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"Liz Egan: I like to tell my team that marketing is a feeling. If marketing hosts in all hands in a company and the company isn't fired up after it, that's bad. That's a bad sign. Being a CMO is just such a challenging job because there are so many disciplines within it. But you really do have to balance hardcore numbers and making decisions that way with being the heart and soul of the company."

[00:00:00] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is a seasoned SaaS marketer and marketing leader, Liz Egan. Liz started her SaaS marketing career with a decade-long run at Yext where she helped scale the company from a $10 million revenue startup to a $400 million public company. Most recently, Liz was the Chief Marketing Officer at Lattice, a market-leading performance management software suite. Liz, such an honour to have you on The Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.

[00:00:50] Liz Egan: Sunny, thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:52] Sunny Manivannan: Great. I want to start at the beginning. Tell us how you got into marketing in the first place.

[00:00:58] Liz Egan: I'm still sort of unclear how I got into marketing. I studied classics and economics in school, so not something that's terribly related to marketing. But, actually, my parents encouraged me to pursue it. They thought it would be a good fit for me. In college, I had a couple of internships in public relations actually in New York City and working for consumer PR. 

One of them gave me a job out of graduation. I went to that company, and it was the moment when social media and influencer was taking off. We knew social was a big deal, and so I spent a lot of my time in the early days being very online. We didn't have the name for influencer. But looking backwards, that's what we were doing.

I spent two years at a big PR agency, working with big traditional consumer brands like Hanes and WeightWatchers, Degree Men. But I knew that wasn't really what I wanted to do. I come from a family where my grandfather was a professional inventor. My dad is an inventor and works in innovation and manufacturing. There was something in my blood where I was like, “I think I need to be closer to that space.” That looked like tech and tech startups.

I was really lucky to have the foundation of marketing. Ultimately, what I realized I like to do was build companies. I went from that PR agency to a very small consumer iPhone app. This was before Facebook had acquired Instagram. It was the early days of apps. I remember telling people I was going to join the company and they were like, "There's groups of people who work on apps?" It was such a foreign concept. It was founded by some guys who I went to college with, so got a connection there. We were acquired by Yahoo, and this was in 2012. 

In that process, Google Ventures was one of our investors, and they introduced me to Yext. In full transparency, when I accepted the job at Yext, I was not 100% sure what the company did. I just knew that the people were great. This was at the point where you went into offices for interviews, right? I went in, and energy was palpable, and it just felt like something I wanted to be a part of.

The fact that I didn't know exactly what the company did probably meant that they could use marketing help, right? I figured I could have a big impact. That was about 75 people, 10 million in revenue. Coming from a very small company, that felt like a big one. But looking backwards, it was just the earliest days.

[00:03:15] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, amazing journey you to get to that point. Yes, to think that $10 million revenue is a big company, that's a true startup person thing to say.

[00:03:26] Liz Egan: Yes. Exactly right. Exactly.

[00:03:28] Sunny Manivannan: Incredible. Yes. Just hearing you talk about the rise of social media for the first time. I remember Facebook when it was TheFacebook and then eventually Instagram. All these things really were really a big part of our 20s, and growing up, and our early careers. Fascinating to know that only really 12 years have passed, but now we're in this completely different era, which I want to talk to you about later.

[00:03:54] Liz Egan: I feel old as I describe these things. But it wasn't that long ago. It's wild how quickly things have changed.

[00:04:01] Sunny Manivannan: Exactly. Every time I either talk to my kids or I talk to people about what happened 10 years ago in technology, I, all of a sudden, feel extremely old. I think more grey hairs pop up all of a sudden.

[00:04:10] Liz Egan: Right. Maybe we are just getting old. Maybe that's it.

[00:04:13] Sunny Manivannan: Maybe we should just admit it. Amazing. Amazing. All right. Let me ask you about Yext. You joined this company. You're employee number 75, and the company is growing fast. But at that stage, a lot of things are still up in the air, and there's many problems to be solved. One of which is that you hadn't heard about the company, which means that many perspective buyers probably hadn't heard about the company either. What was your mindset over the first few years at Yext? You had really a generational run at Yext from being a marketing manager all the way to being CMO.

