Stop Delegating Marketing to AI: Kip Knight on the Mistake Killing B2B Founders

0:00 · — Introduction

Jordan:0:00
Welcome back to the High Ticket AI Systems Podcast. Everyone, please welcome the one and only Mr. Kip Knight. Kip, how you doing today, my friend? Yes, sir. First and foremost, can you give us a high level overview of essentially what you do and who you guys help?

Kip Knight:0:09
Good, Jordan. Good to see you.

Kip Knight:0:19
Sure, my background is primarily both marketing and general management. And right now I'm involved in a couple of different businesses. The two I guess we'll talk about today involve executive coaching. I've got a business called simocoaches.com. And then there's another one called Mavca Growth, which is tailored toward helping Series A funded B2B companies get to Series B. by helping them on their sales and marketing, both strategy and implementation.

Jordan:0:52
So which one do you feel like takes up majority of your time?

Kip Knight:0:58
Depends on the week. You know, I'd say that CMO coaches has been around for now about eight years. So that one is more of a steady Eddie Mavka growth. We're still in the, in the ramping stages. So probably more toward Mavka growth.

1:15 · — What Mavka Growth does and who it helps

Jordan:1:15
Gotcha. What for that specifically, cause you know, looking at that website, looks like I would be pretty interested in, know, learning all the secrets and trades. I don't run a SaaS company, but I use a lot of SaaS products for my, for my business, for my agency. So I suppose when you are working with a series a company, what is the first one to three things you tend to implement inside that organization to help them really scale up to get that series B.

I know that might be broad, might be generalized, but it also might be different for every company. But if you had to pick like one to three non-negotiables for that company, what do feel like it would be?

Kip Knight:1:57
Well, the most important thing we do is the foundational work, the strategy and the positioning and the dilemma, frankly, you have a lot of series eight companies is they want to get on with it. You know, like they want to make the next sale. They want to make sure that, you know, they're hitting their financial numbers. But the point we're making is if you're building for the long-term and you want to ramp, you've got to make it. It's like building a house. If you don't have a solid foundation.

You could build something very quickly, when you're finished with it, you might look back and go, uh-oh, that was not a good idea. So strategy is the first thing we focus on. The second is just looking at their technical capabilities of ramping up both on the marketing and the sales side. Because again, when you're really small, there's a real risk of people getting confused as to what is the difference between what marketing does and what sales does.

And we try to make sure that we're real clear as to who does what. And then finally, there's the scaling aspect of it because as the company grows, you're probably going to need to give up some things that you did originally and then adapt some new practices and frankly, try some things that don't work out.

So it's really a phased approach where you start with a foundation, you try to figure out the best game plan to scale, and then you adjust as you begin to scale.

3:21 · — Real client case study: the pivot that changed everything

Jordan:3:21
Can you give us a specific example of when you did that with a previous client? Like what their offer was, what strategy you guys used and where you had to pay?

Kip Knight:3:29
Well, there's one that I'm working with as a business advisor. It's more in lending space for B2B. And yeah, that's a really good example because the initial idea was to make it available on a broad scale. And you can relate to this, Jordan. It was basically saying, hey, if you're a B2B startup and you need funding, we've got this network of about 2,000 private credit lenders. And come on out and we'll help you out.

The problem with that, and a lot of the listeners probably relate to this, is as you start to do the math, from a CAC point of view and the lifetime value and the ability to pay back your investment, didn't pencil out. So I went to the CEO and said, look, we've got a problem here. We need to really pivot. And what we've pivoted to is going after... a much, much, much smaller number of clients that have literally tens of thousands of members. And we basically are going to be the platform within those larger companies of providing their members the financing when they need it. And that's a longer play and it's going to take more of a long-term investment, but the potential payout on something like that is dramatically better than the original approach we had. So I think that's a pretty good example of getting the foundation right.

Jordan:4:49
And how would you approach those? I guess that smaller niche that had 10,000 plus members, would you approach them through email, through networking in person, through LinkedIn?

