IAM2223 – Fractional CMO Transforms Businesses with Holistic Marketing Strategies

Title: Transcript - Sun, 01 Sep 2024 12:31:09 GMT

Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2024 12:31:09 GMT, Duration: [00:16:59.32]

[00:00:00.32] - Natalie Swan

And so what that looks like is we work with our clients and typically start with what we call a strategy playbook. It's highly customized and it's a tried and true framework that we've used for years where we are interviewing the clients of our customers, we are interviewing their team members, we're assessing the current marketing they're doing. We're looking for opportunities. We're trying to understand the resources that they have available.

[00:00:24.98] - Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and level up your business from awesome CEO's, entrepreneurs and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gretch values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the Imceo podcast.

[00:00:52.18] - Gresham Harkless

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gretch from the Imceo podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I'm Natalie Swan. Natalie, excited to have you on the show.

[00:00:59.78] - Natalie Swan

Thank you so much for having me. Really excited for the conversation today.

[00:01:03.06] - Gresham Harkless

Yes, I'm excited as well too. And of course, before we jump into having a phenomenal conversation, I want to read a little bit more about Natalie so you can have and hear some of the awesome things that she's doing. MB two B company leaders hire Natalie and her team to turn business objectives into strategic, actionable marketing. Her firm, Swan and associates, provides fractional CMO support to 5 million and up B two B companies as long term partners for her clients. Swannon Associates offers high touch and transformational marketing strategy services. Marketing is always an experiment, so Natalie's team champions an iterative approach while making marketing strategy doable and actionable. They collaborate closely with leadership and cross functional teams, allowing them to deeply understand the business and drive impactful results and absolutely love everything that Natalie's doing. Actually, we connected at a networking group and I actually heard her presentation and her philosophy around marketing, so I was glued to her presentation, all the awesome things that she's doing. But preparing for this, I read a little bit more and I love the story of how she got started in entrepreneurship. I think her dad was a really big reason for that. She has a really cool story around going to garage sales, lawn sales, yeah. And finding out about those things. So I absolutely love that. But one of the biggest things that I heard during her presentations and I heard on one of her other interviews is that strategy is one of the most fun things that she gets to do in her position now. So Natalie excited to have you on the show, you're ready to speak to Imco community.

[00:02:35.59] - Natalie Swan

Yes. Thank you so much, and thanks for the wonderful introduction. I really appreciate it.

[00:02:39.61] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I got so tongue tied, I couldn't keep up with myself. But I know we're gonna make sure that we have a phenomenal interview. So to kind of kick everything off, let's rewind the clock, hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

[00:02:52.22] - Natalie Swan

Yeah, absolutely. And just thank you for looking into everything. But, like, you identified. My dad was a really big part of it, which he spent his entire career as a banker, and, you know, so very corporate. Like, wore the suit to work every day. But he always encouraged my siblings and I with entrepreneurship, and he was always kind of educating us and talking to us about the importance of starting your own business and how much fun that could be. So he would take us to garage sales on the weekend, and that's where he taught me how to negotiate for things. And so the story you're referencing, there was a gaming console, and we had never been allowed to have them in our house before. Like, that was a rule that our parents had because they wanted us to play outside. And it said, there's a sign on it said, dollar 20, no negotiating. And my dad gave me $10 and said, if. If they say yes, you can have this gaming console. And all my siblings were there. So it was this whole moment, but he just kind of made it safe to do. And I tried that, and it worked. And we were obviously so excited. But, you know, that was just sort of something that I was taught was okay to do, was to, you know, have conversations and negotiate and ask for what you want. And beyond that, he and my mom owned a preschool together, and I have a lot of siblings, and so it was important for my mom to be able to be part of our lives and take us to, you know, games where we were playing sports. And so they had this preschool, and one of my first businesses was my dad. And I sold, like, snacks at the preschool, so we sold candy bars and muffins and things like that. And so really just teaching us the importance of that and what it could look like and how much fun it could be. And, you know, years later, growing up, my first big girl job was a company in downtown Chicago, and we did large scale event production all across the US and internationally. Mud runs music festivals for tens of thousands of people. And the company was incredibly entrepreneurial. It was incredibly scrappy. It was, roll up your sleeves, figure it out by doing you know, sneak or swim. And that just sort of reinforced my love of being creative and problem solving and teamwork. And so after that, I was at that company for a handful of years. I moved to Seattle. I got a new job at a marketing firm, and I had a wonderful experience working with some really high level brands there. But I just decided that consulting was a little too hands off for me. I really like to get in the weeds, to be really intentional, to be part of the team. And so I started my business in 2017 and been here ever since. So that's a little bit of background for you.