[00:04:46] Liz Egan: Yes. I started on the brand comms side of the house. I came in. I remember my first couple weeks. I put together a plan. It was a lot of education, and a lot of content, and a lot of just like, “Let's get the story out there.” It was the moment where the company went from SMB. We actually call it VSB, very small businesses, like plumbers and locksmiths. We're going enterprise. Yext had a really interesting product-market fit where we were the strongest with giant companies like J.P. Morgan and plumbers.

It’s really different, the product, but also how you market to them and sell to them. That's what I came into to do was help us figure out enterprise. We also, at the same time, had partners. When we went public, I believe half of our revenue came from partners. That was a huge, important channel for us, and there are lots of different flavours of partnerships that we had.

As I look back and I think about what we did, it was really just tackling lots of different problems. You go in a circle and then painting the Golden Gate Bridge, right? You're never done. You just tackle it, and you go, and then you say, "Okay. This is done. I'll do the next thing." Then you look back, and you're like, "Oh, wait. Now, the world has changed. We have to go revisit this again." It was a lot of building up and tearing down, building up and tearing down, which not everybody has the stomach for. That's not always the most fun thing to do. But I liked and continue to like building companies. You do what needs to be done kind of thing.

As I think about the moments, the milestones in the company, it was things like SMB to enterprise. We had verticalization in there. We went international, multi-product, all of these different things, which you can do really quickly, you can do over periods of time. You can do it the right way. You can do it the wrong way. I think we did all of it, so I feel lucky that I was able to be there over the course of a decade to see us do things.

I think one of the things that continues to – a lesson I continue to think through is just because something didn't work a couple of years ago doesn't mean it won't work now. The dynamics are different. Maybe execution looks different, whatever it is. I was always surprised. I'm sure you've been in companies, and you come in, and you have an idea. I was like, "Oh, we tried that. It didn't work." It’s like it might now.

I think that's what I learned. It kind of does. It often will work better later. Having the 10-year time horizon allowed me to really see us try things, fail, try it again, succeed. What was different? It creates some new pattern matching as a result.

[00:07:04] Sunny Manivannan: There's so much to unpack in what you just said. But I'll start with the last point, which is this idea of something that didn't work before could work now. Because, all of a sudden, there's an evangelist for that cause. Whether it's a new program, or different type of campaign, or whatever it is, right? That evangelist will just lead to better execution. The company is also a different company. You put those two things together and a failure can just turn into a success very quickly.

[00:07:31] Liz Egan: I think the other thing I'd add is market dynamics. Yext may have been a little early in the market. When we were trying things, people didn't really get it, or there wasn't awareness. But then as competition pops up, competition can be a very good thing because it helps create the market. You try something again in five years, and it works because the prospect is ready. There's all sorts of different things that are different as companies evolve.

[00:07:31] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. If there's any change agents out there listening to this episode and listening to this section of the episode, don't lose heart because time is your friend. What didn't work or couldn't get through a year ago may find a second life.

[00:08:07] Liz Egan: Similarly, what I would say is if you are facing that pushback, someone's like, "Oh, this didn't work when we tried it before," I would ask why and learn from it. Really deeply diagnose. That way, you don't make the same mistakes that were made before because that is how you can ensure it works.

[00:08:24] Sunny Manivannan: Now, as you grew your career within Yext, were you always on the communications and corporate marketing side? Tell us about your journey.

[00:08:32] Liz Egan: It started there. The first five years, call it, that's what I was focused on. Then 2017, we went public, and I led that process on the business side, so working with the finance team, and lawyers, and all these, bankers. After that, I went over to the demand gen side. I think I'm one of the few marketing folks who has actually sat on both sides of the house, if you will. Then I did that for five years. After we went public, we were 117 million in revenue. Then I did that till 400 million.

[00:09:02] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. It's rare to find somebody who's been in two out of the big three functions within marketing, right? Product marketing, demand generation, and corporate marketing and communications. You've done both. One part of that is very numbers-heavy. Another part is much more art, although not numbers agnostic. Numbers there, too, but more art. What was your experience?

[00:09:26] Liz Egan: Yes. My experience was two things I think about with demand gen. One is hardcore numbers, the digital media side. Making sure that you know where your dollar is going. What return on investment are you getting? Where's the pipeline? All of this sort of stuff. Then there's the piece of, at least with an enterprise-focused company, working with the sales team. 

I think the reason I was so particularly well-suited for that is because I knew the company so well. I knew how to navigate it. I've been told I speak sales very well. I was very effective at working with the sales team, and navigating the company, and getting huge groups of people to go do something, which I believe was an insider's advantage, just because I'd been there for so long.