Kip Knight:5:02
Well, all of the above, but that was the problem because, and you experience this every day with the response rates on email being what they are. And frankly, with all of the LLMs changing the game, so to speak, in terms of like paid search and SEO and all that, you're kind of building the plane as you're flying it. There are a lot of things that used to work that aren't working anymore.

I think on situations like that, you've got to explore some other alternatives to say, wait a minute, is this really the best use of our resources or are we better off maybe going a different route? And on that one we did and I'm really glad we have.

Jordan:5:45
Which or which pivot did you guys make?

Kip Knight:5:47
Or the pivot to say, we're not going to try to pray and spray. We're going to go for more of a shotgun approach and go for two or three large players that have literally thousands and thousands of members that might need our services and basically work through them as an intermediary, as opposed to trying to go directly to individual businesses themselves.

Jordan:6:10
Thank you for saying the shotgun approach. Cause we talk, we talk about the podcast about niching down, not, not being a, me, not being everything to every one agency business model. Cause that's not scalable. No investor is going to want to give you funding because it's not repeatable. That's why that's what truly makes you're able to go up. What increases equity within the, within the company is by having a repeatable process for marketing, bringing the customers to the door, the sales process, turning them into clients, and then onboarding and fulfilling that client at a very repeatable process. That's how you increase enterprise value. It can get private equity firms to invest into your company. But something that we don't talk about, and hopefully you and I can talk about this more, is niching down even more. Like sure, you can help, as an example, you can help gym owners. that have a small box gym, not a big box gym, but a small box gym. Okay, well, what type of gym owner? Like what type of gym, what type of, I guess classes do they have? How big is their gym from a square footage standpoint? How many employees do they have? Like you can always niche down even further. And when you really, I probably have to do this as well. But when you do that, like when you niche down even more and even more and even more, I think it's almost like a, like a cheat code one might say, because it's really the same avatar coming through the door every single time, like with the exact same problems, with the exact same way to solve that problem. Can you expand on that with your experience, my friend, and why that's so important?

7:50 · — Why niching down is a cheat code (and how far to take it)

Kip Knight:7:50
yeah, no, this is a, you've hit upon a favorite topic of mine, believe it or not. There's a book, there's a book about 40 years ago. still my favorite marketing book. It's called a positioning battle for the mind by Trout and Weas. Have you heard about this book or not?

Jordan:7:55
perfect.

Jordan:8:07
I haven't heard of it, no, but I probably should read it.

Kip Knight:8:09
You should absolutely read it because the whole point of the book is to say, unless you are the number one or number two in your category, you're going to be left picking up table scraps. And the key to that is how are you defining your category? Let me give you an example. One of the things that I do is I am a faculty member of the College of Executive Coaching. And so I teach marketing to potential for coaches in training.

And one of the things that I emphasize, just what you said, I've said, it is practically impossible for me to think of you being in too narrow of a niche. And the example I use is take any profession. If you're a doctor, if you're a lawyer, if you're an architect, who makes the most money? Typically, the people that make the most money are the ones that are super nichey. And to your point, Jordan, the The way that you get there is that you just keep, you know, narrowing down the number of people that are going to be interested in it. Because the more you, you probably make a math equation out of the more you narrow it down. Remember Jerry Maguire, where he walks in and she says, you had me at hello. Well, if you narrow it down enough, when somebody hears about you, they're going to go, you are exactly the one I'm looking for. So let's, let's do some business. And the problem you get into a lot of, businesses and including coaches is they'll take anybody. mean, it's like, Hey, you know, you, yeah, I'll, I'll coach you on anything you like. But one of the reasons CMO coaches decided to be focused on a niche of CMOs, hence the title is we have walked them out on their shoes. Everybody that is a CMO coach has been a CMO. and if you had a life coach trying to coach a CMO on a marketing issue, well, that's going to be. pretty frustrating experience on both sides. So again, I would echo your premise that you really have to think carefully about your niche. And you should always be continually exploring ways to make it even tighter than it currently is. Because it will only get you a better conversion rate if you do that.

