of that and take control of the conversation and steer it towards not only the problems as you say and really deeply understanding them, but the outcomes that come from the use of the products. There's problems, and then there are what is the outcome for the user? How does it make their life better? How does it change them for the better? If you think of those as two different poles, and in the middle, lies the product and all the stuff it does, if you can keep the conversation more at the periphery on those poles, then I think you can be really successful. But that's tough. John: No, I've never heard it described that way, but that's a really clear way of describing that. And it's funny you mention that because I was having the opposite experience just this week. I was there was looking for a new email client for my computer. And that's a pretty established category. There's a million email clients. And in that context, you don't need to talk about the problem of communicating with people. Kathleen: Right. John: You know what email is. You don't need to talk about the outcome so much. There were a few features I was looking for and I was trying to find a client that had those features. And so you can talk about that a little bit more upfront when the category is established and people know what the category is, what it isn't, what it's supposed to do. But to your point, Kathleen, if that category doesn't exist and you're really trying to sell a vision around solving a problem, emphasizing what the problem is and then emphasizing the outcomes are really what's necessary to get people interested in just having a discussion around this new idea. And then from there, they're probably going to ask, "Okay, this sounds really good. Tell me about that product itself. What does it actually do?" Then you're in a perfect position to go into those details because they're ready for it. And they get the larger idea. Kathleen: Yeah, and that's where I think the traditional framework of top, middle, and bottom of the funnel comes back into the discussion, right? When you do get towards that middle to bottom of funnel stage, you can get into the weeds of how it works. And I know in our case, for example, it might not even be the same person we're having the conversation with. Our ultimate buyer isn't going to ever care so much how it works. They're going to hand that part of the decision off to somebody on their team and say, "Validate this for me." And it's almost like we've talked about it. We just need a spec sheet, but that... It's kind of like when you're going to a conference and you get the convince your boss letter, but in reverse. We're selling to the boss and the boss needs a convince their engineer letter that they can just hand to them and say, "Here, take this. It's in your language. It'll answer all your questions." Right? To me, that's the steps that we need to go through, but if we get too stuck in the weeds of convincing the engineer early, we're never going to get to convince the boss. John: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Building your category design go-to-market plan Kathleen: Yeah. Well, have you seen... So there are those foundational elements of how you talk about what it is you're doing, how you talk about the category, how you begin to gain share of mind. And then there's the actual go to market. And I've seen a lot of information written. For example, in the book, Play Bigger, which we've mentioned a few times, which is kind of like the Bible for category creation and other places. They talk about the concept of a lightning strike, which is just really a big kind of splashy go to market. It could be an event. It could be some other, something else that really makes an impression on the market and gets it talking about your thing. What have you seen or have you seen anything that has worked really well as far as like quick, well, I don't know if quick is the right word, but very high impact kind of strategies for really making an impression on the market? John: That's a great question. I'm not sure that I've seen a ton of really great examples beyond the few that we've discussed. So back to HubSpot, I don't recall a big... They have their INBOUND event, right? I don't recall that having a huge kind of blow up the world moment at the time when that conference first came out, but they've certainly been consistent and they made it a very conscious decision not to call it the HubSpot User Conference or even put the word HubSpot in there. It was about inbound, something bigger than themselves. I've seen Terminus, they have focused on this idea of a community of people who are interested in account-based marketing. Sangram told me they started with a fairly small event, relatively small event. And they've kind of built it from there. But that's more of an ongoing exercise, I guess, an ongoing process. Drift has their HYPERGROWTH conference. They came out with a book called Conversational Marketing. That's probably the biggest kind of high profile thing they did that was explicitly around that category. I think one of the things around lightning strikes is that, at least the way they're described in the book, is that they feel like they could be appropriate for a VC-backed company, or maybe a publicly traded company who's launching a new category and wants to really make that big splash and can afford to do that. I would say if you're earlier on and you don't have millions to drop on a big event or a massive campaign of another nature, it seems like other companies can can be successful with more of a process-driven approach of who are we trying to get to care about this category? What are they interested in? Where do they spend their time? And how can we just have these conversations with them on a repeatable basis? Because, like we were talking about earlier, it's not like once you name your category, the whole world suddenly cares about it and there's all these... Gartner doesn't give you a ring and say, "Hey, I guess we're going to create a Magic Quadrant because we saw your lightning strike. That's good. This is so great." Everyone who I've talked to anyway, who's done it well, has had to dedicate consistent resources over time to really get people to understand it and think about it. Kathleen: Yeah. You're talking about something that strikes very close to home for me because I've looked at those examples too and I had an opportunity... I've interviewed Kipp Bodnar. I've interviewed Nikki Nixon, who was one of the first leaders of the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. I interviewed Dave Gerhardt at Drift. So I've had a little bit of an inside peek into some of those companies. We didn't talk about this topic specifically, but what did strike me about all of those conversations and all of those examples is, as you say, consistency but also not just consistency, volume. There's a difference between, "Hey, we're going to consistently blog once a week, and it's going to be a great blog," and that's just an example. All of these companies not only have been super consistent, but they have turned the volume dial way up in terms of the amount of content they're creating around their category. I think every one of them has written a book actually, because Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote the book, Inbound Marketing. You mentioned the book that Drift wrote. Sangram has written a couple of books. I don't know if that's a requirement or it's just a coincidence, but I think it certainly has helped. But it's also a reflection of that turning up the volume. We're not just going to write a bunch of blogs and use this keyword on them. We're going to write the book on our topic and really own it. And to me, there's something to that. If you're going to do a category creation play, you don't necessarily have to have the biggest budget in the world. Maybe you're not going to throw a HYPERGROWTH type conference, which is a cool conference. But you are going to need to really be prepared to just saturate the market with content, flood people with educational content around what is that problem you're solving, why it matters, why it's new, and why the new approach is better than the old one. John: Yeah. And that comes down to having patience and the right time horizon. And like you were asking about earlier, if your expectation is that category design is something maybe you can do for a few months and then you can go about business as usual, that's a wrong time horizon. And it will take months or probably years for people to really get what you do and talk about it, independent of conversations with you. And you have to have the content to support that, whether that's an event or a blog or a book or a podcast. And I think you also have to make sure that your investors understand that vision. They understand that you want to create something big, you want to create a category that you can dominate and design to your favor. And then if you do that, five to 10 years from now, you will be in a very good position. But also understanding that the first few years will have a different trajectory than someone who's just really trying to scale growth right off the bat at a very high level. Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like you just brought the conversation perfectly full circle because we started talking about how important buy-in was, top to bottom. And you can think of top to bottom as like CEO to the bottom of the organization. But honestly, if you have investors, that's really the top. Your board has to be totally bought-in because you'll get a ton of pressure. I mean we do have investors. We just got a series A round, so I'm dealing with this right now. And we're very fortunate that we have a really bought-in board, but I completely agree with you. It's also fascinating, you mentioned earlier analysts. That's another thing. If you're working with the analysts, what are the expectations you should have there? Because I recently read a quote that was like, "Gartner will never create a new market if there's only one player in it." Right? Because what's in it for them to build a Magic Quadrant for one company? They're not going to do it. So by definition, if you truly, truly are creating a new category, your thing is new and different and not like anything else and you "don't have any competition" which is like the bad words to ever say... Because even if you don't have competition, you have perceived competition. There's nothing in it for an analyst to say, "Well, this is a new category because a lot of work to produce a Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave." They're not going to do it for one company. So that goes back again to the conversation around time horizon. So it's such an interesting play and not for everyone certainly. You mentioned a couple of really good examples from the marketing world, Drift, HubSpot, Terminus. Can you think of any examples from outside of the marketing technology world that are really great examples of category creation? So if somebody is listening and they want to kind of look out in the wild and see who's doing this well, who would you point to? Examples of category creators John: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Once you understand what category design actually means, you start to see new categories all over the place. So I'll mention two. So in high school, Kathleen, I drove a minivan. It had wood siding, I hated it, and it was just the dorkiest car you could drive. But at the time, I didn't know- Kathleen: We have to come back and have a conversation about that in a minute. John: So at the time, I didn't know that minivans were actually representative of a new category in the market. And I can't remember when they first came out. I think it was maybe the mid-80s, and I mean there were these full-size work vans, but people didn't conceive of this van that you would use to haul your family around. It was a completely new category. And it continues to be... I've come full circle. We've got a minivan today, another one. And so anyway, that's kind of a great example. You see that in automotive all the time, so hybrid cars. The Prius was a great example of designing that category. Tesla now for electric cars, SUVs as well. So that's one. And then another one is, I was actually thinking about this on the way to work this morning, the way that Apple and Spotify have really created, I guess, a new category around how music is distributed, I think, is another interesting example. And I think it's a... The reason I bring it up is category design isn't so much about a specific name or a specific taxonomy or a word that Gartner has capitalized. It more has to do with the business model and the way people look at a space. So when Apple launched iTunes, they completely changed the way music was distributed from buying a full album to buying individual songs and to needing to have the physical copy of the media to having a digital copy you could take anywhere. And now, I would argue that maybe Apple or iTunes created that category. They are the first to do that. But I would also argue that it's really Spotify, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think their user number is larger than Apple's for Apple Music, they're the ones who have actually designed the category. They're the ones who said, "This is what streaming music looks like. This is what you're supposed to pay. This is about how many artists or songs we're supposed to have available. This is how we're going to curate music to you." And that's a completely new way of using music or listening to music. I don't know what the official name for that category is. Maybe it's just called streaming music. It's not something I'm an expert on, but that was a very long answer to your question but those I think are two that come to mind for me. Kathleen: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I do feel like we're surrounded by category creation. And it's happening even faster than I think it used to because of the pace of technological change. We just don't necessarily recognize it as such. But when you have that framework through which to think about it, you do start to see it everywhere and it's really interesting to watch. And I think it's kind of like the whole frog that boiled in the water analogy, which is actually a terrible analogy when you really think about what you're talking about. But the notion that- John: Who's actually tried that by the way? Do you know anyone? Kathleen: No, God, I hope not. That's like, don't they say serial killers start by torturing animals? No, no, no. Do not boil any frogs. But the whole idea being it's happening to us. We are experiencing category creation. It's just that it's happening at a pace that we don't like see it. It's not like a yesterday it didn't exist, and today it does. That by the time the category has happened and has become commonplace, it just feels like it's been there all along kind of. It's really interesting. I think there's probably a whole psychological aspect to this that hasn't even been mined in a way that it could. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: But all right, shifting gears because I could talk about category creation forever, but we don't have forever. Inbound marketing. We talked about really what the podcast is about, and I love talking about category creation as part of it. Because when you talked about consistency and HubSpot and Drift and Terminus, really they were all phenomenal examples of companies that really did inbound marketing well. So when you think about inbound marketing as it is today, is there a particular individual or company that you really think is killing it? John: I'm going to say that it's really like a style of inbound marketing that I think is starting to get a lot of attention and it's this idea of having an evangelist be a voice for the company. And the reason I think this is so interesting is because, like our world is, there's so many messages we get from brands today, both on the consumer side and on the B2B side, that I think people have a real... They started to see that you can have a brand say anything, right? It's a construct. But when you have a person who's a real human being talking about the vision and the values and what their brand represents and how it might be able to help, to me, that's a much more authentic way and it's just very relevant in the world today because I feel like people just crave more human-to-human interaction. So a three examples of that. We've mentioned a couple already, so Sangram and Terminus does that very well. Dave Gerhardt does that. He doesn't have the title of evangelist, but he's much more of the face of the company I think even than David Cancel or others. And then, Ethan Beute at BombBomb is doing that really well. Kathleen: Yeah. John: I know you had him on a previous episode, and yeah. I know there's others out there, but those are the three that come to mind. I see their content very regularly. They all do a different job. They have their own styles. They have their own voice, but they're very authentic. And I think they're adding a lot of value for the respective companies through what they do. Kathleen: I totally agree. Those are three great examples. And picking the right person or settling on the right person to fill that role is such a critical decision for the company. It has to be somebody that truly, deeply understands, as you said, the problem that the audience is experiencing, but that also can come across as charismatically and passionately believing in that shift that needs to occur to create that new category. So it's an interesting mix of skills that you look for when you try to find your evangelist. John: Right, right. So does this mean you're going to step up and be the evangelist at Prevailion? Kathleen: I don't know. We actually... I'm really lucky. And one of the reasons I joined the company is that we have this amazing team of really smart people, who are also very invested in participating in marketing. So our CEO is unbelievable. He could sell ice to the Eskimos, not that he would. That makes him sound like he's a smarmy sales guy. He is so smart and he really has been in the market a long time and knows it, and he's also incredibly well-spoken. So while I would love to get up and talk about it, I think I'm really lucky that I have an executive team that is full of people who could probably fill that role better than I could. John: And you know what? I don't think it's entirely an either or situation. Some of those companies I've mentioned, they have someone who's maybe has the largest following or the loudest voice, but there's others on the team who can contribute to that. And I think that's what's really exciting, is it's not just one person, but you can have a whole series of people on your team evangelize for the company. And I don't know about you, there's something about when I just see the people behind a product that I'm thinking about using. I feel so much more comfortable having that conversation and and exploring what they do than I would if I was just reading pure brand messages. Kathleen: Absolutely. It all comes down to trust, right? And if you feel like you can trust that person who is the chief spokesperson, somehow or another there's a halo effect from that that shines down on the brand. And it really saturates the brand with that feeling of trustworthiness, that makes you want to buy from them. John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: Yeah. I love it. Well, digital marketing is changing so quickly. This topic of category creation is so fascinating because conceptually it seems like something that will stand the test of time, but then how you implement it obviously will change over time. With everything changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and stay educated on all things marketing-related? John: Yeah. For me, both listening to and hosting podcasts has been a big driver of my growth. And so conversations like this one with you are really helpful because you and I could swap ideas. The episodes I've done... So I co-host a series on the B2B Growth show around category creation. I also did a series on FlipMyFunnel. That's given me the chance to talk to people who have done more category design work than I have and learn from them in the process. And for me, that's been so much more valuable than anything I could read or stumble across in a newsletter, not that those things aren't valuable. But having one-to-one access to experts, there's few things that are... I'm not sure if anything is going to beat that. Some of those conversations have led to ongoing relationships, where I've been able to ask questions and dive deeper into other topics. And so that's where I found the most valuable use of time, is just having conversations. I love to read, love to listen to podcasts, but anytime I could just talk to people and listen to them and then talk through my own ideas, man, I'd do that every day if I could. Kathleen: Amen. I just filmed a LinkedIn video about this, about how I learn. And the number one way I learn is through hosting this podcast, which when I say that to people, I know that that's not something that's going to be feasible for everyone. Let me just spin up a podcast so that I can learn. But it is the most amazing vehicle because you get to meet such incredible people like yourself, pick their brains, really get into detail that you can't get into in other ways. And it's amazing how much I take away from it. Second for me is I love to listen to Audible business books on 2X speed as I do my commute. John: What are you listening to right now? Kathleen: I am finishing Crossing the Chasm. And then before that, it was Play Bigger, From Impossible to Inevitable, and I come back. I'll listen multiple times to books because I feel like you absorb more the second time. John: Right. Kathleen: So yeah, lots of good ones. There's never too many books to read or never too few books, I should say. I always have more. John: Right, no shortage of content, yeah. How to connect with John Kathleen: Thank you. That's what I was trying to say. Well, if somebody has questions about category design and they want to reach out, learn more about what you're doing, or ask you a question, what's the best way for them to get in touch? John: Sure. So you could email me at John@FlagandFrontier.com. So that's J-O-H-N@FlagandFrontier.com. You can also just put in John.Marketing in your browser, and it'll bring up a really simple page with just my contact info. Sometimes that's easier to remember. Kathleen: So smart. That's great. I love that. John: I can't believe no one bought that domain, but it was there so why not? Kathleen: Genius. John: It's easier than spelling my last name. And then you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I won't attempt to spell my name here, but if you want to link to it in your episode- Kathleen: I'll put that in the show notes, absolutely. John: Yeah. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. Well, I have really enjoyed this. I've learned so much. I feel like I probably could have made this podcast three hours long, but nobody wants to listen for that long. If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I would really appreciate it if you would take a minute, go to Apple podcasts, and leave the podcast a five-star review. That is how other people discover us, and that is how we get in front of a bigger audience. So take a minute and do that. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, John. This has been fun. John: Yeah, my pleasure, Kathleen. And hopefully, we can have another conversation later on as you go further into your own category design process. Kathleen: Yes, about that and also about the minivan that you drove in high school. John: All right, sounds good.