[00:05:37.98] - Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. And it kind of reminded me so much. I don't know if you've heard of Sarah Blakely and how she grew up, the founder of Spanx.

[00:05:46.16] - Natalie Swan

I don't know how she grew up. I've heard about her starting the business and some of the very resourceful things we'll say that she did to get the product out there.

[00:05:54.70] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah. So I know you're doing a lot of impact for the clients that you work with. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more here, how you're, quote unquote, mentoring them, how you're making their impact and executing for them.

[00:06:06.27] - Natalie Swan

Yeah. So like you mentioned, Swannon Associates is a fractional chief marketing officer firm, and it's myself and a small team. And with marketing services, my background's in marketing, and I've done everything from brand to digital to copywriting. And I was a brand manager at the company I worked for for a long time. So my role in that was overseeing all new go to market. So all of our brands that were new, I was coordinating with website developers and designers and the company leadership, and I was overseeing all of our full on integrated marketing campaigns with agencies that we worked with. So I really got to see how all of marketing really works together in order to be most effective. And not only marketing, but because it was live events, also the operations team and sponsorship and customer experience. And so it really just gave me this holistic view of marketing where what's in the market? And Gresham, I know you're a marketer as well. So you see, this is, it's kind of these one off solutions to marketing. Like, you know, hey, we'll run ads on Facebook for you, or we'll, you know, we'll post on social media a few times a week or something like that. Whereas what my firm does, it's a bit different, is we start with the foundational strategy for the entirety of marketing. Right. It's not. It's not the website strategy or the, you know, outreach strategy, what have you, but it's, what does the business do really well? How do we get our best customers, and how can we do more of that? Even better, by being more strategic and by really focusing on the marketing. That's going to be most impactful for where we're at right now as a business. And so what that looks like is we work with our clients and typically start with what we call a strategy playbook. It's highly customized, and it's a tried and true framework that we've used for years where we are interviewing the clients of our customers, we are interviewing their team members, we're assessing the current marketing they're doing. We're looking for opportunities. We're trying to understand the resources that they have available. And based on all these inputs, we're providing a recommendation of, here's how you really should be prioritizing the marketing that you're doing. And so that allows us to really create marketing that impacts the business. And I'm sure you see this, too, gresh, where a lot of businesses kind of treat marketing as an admin function. Right. It's, let's update a brochure. Let's do this one event. But that's never how it works. If you want it to work, if you want to build the momentum, you need all of these pieces to be built from the ground up together. And so that's really a big part of what our, what our firm does.

[00:09:03.10] - Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. Do you feel like that's part of, like, what is your secret sauce? What you feel kind of sets you in the organization apart and makes it unique, is that ability to kind of see the forest for the trees and understand that marketing is not siloed. It's not something you sprinkle on top of the ingredients of the recipe you're doing. It's something that's fully embedded in everything. If you're understanding and able to execute.

[00:09:23.75] - Natalie Swan

It well, 100% it is. That is a huge part of our secret sauce. And the other piece of it I touched on a minute ago, a minute ago, which is our ability to work really well cross functionally, and our ability to build partnerships in the organization with the other team members that maybe before working with us, didn't think of themselves as marketers at all or didn't really have a lot of exposure to marketing. But we all are better when we can work together in general, of course. And the other really big piece of our secret sauce is a word that I use a lot, I used earlier is scrappy. A lot of fractional executives come from corporate backgrounds and have had very large teams. They've had a lot of resources at their disposal. They've had big budgets. Our clients need us to be really resourceful. And scrappy doesn't mean less polished. It doesn't mean less professional. It doesn't mean less intentional. It just means creative and resourceful for where we're currently at today and what makes sense for the business. You know, if I came into one of our clients and said, oh, by the way, now you're going to have to start spending $100,000 a month on ads to be effective, like, they're not keeping us around. And so what we really do is we, we, like I mentioned, we focus on what's working, why is it working well, and how do we do that even better? And what are some tools that we can bring in in a really smart way that amplify that versus, hey, we're going to do a 180. We've never, we've never tested this concept before. We have no idea how this is going to work for the business. So why would we focus there? You know what I mean? So that's another big piece of what makes us really, really unique is we, we hustle, we get it done. We get in there and roll up our sleeves.