I had to learn the other stuff, right? I definitely did my fair share of Googling of attribution models, and what dashboards should look like, and all that sort of thing. I was lucky to have a great team, and so the combination of the two. I think at some point, as your team gets big enough and the company gets big enough, a lot of your job is leadership and hiring great people, then giving them the right direction, and then inspecting, right. 

I know the “founder mode” memo or post is big right now, so I don't want to apply. It's all hands-off. But I think it's about knowing where you are strong and where the people you've hired are stronger and then balancing the two.

[00:10:45] Sunny Manivannan: What did you think of the founder mode essay? We're going way off script, but there are so many interesting things to unpack with you. What did you think of that memo?

[00:10:57] Liz Egan: On the whole, I think very positive. There's a reason it went viral, right? I think it was very resonant with folks. I think it was a little bit black and white. I've seen a couple of follow-up things that are trying to help clarify it because founder mode done poorly is someone who will not delegate and then micromanage. I think that's not what he was advocating for. 

What I saw Howard Lerman, our Co-Founder and CEO at Yext, do just so effectively is he always managed two or three levels down. We did have leadership off-sites that had – maybe he didn't refer to it as the most important people in the company. But there would be people who were not where you would – in the org chart, at the top, and they would be at the offsite, just because they were the most relevant person in the room at that time. In my experience, that is how Howard ran Yext, and I found that to be a very positive thing. But I do think founder mode in the hands of the wrong person could just be micromanaging.

I did not get an MBA. Not to malign anyone who did. I had the choice to. I was ready. I had my applications. I was ready. Then I had the opportunity to report to our CEO, Howard. I was like, "Well, let's see where this goes." Maybe I can apply in a year if I want, that kind of thing. It ended up being the best decision I could have made. I think that there's something around having people oriented towards doing the right thing for the company and building something special versus hiring the – again, I don't want to malign anybody. But like management consultant who comes in and they know how to manage. They know how to "run a business.” I think there's a delta between the two.

Actually, yesterday, I was reading a blog post. I'm forgetting who wrote it. I should get some attribution to it. But there was an engineering manager, and he was talking about well-run companies versus poorly – not well-run companies. But he was describing well-run companies as being bad. Well-run companies are ones that have KPIs. Everything is measured. Da-da-da. You don't do anything unless your performance review is going to be tied to it, which can create the wrong incentives. You were incentivized to play the game versus do the right thing for the business versus poorly run companies don't have any of that.

But it means that the person has more autonomy and they have more decision-making ability. So they're going to perhaps do the things that are right for the company and make better choices. I just thought that was such an interesting articulation of when something is "well-run". Actually, it may be worse-run. To me, the founders mode is speaking to that.

[00:13:24] Sunny Manivannan: Love that. Yes. The facade of metrics, right? We're so data-driven, and we have all these metrics. If we hit this metric, the company will win. It’s this desire to make this almost magical thing. Everybody wants it to be so deterministic and so measurable, but it's not. Excellence is just very difficult to really put your finger on. But you know it when you see it.

[00:13:51] Liz Egan: It’s the result of a thousand small decisions. You have to have the right incentives in place to get people to act that way. Since I read that yesterday, it was really in my mind. I think he was talking more about you could clean up your code, and you can have your AWS bill be lower, but if there's a political game to be played here of you don't do it until you're asked. All this kind of stuff that I thought was – ugh, politics. But you do need to understand those dynamics.

[00:14:14] Sunny Manivannan: It's very funny that that came from the engineering side of the house because I think it was – you and I talked about, this article came out about Nike's results. They had gone super hardcore on – I think it was direct to consumer. Everything was about measurability, and returns, and ROI, and things like that. During COVID, I think it actually yielded some – at least very measurably good results. Now, they're on the back end of COVID, and they just lost really significant market share in a lot of key categories. They're rolling back all these changes.

But I forget who wrote the post, and maybe we should write this as part of the show notes as well. But this person with this beautiful blog post or LinkedIn post about just, "Hey, all the things that we measured gave us a lot of comfort. But it turns out, it’s just about great creative, knowing your brand, and understanding your customer." Those are just mushy hard-to-measure things, amorphous things.