After spending more than a decade in finance, Michael Volpe has worked as a freelance journalist since 2009. He's the author of "Bullied to Death". Follow his work on CPS corruption, VA corruption, and more at DailyCaller.com/.

Guest Mike Volpe is the CEO of Lola.com, the fast-growing corporate travel SaaS platform that raised $37 million earlier this year with aims to dominate the $1.6 trillion global travel market. HubSpot’s third founder and former marketing chief, Volpe was offered the position of Lola.com CEO while still the CMO at Cybereason, a cybersecurity SaaS company where he led marketing and sales development. He’s also a member of the Board of Directors at sales and marketing SaaS Validity Inc. Volpe is well known in the Boston startup community, and an angel investor in more than 30 startups, including Desktop Metal, Drift, and Privy. He has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management where he focused on marketing, product management, strategy, and startups. Discover more Boston Speaks Up at Boston Business Journal's BostInno: www.americaninno.com/boston/boston-speaks-up/

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about the Transition from CMO to CEO, Travel Hacks, the CMO Stack and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: NetSuite and OmniFocus Stack & Flow Interview with Mike when he was still at Cybereason Mike on MoC when he was CMO of Hubspot The […] The post Special Interview with Lola CEO Mike Volpe! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

One of the most overlooked aspects of marketing for many companies is their own employees' experiences. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, TINYpulse Senior Director of Marketing Andrew Sumitani talks about why employee experience has such a powerful impact on marketing, how the best companies create great workplaces and channel that into their marketing, and how the hiring process can affect both your culture and your marketing outcomes. Highlights from my conversation with Alex include: TINYpulse is a software tool that empowers employers to get feedback from employees and incorporate that into business decision making. Andrew says we are in a time where the employee experience is the brand for an employer. According to Gallup, only 12% of employees strongly agree that the organization does a good job of employer branding. The job of marketers is to look broadly at their scope and ask themselves, how can I create an employee experience here at this company that is so good that people simply want to authentically share that? The silent killer that impacts growth at most companies is employee churn. If you can slow that down you solve for a lot of things. In the hiring process, it's important to not just look for people who have experience in the role, but to also use almost a regression analysis-like approach that resembles lead scoring to determine whether someone is likely to contribute to content creation and support marketing. Approach marketing your employee experience much like you would anything else - by starting with stories and looking for ways to create content around them. You can also use a tool like BuzzSumo to find people who have written about other employers in your space and get them to cover you in an article. HubSpot, Zillow and LinkedIn are examples of three companies that do a really great job of leveraging the employee experience in their marketing. Resources from this episode: Check out the TINYpulse website Follow Andrew on Twitter Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn more about the connection between employee experience and marketing. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Andrew Sumitani, who is the Senior Director of Marketing at TINYpulse. Welcome, Andrew. Andrew Sumitani (Guest): Thank you, Kathleen. Happy to be here. Andrew and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: I’m excited to learn more about you and what you do at TINYpulse. Can you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, and your story, and how you came to be where you are, and also what TINYpulse does? About Andrew and TINYpulse Andrew: Absolutely. So, I've been in the digital marketing space, got my start in advertising about 10 years ago, and mainly been working in startups. So really, my core competencies have been in demand generation, building traffic, SEO, and a lot of different hats, as folks who are listening maybe in the startup scene maybe, can attest to. And that brought me here to TINYpulse, working for David Niu. He's been a long-time mentor and steward of my career in the marketing space. So, having worked for him in the past, our paths crossed again at the opportunity to work for TINYpulse. So, I think that was a natural way for me to continue advancing into more of a management career here at TINYpulse, where we do a lot of different things. But, I think really, that the value proposition of TINYpulse boils down to one thing. And a lot of managers I think, will attest to this, which is that sinking feeling when an employee or a valued team member gives two weeks' completely by surprise. And it's a gut punch. And so, TINYpulse really solves that in a number of different ways. One is, if you ask any leader, "What are your top three competitive advantages in the marketplace?" invariably, if they close their eyes and really think about it, people's going to be on that list. And that's very, very important, and it's a very valuable philosophy. But when we actually look at the behaviors and tools that enable leaders to check on their people, and they're not checking on their people as much as say, their finances. But finances aren't necessarily going to be in their top three competitive advantages. So, what we've done here at TINYpulse is built technology that's really lightweight, really easy to use in a way that allows managers to get the deal, to get the feedback from employees that they really need to make smart people decisions. And ultimately, when it comes to understanding, "Am I at risk of employee churn?" Or, "Am I at risk of people leaving as a result of, say, a merger or acquisition?" It can be a positive reason. We give managers the tools to understand that, and make decisions around that. Kathleen: So, is it a form of employee NPS score? Andrew: That's one of the aspects of TINYpulse. So, we make sure with our customers, with regularity that they ask the questions quite simply, "How happy are you at work, on a scale of one to 10?" And that yields a lot of different insights, not only from a quantitative standpoint, simply getting a distribution of one to 10 scores, but also qualitative feedback. So, someone may respond to that question with an eight out of 10. And that might seem really good. And I think it is, and it's worth celebrating. But at the same time, that eight out of 10 person may be someone who's very valuable, who has feedback, and constructive feedback at that, that'll help them in a month's time, retain that score of eight out of 10, or even become a nine or a 10 out of 10. Kathleen: Yeah, I can see where having a tool like that would be so powerful. I manage a team of eight, and I do weekly one-on-ones with them. But there's something to be said for a precursor to your weekly conversation where they're able to sit and with clarity and without the influence of somebody staring them down, record their thoughts and their feelings about how things are going. And then, you can follow it up with a conversation. But yeah- Andrew: Absolutely. And we've done a lot of ... I've been doing a lot of personal reading too, and research into this as we develop more products, especially on the coaching space. But when we really boils down to it, what is going to help someone learn how to do something better, whether it's management or their job, or learning a new piece of software. Is it going to be reading it out of a book or is it going to be perhaps, a private lesson with an expert? Generally speaking, it's going to be private lessons with an expert. And if we take those concepts and map them to the one-on-one experience, that's where we find a lot of managers can use some help structuring their one-on-ones. How much time should they be spending on them? What can I do to, again, front load ... to your point, front load those conversations in a way so that we can quantify and understand the trending over time? So, if you were to have a report one day who rated themselves a two out of five for how they're feeling coming into the week, you might not go into that conversation blasting right into, "Hey, let's talk about your work items. Let's talk about your goals. How are your tracking towards your OKRs?" Someone who answers two out of five may have something going on in their personal life. They may have something going on completely outside of work that is worth talking about. And that's something we've experienced here at TINYpulse as we develop and release more products in the coaching space, which is, as long as it's a five out of five, they're doing great. So yeah, we can challenge that person with more. But that person who, maybe a two out of five or a three out of five, what are some of those things that are going to help that person get to four or five? And that may be something that, it might be outside of work, it might be quite simply, "I don't feel that I have the tools to succeed in this project." And that's a completely different topic from say, nudging that person to really step on the gas and keep a sense of urgency. That's a completely different conversation. So that's what we've been putting a lot of work into lately. The Connection Between Employee Experience and Marketing Kathleen: I'm fascinated by that topic, as somebody who manages people. But it's interesting, this is a podcast about marketing. And my listeners might be sitting here thinking, "This is great, but what does it have to do with marketing?" And one of the reasons I was excited to have you on is that you have a very interesting perspective on the connection between employee experience and marketing. Can you talk a little bit about that? Andrew: Absolutely. And, I think it's very, very ... it's a point ... it's a very salient point right now, because we are in a time where the employee experience is the brand for an employer. The workplace is more transparent than it has ever been. Culture is becoming more and more top of mind. And as a people try to understand what culture is, I think historically it's been thought of as this touchy-feely look and feel of a place. It used to mean ping pong tables, it used to mean perhaps, having drinks in the office. And at the beginning of that, that might've been true. It really represented a way of thinking and the way of thinking that that employer valued. But as soon as everyone gets a ping pong table, as soon as everyone gets a a beer tap, then it becomes no longer a differentiator. And as we all know in marketing, I think being able to articulate why your employer brand is different, is paramount to success in the marketplace. So, that's number one, which is, from our research, only a very, very small percentage. I think Gallup put it as low as 12% of employees strongly agree that the organization does a good job of employer branding. So, they have trouble engaging their employees over the longterm when it comes to that brand. One of our mentors, Scott Dorsey, shout out Scott, he left me with a very, very important piece of advice, which is as marketers, yes, we can worry about MQL's, we can worry about sales pipeline contribution. But it's important for us to think about our roles in the broadest context as possible. And what he meant by that was not just caring about those metrics, but also caring about, "How can I create an employee experience here at this company that is so good that people simply want to authentically share that?" And we see the effects of that in third-party review sites like Glassdoor. You can bet that anyone looking for those listeners out there, if you are hiring, that anyone who's considering your company, they're looking there for, for social proof. And that's another marketing concept that we come back to, which is, well, what are people at that company saying about working at this company, and what it's like, what it's really like, to work there. And, that has implications into how quickly teams can grow. How the silent killer I would think is, how much a company turns over their employees. So, how much are they retaining their employees for the longterm? How long is that tenure, and the ultimate, which is, how are they performing and what are they doing over time that contributes to the value of that company. Kathleen: Yeah, you make a really good point. And I love that advice that you got about looking at marketing in the broadest possible sense. I know that when I interview people for my team, almost to a person, they reference Glassdoor. People are out there looking. And I know I do this when I'm looking at companies. And I used to be in a sales role. And I would actually do this as a salesperson and look at the comments on the CEO because I was selling for an agency, which is a very collaborative relationship-based kind of working arrangement. And you want to know the temperament of the person that you're getting into bed with, if you will, from a business standpoint. And there were definitely a few prospective clients that I decided not to chase because I read their Glassdoor and found out that they had terrible reviews of the CEO. And I remember thinking, if this is this bad for employees, it's going to not be great for us as an agency-client relationship. So, I do think there's something that's really real there. And I also think you touched on something that most marketers really get wrong, which is that they do tend to focus so myopically in on legion to the exclusion of everything else. Not only to the exclusion of the employee experience, but also things like customer retention. We forget that marketing has a responsibility even after we land a customer. So, there's this vast area of opportunity for marketers, which I think would also place the marketer at a much more strategic role within the organization than most marketers are currently. Andrew: Yeah, I can't agree more with that. And so if we've, over the course of this episode, we've talked a little bit about the top of the funnel, if you will, which is job seekers using Glassdoor. They're looking at job openings. They're taking that social proof of ratings for what it is. But as for how those companies are fairing once an employee has joined their company, it's, "What are those companies doing to really sharpen the employee experience so that they can maximize the tenure of those talented individuals and maximize the value of their investments that they make in training, in onboarding, in retention, and all those components. And how does that reveal itself on the other side? Glassdoor in that lens, is merely a lagging indicator of what has happened. But it might not always be the best indicator. And I would argue it's a terrible indicator at times, of what a company should do if they want to grow. If they want to join forces with another company, if they want to change their culture, what are some of the things that they should be doing? And, I think some of those sites are very limited in their capacity. And that's where, with regard to what we do here at TINYpulse, what a lot of organizations are now adopting is more of a real-time feedback model, which is to constantly pulse your employees to understand, hey, with regard to, if it's NPS, it could be simple as something as a company holiday party. For many companies it's not a small investment. So it's important then to understand, well, hey, is that adding to the employee experience or is it not? And can you quantify that? And that immediately arms, not only marketers but HR professionals. If it's a smaller organization that doesn't have necessarily, the biggest HR team, the CEOs themselves to deploy those resources in a plus ROI manner. And it's no longer squishy, it's no longer about, "Hey was that about perceptions?" It's really about on the broad scheme of things on big data, from a big big data perspective, are the investments that we're making adding to the employee experience, not merely continuing it or not falling behind. It's a way for us to get ahead. How TINYpulse Leverages Employee Happiness For Marketing Kathleen: Now, you, yourself have built or actually rebuilt, as I understand it, a marketing team at TINYpulse. So, can you talk to me a little bit about, from your own standpoint, what you've done to build the employee experience on your team, but then also, how you are leveraging that for marketing? Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I think ... I was in a circumstance in which I was a marketer of one and given an extraordinary opportunity to build the team up. And for me, A, I talked to a number of really smart marketers, but really wanted to take this approach that utilized real-time feedback, but also, some of what the broader industry has indicated about how to manage teams while how to manage teams when it comes to creative work, how to manage teams when it's not routine work. And for those listeners out there who are readers, I highly encourage you to pick up a book by Daniel Pink. It's called Drive. It's all about motivation, and what helps teams come out with the very best results. And for many organizations, I think the knee jerk response is to point to metrics, point to carrots and sticks and say, "Well, if I find the right carrot, if I find the right sticks, that's going to help me bring you the best results." Now, that may work to a certain level. But the one step above that is really about A, giving people what is the intrinsic value of working together. And marketing brands, I'd say, are a little bit different, in the sense that it's not routine work. One campaign that may work this month may fizzle out due to ad blindness, due to the Google ad words becoming insanely expensive, or one channel simply not working well anymore. So, there's a constant creativity that needs to be put into place when it comes to marketing. And when I look at those characteristics in terms of the team, it's not only, "Hey, what is your track record?" but, "Are you a natural producer of content? Are you more analytical, on average, than the average content marketer?" for example, and then finally, are these behaviors a struggle for this person? Or is it something that they're, they're naturally going to bring to the table? So, I think that that team aspect, that's an area where, in some of our hiring tools, when we look at success criteria, again, we try to quantify those with regression analysis, understand, "Hey, who are the people who can best suss out these qualities in that regard?" that's another area where I think in marketing can play a role. This starts to resemble lead scoring. It starts to resemble how to qualify a candidate. So, for those who are hiring out there, I really recommend looking to the concepts that are the bread and butter of marketing. It's inbound, it's lead scoring, it's, some combined with some great HR best practices to build a really great team. Kathleen: Yeah, you're so right about kind of the blurry line. I used to own an agency for 11 years, and I hired a lot of marketers. And at the time, I was a HubSpot partner and a customer. And I built out an entire hiring workflow in HubSpot, where you could submit your application through a HubSpot form. There was a workflow follow up. I mean it, it made my whole hiring process much faster. I think it went from three months to three weeks, or something, because it was all automated. It was great. It saved me a ton of time. So, I can definitely see where you're heading with that. Andrew: Yeah. Amazing. And, what is the SLA with HR and their ability to call down interested job candidates who have expressed interest? We have a very tight SLA with sales. Maybe it's they've downloaded something. Perhaps it's a piece of content, or a white paper, or an ebook. And the SLA might be that person should be getting a call within 30 seconds or our SLA's broken. But when we look on the hiring side to create a delightful candidate experience, what are we doing on the SLA side there? Are those folks getting an immediate call back? Are they getting followup? Are they getting everything that they need to understand what it's like to work at this company? I think that's where a lot of employers are starting to look to their marketing teams for those best practices. And it's amazing. Mike Volpe himself, Mr. Inbound at HubSpot, gave a talk on this about how to break down people operations in that manner. So, when it comes to a product, talk to the folks who are in sales and who know what is being solved when it comes to hiring in that pipeline. Look to the marketing folks so that you can have those broader conversations you can't reach. When it comes to retention, what are you doing to keep these people happy? That's where real-time feedback, that's where HR best practices, that's where incentive programs, that's where employee recognition becomes a much bigger part of the spectrum. Turning Team Happiness Into a Marketing Asset Kathleen: So, assuming somebody is listening and they're thinking, "I have a really happy team. I have a great culture, my team is really happy," I would think the next natural question that they would be asking themselves is, "How should I leverage that in the marketing that I do? What is the best way for me to capitalize on the fact that I have this great place?" So, can you speak a little bit to that? Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I think applying the very same marketing playbook that we all know, and for those that may be still learning, the first thing I would look at is, "How do we create content around this?" No marketing without content being produced, no communication occurs without some kind of message being created. And so, that's where I would encourage a lot of the marketers out there, if you have a great culture, if you have quantitative scores around how happy your team is, if you have quotes, if you have testimonials, even if you have case studies of how someone may have entered the company as a teacher of English, and becoming a senior product manager, and leaving to go travel the world and become a senior product manager somewhere else. Those are the case studies. Those are the stories, if you will, that resonate with people. And human nature at its very essence, we respond to those stories. So, if you have outspoken employees who want to authentically share, give them an opportunity to speak about those. Keep your social posts updated regularly, social posts on your employee profiles, figure out what are the differentiating factors about working for your company that are the benefits that someone who is a valuable candidate is going to find compelling and want to say, "Well, I want to work in that company. And because those benefits are only found at that company, that's the place that I'm going to accept an offer down the road." So, ultimately again, just apply that same marketing playbook, create content, promote it, the 80/20 rule, which is, 20% should be on that content production, but 80% should be really on the distribution. Kathleen: Oh, I'm sorry. I have to interrupt you. I'm so glad you just said that. I literally, just posted a video to LinkedIn today talking about, somewhat ranting about, how I've interviewed like a hundred plus marketers now, for this podcast. And that is one of the most consistent themes of the most successful marketers, is they put more effort into content promotion than they do into content creation. But what I have noticed is that most average marketers, it's the completely flipped. They put way more effort into content creation than content promotion. So, Amen. Andrew: Absolutely. And use those same tactics. I mean, if you find, talk to your PR person. Who is the person who is getting stuff written up by other people, never, not just on your blog. If you don't have a huge audience, make use of someone else's. Use BuzzSumo. Find people who have written about really interesting companies. Use BuzzSumo. Find journalists who have written about other companies in your space, other companies in your geographic location, other people who have profiled people who might be covering the same type of topic. Then reach out to those folks. Find out if they are ... be their friends. Share their stuff. But, at the end of the day, what's really going to show value for them is giving them a piece of content that is going to be a value to their viewers. Now, if they've written about the employee experience, if they written about high-performing, high-flying cultures, chances are they're going to want to publish again, so that they can keep getting traffic for their posts. So, don't be afraid, reach out to those folks. And over time, what you'll find is that it can take a little bit of time to spin up. But generally what I found is that always, always, always has a longterm ROI that is going to work out just right. Companies That Do A Great Job of Leveraging Employee Experience For Marketing Kathleen: Yeah. Now, are there any particular companies that you think do a really excellent job of this? Andrew: Let's see. So, outside of present company, I think there are a few. Those in the marketing space, such as yourselves over at Impact. I think those over at HubSpot for example, very, very strong in their marketing. They screen for some of the folks who are going to socially post. Again, it's not a struggle for the average candidate to propagate the marketing message, not only on the product marketing side, but also on the employee experience side, which is, "How great is it to work here? What are the benefits that I get from this?" Not the features, but "What is a benefit that I get from this? I'm a happier person. I'm a better husband, I'm a better spouse, I'm a better parent because I work here." And those companies that do that really well, you're going to see them spouting this out. They're spouting it in their blogs, they're spouting on social. And again, they're finding ways to get employees to authentically share it. And they're doing that by creating such a great employee experience. So, whenever you find a really great social post by someone who's sharing something, again, really authentic about their employee experience, screenshot that and see if you can replicate that playbook. I see HubSpot doing this, I see IMPACT doing this. Any company that may have a Lifepath hashtag, folks at Zillow are doing that. These are the companies I think are really putting together campaigns around employee experience that will help build again, that candidate pipeline, and then also nurture the existing employee base so they can grow and have that negative churn. Kathleen: Yeah. The one that I've always been so impressed by is actually at LinkedIn. A good friend of mine from many years ago works there. And she's in the kind of the HR/culture department. And what I've always been especially impressed by with them, I mean, everything they do, employee-wise seems to be top notch, but the most impressive thing to me has been the way they've built this alumni network. So, they look at the employee experience as something that continues after you stop working there, and they have these reunions for all of their former employees, who come together and still love the company. And when you consider, as you said in the beginning, talent is so hard to find. When you consider that the people that you've taken the time to train, and who've gone on to other places, could someday come back. What an interesting investment to make, and what an interesting thing to see, and incorporate into their strategy. That's always been really, really cool to me. Andrew: Absolutely. If the company is the product, then, what are the benefits and what are the benefits that make for the right fit of candidate and the right fit of employee. And maybe it's work life balance, maybe it's career growth, maybe it's a pay and benefits, maybe it's mentorship from senior leaders, or culture and values, or all of the above. These are all those benefits that are worth testing out in your messaging to find out, hey, what's resonating with the right audience so that I can double down on that on what's working, maybe emphasize less what's not working or what's not as important to the candidate company fit. And, that in itself will make the ROI on recruiting, which is a very expensive tool that a lot of companies, I think, can continue to struggle with. It'll make that ROI much, much sharper. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Yeah. Now, shifting gears, there are two questions I always ask all of my guests. And I'm curious to know what your answers are. The first one is, obviously, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Are there any companies or individual people who you think are really knocking it out of the park with their inbound marketing right now? Andrew: Yeah, so I just think a few folks who have always had an influence on me. Mike Volpe over, I think he's, yeah, he's over at Lola Travel now. He's now the CEO there. He coined "inbound marketing" in the HubSpot days and he's still doing that. He's still practicing what he developed all those years ago at HubSpot. Another is a Neil Patel. And I've worked with Neil on a number of occasions. I think when it comes to content marketing, he's taken this idea of being just insanely useful to marketers to the extreme, which is, 20,000-word guides on how to break down SEO, versus hiring expensive ... a partner to do it, or bringing in an expert to help them out. This is a way for people and marketers to grasp some concepts that are a minute to learn but a lifetime to master. And I think he's done a really great job with that. Kathleen: Yeah, he gets mentioned a lot when I ask that question. It's interesting to see the trends over time of whose names come up. And his definitely is one of the ones that I hear a lot. Second question, one of the biggest kind of complaints I hear from marketers is that digital is changing so quickly that it's trying to keep up. It's like drinking from a fire hose. So, how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Andrew: There are a couple of things. I'm highly-engaged on Twitter. I think that's a great place for marketers in particular, to stay engaged. A, because I think I find that's where a lot of more and more executives tend to to hang out online. LinkedIn is another, that's a close second to where I hang out. Is to go where one's peers are hanging out online. And, I used to be a person who really wasn't into conferences, but I've really changed in that regard. So if you're ever, I think, reluctant to make that investment is, to really, I think wholeheartedly embrace it. Because what I found over time is that for a lot of conferences I go to, it's not about necessarily, who's speaking. Yes, it's great to have really inspiring speakers, but it's about the networking and meeting with one's peers. It's just what ... If one wants to be a movie star, you got to go to LA to be in Show Biz. The exact same thing. And creating that who kind of love, which is knowing the right folks who are going to help build your career, and also give you not just learnings. I often come away from networking, not having learned anything, but just coming back to the office really inspired, and really ready to execute, and really ready to keep things tiny and lightweight. That's often what I need to actually progress. And it's not that, it's not about learning the greatest new tactics, it's actually about staying focused and not allowing those things to distract from what we're trying to do. Kathleen: Any particular marketing conferences that you really are partial to? Andrew: Yeah, I think Traffic and Conversions Summit is one. I think SaaStr is another one that's growing, and it's a great place to meet other marketers and folks trying to grow their business. If you're not in SaaS, I think growth marketing, I think it's Growth Summit actually that is the title is another one. But generally speaking, I think those have been places where I find the content to be really geared toward people like me. So, if you are in that space, check those out. You should be able to get a lot of value and get ROI by attending those. How to Connect With Andrew Kathleen: Yeah, those are some good suggestions. Well, if somebody is listening, and they want to learn more about TINYpulse, or connect with you and ask a question, what's the best way for them to do that? Andrew: Sure. Yeah, hit me up on Twitter. Follow me @andrewsumitani. Also visit us at TINYpulse.com. It's a great place to learn. We have the number two HR blog, hopefully number one soon, but the number two HR blog in the space. A lot, when it comes to what we've talked about here today, we have a lot of our stats when it comes to, well, what is it like using real time feedback and what kind of location does it have on Glassdoor? What are some of the latest industries? That's when it comes to employee retention, employee recognition or employee engagement. Check us out there. And yeah, love to hear from you. Kathleen: Great. And I will put a link to your Twitter and to the TINYpulse website in the show notes. So, head there if you want to click through and check those out. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: And if you are listening and you learned something new, or you liked what you heard, leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple podcasts. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, as always, Tweet me @workmommywork, because they could be my next interview. Thanks, Andrew. Andrew: Thanks very much, Kathleen. Five Stars Only. Kathleen: Five Stars Only, absolutely.