Jordan:10:07
Hi, sir.

Jordan:10:23
Absolutely. I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to sound cliche at all, but with your experience and what you do, Mr. Knight, you are like the CMO coach for CMO coaches. You may not think about it that way, but I think that's super cool. Like, like when people want coaching, when people want coaching for the CMO tactics, like they, look at you. How did you manage to get into, how did you manage to position yourself to be that guy in our, in our field?

10:52 · — Employment vs. career vs. calling which one are you?

Kip Knight:10:52
Well, first of all, thanks. I appreciate the compliment. I love marketing. I think that one of the keys to any successful career, here's the acid test, Maybe you'll say no. But I think there are three levels of types of work. There is employment, and then there is a career, and then there is a calling.

Jordan:10:54
You

Kip Knight:11:15
And if you, if you're working after a calling, you would even do it if you didn't get paid. I do a lot of volunteer work on the coaching side. I'm part of this group called the marketing academy. I've been a part of that for about seven years. I've coached a number of people through that means I've done a number of things to try to help out the marketing profession, which frankly, I'm very concerned about right now. They're, they're not in good place. So the way I think I try to position myself is to say, you know, I've now got enough experience.

I've been doing this for like over 40 years that I've probably been there and seeing that and that's reassuring to people.

You name a crisis, I've probably been through it. And I also try to keep on top of what's happening in the MarTech space. Now that is incredibly hard. You're infinitely better at that than I am. But one analogy I like to use, at least on the marketing side, is that you have to be almost like a conductor. You don't need to know how to play every instrument in the symphony, but you need to know what good looks like and sounds like and be able to coach somebody to get better at it if they're not performing.

Um, and so having the amount of experience I've got, and also frankly, having a, pretty high curiosity quotient. mean, I am always intrigued with learning more about, you know, like B2B is an area that I didn't start out with. I started out B2C and I've worked with some really big, um, B2C companies, uh, Brocter and Gamble and PepsiCo and eBay and such. Um, so if you're naturally curious and you're willing to learn and you're willing to try to. communicate to people in ways that work for them, then most people will be very receptive to that.

Jordan:13:02
On that topic of marketing is changing and, know, man, increasing rate year over year, thanks to AI. How do you see AI and marketing coinciding together? Do you think AI is taking over marketing professionals? Do you think marketing is going to now become more enhanced because we have AI here? What are your thoughts on that?

13:27 · — AI and marketing: the opportunity and the danger

Kip Knight:13:27
I got a bunch of thoughts. First, I think AI has got a hell of a lot of potential. And I think we're already seeing that. For example, I took one computer science course in college, Fortran. You don't even know what Fortran is, probably. And I never thought I'd be coding apps, but I've got a

Jordan:13:50
That's it.

Kip Knight:13:55
started playing around with, are you familiar with Replet? Okay, well, Replet, you can do your own customized app. I've done about a dozen of them so far. It's a lot of fun. And I plan on doing a lot more and I've used those for various marketing tasks. I'm also learning on a daily basis. I've just got off the phone with a guy that was showing me some ways in which you can start with LinkedIn and then create, well, you do those all the time, customized emails and then track that through and.

Jordan:13:59
I'm not.

Kip Knight:14:25
Et cetera, et cetera. So bottom line, think, and he does it all through LLMs and AI. So that's the good news. The bad news is I think you're getting more more people that think, and sadly, these are a number of B2B founders, that they can literally delegate all the marketing over some agent or a group of agents and it'll all be wonderful and they'll never have to worry about marketing again. Well, bad news.