[00:15:17] Liz Egan: I think that's the hardest part about being a CMO is you are a revenue leader. Therefore, it's tempting to want to make decisions but also feel in control with numbers and prove your value with numbers when a lot of the magic of marketing is actually the softer, more intangible stuff. I like to tell my team that marketing is a feeling. If marketing hosts in all hands in a company and the company isn't fired up after it, that's bad. That's a bad sign. Marketing, you have to bring the extra.

That's not actually my nature. That is so not my nature. But it's something I've learned as really important and fun when you free the team up to allow them to do that. Being a CMO is just such a challenging job because there are so many disciplines within it. But you really do have to balance the hardcore numbers and making decisions that way with being the heart and soul of the company.

[00:16:08] Sunny Manivannan: Yes, yes. What's super funny is, as you said, marketing is a feeling. I remember – I'm nodding internally because that totally makes sense to me. But I'm also thinking about how many CEOs would really believe us if we said that or CROs? That's what makes the position challenging because you can't go to these parties where they're so in the numbers all the time and say it's a feeling. But everybody knows a beautiful marketing campaign when they see it.

[00:16:36] Liz Egan: They do. They do. Well, and you know what? I think it doesn't have to be a campaign. I think sometimes people, CEOs and CFOs, get afraid of marketing. It's like it has to be a billboard and all this stuff. It can be about how you do it. The media is the message. Sometimes, it can be just like you have extra flare, extra design. Or you show up in a more confident way. Whatever it is, marketing also confidence.

Sometimes, when you take a bigger swing or you have a certain tone of voice, that can be the energy that it needs. You have to execute that stuff well. That stuff can be higher risk. That’s where bringing in excellent marketers makes a difference. But you're right. I don't think that, certainly, the CFO may not – it may not be a given, right? How do you justify that? That spend, once you feel it, then I think it's hard to go back.

[00:17:26] Sunny Manivannan: That's why it's so rare still in this day to see really beautiful marketing or even a commercial or an advertisement for any product, right? It's so rare to see that perfect thing out there, even though we all know we want that. But what I think about now is every time I see something that's really just stunning, I think about how many committees it must have gone through and how it managed to survive. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

[00:17:54] Liz Egan: Oh, yes. We could go in so many directions here, Sunny.

[00:17:58] Sunny Manivannan: Let's do it.

[00:17:59] Liz Egan: My husband's a creative director in advertising. I have a unique perspective on the advertising biz, which is a couple of things. One, him as a creative, he's actually not that oriented towards the business. Maybe he should be. Maybe that's a weakness of his. But he's really focused on, how do we make some really special work? Which is different than how I think about things.

I think as a CMO, it's important to understand what creatives' motivations are, so then you know how to harness them. But you have to recognize their motivations are probably not the same as yours. I think that's one of the reasons that it can be hard to work with an ad agency, one, the expense is tremendous. You have to really know what your strategy is or what you're going after and that this is the best way to execute it in order to make that work. It’s very easy to get the altitude and the messaging wrong or to just be slightly off strategy or off message, whatever it is, and you've just spent many millions of dollars. You don't have to spend that much always.

But that's why it's actually sometimes in-house, particularly if you're newer to creative work. In-house is what I'd recommend because you can just be a lot more nimble. You don't have to make something like a huge project brief. Then at the end, you're like, "What did we do wrong?" It can be more iterative, which I think particularly in B2B, earlier stage companies is probably the right way.

[00:19:20] Sunny Manivannan: You mentioned something earlier, which is that people gave you credit for being able to talk sales and understand that function, which, especially marketers who are earlier career, they don't really understand what the other side feels like. What advice do you have for people who may be struggling to build productive relationships with their sales counterparts? What do marketers miss?

[00:19:49] Liz Egan: I mean, my initial instinct as a response to that question is a little bit of a hot take. But go carry a bag. I mean, actually go and have a quota on your back. I think you will feel things a little bit differently. In fairness, I never have done that. My husband and I started a little company, and I was everything. I was salesperson. I was literally everything, accountant. That's the closest I've come to that.

But be responsible for taking something from lead, and qualifying them, and getting them to the next stage, and doing a demo, and doing the pitch, and navigating the company and procurement, whatever. That's how you're going to build the most empathy. If you can't do that, I would suggest actually choose – either ride-along. Intentionally say, "Okay, I'm going to work with this rep. I'm going to spend five hours a week with them for a month, whatever it is,” and really deeply shadow them. I think you'll get a lot of credibility that way. 