[00:11:14.22] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that so much. I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or even a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:11:27.36] - Natalie Swan

So hands down, my favorite tool that I use for my business is ClickUp. It's a project management software. It's much like a sauna or Monday.com. but I'm a process nerd. And so it is just one of my favorite things that our entire team, we pretty much never email each other. We are living in the project management software. That's where we keep all of our client project plans. It's where we keep our reporting, our CRM, our pipeline. And so it's just been incredible to have that because you never have to use the brain space to wonder what is this person talking about and where is it and where do I find the latest version? It's all just there. And I kind of fell into it. I had a client that had the software and they weren't using it effectively. And so I sort of just self taught. And it was a very complicated content process that we were trying to build out. And so as you can imagine, it was very important for us to have a project management software. And after that, I'm like, this is the thing, man. And so every time we've onboarded a new team member, it's been incredibly easy to just, here's your task, here's what your name is next to you, here are the deadlines, and here's where you can find all the resources that relate to it.

[00:12:45.61] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I absolutely love that. What would you consider to be a little bit more of what I call see on nuggets? So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you happen to do a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

[00:12:58.95] - Natalie Swan

Yeah, so I'm going to take this from a marketing direction or perspective, and it is that if you are trying a marketing initiative or you're putting resources into something, you have to know how you'll know if it worked or not. Because one of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they're investing in their marketing is we know marketing takes time, which it does. We know it's iterative and it's experimental. It is like, that's just how, how it works, right? You don't know until you are able to implement and get data and understand what's working and what's not. What a lot of people do, though, is they are, you know, okay, I know this is going to take time, so we're going to invest in it and we're going to see what happens. And then six months goes by and nothing's happened and we don't know what we should be looking for. And so then there's no path forward. Right. Then it's just we, we've lost six months, we've lost all the money we've invested, and there's nothing that we can improve upon to make it better. And so I would just say, really be clear with yourself about that. In marketing, we have what are called leading indicators, and those are things that you can look for. They're clues that your marketing is working, even if it necessarily hasn't resulted in revenue yet. So, for example, if you host customer events, okay, are people showing up to your customer events? Right, like, are they the right people? Like, what are the job titles that are coming? Are they booking, you know, sales calls after the event? Are they staying in touch with you months later? So those are the type of things that you always want to be looking for on the front end of your marketing to know if you're headed in the right direction, rather than just getting, you know, six months, nine months, a year down the road and then having to scrap everything and completely start overd.

[00:14:49.37] - Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love that. And so I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different, quote unquote, CEO's on this show. So, Natalie, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:15:00.84] - Natalie Swan

Being able to prioritize your time and what you think is important in life. And that's always been a big part of it for me, is knowing that it's maybe not the quote unquote, easy route to start your own business. But I just believed in it so much that I. And because, like, my. My dad believed in me and my parents believed in me, that you feel it and you're like, I can't imagine not giving this a try. And so it's just having that belief in yourself, even if you don't, you can't see the full path, but you know that this is the right way for you.

[00:15:34.15] - Gresham Harkless

Well, Natalie, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want you to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, course, how best people can get a hold of you, find about all the awesome things you and team are working on.

[00:15:49.19] - Natalie Swan

Absolutely. Well, I just, again, thank you so much for having me to share today and would love to connect with anyone on LinkedIn. So I'm Natalie Swan there. Spend a decent amount of time there. If you have any questions at all, please reach out to me, send me a DM. I'm always happy to hop on a call and chat marketing, so would absolutely welcome the opportunity.

[00:16:10.35] - Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. And of course, to make it even easier, we're gonna have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up with you.

[00:16:17.87] - Natalie Swan

Thank you so much. Gresh. All right, sounds great.

[00:16:20.33] - Intro

Thank you for listening to the imceo podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at Imceo Co. Imceo is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and everywhere you listen to podcasts, subscribe and leave us a five star rating. This has been the Imceo podcast with Gresham Harkness Junior. Thank you for listening.