That scares the hell out of me. And it should scare the hell out of them because again, going back to the foundational work, unless they've thought through what is your strategy? What is your positioning? What makes you unique? Why should people believe you? What is your ideal customer profile? How are you going to continually keep up with how they're thinking about your business? How do you get customer feedback and adjust your business processes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can't delegate all of that. You need to know that. so that you know what good looks like. There have been so many times, and you probably have experienced this, where I will do something in Claude or Replet, and it will come up with the initial answer. go, wait a minute, that doesn't right. And the thing that blows me away is it agrees with me every time. It goes, yeah, it's not right. I need to go back and fix that. Well, if you don't know what good looks like, you're going to be. flying blind and the amount of money and time and frankly, relationships you can damage in the process are pretty frightening to me. So it's a tool like any other tool. I was talking to some folks that medical appliance company and the guy was having a hard time getting his management to think about how do you adapt AI into the organization? And I'm old enough to know what it was like before and after the internet. And, you know, I saw a lot of mistakes and a lot of fault starts there. And I think you're going to have the same thing with AI, but the whole point I make is, you know, make a little, sell a little, learn a lot. You don't need to think that you're going to go out and just change everything you're doing tomorrow because of AI. Start with those things to your point earlier that are replicatable, that are systematic, that are measurable.

Kip Knight:16:31
See if you can get an ROI behind that. then based on that learning, maybe expand to the next thing and the next thing. So a systematic logical process by which you can automate a lot of this stuff, but don't think you're going to just delegate all of your marketing over to some AI bot. is, that's insane. It's stupid.

Jordan:16:51
I do agree with you there. Another person we had on their show, they kind of framed AI like this. It's 80-20. 10 % of the work upfront needs to be human. And that's where part of the 20 % comes in from the human side of things.

Now the more context you can feed AI or the LLM, the better the output is going to be. Now, Mr. Knight, if I were to feed some marketing tactics or some context into the LLM, I might get some pretty decent results. However, if you, with your experience, with your knowledge, with all of your background and accolades and all that fun stuff, if you were to feed the LLM, the 10 % context that we're referring to here, I guarantee you would probably achieve a better output than me. Why? Because you just have more knowledge and you're feeding better context to that LLM. And then the 80 % is where AI is going to, you know, do the work for you. It's going to take your instructions and just, you know, spit out an output. Cool. And then the last 10 % is what we call human in the loop. Basically it's our job, you and my job to...

Ensure that the output is actually correct, right? It's not fabricated any information that the, that it actually looks good, that whatever the hell we're ever trying to achieve in the backend here actually looks good and we can bring it to market or send it to a customer, to a potential client, whatever the case is. Do you kind of agree in basically that that's kind of what you were saying where you shouldn't feed over everything to the LLM, to AI, your ideas, your processes, you should, or you, should.

Kind of treat it like a sounding board. Well, you have an idea and you bounce feedback back and forth between the AI to see if it's actually a good idea. Or are you thinking because it's, because you're already in your position, you don't really have to treat it like a sounding board because you know what works and what doesn't work.

Kip Knight:18:49
Well, again, I think in analogies and I don't play tennis, but I think AI is a good tennis partner. You're going to be bouncing the ball back and forth. And with each lob, you're going to get a little bit better. And you're also hopefully working with an LLM that is smart and flexible enough to take your feedback and acknowledge what's going on. I'll you an example. And Reblin is good example of this.

I will come up with an initial idea. I will ask for it to develop a prompt. It will develop an initial prototype. I'll look at it. I'll make some suggestions. We'll get it to the point that I think is pretty good. And the thing I love to do at that point and go, and what are your ideas and what would you do to make this better? And it always comes back with stuff that is pretty cool and pretty amazing and stuff that I would have never thought of. But it's not like I went to the platform and said, here's the task, go do it.

And then I walked away and assumed it was done. That to me, I'm afraid, is the science fiction. A lot of people are thinking that they can literally just delegate this really, really important thing to this machine and think it's going to actually get the results they need. At Procter, their mantra around the definition of marketing is one that I think is absolutely true and always will be true. And that is the role of marketing is to listen and respond to the voice of the customer.

And you cannot delegate that to a machine. You can have a machine help you get better at that. But you're never going to be able to just turn that over. It'd be like turning over your finances to a machine and believing that there was never going to be a need to go back and audit the results or make sure that they were doing what they're supposed to be doing. It's a partnership. But at the end of the day, it's a machine. It's a tool there to help you. It's not something that's going to be a delegated total responsibility for that. Ultimately, that responsibility rests with you.

20:45 · — The real role of marketing (most companies get this wrong)

Jordan:20:45
Great insights. You said the role of marketing is to, please repeat that, is to listen and respond.

Kip Knight:20:50
Listen and respond to the voice of the customer. Because here's the point I try to make with companies that are either degrading or in some cases eliminating marketing. I'm going, okay, well, let's just walk through that. You're sitting around the executive table. You've got all the functions there. Marketing's not there. Who is going to speak up for the customer? Who's going to speak up with the client? Because I guarantee you, as I go around the table, It ain't going to be anybody else because the lawyers got their thing. The IT folks have their thing. CFO's got their thing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you do not have a passionate voice of the customer insisting that we do certain things, then at the end of the day, you're going to be a short-term company because you're going to become really stupid when it comes to making sure you're doing what people find valuable. And over time, your competition is going to kick your ass. So.

Like I I'm pretty passionate about the role of marketing. I think it's really misunderstood. think a lot of marketers don't help themselves because they get into this marketing jargon that nobody understands. And at the end of the day, marketing is a means to an end to help a company be successful by making more money. But the way you make more money is by listening and responding to the voice of the customer. So it all kind of links together. And when it works, it's beautiful. And when it doesn't work, it's a train wreck.

22:09 · — What's most misunderstood about marketing today

Jordan:22:09
What do you feel like are some of the things that are really, really misunderstood in marketing and in context?

Kip Knight:22:17
Well, I'll take it from both sides. think that from the marketer side, they need to understand that you need to speak in the language of business, i.e. finance, every single time you're talking to the CFO or the CEO or the board.

Because you probably dealt with a number of those folks. And if you go in there and just start talking about cac or lifetime value or clicks or impressions and all that, they're going to, eyes are going to glaze over. at end of the day, it's like, all right, so what have you done for me lately in terms of making money? know, every single thing in marketing you need to somehow tie back to, and this is how we make more money. Now the timeframe is going to vary. You know, for paid search, it might be overnight for a brand campaign. might be a year or longer.

But you've got to be able to speak the language of marketing on the flip side of it. I think you've got a number of folks that this has been frustrates the hell are marketers. See if you can relate to this. A lot of non-marketers think they are better marketers and marketers are, and that is a phenomenon that doesn't apply to any other profession. I don't know. I don't think I'm a better lawyer than the head of legal. I don't think I'm better at IT. I don't think I'm better at HR, but by God, there are a lot of people that think they are a better market because they've been exposed to marketing all their life and they think How hard can this be? And if you just let me drive the boat for a while, I'll show you how to really do this. And it's just not true. So trying to make sure we get a little bit more respect is something that we've got to work hard at. I think we get there by, again, speaking the language of business, but also educating the organization as to what is the role and the function of marketing. We are educators first and foremost. And if we don't do a good job educating, people are going to make some assumptions like, for example, If a company is in trouble and they've got to cut out the budget, Jordan, what's the first thing they're going to cut?

Kip Knight:24:05
And again, I'm an allergy guy. I'd tell you the CFO, okay, so we were going to drive from here to Chicago, and now you just took half the gas out of the tank. Am I still going to get to Chicago or not? No, I'm going to be somewhere in Des Moines. So there are consequences for cutting the budget like that. But if you educate the CFO over time in terms of what are some options we can look at that will help you achieve your objective, but not destroy our ability to build the the revenue and the client base we need, then we've got a partnership. Otherwise, you're you're silos and you're talking past each other and it becomes a blame game. You've seen that way too many times, I'm sure.