Or I would probably choose a moment in the funnel that you want to really get to understand. Maybe it's like you want to figure out why are we having a drop off from, I don't know, demo requests to meeting book. That's maybe not the best example because you can do that behind a computer. But get in the room and really start to understand what's going on. That's not just talking to customers. That's important as well. But I think it's more about building empathy for the salesperson and understanding what tools they have and how they're working.

[00:21:12] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. I love the idea of trying to figure out, okay, why is a number not as good as we thought it was going to be by actually going into those calls and finding out what's happening.

[00:21:22] Liz Egan: There's some cheat codes today. You can watch Gong calls. You don't have to actually be in the room. Sometimes, it could be weird if you're in the room. But you will probably learn more if you are.

[00:21:31] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I, strangely enough, am friends with a lot of obsessive Gong call watchers and listeners. I'm one of them as well. Yes. It's incredible the things you can learn. Now, as a former product marketer, I think the number of times I was humbled by how a salesperson presented what I thought was the perfect deck. You're just like, "Okay. Well, you, the rep, have a lot of things going on in this meeting." Now, there's a million words on the slide. Or even, let's say, 15 words on the slide. That's too many. Because you're trying to gauge, "Okay, is this person for real? Am I talking to the right person? Do they have budget? What do they think of our – are there competitors?" There are so many questions in your head. The slide should enable you not – actually bring you out of that mode of just being in crazy discovery.

[00:22:19] Liz Egan: Well, and there's no better way to erode trust than being like, "This is the best deck ever or slide ever." Then the salesperson is like, "No, it's not." Then they're just going to write you off. I think it's actually critical to your success that you have at least one or two sales partners that you can really build that rapport with. But have them vet things.

I'm a really big feedback person. Meaning, I'm never someone who's like, "It's my way. We have to do this." I actively want people to be giving feedback and be bought-in on things. It takes a lot more time, but I think it's the more effective approach.

[00:22:55] Sunny Manivannan: Love that. Let me talk to you about AI for a second. You were at Lattice recently. You led the charge in terms of marketing. Lattice pushed into this AI-first world. I have so many questions for you just on that. But what messaging did you feel comfortable with when it comes to AI? There's so much fear around this technology as there has been around, I think, pretty much every start of technology in our lifetimes and even before our lifetimes. AI is very different. But at the same time, there's also so much promise. How did you toe the line? What were some of the decisions that you made when you announced Lattice's AI offerings?

[00:23:35] Liz Egan: Oh, AI is such an interesting thing. I feel like when ChatGPT – well, okay. I was working at Sprig when ChatGPT came out. Actually, this might be a little-known fact. Sprig was on Forbes AI 50 list in the year leading up to when ChatGPT came out. Sprig had actually been in the AI space for a while. Then when ChatGPT came out, it was just like a new game.

It's just funny to think about what AI was to what now it has become in a year and a half, almost two years. It's just pretty wild. What I remember when it first came out, there was this push to be like, "Oh, if you have AI in your product, you're going to get coverage. You're going to get people interested just because it's in there." It was like the sizzle thing.

If you think about the hype cycle, it was like hype, hype, hype. If you have it, you're golden. It doesn't matter what it does. You just want to be able to say AI on your website. Buy the AI domain, whatever. Then it kind of, I think, has got into more of a thing where you actually have to have AI that does something. It isn't AI – well, I think AI-washing is still happening. I'm not going to say it's not.

[00:24:38] Sunny Manivannan: It is still happening. Yes.

[00:24:40] Liz Egan: I think it's more that like it's not just about the fact that you have AI. It is what problem are you solving with it? How does this make it more effective? Lattice came out with AI – It was February, March this year. A little bit late, if you will, relative to the rest of the market. But I think that was an advantage because we kind of gone through that hype cycle of AI. It was more about, how's this going to help?

We really tried to focus on that. We made a big deal about it being AI, which actually is funny. If we were to do it today, I'd say we wouldn't because the market has evolved even more. It's really about, well, what problems can you solve that you couldn't solve before? And then saying like, “By the way, we do it with AI.” I think that's important.