Select the best approach to entering the marketplace: A) Category creation B) Building a better mousetrap The answer? Both. We sat down to discuss market strategies with one of HubSpot's co-founders and current CEO of Lola.com, Mike Volpe. Mike has been involved in both ends of the spectrum: category creation and building a better tool to serve an existing category. He gives FMF co-host John Rougeux the lowdown in the first of four #TakeoverTuesday episodes focused on category creation. *More about John Rougeux*John is the founder of Flag & Frontier, a marketing consultancy that helps B2B startups stand out in crowded markets.

Talk about a resume. Mike Volpe is the CEO at Lola, where he joined after building HubSpot for eight years (he was one of the five founding team members), and then growing revenue by 500% in two years as the CMO at Cybereason. Mike is one of the best B2B marketers on the planet, and on this episode of the Marketing Swipe File, DG and Mike talk about why your marketing should always try to “date up”, how PR changes as your company grows, why remixing old content ideas is better than finding new ones, why you should hire people who are better than you, and what CMOs need to learn before they can become CEOs.

Mike Volpe joins Rob to discuss Clueless, the 90's high school adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Emma. The post RMC #037 – Clueless w/ Mike Volpe appeared first on The Geek Generation.

We sit down with Mike Volpe, CEO of lola.com, to chat about how he went from helping companies IPO to building one of the best marketing teams during his time at HubSpot.

Mike Volpe is no stranger to competitive markets. He was part of HubSpot's founding team, then moved into the world of cybersecurity with Cybereason and is now CEO of Lola.com, a travel management tool. In this episode, he explains the relationship between pricing and brand, his perception of freemium and the importance of looking closely at your happiest customers for growth opportunities.

Mike Volpe knows quite a bit about being on the road. Whether he’s crisscrossing the country to speak at industry events or meeting with Lola.com investors, partners or customers, hardly a week goes by where Mike isn’t catching a plane somewhere. As a result, he’s built up a ton of tips and tricks for staying productive on the road (and plenty of war stories along the way). Check out the first episode of Road Warrior Radio to listen in as Ryan and Mike dive deep into productivity hacks, their favorite travel tools and so much more. Mike Volpe is the CEO at Lola.com, where he is responsible for definition and execution of the company’s strategy including customer service, marketing, sales, and operations. Previously he was CMO at Cybereason, a cybersecurity SaaS company, where he helped the company increase pipeline by 650% in a single year, and grow revenue by 5 times during his tenure. Mike was also part of the founding team at HubSpot, where he spent 8 years growing the company from 5 people to over 1,000 employees, $175m in revenue, and a successful IPO.Mike (aka “the best marketer in Boston”) is well respected and active in the entrepreneurial community as a member of the board of directors of Validity, and as an advisor or investor in more than 30 startups. You can read more about Mike at MikeVolpe.com.

In this episode we hear from Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com. Want help developing your plan to become an influencer & thought leader? Check out IMPACT SUMMIT on Oct. 13th in Salt Lake City. B2B Growth listeners can get 15% OFF with the promo code: SWEETFISH. Click here to connect with this guest on LinkedIn.

Fresh of his announcement of joining Lola.com as CEO, Mike Volpe shares his insights on building a movement, marketing to the SMB, and the current state of inbound marketing.

After years of being a very successful CMO, last month Mike Volpe was named CEO of Lola.com – a company focused on making business travel easier for the travel manager and the traveler. I caught with Mike at Lola’s headquarters in Boston to learn more about making the transition from CMO to CEO, how being a CMO helped him prepare for being a CEO, and to get his take on how leading a startup in today’s environment compares to what is was like building HubSpot up more than a decade ago.

What is the single most effective - and least expensive marketing channel - available to all businesses? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, BirdEye Head of Marketing Sam Mallikarjunan shares why your customers are your best marketing channel and how BirdEye is developing a platform designed to help businesses leverage trust - via customer evangelism - at scale.  From his year's spent as "the face of HubSpot" to teaching marketing at Harvard to taking over marketing for BirdEye, a martech SaaS startup, Sam has gathered fascinating insights into what it takes to build a high growth business and the role that marketing plays in that process. Listen to the podcast to hear Sam's thoughts on leveraging customers for your marketing and to learn more about his plans for marketing BirdEye. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and today, my guest is Sam Mallikarjunan, who is the Head of Marketing for BirdEye. Welcome, Sam. Sam Mallikarjunan (guest): Thanks for having me. Sam and I recording this episode Kathleen: I'm excited to speak with you. You told me that this is going to be your first podcast since joining BirdEye, so I'm really excited to dig in and learn a little bit more about it and share that with the audience, but also talk about some of the things you've learned throughout your career because you have a really interesting background with many years at HubSpot, and you're doing some teaching now. I have a lot of questions that I want to ask you! Sam: I'm looking forward to it. It's been a weird ride, so we can go in whatever direction you want. Kathleen: Great. Well, why don't we start by having you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, and your background, and how you wound up where you are today. Sam: Sure. So my name is Sam Mallikarjunan. If you can't pronounce it, you can Google anything even close to it and you'll generally find me. For seven years, I worked at HubSpot, which if your listeners don't know, is a software company based out of Boston. For the last three or so years, I was teaching the advanced digital marketing course at Harvard University. And then for all of last year, as we discussed before we started recording, I lived in a van, both teaching at Harvard, and then also I was HubSpot's full time speaker. So I spoke in 49 US states and about eight other countries last year on a range of topics: innovation, and innovation marketing management, et cetera, marketing strategy. (to learn more about Sam's adventures traveling the world and living in a van, check out the "Sam from the Van" Facebook page) So now, however, what people thought would never happen is happening. They used to joke that we could change my name to "Sam from HubSpot," so that people didn't have to say Mallikarjunan. But no, I have left. I have left and taken over as Head of Marketing at birdeye.com, which is based in Dallas. So I'm moving from Tampa to Dallas, and I'm really, really, really excited because it feels ... First of all, we share some board members with HubSpot, so it's kind of similar in that way. But second of all, it feels like HubSpot did back in the early days. So I'm very, very excited. Kathleen: Oh that's great. So true confession, both times I've heard you say, "I lived in a van," in my head what comes up is Chris Farley. And I want to say, "Was it down by the river?" Sam: Many times it was down by a river. We posted on Instagram, everybody got their joke, ha ha ha, very funny. Kathleen: I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard someone say that. I'm not super original in that. Sam: In fact, if you bust out, "Do you like green eggs and ham," based on my name, between those two jokes, you'll have hit about 50% of the recurring jokes that I've heard in my life. Kathleen: Oh, I didn't even think of that. Sam: Yeah. Kathleen: Alright. Well, fascinating kind of journey to where you are. Can you share what was it that prompted you to leave HubSpot after so many years? Because you were there for a long time, and I mean, when I hear what you've been doing - you were Head of Experimental Marketing, you were the full time speaker - I mean some of those gigs sound like dream jobs. What got you to move on? Sam: So here's the weird thing about dream jobs, is that once you do it long enough, it becomes work again. And then also, I had an enormous privilege being at HubSpot and getting to work with and under some incredible people. HubSpot was the same size when I joined it as BirdEye is now, but I always had Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders. I had Mike Volpe, the former CMO, Kipp Bodnar, the current CMO ... I always had them to fall back on, right? It was never ... There was always a limit to how much damage I could actually do to the long term success of the company. HubSpot's huge now. I think it crossed the five billion dollar market cap rate, 2300 employees and something like seven or eight global offices. It's absolutely huge and to be honest, I could have spent the rest of my life at HubSpot and been absolutely happy. But what I wanted to see is if I could do it if I didn't have Volpe, and Kipp, and everybody else to fall back on. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: So now I'm the Head of Marketing for a company that's the size that HubSpot was when I joined it, and if I fail I have nobody to blame but myself. HubSpot's always had this role where if you have good trust with your manager you should be able to tell your manager when you think it's time to move on. So Kipp, and Dharmesh, and everybody always said that to me, "If you eventually want to leave the company, let us know and we'll help you find something awesome." And so I did, about six months ago I told them that, "Hey, I really want to try and do this on my own." So I had a freelancer make me a list of 144 different start-ups in the U.S., post-Series-B, pre-IPO, either MarTech SaaS, blockchain or AI. I shortlisted those into three categories of pretty cool, really cool, and insanely cool. And then I got introductions, and feedback, and everything else from my bosses, from the people on the Executive Team. From those 144, I chose BirdEye. Kathleen: That's amazing actually. I mean, it says a lot, first of all, for HubSpot's culture that they've created an environment where you can go and feel safe saying basically, "I'm mentally getting ready to leave." That's a scary proposition for anybody, but I think it's wonderful that that environment exists there.  Sam: It's good both ways, right? Because it's a good retention mechanism. So I have turned down two formal CMO offers in the last several years, and many, many more opportunities and it's because they've made me really snobby. I would look at it and I would be like, "I bet Brian, and Dharmesh, and Kipp, between us we could find something even better." So it was never a surprise to them, it always gave them an opportunity to move me internally. Almost every time you see a job in the last five years that I've moved internally at HubSpot on my LinkedIn profile it's because Sam was thinking about leaving, and we figured out a way to make it better for me to stay. And, obviously, it's good for the employee, right? Probably the most interesting opportunities in my professional career was a couple months ago. I'm literally sitting at breakfast with my boss, texting back and forth with my new boss negotiating comp. Most people hide the fact that they're looking for a new job from their boss? My boss helped me negotiate comp. Which is good, because I had never heard of things like single option triggers and stuff like that. Kathleen: Yeah. That's amazing and it's also really smart on the part of the employer because, especially if you're talking about key personnel. I mean, really in the technology space any personnel it seems like is key, but particularly someone like yourself who's been there so long. You're the kind of person who's hard to replace, and so having that ramp or that runway to know that you're ready for that departure as an employer is really great as well. Such an interesting process that you went through. What an incredible opportunity to get introductions - warm introductions - to all those companies. Now you have me dying to learn more about BirdEye because I want to know what it is about this company that made it the one, right? I feel like you were on The Bachelor and there are all these companies handing you roses and you chose this one. Sam: Yeah. So first off, you're right. They functionally got six month's notice, so it was a little sad actually, by the time I left they no longer needed me because they had a replacement. So I didn't have that ... you know. I don't know, it was both good and bad. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: Yeah, so BirdEye. There was a couple of things I was looking for, right? One was I wanted to work for a company where solving the problem was meaningful. What I loved about HubSpot in the early days was inbound marketing felt right. You know? The way the world was was that you made money by pissing people off. I used to train ... Those annoying people in the mall who try and sell you cell phones? I used to train them, so that was my background. But it felt wrong. I was never happy about it, the work that I was doing. Inbound marketing felt right. You should be able to build a big, profitable business off of creating an experience that people love on the internet and in all of your market. What I love about BirdEye was that it felt right too, which is - the website we're still working on, clarifying our value propositions - but the way that I think about it is if you're a world class dentist, or a lawyer, or autobody repair shop, or whatever, you should not also have to be a world class internet marketing professional. You should be able to just be good at your job and empower your customers with a framework that's going to help you grow your business. Obviously the opposite is true, which is that if you ask your local mechanic how they feel about the local big dealerships, they're going to say the work is subpar and overpriced. Same thing if you asked most dentists, or lawyers, or whatever the small business is. So I loved that bit of it, where every day I come into work, my team comes into work, the better we do our jobs, the closer we are towards shifting the world of business the way that it should be. I also just like it too because I love things that are unfair advantages that really irritate large entrenched companies. So for a hundred years functionally, the business growth has been about, "Can my Sales and Marketing team beat up your Sales and Marketing team? Can we just sell better than you?" In this day and age, I think as we've seen with companies like United, right - great Sales and Marketing team at United - but if you piss off the customers there's no defense from that anymore. Kathleen: Oh yeah. Sam: Right? So it's not this marginal battle anymore. Companies like BirdEye came and flipped the table over and it says that, "My community of empowered community fans can just obliterate your Sales and Marketing team." That's what I loved about it. So it was the mission, it was the brand. I mean, it's a MarTech SaaS company with executives that I love and it's a very comfortable fit. But for me, I wanted to do what Brian and Dharmesh and Mike did for inbound marketing, which is create that movement. I wanted to do that for what I honestly think ... We haven't finished defining it yet, but this has got to be the next wave in growth, right? The only thing that matters about you is how empowered customers are that like you. Because you don't want the only empowered customers to be the ones that don't like you. Kathleen: You know, it really resonated because you talk about doctors, and dentists, and lawyers, and people like that. I owned an agency for 11 years and I had many of them as clients, and the best campaigns we did - in fact we won HubSpot's first ever Client Campaign of the Year award back in 2015 for work we did for a LASIK eye surgeon. The reason it was so successful is, it was kind of like what you're talking about mixed with a little dash of influencer marketing. We found a guy that happened to have a really strong Facebook presence, and out of nothing but dumb luck figured out that he wore glasses, would love to have LASIK. We paired him up with a doctor, they agreed to do the surgery at no cost if he would just blog and talk about his experience, good, bad, or otherwise, there was no requirement that it could only be positive. He had a great experience; he went and vlogged, and blogged, and just spoke to his audience about it and that campaign far and away crushed anything else we've ever done. Especially with things like healthcare and attorneys, you really trust your friends and those people in your network so much more than you trust an e-book, because we did plenty of those too. But it wasn't the e-book that killed it for us, it was this guy telling his story and personally endorsing the doctor and the procedure that was the lightening in a bottle. So I can totally see how that's so important. Sam: Yeah, now the question is, can you do that 100,000 times, right? Kathleen: Right? Sam: Especially for local marketing, there's not always local influencers who you go to to determine what dentist you go to. For dentists it's funny, it's the old joke, it's a cliché. It's, "What do you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school? You call them doctor." Kathleen: Right. Sam: So the only way that I, as a patient, or whatever, can tell the difference between Dr. A and Dr. B is what their patients say about them online. And yeah, we trust them way more than what people say about themselves. I think the other thing that's changed is the passionate relationship we have with certain brands. It feels new. I don't have data on this, but it feels super new. I love using Uber as an example, because Uber in 2011 was banned by the state of Massachusetts for 23 hours. It's the fastest I've ever seen government move. And it's not because Uber had a bunch of lobbyists then like they do now, it's because ... We literally got a phone call from the mayor of Boston's office at the HubSpot office asking us to stop slamming them on Twitter. It was a decision by the governor's office, not the mayor's office, and we just didn't know that. Uber got hundreds of people to show up to the Cambridge City Council meeting, which is used to a dozen or so people showing up. When I see that and I see things like what happened with United, or I see things both good and bad, communities of customers rising to your defense, or communities of customers tearing you down, there's something there. Kathleen: Oh, it's incredibly powerful. I was going to say Uber is a study in and of itself of both dynamics, like how it can go well and how it can go not so well. You said a word that I think is so important, which is trust. You know, one of my colleagues at IMPACT is Marcus Sheridan. I've seen him speak numerous times and he has this one thing he always says that I find so powerful, which is that, "Every company is in the same business, whether you're Uber selling rides, or you're McDonald's selling hamburgers, or whether you're HubSpot selling software." When you boil it down, they're really selling trust, because if somebody can't trust you they're not going to buy from you. Just like my campaign, even though we had an influencer, it's really no different than if I go on Facebook and ask my friends. It's about who do I trust, who's opinion do I trust? So it sounds like what you're building is something that helps you leverage trust at scale. Sam: I like that, "Leverage trust at scale." Kathleen: There you go, you can put that on the website. Sam: When I teach at Harvard there's a metaphor I like to use, which is about how all economists, of which business is a subset, of which marketing is a subset, have physics envy, right? In physics, I can drop this pen a hundred times out of a hundred, and it's going to fall and hit the ground. I can stand in Harvard Square handing out a hundred $1 bills and at least 20 people will make the irrational decision, they'll call me a "chowda head" and keep walking, right? We work in a profession where it's not this simple, "If this, then that, zero in one binary value," marketing is a social science, economics and all of business is a social science and the definition of social science is, "A science about which we are very uncertain." Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: The most important variable, by far, is exactly what you said, which is that trust. That's what separates us from all of the other professional disciplines, is our dentists, or lawyers, right? Whatever, they know there's something objectively true that they can work against. We have to work in an environment where that's never the case, things are always changing. The one constant is it doesn't matter how compelling the argument is, or how cheap it is, or how cool it is, whatever, if there's no trust that's the deal breaker. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: Fell out of your hand while I'm standing in the square. Kathleen: Yeah. So, I would love it if you could talk a little bit about how you see this playing out for companies, whether these are dental practices, law firms, any other type of company in terms of trying to leverage trust at scale. What does that really look like and how does that manifest in terms of a company's marketing? And you using that at all with BirdEye or planning to use it at all? Sam: Yeah, well first of all, you should always drink your own champagne, eat your own dog food, whatever metaphor you want to use, so we definitely are ... That's really important to us because people want to buy from a company that sells to people like them. So we're not done with this yet, but you'll notice that soon, if you come to the BirdEye website from one of our dental ad campaigns it's all going to show you reviews and stories of dentists versus lawyers, right? That would be very different. I will say one of the cool things, again, about how this is like HubSpot was in the early days is you remember how easy blogging was back in 2011? 2010? Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: I mean, it was great. If you had a blog, you were light years ahead of the curve, right? If you were blogging frequently, you would win your market, right? I had a toenail fungus remover company, I had knee scooters, I had mortgage companies, if you just did the work, you'd be fine and absolutely crush it. Now that's really hard, growing your traffic, your acquisition engine off of blogging is really, really hard because it's a very crowded space. The good thing about reputation marketing, reviews, and leveraging your customer base like that is almost universally everyone is really bad at it.  The large companies, like T-Mobile sends me an NPS survey, right, which is one way to begin the conversation about leaving a review, and whenever a company does it I always give them a zero because I know I'm not going to mess with their data that bad. I want to see if there's follow up. If I send you a zero ... If I send you a 10, right, yes, I'm absolutely going to recommend you, you should send me a link. Say, "Hey, here's an easy way to do that." Kathleen: Right. Sam: If I send you a zero, I would expect that a company would have that mentality of following up with me to find out way. Almost no one does. T-Mobile, Verizon... you know, as much as I hate to admit, even at HubSpot it was still a very basic implementation of no, somebody gave you a bad NPS score whether or not they'd get a follow up. You know, if you do it at all, you're going to be in good shape. Asking your customers for reviews is still innovative as weird as that sounds. We don't feel that way because we see everybody moving in this direction. You and I see lots of people are talking about this sort of thing, but the vast majority of businesses and the vast majority of markets don't even ask their customers for reviews. If their customers say something negative, they don't follow up, and if their customers say something positive they don't use that in any way. They don't put it in their email. They don't put it on their website, they don't put it in their ads, so the- Kathleen: Why do you think that is? Sam: Well, you know, the bell curve of adoption, right? So you've always got the people who are the innovators and the early adopters who are going to try everything just because it's new, and they're worried about being second place, and you know, we just haven't got there with some of the technologies and behaviors that are new. Stuff like Bird Eye is new. How important reviews are may not feel new, but it's relatively new to the world of business. It's not been around for 30 years. The underlying concepts have, but the websites - Yelp hasn't been around for 30 years sort of thing. The other thing is that, you know, if you've read 'The Innovator's Dilemma' by Clayton Christensen it's a really great book. I have a different concept of the innovator's dilemma, which is that it's really, really easy to be innovative when things are going well, because you have lots of breathing room. It's really, really easy to be innovative when things are going really poorly. So like, when I first applied to HubSpot I didn't apply. I built hiremeHubSpot.com and ran ads targeting people who worked at HubSpot to register for the free webinar on why you should hire me. It's because I was a college drop out with no previous experience, so you know, when you have no chance of success it's easy to be innovative. It's the middle area where things are going okay, but if you mess up they could go off the rails really quickly where it's hard to be innovative, and that's where most of the world of small business is right now. You know, if you're a dentist or a lawyer, auto repair shop, whatever, you're running on pretty thin margins. You're having to fight pretty hard to get your customers. You're already behind the curve, because you don't know the highly technical things, like local SEO and PPC. You generally don't have a sophisticated understanding of the marketing engine behind that, and you don't have the luxury to be innovative, so that's, again, one of the things I loved about Bird Eye was we try and take some of the hard work out of that and make it a little more attainable. Kathleen: So focusing on reviews for a second, because that seems like it's a big part of this, you know, you want to get a customer to review you, and I've worked with different companies and talked to them about this, and you know, some of the times it seems like they don't do it because they're just afraid to ask. Other times, they don't know how to ask, so can you talk about what is the right way to ask for a review? How do you navigate that process in a way that doesn't seem too pushy and doesn't seem like you're placing too much of a burden on the customer? Sam: I mean, so NPS, the net promoter score, is sort of an easy cheat, because it asks on a scale of zero to 10 how likely are you to refer us to a friend or colleague. If they give you a zero through six you should follow up immediately, right? Sevens and eights are passives, and nines and 10s are promoters. You would really only tell the people who would give you a nine or a 10, "Hey, that's awesome. I'm glad you were happy. Can you share your story with the world?" Then, everybody who's less than that you would put them into a service remediation process, right? Just send a text message to the business owner or whatever you want to do to follow up with this customer because they're unhappy. I definitely think you're right, which is that people are somewhat afraid of the answer, because it is, especially for small businesses, highly personal. This is ... I put my blood, my sweat, and my money, and my risk and everything into this business that I built, and then to actively solicit anybody to say anything negative about it is hard. It's a hard thing to do emotionally. There's a humility in that, which is that you've got to know that you're never going to be perfect, and as we say here it's not about being the best. It's about being the best at getting better. We have a tool that tells you all of the things that your customers hate in a market. You can look at it just by your company or you can look at it by your entire industry. Kathleen: Oh, that's really interesting. Like if you're a dentist, is it the anonymized aggregate feedback from all the dental- Sam: Yeah. Cool thing about our industry is most of the data set we're working with is public, so I call it our blue ocean finder for the business strategy nerds who are listening to the podcast, because you can literally plot what's important to my customers and which competitors are bad at that? You can adjust your strategy accordingly. Also, on the more micro level you can say what's important to my customers that I'm bad at? What's important to my customers that I'm good at? Then, you make the decision. Do I fix the things that I'm bad at or do I stop doing those things entirely, or what, right? The exact same process you'd follow going through a blue ocean strategy canvas. Yeah, it's about listening but not just about hearing, right? It's actually listening and making change based on that. Kathleen: And what industries do you currently have that for? Sam: So the really good ones for us so far, the people who have been willing to take a risk, are people like dentists and lawyers and auto body repair shops. We're working on our own buyer persona exercise right now, so you'll forgive me. I don't have a nice "Marketing Mary" to show you like we had at HubSpot. The key variables for us are people who their customers don't want to be their customer, so like divorce lawyer, collision repair shops, etc. People for whom differentiation is very difficult, like dentists. And then people for whom the consequences of the decision are extremely severe, right? Kathleen: Surgeons. Sam: Surgeons. Well, wedding venues, that sort of thing, right? You mess that up you can't get that back, right? Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: So those are generally the three psychographic categories of businesses that we're looking at right now. Kathleen: Interesting. So for example, if I were to go on and I wanted to get that industry-wide view of what customers are and are not happy with, could I get that right now for marketing agencies for example or is there a certain pick list I need to choose from? Sam: I don't know if we have marketing agency ... We should. We have advertising and media as one of our categories in our database, but we're a startup, so you know exactly what that means- Kathleen: Oh yeah. Sam: -which is that odds are all of the data exists. It's just a question of if anybody has asked that question before. That'd be a fun follow up to do for the podcast.  Kathleen: I mean, I have a feeling I know the answer, but you know, you can't assume. It would be interesting to look. I'd love to play around with that at some point, so if you ever want a beta tester for agencies, you know who to call. Sam: Absolutely. Yeah. Kathleen: I think that kind of competitive intelligence is really interesting, and one of the things you said really struck me, which is that it's not just about understanding how to change your messaging and your marketing. You could truly use that to make very fundamental decisions about your product offering, your service offering, what you want to do as a company, you know? Do we cut certain services because we're just never going to be great at it and it's a huge pain point? There are some really interesting potential in terms of how that data can be used. Sam: We haven't even begun to tap into this, but you're right. It's the lipstick on a pig. If you're changing your sales and marketing but not changing who you really are, in 2018 you're going to be found out, and you're going to be found out because your customers are going to sell you out hard. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: They're going to hop on Google, Facebook, and everything else like that and tell people that your marketing does not match up with the customer experience. I will say man, you're getting me excited here, because it is super fascinating. You know, when we think about the world of disruptive innovation and - forgive me for the Harvard jargon terms here, right - but you think about things like the extendable core, which is what's the thing that a business should lean on to survive the disruption of its market? The classic example here is, like, hotels, right? Have you ever stayed in an Airbnb? Kathleen: Oh yeah. Sam: Yeah, have you ever attended a conference in an Airbnb? Kathleen: No. Sam: Yeah, right? So there's some things that Airbnb simply can't do without adopting the same cost structure. Turns out they're really important. So business travelers, there's a reason Airbnb's never really nailed business travel. It's because of the standardization. You can look at what is important to the customers who are leaving me and what is important to the customers who are staying around? You can look at some of those mappings, and you know, if I'm Marriott hotel group right now, I'm not actually worried about spending too much time solving for the destination vacation traveler, right? I'm really focused on events. I'm focused on business travel. I landed here in Palo Alto at 12:30 in the morning, didn't matter. I walked into the Sheraton. I know exactly what the lobby looks like even though I've never been to this hotel. That's what I value. I don't have to think about it. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. Sam: So yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a lot of interesting data that can come from the fact that we now have the ability to listen to our customers at scale and make decisions. Kathleen: I'm always struck by how many companies have that information - like have it in their hands, not just have access to it, but have been given it - and don't do anything with it. Sam: Most of them. Kathleen: Yeah, it's kind of shocking actually. Sam: So this is going to sound super weird I guess, but I don't work at HubSpot anymore, so I'm allowed to say nice things about them. HubSpot was so humble by the way that we never felt comfortable bragging about ourselves. You know, in DC they have the beltway syndrome, right? Everybody in DC thinks everybody else in the world sees things the way people in DC do. At HubSpot we had "sprocket syndrome," which is we thought everybody in the world was just as sophisticated in their concepts of economics and growth and business as we were, which isn't true, right? You know, things are changing so fast. What was the Deloitte research? The average life span of a knowledge stock, a competitive piece of information like a knowledge that you own, is down to like five years. Whatever it is you own that you're basing your business on, much less your career on, you can expect to be a differentiator for something like five years as opposed to we literally used to name our families after what we did. You were Smith, you were a Wainright, you made wagons, whatever. Now, it's like you can't even name your company after what you do, right? Like you know, it's hard to even have a job title after what you do, because everything changes so fast. The mechanisms for perpetual learning and keeping up with all of that, I just don't think most professionals and definitely most businesses haven't figured out. Kathleen: Yeah, you know, it's so funny that you just said that about the pace of change, because as I was telling you before we started, I just came back from a two week vacation, and I'm going to fly my geek flag now. On vacation, I decided to read 'Becoming Steve Jobs'. There's probably a lot I could have read, but for some reason I was really into that. And you know, I lived through the whole evolution of Apple. I'm old enough that I was working pre-Apple, but yet I had forgotten how quickly all of that happened - how we went from we didn't even have personal computers to "wow, we have a laptop," to "oh my gosh, now we have a little music player and iTunes," and then "we have phones that are full screen and tablets." I mean, rereading it was really both exciting but also kind of frightening. I have an 11 year old, and all I could think was "wow, I just have no idea what the future holds for him when I read this book." It's true. When I think about any business, you know, my company that I used to own, we were EOS practitioners, the entrepreneurial operating system, and they talk about having your long term plan. I don't know how you could ever have more than a ... You could have a three year plan, but it's going to change dramatically, right? I don't even know how you could have a five year plan anymore. It used to be when I graduated from business school it was all about the rolling five year plan. I just think that would be a piece of fiction today if I created it. Sam: Yeah. There's somebody ... I don't remember who it is. They had this great graphic of the pace of change, and if you went back to 10,000 BC you could bring somebody forward in time to 5,000 BC before they saw something that fundamentally challenged their world view, and then 5,000 BC, okay, to 2,000 BC and then 2,000 BC to zero BC. You're starting to see some innovation. Zero BC to like 1,000 BC, very different world. 1000 BC to 1500 - hugely different world, and now if you brought somebody from the early 1900s to just 100 years later it's nuts. If you brought somebody even just from the 60s or the 70s- Kathleen: Totally. Sam: -right just with no context, they saw everything new, this is dark magic, right? It's incredible. That pace of change is accelerating, and the virtue of planning is being replaced by the virtue of adaptability. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: It is not nearly as important to me. When I'm interviewing people, for example, it's not nearly as important to me for most roles whether or not you have deep domain experience. What matters to me is your ability to comprehend new concepts that you've never studied before and your ability to adapt to change, because you know, it's a cliché that the only constant is change, but that used to be true, and now it is not only true, it is the defining characteristic of what life is for all of us. If you can't be adaptable, if you can't wrap your mind around concepts that you've never even been presented with before, you're not going to survive - definitely not in the world of business. Kathleen: Yeah, and the other fascinating thing that came out of me reading that book was Steve Jobs talked about how there's a difference between people who are focused on improving what already exists - which he kind of looked at as the Microsoft model - and seeing what doesn't exist but what is fundamentally needed. That's what obviously he saw as the Apple model. It's a really interesting construct if you think about it, because if you're only working off of the existing reality and looking to improve it, you can only experience change so quickly, whereas if you kind of forget about the reality and are able to think about what's not here that should be, all of a sudden you get these leaps and bounds that start to happen. That's a tough ask for a lot of people though. I don't think there's a large percentage of people that are comfortable in that realm. Sam: Yeah, I mean, if you do what everyone else does you get what everyone else gets sort of thing, right? Again, it's one of the reasons I loved this company is, for a century it's sales and marketing versus sales and marketing team, and now it's we're flipping the table and doing something new. I think part of that is the way that we grow up, right? We grow up not learning how to think but learning what to think. It's this graded progression, right? It's still amazing to me when people come out of college and they come into their first role and there's all these stereotypes about them needing positive feedback. That's because that's how they were raised, right? Like "I do the thing, and then I get this" - it's an "If this then that" sort of world. Kathleen: Everyone gets a trophy. Sam: Yeah, I study ... Not everybody just getting a trophy, but it's even the high performers, the exceptionally good people were told that the way to be exceptionally good, okay, you study, you take the test, you get an A, and then the assumption was you get a job, which everybody who's graduated college in the last five years knows that's not true. You know, and now we live in a fundamentally different world where we have to take everybody who grew up in that universe and teach them something new. We also need to start teaching our kids and future generations it is not about knowing the thing. It's about knowing the way to think and knowing new ways to think and processing it that way. When I'm in an argument at a bar, it's not a question of whether or not I can figure out who was batting for the Red Sox in the 1986 World Cup or something like that. I can just ask my phone that. What matters way more is that I know that I should ask that question and why that question's important. Some of the stuff, it's not as clear. It's not this logical, linear progression. Kathleen: Yeah, man, that makes parenting sound more intimidating. Sam: It is. I don't have kids, but good luck, right? Kathleen: I'm not convinced I'm doing a great job, so ... No. It's a lot to think about, and it's pretty overwhelming, but love the philosophical bent that this conversation took, because this is all really important stuff, and it's easy to sink into just talking about tactics, because marketers love that, and it's easy to say, “Oh, give me a 10 point checklist of the things I should do to be successful,” but a lot of times the reality really is it's not a 10 point checklist, it's take a step back and think differently. Sam: For everyone listening to this, if you ever come across a blog article that says "here's exactly what you need to do," that means that it has been codified to the point, like "10 steps to do whatever," it has been codified to the point that everybody else in your industry knows it too. Right? This is why it's valuable, because it's hard. It's because it's not clearly defined. I can't just write a roadmap for you, I don't even have a name for this movement, yet. Right? What's my inbound marketing? We haven't figured that out yet, but I can tell you it's important, and you and I know intuitively we believe that it's important, and the people who are going to grow by leaps and bounds, 10-X, 100-X, are going to be people who work with people like you and me to figure that out, not the people who wait to, you know, AOL still makes what, 20 million a year, or something like that off of their dial up internet subscription? Those sorts of people are not going to be the ones who are going to figure this stuff out, and are going to make that big change. Kathleen: Unless everything old is new again, and dial up comes back just like record players did. Kidding. You have all these years of really interesting experience at HubSpot. I mean, you were with other companies before that. You've been in marketing roles for a very long time, you taught marketing at Harvard. You're coming into this role at BirdEye, I would love to just hear a little bit about what are you planning to do with BirdEye, what's in your roadmap that you think is going to really help you achieve the goals that you set out? BirdEye's Marketing Roadmap Sam: Yeah. This isn't like the cool thing to say, but what matters most is the fundamental mechanics, right? We have to execute consistently over time. We have to build a team that's aligned very closely with an inside sales team. That's why I'm moving to Dallas, by the way, that's where most of the sales team is, even though we have a Palo Alto office. I'm building the marketing team where the sales team is. We've got to measure the right things. We've got to train and empower folks. We got to build just the disciplined cadence. That sounds easy. That is not easy, right? Making sure that people are aligned. Making sure that people can execute. Making sure that the right people are on the bus, because there are some people at this company, and at all companies who help them get from zero dollars to the run rate they're at now. But the people who are going to help you get from $30 million dollars to $300 million dollars are not necessarily the same people, and the people who are going to help you get from $30 million to $300 billion dollars, are not necessarily the same people. Making that transition smooth, making sure that you're recruiting people who are good fits, that's all the basics, right? The next thing that I wanted to do is this is a community play. We have to build a movement here. We have to build something like inbound marketing. It was such a moment of pride for me, it was actually 2015 on Google Trends the phrase inbound marketing exceeded the phrase cold calling. Kathleen: Oh, that's awesome. Sam: We won. It was great. We need to figure that out. What that is on our end, and we need to... Again this is the innovators, the real innovator's dilemma, is things aren't going bad, but they're also, we're not like 10-Xing for no reason, so it's how do we make the time, and make sure that everybody on my team is carving out that bandwidth to do the things that for lack of a better term are end plus one, they're innovative. Right? How do we have a podcast that tells the story of peoples' favorite customers? So I used to host an AM talk radio show, AM/FM talk radio show about cigars, right? Kathleen: I was sniffing around online, and I saw on your LinkedIn profile that you once worked for a company called cheaphumidors.com, is that right? Do I have that right? Sam: Yeah. This was before that, but yeah. Kathleen: I totally wanted to ask you about that, but we'll do that in a separate conversation. Sam: This was before that, but every cigar lounge, like Cheap Humidors is another good example, but every cigar lounge in the country, I joke, has somebody named Rex who remembers Cuba before the revolution. He's usually a great guy to talk to, you can sit down and have great conversation, and what we are selling is that kernel, that relationship between the business owner and their favorite customer. That is just storytelling gold. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: Right? We've really got to nail that. We've got to know the strategy better than everything else. On Cheap Humidors, by the way, don't judge me, because back then exact match domains were really important, so if you googled cheap humidors ... Kathleen: I was going to say it's probably a domain a lot of people would like to own. Sam: Yeah. Now, I mean, with RankBrain and everything it's more about the conceptual topic extraction from the search engines- Kathleen: Right. Sam: And stuff like that. You could call yourselves reallylowcosthumidors.com and somebody googles really low cost humidors they're not necessarily going to find you. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: Marketing - it's hard. It used to be easy. Well, it used to be way easier. The problem is, is now we've got brilliant people, who their minds are working against yours, and you're really fighting, you know, at least if you're following the old sales and marketing team versus sales and marketing team you're following this optimization, this game of inches, sort of thing, and it's hard. I can't do seven eCommerce applications of LOLcats any more - it's one of my favorite articles I wrote. Kathleen: It's hard, but I've got to tell you, in some ways I think it's great for smaller businesses, because when it wasn't so hard, when you could game the search engines, you could basically buy your way to the top, and that favors people with deeper pockets. You could never compete against them. I feel like now, if you're willing to put in the elbow grease and really create awesome content, you have a shot, and that's a matter of time. Granted, time is always at a premium for everybody, but in some funny ways there's a little more of an even playing field than before, but I could be wrong about that. Sam: Not to sound too self promotional, but again there was a reason I chose to work for this company, all of the arch of history has bent - business history at least - has bent towards doing the right thing, being more profitable, right? You could never run a business model now based off of the horrible things that people used to do back in the day. The way they treated their workers, for example, much less the way they treated their customers, or their competitors. The cool thing is companies like Google - whether we like to admit it or not - have forced us to do better marketing. Doing the right thing is now good business. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: And that feels great, right? Because when I talk about T-Mobile, I could do that sales pitch in Spanish, even though I don't speak Spanish, right? Because it didn't matter. I didn't care what you were going to say back to me, you were either going to sign it or you're going to walk away, so it didn't matter to me that I understood what I was saying. I didn't feel good about that, right? It was just the best way to make money at the time. Now, like creating a good value-added inbound experience is the best way to make money, and that's again what I love about this company, which is the best way to make money should be being good at your job, like serving customers well, and I think all of the weight and inertia of the history of business is driving us towards this point, where whether it's Google, whether it's Yelp, whether it's Facebook, or whatever, you're going to have to solve that bit, or you're never going to succeed in business. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: I want to ask you my favorite two questions that I ask everybody, because I think you've given me the perfect segue into it, and we've talked about how to be successful in business these days you have to right by your customers. When you think about the world of companies, and brands, and even individual marketers out there, my usual question is, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well, but I'm going to put a little twist on that, and say, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well by virtue of how they are kind of nurturing, and building, and leveraging that trust with the customer? Sam: Yeah. HubSpot does a good job, that's way to softball of an answer. You know what I really love, and this is one of my favorite business models in the world, is Netflix, because Netflix has scaled the relationship. I've rented more than 900 movies through Netflix, and I do that because I know that every time I give them that information, they're going to listen and use that to make my experience better. If the internet is about bringing together some of these groups of people with similar interests, Netflix does that beautifully, because it figures out, "Hey, listen, like you like Star Trek, I like Star Trek - people may not put the two of us next together on a demographics sheet, but Netflix will put us back together." The more information we give it, the more valuable that relationship becomes. I actually couldn't leave Netflix now, like let's say you launched your own streaming service for a $1.00 a month, I still wouldn't leave Netflix, because there's so much value in the history of that relationship that I have. They're probably my favorite from the customer delight, and customer retention perspective. From the actual using your customers to grow, Apple is still amazing, because there's three things you can never talk about at a party or at an office. Right? Politics, religion, and PC versus MAC, because no one can have a rational conversation about that, and - Kathleen: Or jiffy versus giffy, at least in our office. Sam: Whoa, that's true. You start talking about MAC, and the MAC fans will just like, they're so passionate, they're so ravenous. Right? And Apple actually does a pretty good job of leveraging those evangelists. So do companies like Uber. You know Uber grew enormously fast, because I told everybody to take Uber, you know, companies that did not have that like Lyft, Lyft started about the same time, if not slightly before Uber, but what they never nailed was that customer evangelism piece, and so that's why Uber managed to outgrow them. Those are some companies that I think do it right. Kathleen: Yeah. Those are great recommendations. You also touched on the fact that marketing is changing so quickly, and that you look for people who are able to keep pace with that change, and are able to embrace, and quickly learn and understand new concepts. Given that pace of change, how do you personally stay up to date, and educate yourself on everything that's happening in the world of digital marketing? Sam: Yeah. That is a difficult question, which unfortunately has a difficult answer, which is that we are, especially in this day and age, like our own businesses. My fathers generation, my grandfathers generation, could expect to work for one company their entire life, get a pension, and move on. We have to think about ourselves as businesses. We're generally not going to stay with the same company for our entire lives and then get a pension, and whatever, which we define ourselves that way. We have to start thinking about disruptive innovation the same way they do. There's a few core characteristics of that. One, is get ridiculously good at defining the value you bring. We call this the "jobs to be done framework." Henry Ford had the most famous quote, if he'd ask his customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.. Obviously he didn't found the Ford Horse Breeding Corporation. He founded the Ford Motor Company. Kathleen: That goes back to the Steve Job's thing- Sam: Yeah. Kathleen: Find the thing that's missing. Sam: Right now, if I asked my boss what he wants me to do, he's going to say, “Drive more leads for the sales team.” That's not really what it is. Right? That's not the value that I bring. The value that I bring is the coaching, and unique perspective, et cetera, so I have focused not on the tactics of marketing, but I'm focusing, and I'm ridiculously good at coaching, and ridiculously good at strategy, not, and that's sort of self disruption. That self disruption is the next piece, so you define your value, you need to be really, really paranoid. The best companies, like HubSpot Labs, for example, are those who are continually investing in testing whether or not they can provide more value for their customers than the core model. So the free version of HubSpot, right? For example, we knew somebody was going to do that eventually, and it might as well be us and not some random nerd out of MIT's basement who does it, don't fight, it's uncomfortable, but don't fight the change. Lean into that change, and be very, very, like... get comfortable with change. The value that I'm adding to business right now is probably not going to be, as you said, the value that I'm adding to five years, it's going to be something different. We have to be comfortable with that. Now, the flip side of that is adopting this mindset of continuous learning, which is, I hate when people ask me for book recommendations, because very rarely do I feel you have to read the entire book to get the point. Kathleen: Yeah. Sam: And it's way more interesting to me to see specific blog articles, like send me the three most interesting blog articles that you've read in the last six months on recruiting marketers. You could probably do that, and that would take a shorter amount of my time, and add more value than you telling me to read random books on hiring. That self selection comes from joining communities, not from going and getting a degree, not from trying to read a book a day, or something like that, but from joining communities and asking those hard questions, and never being afraid to ask stupid questions. That is my greatest pet peeve. We saw this on inbound.org, so I ran Labs, which built inbound.org, HubSpot's community site, people never wanted to use our "Quora for Marketers" that we built because they were terrified of looking like they didn't already know the answer, those are the people who are going to find it very hard to have long successful careers. The fear of asking stupid questions is how company's are killed, the fear of asking stupid questions is also how careers are killed. Where to Find Sam (and BirdEye) Online Kathleen: Yeah. That's great advice. Wow. There is so much to think about, and this was really fun. I'm so glad I got to be the first person to talk to you about BirdEye, and excited to check it out myself, and hopefully learn a little bit more about what people do and do not like about marketing agencies. If somebody has a question, wants to followup with you, and learn more, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Sam: Again, if you Google anything close to my name you will find my website, my Twitter, my LinkedIn. I answer every website inquiry, every tweet, every LinkedIn message. Before you do that, if you're going to ask me for an opinion on something my one favor that I would ask you go check out the BirdEye website, and try to do something. I'm not trying to get you to buy here, what I want you to do, though, is play around with it, see what things break, see what things are interesting to you, and then let's talk about that, too. We're a startup just like HubSpot was back in the day. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a repeatable business model, so I want feedback from you all now that I don't have Kip and Volpe and Dharmesh and Halligan, and everybody else to hide behind. Yeah. Definitely, please do that, and reach out to me if you want. I'd love to talk. Kathleen: All right. Awesome. I'm going to put all those links in the show notes, so that if people don't know how to spell your name they can just go to the show notes, click the link, and find it, but we'll also of course put links into BirdEye, so that they can go and try to find all the bugs, and expose the weaknesses, and then make that the platform for their conversation with you. Great. Thank you so much, Sam. I really appreciate it. If you are listening, and you found some value in today's conversation, I would really appreciate it if you consider giving the podcast a review on iTunes, or Stitcher, or whatever platform you chose to listen on, and if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks again, Sam. Sam: Thanks.

Welcome to Episode 39 of The VentureFizz Podcast, the flagship podcast of your most-trusted source for startup and tech jobs, news, and insights! I'm excited, as this is Part 2 of our special podcast mini-series where I interviewed two Boston tech legends. The first being Paul English, who is best known as the Co-Founder & CTO of KAYAK. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, make sure you do. There's so much great info in there. But today's interview features Mike Volpe, who as most of you already know, was the Chief Marketing Officer and an early employee at HubSpot. And, he was recently the CMO of Cybereason. So, why is this a podcast mini-series? Well, they are both together now at Lola.com, a disruptive online travel service which is focused on serving the needs of business travelers. They recently announced the addition of Mike as the company's CEO, and Paul moved to the role of CTO. I went over to their offices to interview both of them shortly after the announcement was made to bring you these exclusive interviews for our podcast. In this episode, we cover: -Mike's background, and his family's history of success in the tech industry -The story of HubSpot; we talk a lot about its early days, how they built a world-class culture, experimental marketing, and what it was like going public -His current role as CEO of Lola.com, and the future outlook of the company -His thoughts on the Boston tech and angel investment scene -Plus, a lot more Today's podcast is sponsored by Yesware, an inbox productivity platform that transforms the way you send emails. With features such as campaigns, email tracking, and templates, Yesware removes barriers to productivity and empowers teams to make smarter decisions, faster. Yesware is hiring! Be sure to check out http://bit.ly/yeswareishiring for more info on their culture and job openings. Lastly, if you like the show, please remember to subscribe to and review us on iTunes, or your podcast player of choice!

Welcome to Episode 37 of The VentureFizz Podcast, the flagship podcast of your most-trusted source for startup and tech jobs, news, and insights! For this episode of our podcast, I interviewed Paul English, who is one of the top entrepreneurs in the tech industry. Several of Paul's companies have been acquired, but he is probably best known as the Co-Founder and CTO of KAYAK, which went public and was acquired by Priceline for $1.8B. Paul's current company, Lola.com, is a disruptive online travel service focused on serving the needs of business travelers. In this episode, we cover: -Paul's background, and his earlier companies -The founding of KAYAK and its acquisition -The details on Lola.com -His thoughts and tips on hiring -What it was like having a book written about him -His charitable work -Plus, a lot more! Ok - quick side note! This interview is actually Part 1 of a two-part podcast mini-series, as this interview was held shortly after the announcement of Mike Volpe joining the Lola.com team as CEO (and Paul moving into the role of CTO). So in addition to today's interview with Paul you'll want to check back next week because we are going to have an interview with Mike Volpe, which is his first podcast interview since taking on the role as CEO. Lastly, if you like the show, please remember to subscribe to and review us on iTunes, or your podcast player of choice!

Mike Volpe is now a CEO, so what’s he doing on Coffee With a CMO? Well, Mike has a long history in marketing, and at the time of this recording, he still had a few hours left as CMO before he transitioned into the big chair. So technically, we didn’t cheat. In this one, Mike talks about how your PR focus should change as your company grows, why you should associate with big-name brands, and why you should hire people who are better than you. Use the promo code SEEKINGWISDOM when you get your tickets to HYPERGROWTH 2018 and save $500 today (just $199 for your ticket). Visit https://hypergrowth.drift.com/ to get your tickets today and come see speakers like Jocko Willink, Molly Graham, Chaka Pilgrim, Amelia Boone, Grant Cardone, and more in September. PS. The Seeking Wisdom Official Facebook Group is live! One place, finally, for all of us to hang out, get updates on the podcast, and share what we’re learning (plus some exclusives). Just search for the Seeking Wisdom Official group on Facebook. On Twitter: @davegerhardt and @seekingwisdomio

Produced by Foundersuite.com, "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with Andy Cook of Tettra in Boston. Tettra is a wiki enabled Slack platform to improve team productivity. The Company raised a seed round from prominent Boston angels such as Dharmesh Shah, David Cancel, Mike Volpe, Paul English, Brian Halligan and others as well as HubSpot and Boston Syndicates.

Joining us for today’s show is Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer for Cybereason. Today we are going to demonstrate how to replace leads with real opportunities for the sales team through Account Based Marketing.  Why is this an important topic? Demand generation and lead management does not work for companies with business models dependent on a small number of accounts but who spend a lot. Waiting for dream accounts to come to you will result in you missing your revenue targets. If you live and die by the big deal, growing revenues faster than your industry, and your competitors requires a shift to account based marketing.  The first segment will seek to answer the question: When does ABM make sense for your company?  Mike provides an overview to validate that ABM is the right strategy for your company.    Mike outlines in the second segment what a successful ABM program should look like. How should marketing implement ABM to support the sales reach to new buyers and influencers in targeted account.  The types of roles are required for success are described for sales and marketing.  Mike covers the key metrics to track and the time horizon to expect for results. 

Mike Volpe is the Chief Marketing Officer at Cybereason. I’ve had the privilege of knowing Mike for about ten years, and I consider him to be one of the brightest marketing minds. He combines inbound content, SEO, video, podcast and traditional marketing with account based marketing strategies to support the sales efforts at his current company, Cybereason. Mike is a very hands-on marketing executive. As a member of the founding team and CMO at HubSpot, he drove their growth from zero to 1,000 employees and 15,000 plus customers, as well as a successful IPO. Mike is also an angel investor, advisor, or board member at more than 25 companies, primarily software startups in Boston. On this episode, we discuss how Cybereason's marketing and sales teams work together leveraging an integrated approach. We even talk a little bit about some offline marketing tactics that you don’t hear a lot about in today’s digital marketing landscape. View the show notes: http://www.socialbusinessengine.com/podcasts/marketing-cyber-security-software-through-account-based-marketing

In this episode Mike talks about: What separates the great marketers from the lazy How customer lifetime value (LTV) can expand your marketing program options Why the rule breakers cut through the clutter The challenge of running a company spread around the globe

Mike Volpe is the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot discusses the company policy of unlimited vacation.

In this episode we talk to Mike Volpe, CMO at Cybereason.

If you liked this episode, we bet that you’ll love our blog content. blog.drift.com/#subscribe Subscribe to never miss a post & join the 20,000+ other pros committed to getting better every day. ----- Mike Volpe joined us live at Drift for lunch with the team, so we hit record for Seeking Wisdom. Mike is the CMO at Cybereason and a friend, investor, and advisor to us at Drift (but you probably know him as the former CMO at HubSpot). Tweet at Mike @mvolpe and let him know you heard him on Seeking Wisdom. Here’s how you can support Seeking Wisdom if you’re a fan of the show: 1. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. 2. Leave us a five-star review. Here's how: bit.ly/5-Stars-Only. 3. Follow David (twitter.com/dcancel) and Dave (twitter.com/davegerhardt) on Twitter. 4. Learn more about Drift at Drift.com. PS. We just announced our first annual conference, HYPERGROWTH. Get your tickets at hypergrowth.drift.com

This episode features two veteran marketers going deep into the ins and outs of building an initial marketing team from scratch. On the show today, Jay talks to Mike Volpe, CMO of Cybereason and former CMO of HubSpot. Follow Mike - http://twitter.com/mvolpe Follow Jay - http://twitter.com/jayacunzo Follow NextView - http://twitter.com/nextviewvc Check out Jay's other marketing show - http://unthinkable.fm Be sure to rate and review Traction on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Tettra co-founder Andy Cook joins me on this episode of TiB to talk about leaving HubSpot to start Tettra and what it was like raising seed money from angel investors here in Boston from Dharmesh Shah to David Cancel to Mike Volpe and the BOSS Syndicate. Catch all the previous episode of the podcast at techinboston.co or search for Tech In Boston on your favorite podcast app. Follow TiB on Twitter: https://twitter.com/techinboston Follow Andy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndyGCook Learn more about Tettra: http://tettra.co/

Episode 29 of Leading Matters features former CMO of Hubspot and angel investor Mike Volpe.  Perhaps the leading hands-on expert of building a marketing approach and team in today’s age, Mike shares wisdom on marketing, leadership, and a surprising look at the team diversity required to achieve results. 

“Today people are exposed to your brand in a whole new way.” Customers are different than they used to be. We don’t like cold calls. We use our DVRs to skip commercials. Hubspot knows and has built a marketing movement around this shift. This week, Hubspot CMO Mike Volpe joined me on the On Brand podcast for a discussion charting the growth of this inbound marketing giant. About Mike Volpe Mike Volpe is Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, a marketing and sales software company, where he leads the company’s lead generation and branding strategy through inbound marketing, including blogging, search engine optimization, video marketing, and social media. Since Mike has joined HubSpot, the company has grown from 10 to 13,000 customers, from 5 to 800 employees, surpassed $100 million in annual revenue, and completed a successful IPO leading to a valuation over $1 billion. Under Mike’s leadership, HubSpot’s marketing has won more than 30 awards, been featured in over 20 marketing and business books, and generated over 2 million inbound leads. Mike also hosts The Growth Show, a top 10 business podcast that interviews c-level executives about how they grew their business. Mike holds an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BA from Bowdoin College and appears frequently as a marketing speaker. As We Wrap … Recently our friend Luis Sanz gave us a shout on Twitter about our recent episode focused on influence and thought leadership featuring Ian Greenleigh. Thanks for listening Luis! Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you’d like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. Last but not least … Subscribe to the podcast – You can subscribe to the show via iTunes, Stitcher, and RSS. Rate and review the show – If you like what you’re hearing, head over to iTunes and click that 5-star button to rate the show. And if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review. This helps others find the podcast. OK. How do you rate and review a podcast? Need a quick tutorial on leaving a rating/review in iTunes? Check this out. And don’t forget that this podcast is brought to you by our Brand Driven Digital events series, learn more about the industry leading Social Brand Forum and our other trainings and workshops now. Until next week, I’ll see you on the Internet!

This week we’re talking inbound marketing, corporate culture and thought leadership with HubSpot CMO, Mike Volpe. Tune in to learn why inbound marketing was almost called “attraction marketing,” how thought leadership is like Black Sabbath, and how I got to work with the Dollar Shave Club guy.  

Part 2 of Mike Volpe's interview with David Skok, General Partner, Matrix Partners and four-time entrepreneur.

On this episode of The Growth Show, HubSpot’s Mike Volpe and Meghan Keaney-Anderson sit down with Craig Miller, Chief Marketing Officer at Shopify, to talk about the techniques that his team has used to help fuel Shopify's 10x growth since joining the company just three years ago. Miller also talks about why he thinks engineers make great marketers, his decision to re-brand the marketing team to the growth team, and why there are huge opportunities in things that are often boring like your Terms of Servic

Just four more shows after this one and we hit Epi100, the last show of the first season of Succotash, the Comedy Podcast Podcast. Seasons in podcasting seem a little silly to me, so I figured after almost 3 years and 100 ‘sodes, we’ll make THAT the end of season one.  (I’m still trying to figure out if I have it together enough to do a live show somewhere for the 100th episode. Don’t know. We’ll see… I’ve also been talking with our Associate Producer Tyson Saner– or messaging him, more precisely, about a couple of format changes that Succotash is in for in the second season of the show. I’ll tell you more about that soon. Nothing major in terms of what you hear, just going to tighten up the struts on this rust heap a little bit and see if we can’t keep it flying a little longer. We only have a few comedy podcast clips to share with you this episode because the main attraction is my interview with comic–magician The Amazing Johnathan. He recently announced his retirement from performing live on stage and we find out during the interview. I had heard Johnathan on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast – a great interview, by the way. If you didn’t hear it, think about tracking it down over at WTFpod.com. But because I’ve known Johnathan for years, I figured it might be neat to get him on here to chat and we’d no doubt find some other things to talk about. Which we did… He's had an interesting career, starting out trying to do stage magic in Michigan, then street magic in San Francisco, before finding his unique "punk magician" spin on an act that has always been more about the laughs than the magic. Johnathan talks about those early days on the street - competing for sidewalk space with the likes of Harry Anderson and A. Whitney Brown. We also find out how a bet he made with a friend ended up keeping off Late Night with David Letterman for years after he made his debut. And once upon a time I was the head writer on a short-lived game show called Ruckus for Merv Griffin. Johnathan was the host and we talk about some of that craziness, too. We talk at length about Ruckus, actually and one of the things we bring up - in fact, something I did in this particular segment Johnathan uses to kick off and close our chat - was a gag called The Ultimate Blindfold. I came on stage as a"stooge", pretending to be a member of the theater audience, which was where we pulled our contestants from for each episode. That bit lives in perpetuity on YouTube, so I figured I'd slug it in the blog here…  The 10 Most Active Shows on Stitcher's Top 100 Comedy Podcast List Nowhere else in Podcastland are you likely to hear a list featuring the 10 most active shows on any list. But we have it for you here! These are the shows that moved up OR down the most in the past week on Stitcher’s Top 100 Comedy Podcast List. (Some weeks we get big, massive swings in the numbers. Some weeks, not so much. Mostly single digit moves this week with a couple of exceptions.) AT                                                                     MOVED8   SModcast >> Tell ‘Em, Steve-Dave!                    + 622 The Bugle                                                         + 826 Judge John Hodgman                                        - 1032 Bertcast’s Podcast                                            +1046 The Christopher Titus Podcast                           + 647 Off The Air – Chick McGee                                 - 768 Sawbones: A Marital Tour…Misguided Medicine   - 781 U Talkin’ U2 To Me?                                          +3090 DVDASA with David Choe and Asa Akira              -1295 By The Way: In Conversation with Jeff Garland  - 7 As much as I kind of get a kick out of this feature, we may need to trim some fat if we move to a shorter show in a few episodes so this could be on the chopping block. Do YOU like the 10 Most Active? Enough to keep it in the show? Call into the Succotash Hotline – (818) 921-7212 – and let me know. Other Stuff In This Episode We have a fresh Burst O' Durst with our resident crankpot, comedian and social commentator Will Durst, who's talking about the new iPhone 6. This episode is sponsored by Henderson's Peer Sucker Pants. And we've got a few things to talk about in the Tweetsack. Clips Greg Proops’ Film ClubThis past week I reviewed Greg Proops’ OTHER podcast for the This Week In Comedy Podcasts column on Splitsider.com, then I shaved it off and put it up on Huffington Post, just for good measure. So I’m not talking about his The Smartest Man In The World podcast. This is his Greg Proops Film Club. It’s a once-a-month movie screening of something that Greg likes – and the most recent one film was The Man Who Would Be King, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine at their most dashing but, in the segment we’re about to listen to, Proops goes off on a tangent about spending teenage nights at the local drive-in movie theater. P.F.’s Tape RecorderWe recently got hit up to revisit the P.F.’s Tape Recorder podcast, hosted by P.F. Wilson and to check out a recent episode featuring the Sklar Brothers – very funny comedians and hosts of the Sklarboro Country and Sklarboro County podcasts. P.F. wanted us to pay particularly close attention to his It’s Facebook NOT Factbook part of that epi, so that's what we do. The Geek GenerationI saw on the Independent Podcaster Association page on Facebook that The Geek Generation podcast hit its 200th episode. Congrats to host Rob Logan and his co-host Mike Volpe. These guys love talking about movies, TV shows, video games…pretty much anything their audience enjoys geeking out over. Our snippet is from their big Epi 200 where they get into…Oreos. Hitting The Road I'll be on the road later this week, heading to Los Angeles and the 3rd Annual Los Angeles Podcast Festival. (This year, BTW, for the first time they're offering a "virtual ticket" to the PodFest - for $25, you get to watch their "livestream" of the entire event online.) I'll kick off my Southland visit by dropping into the big "partycast" being thrown by Chillpak Hollywood Hour hosts Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness Thursday night. So I may toss a Succotash "halfisode" up online between now and Epi96. Thanks for passing the Succotash! — Marc Hershon 

Brent Leary Interviews Mike Volpe of HubSpot by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends

Mike Volpe at Lunch with DriveThruHR at Lunch with DriveThruHR  @bryanwempen @williamtincup & @thehrbuddy DriveThruHR was designed to be a captivating and easy-to-digest lunch discourse that covers topics relevant to HR professionals.  Each 30-minute episode features a guest speaker who shares her or his knowledge and experience in human resources. Our hosts and special guest cover a wealth of topics, including HR Technology, Recruiting, Talent Management, Leadership, Organizational Culture and Strategic HR, every day at 12:00 pm Central Time.  The radio program is hosted by @bryanwempen @williamtincup and @thehrbuddy The #1 HR show, with amazing HR conversations and follow us on the twitters at  @drivethruhr and #dthr. http://www.drivethruhr.com/ http://www.facebook.com/drivethruhr http://www.linkedin.com/company/1651206 http://twitter.com/drivethruhr

First thing you gotta know is that Epi61 is the longest installment of Succotash, the Comedy Podcast Podcast, that we've done to date. No particular reason for it. The interview with our Special Guest Graham Elwood comes in at about 30 minutes. But we've got a bunch of podcast clips to share, a Boozin' With Bill segment, the TweetSack section, our Burst O' Durst and a new song by musical geekmaster John Anealio. That, plus my usual rambling gum-flapping has us pushing the limits in terms of just how long someone can shovel Succotash into their earholes. Sue me - this stuff's free. I was delighted to talk at length with the aforementioned Graham Elwood. We had tried to link up when he was in San Francisco recently for a face-to-face sit-down but couldn't coordinate schedules. So we Skyped it and it came out fine. Graham's a comedian, an actor, a writer, a podcaster, and most recently, co-producer and organizer of the Los Angeles Podcast Festival (the 2nd annual is this October 4-6 in Santa Monica.) Along with his partner-in-crime Chris Mancini, Graham hosts the Comedy Film Nerds podcast and also co-authored the Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies. In addition, he is heard often on Doug Loves Movies, competing against the audience during Doug Benson's live shows on the road. We talk about how he got his comedy start, his podcast start, his podcast festival start...lots of starts. And, most important to our podcaster listeners, reveals what they have in store at this year's LA PodFest to let more of us get into the action of podcasting in relative comfort from the event. (And his latest CD, Palm Strike Dance Party, is available at http://Graham Elwood.com!) GET HIP It's not too late to help friend-of-Succotash Chris Bonno (interviewed in Epi43) as he's just gone through hip replacement surgery. Being as he' a comedian and a painter, he's got zip in terms of health insurance, so paying for his operation is going to be one giant mofo that Obama's health care program doesn't seem set to cover. You can find out how to kick a little money into the hip kitty through his website at http://ChrisBonno.com or else click on the link to get over to the GiveForward website where they're taking care of the funds as they come in. THE 10 MOST ACTIVE IN THE STITCHER TOP 100 COMEDY PODCAST LIST I realized that what I read The 10 Most Active in the Stitcher Top 100 Comedy Podcast List, veroften I don’t even know some of these shows I’m reading about. And they’re in the Top 100 of comedy podcasts – that’s out of literally THOUSANDS. So starting this week I’m going to pick one or two or a few to play clips from so we can all learn as we grow. Here’s the list of, again, the most ACTIVE shows on the list this past week. That means, regardless of their rank, they showed the most movement either up or down the chart. 47. The Champs with Neal Brennan & Moshe Kasher -1059. The World of Phil Hendrie +2163. Sir Darryl Radio Experience +33973. Sex Squad +1779. Conversations with Matt Dwyer +25780. The Dana Gould Hour -1581. Yoshi Didn’t Podcast -1482. Wits +2784. Rollin’ With Dice & Wheels +11398. SModcast FeAB -17 BURST O' DURST FROM THE OL' BOOMERAGER HIMSELF We have our usual  Burst O' Durst feature but I wanted to remind those Succotashians who live in the San Francisco Bay Area that Will Durst still has a couple of Tuesday nights (thru June 25th) left in the run of his one-man show, BoomeRaging: LSD to OMG, at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. Hop over to http://WillDurst.com for showtimes and ticket information. SING YOUR SONG, NERDY MUSIC MAN Our friend John Anealio - from The Functional Nerds podcast with co-host Patrick Hester - has a new song out and we've got it featured in this episode. I'll Be Your Thor is a love song from a nerd to his even nerdier lady for whom only one hero can save the day. Once you hear it on Succotash and  you love it, you can download it for FREE over at http://JohnAnealio.com. STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE  Our Boozin' With Bill is a little different than our usual visit with Succotash's booth announcer cum bartender. He's unearthed an ancient bottle of creme de menthe and he's determined to see if it's still viable for getting a heat on. THE CLIPS The Sir Darryl Radio ExperienceI’m not sure what this show is all about – or why it shot up 339 places on the Stitcher Top 100 Comedy Podcasts this week. I listened to part of a recent episode where Sir Darryl, who bills himself on the homesite for the show as “The Most Articulate Negro in America”, starts drinking wine and apparently starts to get loopy within just a couple of minutes. Conversations with Matt DwyerComedian, actor and writer Matt Dwyer’s podcast is into its 50s, episode wise, and this week his show's Stitcher numbers leaped up 257 places this week!  We feature a slice from his recent interview with Duncan Trussell, who is also a comedian and the host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour. Rollin’ With Dice and WheelsDice is back. Celebrity Apprentice wasn’t enough and now Andrew “Dice” Clay and his longtime opening act Michael “Wheels” Parise have their own podcast. They’re only into their Epi8 and doing phenomenal numbers – up 113 places this week to make it into the Top 100 on Stitcher. In this recent episode we're clipping, comic Tom Green is co-hosting in place of Wheels. Pop My CultureWe haven’t looked in on Cole Stratton and Vanessa Ragland of the Pop My Culture podcast for awhile. They’re going great guns, after taking a little time away from the mikes, and just dropped their 116th episode, which features guest Dana Gould. Comic, actor, writer, he’s also the host of podcasting’s The Dana Gould Hour. (I’m also featuring this episode for my review in This Week In Comedy Podcasts over on Splitsider.com!)  The Paul Mecurio ShowThe Sideshow Network has a massive pile of steaming comedy podcasts, with some really great shows like PodCRASH with THAT Chris Gore, Overview with our pal Rick Overton, and Story Worthy with Christine Blackburn & Hannes Phinney. It’s also home to The Paul Mecurio Show. I’ve clipped Paul here before but it’s been a while. Paul’s guest this week was Jay Leno. I don’t think I’ve heard of Jay being on any podcast before – is that possible? Anyway, Paul got him – they have a bit of a history together – Jay bought the very first joke Paul sold before, which gave him the inspiration to give up his law practice to become a comedian. The Bitter Sound PodcastAlthough I’ve played a few bits and pieces and show ID’s from Davian Dent over at The Bitter Sound podcast, I think I’ve yet to feature a bona fide clip…until now. He’s also a co-host of the Strange Times podcast along with Kat Sorens from the Rigid Fist podcast and Bonn from The Bonn & Obo show. But he’s off in his own thing here, with music, sounds and a great set of pipes to boot. The Geek GenerationRob Logan over at the Geek Generation podcast did what every red-blooded internationally-heard comedy podcaster should do – he sent in a clip! It’s easy to do: Just send along a 3-5 minute MP3 clip of your show to marc@SuccotashShow.com. If you want to include a little written descriptor of what the clip’s about, even better. Like Rob did – here’s what he says: "Rob Logan and Mike Volpe get inspired by the upcoming Fall TV schedule and pitch some show ideas of their own." Whew! That's a lot of show! Hope you enjoy it - don't be shy about letting folks know about it, either! Go on up to iTunes and give us a rating and a little review. And you can give us a thumbs up at Stitcher.com and leave a comment. Or visit our Facebook page and leave us a comment there. Then there's always Stitcher. See you in the next episode but, in the meantime, don't forget to pass the Succotash! — Marc Hershon

Michael Dubin

On this episode of the Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast, I interview Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot. Today’s episode is a special one because it’s something many of you actually asked for in response to a survey I sent out a few months ago. In that survey, many of you indicated that HubSpot is a site that you frequent often, and it was clear that many of you feel that Mike Volpe and HubSpot is the place to go when it comes to list building, content creation, content marketing, and overall social media. For those of you who aren't familiar with HubSpot, they offer inbound marketing software that allows you to blog, tweet, capture leads, optimize your SEO, view analytics, basically everything you need to do to market your business and HubSpot puts it all in one spot. Hence the name. In this episode, here’s what we’ll cover: How inbound marketing can be defined How SEO is interwoven with inbound marketing The most important lead generation strategy How to make calls to action more effective What caused HubSpot's conversion rates to increase significantly What led to an 82% revenue growth for HubSpot Advantages that small companies have over big companies How to streamline content creation The most important tips to keep in mind when it comes to SlideShare presentations The biggest content marketing mistakes companies make

I have declared myself to be a "counter Resolutionist" this year and, accordingly, 2013 is right on track since I have broken no resolutions. You can't break what you don't have.  Been suffering from some kind of viral crud (I'm not talking about an onslaught of cute kitty videos) that's going around the past few days but I don't think it's the flu. More like a cold. Whatever it is, it's taken up residence in my throat and sinuses, and will be making a guest appearance during this episode. Our Special Guest is no virus although, with David Owen's tenaciousness at lining up comedy groups and venues for the San Francisco Sketchfest, he could be mistaken for something contagious. Last year about this time we had Cole Stratton, co-host of the Pop My Culture podcast, former member of my improv group The Riffingtons, and one of the three founder/producers of the  Sketchfest. For the 12th year of the 'fest, Mr. Owen joins me to talk about this year’s upcoming exciting show. How exciting? Here's just a partial list of the performers scheduled to appear: Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein, Rob Corddry, Erinn Hayes, Rob Huebel, Ken Marino, Jonathan Stern, David Wain, Bruce Campbell, Patton Oswalt, Reggie Watts, Kevin McDonald, Adam Savage, Kristen Schaal, Paul F. Tompkins, Janet Varney, Eddie Pepitone, Michael Ian Black, Beth Dover, Carla Gallo, Ryan Hansen, Rob Huebel, Natasha Leggero, Joe Lo Truglio, Ken Marino, Erica Oyama, June Diane Raphael, Paul Scheer, Jonathan Stern, Maria Bamford, Roger Bart, Jennifer Coolidge, Rachel Dratch, Janeane Garofalo, Laraine Newman, Eugene Pack, Dayle Reyfel, Maya Rudolph, Fred Willard…the list goes on and one. If you’re in or near San Francisco between January 24 and February 10, check out the amazing lineup and get ticket at http://SFSketchfest.com You can also follow info about the show on Twitter by following @SFSketchfest. COUNTDOWN As we started doing on the show (and in this blog) last week, here is the latest Top 10 Comedy Podcasts from Stitcher Smart Radio: 10. SModcast w/Kevin Smith9. By The Way, In Conversation w/Jeff Garlin8. Doug Loves Movies7. Death Squad6. Mohr Stories5. The Nerdist4. NPR: Car Talk Podcast3. WTF with Mark Maron2. The Adam Carolla Show1. The Joe Rogan Experience WHAT'S THAT MUSIC? This week we're featuring Jesus Walks by Karen Kilgariff from her album, Behind You. Find it and other goodies, such as Karen's tour schedule, at http://KarenKilgariff.com DURST'S BACK Although I don't have any resolutions for the New Year, our in-house political comedian and Raging Moderate Will Durst does. and he's not ashamed to share them in this epi's Burst O' Durst. Catch more of Will's musings at http://WillDurst.com THE CLIPS By The Way – In Conversation with Jeff GarlinThis new show jumped into the charts at #9 for its very first week of life. It’s over on the Earwolf network and the show is recorded live in front of an audience at Largo in Los Angeles. For his first outing, host Jeff Garlin has tapped Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld and with whom he works on Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s over an hour of rollicking conversation and the audience LOVES it, as you can hear in this clip. This Week With Larry MillerHe’s back! I mentioned last episode that comedian/actor Larry Miller was finally well enough to return to the podcast waves this past week. The first new episode of This Week With Larry Miller dropped last Thursday and most of the show Larry talks about the freak accident that landed him in the hospital, a medically-induced coma, and months of rehabilitation. And he does it in classic Larry Miller storytelling style. (Because that sort of thing is so hard to clip, I’ve opted to tease you with his Joke Of The Week, which is just Larry telling an old joke.) Double Talk RadioAt Double Talk Radio, Double K and one of his guests from this episode, Matty, have a story to tell. And you’ll probably hear from DK’s co-host Cookie J and their other guest, The Hick. The audio quality of this cast is less than our usual standards, but they’re got something going on it seems – been on for awhile and have a lot of loyal listeners. Duncan Trussell Family HourWith well over a hundred episodes of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour under his belt, comedian Duncan Trussell's guests include comedians, actors and people from all sorts of interesting directions. Most recently his focus in his pre-interview portion of the show has been focused on a probable diagnosis of testicular cancer. Our hearts go out to him and we wish him a safe recovery. And you have to admire he spirit with which he approaches such a heavy thing, as heard from the beginning of a recent episode… The Geek GenerationThe Geek Generation, with co-hosts Rob Logan, Mike Volpe, Anna Zifcak, Mikey Arsenault, is another podcast that’s passed the century-episode mark a while ago. They cover ANYTHING remotely geeky – video games, movies, TV, comic books, tech, animation – you name it, they’ll eventually get around to it. And even though co-host Anna Zifcak has grown up by buying a house and now she’s about to get married. But a geek can’t have an ordinary wedding now, can she? Wheelbarrow Full of DicksThat’s the name of a podcast featuring Mike, Drunk, Paul, and Nappier – four guys I know very little about because – as is often the case – 84% of podcasters have an aversion to revealing much information about themselves. (I got that stat the same place I found out that 72% of podcasters make up statistics.) Anyway, Wheelbarrow falls under my heading of being an STS show – Shooting The Shit – and these guys will go anywhere that there’s conversation to be had. It’s Not Soccer PodcastWhat would you call a sports podcast that has precious little to do with sports? How about the It’s Not Soccer Podcast. That’s what Adam Barker who Succotashians know from the Oddcast Podcast and Billy Cutmore call their show. As THEY say, if you’re not into sports, listening to It’s Not Soccer will NOT make you feel left out. That's about it for this episode. Appreciate you stopping by. Appreciate you even more if you wanted to hit the Donate button in the upper right hand corner of our homesite. Or do you Amazon online shopping by getting there through the carousel on the bottom right of our http://SuccotashShow.com site. You can even ignore the offers for the Hallmark Channel movie DVD's that I wrote or the I Hate People! business book I wrote if you want to - but for every product you buy when you go through our page's portal, we get a li'l kickback from the online store named after a big, dirty river. Even if you can't or don't donate or buy anything, could you do me a favor and remember to pass the Succotash? — Marc Hershon

Although episode 36 of Succotash finds us back in Studio P ("The Home of The Hit!"), it's without the benefit of our engineer/producer Joe Paulino this time. Under the unsteady hand of booth assistant Kenny Durgess, the good ship Succotash manages to make the journey through the rocky shoals of podcast clips and interviews (not to mention a new Boozin' With Bill segment) to arrive in one piece in your ears. I'd planned to have Will Durst, our Ambassador to the Middle and the funniest political comic this side of Congress, live in the studio. He's just put out a new e-book, Elect To Laugh, a collection of his syndicated newspaper columns and I figured he'd snap up the chance to plug it. This being an election year with very little time left on the clock, it’s a political comic’s busiest season so we'll have to reschedule for right after Libertarian President Gary Johnson gets sworn in. (See what I did there? It's a joke about the fact I probably will never get Will into the studio...) You can click the links here or visit http://SuccotashShow.com and look for the cover of Will's book for a link to where you can buy and download a copy. Not to mention that with close out this edition of the show with our usual Burst O' Durst. The host with past Succotash guest Joe Klocek In the realm of other things comedy, apropos of nothing having to do with this podcast, I was at the 32nd annual Comedy Day in San Francisco Sunday before last. It's a big tradition in the history of Bay Area comedy, dubbed by the event's originator, the late Jose Simon, as the local comedy scene's version of a company picnic. I hung out backstage, said howdy to a bunch of comedian friends I probably won't see most of for another year, and enjoyed a rare warm and sunny summer day in Golden Gate Park. As mentioned above, show announcer Bill Haywatt stumbles into Studio P this episode to ply me with alcohol in another edition of his Boozin' With Bill segment. This time we literally are draining the dregs of this bit when he prepares the drink he calls "The Starter Kit", basing what we swill down on what he finds left in the glasses and bottles strewn around Studio P following some kind of wild party that went on there the night before we taped the show. Normally you want to follow a recipe pretty closely but, in the case of The Starter Kit, you can pretty much throw in whatever you find lying around. Here's what is in the clip set for Epi36: Fitzdog RadioGreg Fitzsimmons has a great show not just because of the fact he’s genuinely entertaining and funny, but he manages to get some great guests, including producer/director Judd Apatow who, in this clip talks about supporting comedy (being a reformed standup himself), Tweeting too much and casting his own kids in movies. The Geek GenerationRob Logan, Bryan Lipsitz and Mike Volpe are within spitting distance of their 100th Geek Generation episode - congrats, guys - and thought we'd enjoy hearing a slice of their visit with Hollywood producer and former WCW talent Jeff Katz. He tells about the mistakes that were made in regards to Deadpool's character, ultimately resulting in him leaving production of the Wolverine movie. Tiny Odd ConversationsNot just a clip from Tiny Odd Conversations this episode, but I actually Skyped it up with TOC cohost Travis Clark to dig into the detail of his upcoming Hashtag Comedy Show in Los Angeles. What started out as mostly a joke to get people to donate to his and wife Brandi's podcast has lunged out of control into a full-fledged night of comedy with the focus being on having his non-standup spouse get on stage to tell jokes. The show is on for November 11 at The Other Door in North Hollywood. And you can get free tickets just by donating to the cause! So click over to http://TOCpod.com and help joke the life our of Brandi Clark! We also play a clip from TOC feauring their first-ever celebrity chef segment with none other than Chef Eddie Vedder. Podd SocksFirst time on for a show from Down Under I haven’t heard of before, featuring a quartet of Aussie 20-somethings — Ben Dunlop, Kris Francis, Nathan Press and Jack de Zwart — sitting around and shooting the shite about "current events, pop culture, telling personal stories from their lives and analysing conspiracy theories" as their website tells it. Cashing In with TJ MillerI've featured a clip before but I’ve loved the concept for this podcast ever since host Cash Levy told it to me so I'm playing some more. It’s supposed to be a regular talk show style podcast with various guests…but every episode the guest who was scheduled never shows up and comedian/actor TJ Miller is always called to fill in. This clip finds them in a riff about going back to where you grew up to do a comedy show and the kind of reception you get from the old hometown crowd. They also coin the term "hot pods". Random Variety Show PodcastFlattery may not get you many places but it will definitely get your comedy podcast clip on this show. Especially, as in the case of friend-od-Succotash Charley Miller, who has declared that listening to our podcast is what got him psyched up to do The Random Variety Show. Charley's 17.5 episodes into his show, which originates out of San Diego, and he features interviews with various locally-based performers as well as some unusual guest...like Groucho Marx. Don’t Quit Your DaycastAnother fine fellow who’s leapt onto the podcasting soundstage recently is Ed Wallick, who’s also been venturing on the open mic stages around the Bay Area for the past couple of years. Like Charley Miller, he credits Succotash with showing him a way to do his own thing on the interwebs and it’s been fun watching him develop his format and style along the way. In this clip from DQYP, Ed teams up with Tiny Odd Conversation's Travis Clark to create Jesse vs. Jesse, a bit about battling Jesse Venturas. Venturai? The HustleCo-hosts Will Gilman and Adam Tucker run conversationally amok with a variety of guests — comedians, musicians and — I think — random dudes off the street sometimes. In this clip they have fellow comedians Harry J. Riley and Justin McNiff in the house and they’re riffing about men having a limit on the number of erections we get in our lifetimes. In addition to clips this episode, I feature Angy Robot, a cut off of the album Laser Zombie Robot Love by sci-fi/comedy musician (and past Succotash guest) John Anealio. Feel free to not only enjoy the tunage, but click over to John's site (http://JohnAnealio.com) and grab the whole album for yourself for just $5 bucks. Finally, as promised on the actual podcast, here's the artist's rendering of yours truly by Angus Doodall Tommy Royal of the Royal & Doodall podcast, luxuriating over a steaming bowl of succotash. Truly a thing of beauty to behold. I should get the original from him and auction it off. That's our show. Presented for your pleasure. (Here's joping Engineer Joe makes it back in time for the next in-studio edition of the show!) Please remember to pass the Succotash. — Marc Hershon

HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe discusses the power of inbound marketing and how a business can take advantage of the latest in marketing automation techniques to dominate their niche.

HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe discusses the power of inbound marketing and how a business can take advantage of the latest in marketing automation techniques to dominate their niche.

HubSpot TV is a weekly video podcast covering inbound marketing including social media, blogging, SEO, landing pages, lead generation and marketing analytics. Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe share the latest marketing news live at 4pm EST on Fridays.

HubSpot TV is a weekly video podcast covering inbound marketing including social media, blogging, SEO, landing pages, lead generation and marketing analytics. Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe share the latest marketing news live at 4pm EST on Fridays.

Mike Volpe, Marketing VP at Hubspot shares how agile marketing is an essential part of their inbound marketing programs.  He also talks with Frank Days and John Cass about the ways that agile marketing increases transparency. ***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes. The post Mike Volpe CMO of Hubspot appeared first on Agile Marketing Blog - Home of Marketing Agility Podcast.

Professor: Mike Volpe, HubSpot -- Listen to a hearty review of the first 9 inbound marketing classes. This class is part of Inbound Marketing University's free training program by HubSpot.

Professor: Mike Volpe, HubSpot -- Listen to a hearty review of the first 9 inbound marketing classes. This class is part of Inbound Marketing University's free training program by HubSpot.

This podcast is being organized for the purpose of gathering supporting research for the Social Media Buyers Guide Project from Social Media Club. Join SMC Founder Chris Heuer and E-Storm CEO William Gaultier to hear leading technology vendors share their top three pieces of advice for individuals and organizations evaluating and purchasing social media technologies, services and media. Panelists will also share the three most important questions they recommend asking any social media technology vendor. Special guests include Mike Volpe from Hubspot, Blake Cahill from Visible Technologies, and others to be announced. We would like to invite other technology vendors and social media buyers to call in to share your thoughts at (646) 716-9346, or just listen in on the web at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/socialmediaclub/2009/03/04/Social-Media-Buyers-Guide-Insights-from-Technology-Vendors.You are also welcome to share your thoughts via the Social Media Club survey at https://socialmediaclub.wufoo.com/forms/social-media-buyers-guide-survey/. Also check out the event blog post at http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2009/02/26/buyer-be-heard-social-media-buyers-guide-on-blog-talk-radio-march-4-2009/. Additional shows are being hosted to address the perspectives from service providers and organizational buyers.

This podcast is being organized for the purpose of gathering supporting research for the Social Media Buyers Guide Project from Social Media Club. Join SMC Founder Chris Heuer and E-Storm CEO William Gaultier to hear leading technology vendors share their top three pieces of advice for individuals and organizations evaluating and purchasing social media technologies, services and media. Panelists will also share the three most important questions they recommend asking any social media technology vendor. Special guests include Mike Volpe from Hubspot, Blake Cahill from Visible Technologies, and others to be announced. We would like to invite other technology vendors and social media buyers to call in to share your thoughts at (646) 716-9346, or just listen in on the web at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/socialmediaclub/2009/03/04/Social-Media-Buyers-Guide-Insights-from-Technology-Vendors.You are also welcome to share your thoughts via the Social Media Club survey at https://socialmediaclub.wufoo.com/forms/social-media-buyers-guide-survey/. Also check out the event blog post at http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2009/02/26/buyer-be-heard-social-media-buyers-guide-on-blog-talk-radio-march-4-2009/. Additional shows are being hosted to address the perspectives from service providers and organizational buyers.

The world has changed. How we communicate is changing. The old traditional methods: cold calling, direct mail marketing, advertising and trade shows are less effective today. Cutting edge companies are adapting! Are you? The key to success is to attract prospective buyers and not try to sell them! New methods like blogs, podcasts, webinars, news releases, articles, and social networking are the answer! Mike Volpe of HubSpot (www.hubspot.com) talks how entrepreneurs can embrace this new technology! Listen, Learn, Enjoy and Share with a Business Associate! Bumper music provided by Bryan Hunley of New Whyne Music E3C Links: www.BetterSalesandProfitsNow.com (company website) www.twitter.com/KenE3C (Twitter) www.my-business-community.com (community website) www.E3C.typepad.com (Blog) www.E3C.podOmatic.com (podcast) www.E3CPassionateEntrepreneur.pbwiki.com (wiki) www.mybusinesscommunity.ning.com (business social network) Is Your Business A Hobby, Job or Profitable Enterprise? Take the Quiz and Discover For Yourself! Click on this link: www.my-business-community.com/quiz1/player.html (multi-media presentation) Get My Business Tips! Go to my business profile and sign-up! http://mybusinesscommunity.ning.com/profile/KenE3C

I attended the Sunday sessions of Podcamp Boston 3, which was held at the beautiful Harvard Medical School conference center. I met a lot of generous, interesting people and really put the work in networking. There were a lot of presentations, about 4 or 5 every hour, about 5 times during the day, but I spent more time talking to people outside of these sessions.One of the cool features of this conference was something called a BrainTorrent, which was a beautiful oval room full of tables with name tents on them, each one with a different topic or concept and anyone was welcome to sit down and join the conversation. That's where I met Mary Anne Davis and Guido Stein. Mary Anne is a potter and Guido is a knitter and we got into a conversation about social media and craft and before you know it, I was recording it.My own feelings about the even were very positive. I'm so happy I met as many people as I did. More people than I can remember and credit. Meeting Keith Burtis was very fortunate. His live woodworking video cast is very cool and I'm looking forward to conversations with him about the production aspects of creating video shows.I'm always impressed by the number of people who blog but aren't yet podcasting who attend these shows. It's a good sign that the events don't put off an exclusive feeling and it's healthy to talk to people who are just as passionate about new media but aren't in the podcasting fish bowl. Sharon Couto is one blogger who attended the event with an eye on moving into Podcasting.I moved into a new media space that I hadn't intended to become involved in, at the encouragement of Mary Anne. I now have a Twitter account, the user name is Bermamot. I haven't posted anything, anything at all since Sunday. I'm a busy guy, but I'll give it a chance. There are definitely two camps, people who are infatuated with Twitter or microblogging, and people (and one of them) who don't see the sense at all and don't have any time for it. I feel as though I'm standing at the door to the Twilight Zone.Finally let me mention a cool site I saw at a BrainTorrent table. I'm going to use it when I set up my upcoming website. It's a program that analyzes your website for Search Engine Optimization - SEO. It explains what each suggestion means and it appears very thorough. It's free at websitegrader.com. Thanks to Mike Volpe from Hubspot.com for coming to the conference and showing it off.

* Started by the founder of Kayak * Started as B2C but most active users were business people * Gene from HubSpot is running marketing * Third round of funding * Was slow recognizing the opportunity * They did a great job democratizing access to information to the public * Corporate travel booking was a pain * Serve three personas * Road warrior * Admin/Assistant * Finance teams (who dislike salespeople who don't submit expenses) * The most under-valued virtue is discipline * You need to work and build to your future self {{cta('e668f1c5-48ce-4d28-9c66-070972867b08','justifycenter')}} * Discipline is key...while balancing/avoiding paralysis by analysis * Remember the humans behind the titles * Treat people like people to drive word-of-mouth * Set proper expectations to reduce the emotions of the business interaction * The lines between business and personal have merged so business is more flexible and personable and casual * Millennials get a bad rap * Find the hard workers in the interview process * Newer brand with high-velocity sales cycle (5-7 per month) * To make any sale you must make every sale * The three C's of Selling * Confidence * Competence * Credibility * Find the pain * Know the why for the buyer * Know the playbook so well that you can bend the rules * Do cold calls still exist? * The rules of three for your research * 3 minutes research * 3 compelling events/interesting facts * Is rapport over-rated * The hardest thing to do in sales is to get a response * The chili recipe * We know 80% of the ingredients * But the winner has a secret ingredient and process * Be curious. Be a lifelong learner * The three questions for on-boarding new salespeople by Andrew Quinn * How do they make money? * Do they want to make more money? * Can I help them make more money? Get all of the show notes for every episode of The Sales Podcast ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/podcasts/ ) with Wes Schaeffer, The Sales Whisperer® ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/ ). Use these resources to grow your sales: * Sell More This Month ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/30-day-sales-growth ) * Hire Better Salespeople ( https://talentgenius.simplybook.me/v2/ ) * Hire The Best Keynote Speaker ( https://www.wesschaeffer.com/ ) * Find Your Best CRM ( https://info.thesaleswhisperer.com/best-crm-quiz ) * Join the Free Facebook Group ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/theimplementors/ ) Check out early episodes of The Sales Podcast: * Episodes 1 to 10 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-one-to-ten ). * Episodes 11 to 20 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/the-sales-podcast-episodes-11-20 ). * Episodes 21 to 30 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-21-30 ). * Episodes 31 to 40 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-31-40 ). * Episodes 41 to 50 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-41-50 ). Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-sales-podcast/exclusive-content Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Talk about a resume. Mike Volpe is the CEO at Lola, where he joined after building HubSpot for eight years (he was one of the five founding team members), and then growing revenue by 500% in two years as the CMO at Cybereason. Mike is one of the best B2B marketers on the planet, and on this episode of the Marketing Swipe File, DG and Mike talk about why your marketing should always try to “date up”, how PR changes as your company grows, why remixing old content ideas is better than finding new ones, why you should hire people who are better than you, and what CMOs need to learn before they can become CEOs.