Jordan:24:46
I think it's funny where we actually set aside marketing budgets because to me it's like the marketing budget is unlimited in my opinion. If I have the ability to turn one dollar into more dollars, then I'm going to spend all the dollars I have to keep doing that. You know what I mean? So can you give us some feedback maybe at the executive level? Obviously I don't have a board or anything like that within my organization, but why companies actually set aside budgets? for marketing specifically. Because like I just articulated, that's the name of the game. If I have the ability to turn $1 into more dollars and still be profitable after all business expenses, just keep doing that, right?

Kip Knight:25:26
Well, I think everybody would agree with that. The challenge is a couple of things. First of all, there's that last touch credit debate that you get into. Like when I was at eBay, we initially started out spending lots and lots of money on television. but we ended up shifting pretty much all of the money over into paid search because we could get super sophisticated when it comes to measuring the ROI of a specific keyword. And to your point, well, why don't you just do that all day long and, make more money? Well, the reason you don't do that is because most purchase decisions, both B2B and B2C, it or not, are emotion, not logic.

So unless you are nurturing the emotional feelings that somebody has toward your brand and toward doing business with you, at some point you're going to run out of credit at the emotion bank and it's going to become purely transactional. And when that happens, guess what? It's all a pricing game. It's how low can you go? we could have a whole separate episode on how do you figure out how much money to spend on marketing.

There are many, many principles behind it. But to your point about, why not just spend money until it stops working? Well, you need to think about both the short-term and long-term effects of that and whether or not you're measuring the right things. Because you can delude yourself into thinking that you're actually getting a good ROI. But maybe you're not getting as good of an ROI as you initially thought. Does that make sense?

Jordan:26:55
from the long-term perspective. You're making me think about that entirely differently. So thank you. I guess take me back into the eBay days and you list two other major companies that the entire audience would know, but I guess since we're on eBay, what role did you have when you worked with them?

Kip Knight:26:59
Okay.

27:12 · — Lessons from eBay: humility, boldness, and Amazon Prime

Kip Knight:27:12
Well, I was VP of marketing, initially, and then I ended up as a head of all of international marketing. So that was, that was a very cool job because, when you're hot, you're hot. mean, this is in the early two thousands and we were, we were, the bees knees, whatever term you want to use there. We were a very, hot coming in and eBay is still, you know, a great company today. It's not as big as perhaps some of the competition at the time that we had like, Amazon.

But I think they've continued to do a good job in what they do. But part of the trick, Jordan, in terms of successful marketing internationally is you've got to develop your own playbook and you've got to make sure that people understand what the best practices are. Again, I said we're educators first. So one of the things I would do is every quarter bring people together and literally just share best practices, what is working and what is not working. And in marketing, as opposed to, let's say, finance or HR, We move at the fastest speed, well, maybe technology moves faster, but maybe not, because given the rate of change in marketing right now, what worked this year is not gonna necessarily work next year and probably is absolutely not gonna work five years from now. So you've constantly gotta be experimenting and figuring out what is working, what is not working. And if you're in a larger organization, you've gotta make sure that you're sharing that information on a timely. and replicatable basis if you're really going to get bang for the buck on all that overhead you're spending for these marketers around the world.

Jordan:28:44
What other experience can you share? guess nuggets takeaways can you share with your experience at eBay? It's so interesting because like typically, I mean not to shoot myself in the foot or undermine my knowledge here, but like that is very, very definitely way more advanced than something that I would even think of to do. I'm a small time agency over here, very happy with the results that I provide with my outbound email services.

But you're working for Top Docs, you're working for Top Docs. I feel like there's a lot the audience could take away. And maybe I can't think of the best questions to ask, but hence the question, what are some key nuggets and key things that you took away from working with eBay that you can share with the audience?

Kip Knight:29:29
Well, first of all, give yourself a little bit more credit because I think that it's a totally different skill set to be successful as a small agency, but it's something that frankly I would struggle to do because, you know, I've grown up in a very traditionally a larger corporate environment. It's only toward the end of my career that I'm really going more. in the direction that you're going. So never apologize for doing a great job as a small agency. You've got a skill set that, let me put it this way, if you pluck somebody out of one of those corporate roles and put them in your job, it would not be pretty. They would struggle very quickly. But some other things that eBay that I think are maybe worth passing along.