Then also showing – not your AI road map because that's not quite the right way to articulate it, but your road map and then how AI helps you facilitate that. I think if you don't have AI in your product or road map, probably that actually now would create more questions about your commitment to innovation and how innovative you really are. It is still a thing you need to make a highlight, but I don't think having just like, “Here's our AI road map.” That’s not necessarily all that compelling.

That was a bit of a rambly answer, but what I would say is that the market continues to evolve in terms of customer expectations around AI as well as adoption and fear of it and all this. It’s really important for marketers to understand where their customers and prospects are on that journey so that way, you can meet them where they are.

 I think the other thing that's interesting is about monetization, so pricing and packaging of AI. It felt like at the start, we were like, “Okay, we’re going to have AI SKU. Let’s go.” I think you can put your AI features in your highest bundle, your highest bucket, whatever. But it's less novel than it used to be. It comes down to what problem you're solving.

[00:26:29] Sunny Manivannan: I feel like consumers – I mean, customers have mostly played around with ChatGPT by now. What's very funny is that I think they say – at least what I believe is true is I think they're saying internally, “Well, I could do this with ChatGPT myself. It must not have been that hard to put it into the product.” 

But it turns out there's actually a lot of engineering that goes into building a successful AI product that delivers every time and doesn't hallucinate, doesn't do all the crazy things that you'll allow ChatGPT to do because you pay it only 20 bucks a month. But you're going to expect a lot more from Lattice, for example, or really any market-leading solution in any category.

[00:27:07] Liz Egan: It's also like early adopters versus late adopters. Some people have fear. Some people – companies won't even let them use it, or they have to use – there's all this privacy stuff. It’s still the Wild West, but it feels a little bit more like, yes, of course, you have to have it. It's not that special you do, but unless you're doing it in a special way.

[00:27:26] Sunny Manivannan: There's a lot of AI sludge out there, and I think we're getting better at spotting it and not paying attention to it. But that's not stopping it from being generated. There's even software now. I learned about this and scared the heck out of me, which is you can be on Twitter or Instagram or whatever, and there are bots out there that will respond with AI-generated messages to people's posts. It’s so crazy to me.

I read about this new social media app where all of your followers are AI bots, and they say that upfront. You can choose the kind of followers that you want, so you can have trolls. You can have supporters. You can have rabid fans. You can have everything in between. But that struck me as really fascinating. You post something, and then all these people just respond to you, but they're not people. I say people because I'm old, but they're AI bots. I just think that the world of content is about to change in a big way.

[00:28:28] Liz Egan: Totally.

[00:28:29] Sunny Manivannan: As a marketer, does that make you nervous? Does the marketing playbook change?

[00:28:34] Liz Egan: I actually think that roles and responsibilities change. I believe ChatGPT, generative AI, whatever are the calculator moments where you have this tool that can help you think. It can help you create outlines. It can help you with some early content. But it does not replace editing.

In my experience, it helps me speed up a ton, and so that my job becomes an editor, not a writer. You become – you have to be a prompt engineer, right? You have to figure out how exactly to ask for the thing that you want to get which will impact the output. I think if you aren't doing that, you're wasting your time. It's a productivity accelerator. Even things like visual generation.

Or last week, just for fun for this thing, I created a song. It took me five minutes to just create an AI-generated song. There's the stuff that you can do that isn't perfect. You still need a songwriter to come up with something great. But it worked for what I was trying to accomplish. Similarly with visuals where you can use some of these tools, Midjourney or whatever, to just create a mood board when you get feedback. It doesn't mean you don't need a designer. I fundamentally believe you do, but I think it can just change the process.

[00:29:52] Sunny Manivannan: It allows people to get started on a higher step in the ladder.

[00:29:56] Liz Egan: Yes, yes. Exactly, exactly.

[00:30:00] Sunny Manivannan: That’s a very different behaviour for all of us, and we're worried that we're not even going to be able to get on the ladder. But it's really, no, you're just getting on at a higher step, and we're still climbing the rest of the way. I don't see that changing, although we'll see famous last words, potentially. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

[00:30:19] Liz Egan: No. But I think it's important that particularly people who maybe create content are aware of the tools because the problem becomes if you're the horse and buggy driver who never adapted, who never learned how to drive. Then you get left behind. It’s not that you will be replaced by AI. It's that your very narrow version of your job may look different. If you don't evolve, you'll get left behind.

[00:30:41] Sunny Manivannan: I want to ask you. We've gone off-script so many moments, and it's been awesome. