Lindsay Tjepkema: I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and Co- Founder of Casted, the first and only marketing platform built around brand podcasts. And this is a little behind the scenes fun from our own podcast. One of my favorite parts of hosting the Casted podcast is the amazing, authentic conversations I get to have with our guests. Some of my favorite moments are when I get to hear stories from our guests that they've never shared anywhere else. It's fun to get a peek at who they are behind the mic, if you will. But these moments don't always make the final cut for every episode. So a lot of these conversations center around how our guests grew as marketers and how they got to the leadership roles or the positions that they hold today. So instead of letting these conversations sit on the proverbial cutting room floor, if you will, our shared Google Drive, probably like many of you, we're sharing them with you right here. So let's get started. Okay, James. So here we are. We were just talking about how you and your team are responding in this crisis situation, but let's lighten things up a little bit and talk about you, CMO. And I'm interested, I'm always curious to find out if CMOs wanted this. And if so, for how long? Is this something you aspired to for a long time or something that you just kind of ended up in without really planning on it? How did you get to here?

James: Yeah, that's a funny one. I did. I mean, I always wanted to at least get into a CMO position. I worked at large companies. So I worked at it at Cisco and VMware, so really large organizations, and the beauty of those is you get to move around the business. So you get to stay in the company, but you get to really move around the business. So, early on in my career, I said," Look, I want to be able to touch as many functions of marketing as I can." And big companies allow you to kind of go do that. So I was able to do inaudible the product teams, and the digital teams, and the solution teams, and the partner teams, and the services teams, and all within a marketing remit. So it gives you kind of a broad background. And for me it's been great, because I lean on all that experience, honestly, from all the big companies to kind of do this role now. The piece that I didn't lean on, which I had to learn as more of a... As a CMO [inaudible 00:02:20], I didn't come from a brand background. So I came at it from really products early in my career, and then really more of a demand gen guy. And so, that to me was the big one because it was kind of having to go," Hey, I need to go develop a brand. I need to go to develop that top line messaging and be able to go through that." And that's been interesting and fun. But those are great journeys. And this is my second CMO role and both wildly different, because I was in the IT industry for so long and marketing to IT people. So being a marketer, marketing to marketing is really kind of fun and it's been really fun for me, and I get to know all the MarTech and all the MarTech executives and all the products. So that's been really interesting for me really to think. I feel like I get a definite behind the scenes look at all the really cool marketing technologies, and all the ones that are not so cool, but are just interesting as well, because there's obviously a lot of MarTech out there. So it's been fun. I mean, honestly, that's been a fun one for me.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's cool. So one of the common threads that I hear in all of these conversations is," exposed to a lot of things." Like you were exposed to a lot of different parts of marketing pretty early on. And how does that serve you now? Obviously, people working on your team, coming from different areas. You're overseeing things that either you know really, really well because you did it in a past life, or that you were never really exposed to but you know enough to lead those people that are experts in it. So what does that look like, that broad understanding and different areas of expertise? How does that show up in your job now?

James: Yeah, I guess one of the fun ones is product marketing. I know I don't want to do it. I'd rather than go hire somebody. It's a thankless job, to be honest. And it's a very important job in a company to do product marketing and to have that. And true product marketing, where the market is telling you what's happening, you're doing the market research on that competitive [ inaudible 00:00:04:19], everything. And being that true product marketer, I would rather go hire a really good product marketer, because it could take 100% of your time as a CMO. So if it's sort of an odd job, you're doing a poor job, for sure. So that one is probably a fun one for me. I know enough now that I don't want to go do that, and I need to hire a skillset for that. And I think the other piece of being in big companies, you get to meet a lot of different people with a lot of different skill sets. And you as an individual also grow with these people. I've got a lot of folks that are from Cisco. There's a lot of us that are executives and CMOs around Silicon Valley, so it's kind of fun. Well then, there's also a wealth of talent out there. And so you know that, hey, this person's really good at doing this and I've seen them work this before. So you also know that you can kind of go build a team if you really need to and scale up pretty big just because you have a pretty good idea on talent, and who fakes it and who gets things done, if you want to call it that.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, for sure. As you have grown with the people, how have you grown your brain? So where do you go for information, whether it's other people in your life who have helped lead you? Where do you go to learn to scale yourself?

James: So, I read books and I listen to podcasts. So I really actually listen to podcasts because I think in this day and age it's hard to read books. Before I was doing a lot of driving, so I would do the books on tapes [ inaudible 00:00:05:54], whatever. So you do that. But now, with podcasting it's great because there's a wealth of information out there and people have great stuff. So I find myself doing a lot more of that than traditional reading. And then, I do a lot of peer talking. I like to sit down with a lot of my peers and colleagues across multiple industries. There's a company called Vloray and there's these Vloray dinners that are on it, and you get to host these dinners. Before all this was happening. And it was fun because you basically sit down and talk about marketing. And it can be random people that you just sort of come together, and you just have these cool dinners and talk about marketing and what's going on. Whether it's about ABM or attribution or whatever. There's all kinds of stuff you can talk about. So that's how I kind of stay, A, abreast of what's interesting and going on, and then anything I don't see that others are having and either I've just completely zoned out and missed it or was something that I agree with and I've got a new page for it.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, no, I totally agree. That's one of my big go- to things too. It's just other people. Conversation, right? So for the marketers that are listening that are aspiring CMOs, what's one piece of advice that you would give them?

James: I would say, honestly, the one piece that I've always seen is, don't stay in one area too long, but don't be a job jumper. And I found out through my career, I think I probably stayed... Which it may be wrong to say, but I think I stayed probably at Cisco too long. As much as you can move around the business, I think you do build up a body of experience over a number of years. And I think you can move up quickly and also move into roles and get more put on you. I want to say you kind of lean into something, and somebody puts a lot more on your back, you're going to figure it out. And so I think if you can stay in a place, get as much experience, but take that and bottle it up, and go take that somewhere else. And maybe make that jump from director to VP, or from senior manager to director, or senior director or whatever it is. But don't job jump around just to get a title. Because what I find now as I do interviews trying to get a director or VP in, is that if you've moved around and you really have no body of experience, you're always somewhere getting an interesting title jump, but you have no depth in what you're doing. And that's usually trouble down the road, especially in a situation like this where you really need to think about what's worked, and where do we need to go do some tactics that may have worked randomly in the past that you need to rethink through. And I think that's important.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I like it. Yeah, build enough experience to be able to draw on that experience as you continue to grow.

James: Don't just job jump.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I like it. Cool. Well, thank you, James. This was very helpful. Thanks for letting us learn a little bit more about your story.

James: You bet. Thank you.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's our show. I hope you enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about today's guest in this behind the scenes peak of the Casted podcast. For more episodes, visit casted. us. And to hear more bonus content like this from our podcast, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.