One thing is humility counts because I will tell you, and I was one of them, we looked at some of our competition like Alibaba. and we, we thought it was a joke. mean, you know, these guys dare think they're going to compete against us. Well, they did. They ultimately, you know, blew it out of the water. with China, we took the most successful e-commerce website that was over there converted over to eBay and it was an absolute bomb.

Of course, we were not the only American company in China to kind of get our lunch handed to us. So, so humility is something that I've learned the hard way that don't assume that you're so good that your competition is not going to have a chance. They will because they're fighting for survival at the same time. So that's thought number one. And thought number two is, Be bold in your thinking. I remember when Amazon Prime came out, I went to my boss and I said, look, I've done the math. There's no way in hell this thing makes money. I mean, you're gonna lose hundreds of millions of dollars. How can they even begin to compete? Well, it was a long-term play and having used Amazon Prime now for over a decade, I'm sure you have too. It's probably one of the best loyalty programs on the planet.

Kip Knight:31:28
So be humble, but also be bold. Those are two tips that I'd encourage everybody to keep in.

Jordan:31:34
I like that. Now, see if we can pivot to some B2B strategies, optics, anything that you have in mind there. When you are working with CMO or when you are working with other CMOs, are they both B2B and B2C or are they primarily B2B?

Kip Knight:31:52
for pretty much every business, you got to pick a lane. You're either going to be in the B2B business or the B2C. One of my, you know, I've also been involved in helping some universities think about their marketing curriculum. And in fact, I was back at my alma mater a couple of weeks ago at LSU and I was just limiting the fact that, you know, if you wanted to take B2B courses in marketing, it'd be pretty hard because there's nothing really dedicated to that. and they, the dean agreed with me and said that that is clearly a blind spot that a lot of universities have. So in thinking about the role of marketing today, and if I was to design like the perfect career path for someone, I would encourage folks to try to get exposure to both early on.

Because I will tell you that there are things that I did in the B2C category that you would absolutely get a lot of value up and B2B and vice versa. And yeah, those are almost like two parallel universes going against each other. Think about it. And in the finance world and the legal world and the tech world, HR world, you don't divide between B2B and B2C. It's like, okay, it's just, that's the function. And yet in marketing, for some reason, we kind of split the baby and they don't really talk to each other.

So I think there's some opportunities for, if you are in B2B marketing, to maybe study what our B2C cousins are doing and see if there's any application there. And from a career point of view, I've worked in, I counted up eight different categories, which it's kind of crazy. I've worked in everything from.

I've sold ivory soap. I was CMO at Taco Bell. So I've sold tacos and burritos. I'm president of H &R Block. So I've done tax return. I've worked in a whole bunch of different categories. And the one thing I would tell you that in every category that I've worked in, I've picked up a couple of new tricks that I took to the next category. And they would be amazed at, wow, that's genius. I could.

Kip Knight:33:53
I was like, jeez, I just stole it from the other guy. Because there's really no new ideas out there. There's just reapplication of ideas in one part of the world that you're reapplying to another. So for all the folks out there that are especially starting out in their career in marketing, be broad and don't be siloed into one or the other. Try to mix it all together. Because I think especially with AI, the more versatile you can be in your thinking and your applications, the more successful you're going to be.

Jordan:34:21
Okay, so thanks for the more context there. With your VP roles, your president roles, your CMO roles, can you see if you can like dumb this down, for me specifically, maybe even the audience as well, on one thing that you try to achieve with every role from a marketing standpoint? Is it coming up with new offers? Is it coming up with new...

Yes, I don't want to feel the word strategies out there because that's hence that's essentially the question that I'm trying to ask you but like Basically, what strategies do you like to roll over from B2B B2C standpoints? Like yeah, that question makes sense at all. You kind of

35:05 · — Leave the campsite better than you found it

Kip Knight:35:05
Yeah, my answer is going to maybe be either corny or cringe-worthy, but I was very active in scouting growing up. Eagle Scout.

And the mantra in scouting is leave the campsite better than you found it. So to answer your question, you know, I've worked in a whole bunch of, I've worked in startups, I've worked in brands that were in trouble. I've worked in brands that were growing. I've worked in brands that were trying to expand internationally. And so the mission was different on every one, but the goal was to make sure that when you turn the keys over to the next person, the car was running better than when you first got in it. so that's the challenge I would give anybody. mean, what is going to add the most value to the enterprise long-term that you can work on now? Because believe me, there were a couple of brands I worked on and I thought, what in the hell were the people before me doing? Because there's so many mistakes that were made that could have been corrected. That would have made the current situation a lot more. You know, survivable. So leave the camp background better than you found it. Figure out what are the things you're going to focus on that really count and then do that work. And then.

There's gonna be a lot of emotional satisfaction in knowing that the next person is gonna be in a better place than you were when you started.

Jordan:36:19
Okay, thank you. Am I wrong for saying this, that businesses in general really focus on two things, decreasing cost of acquisition and increasing lifetime value? Is that a fair assessment? And everything you do within the organization is to focus on those two numbers, decreasing cost of acquisition and increasing lifetime value in one way or another. It always ties back to those two numbers.

Kip Knight:36:41
OK, well, maybe, but let's just play a little game real quick. OK. What is the typically on a balance sheet for larger organizations? Not necessarily a star, but what do you think the biggest line item is?

Jordan:36:47
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

37:00 · — Goodwill, brand value, and what Apple's valuation really means

Jordan:37:00
My guess is gonna be marketing. Wait, for big corps? For big corps, for big corps.

Kip Knight:37:05
Balance sheet, balance sheet. What line item is going to have the biggest number behind it?

Jordan:37:13
I feel like if I guess I make a fool out myself.

Kip Knight:37:15
OK, well, let me just tell you, it's goodwill. And what is goodwill?

Jordan:37:17
No.

Jordan:37:22
mess ups.

Kip Knight:37:23
I don't know. Goodwill. Okay, let me put it this way. Apple is worth $4 trillion. Do you think Apple has $4 trillion worth of physical assets on their balance sheet? No. Goodwill is what is the collective emotional value that people have toward that brand? How much do they trust that brand? So what you said about those two items decreasing costs and

Jordan:37:35
I see, nah.

Kip Knight:37:52
Increasing the long-term value. I'd say okay great, but on that second one How are you measuring that long-term value and the way I would measure the long-term value is are you in? Increasing the goodwill of this organization on your balance sheet over time because if you're doing that You're doing a great job on the branding You're doing a great job with customer satisfaction and you're doing a great job for your shareholders because that people are going to want to hold those investments forever because those are going to be the most valuable investments in their portfolio, so Yeah, branding matters and branding starts with strategy and positioning. And if there's one thing I could again, maybe to kind of wrap up our conversation here with all your founders.

I mean, do they have a position, and let's just define that real quick. Do they have a benefit that is meaningful to their target? Do you have a reason to believe that you can deliver that benefit consistently over time? And is it unique versus the competition? And is the tone of your marketing something that consumers can relate to and feel an emotional connection with? If you can say yes to all of those, then you're. you're ahead of your majority of competition and double down, if you're not, that's when you really need to go back to the drawing board and maybe work with folks like us to figure out what is your long-term positioning look like.

Jordan:39:13
Kip, it was a pleasure having you on the show, my friend. We have tons of of gems. I do wish we had more time. Where could they find you if they wanted to explore your thoughts more?

Kip Knight:39:24
Well, I'm linked in, so let's connect. I can be reached at kipnight at cmocoaches.com. And I think that'll probably do for most folks.

Jordan:39:37
Awesome. Thank you again, Kip. Audience, thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you guys soon.

Kip Knight:39:42
Thanks, Jordan.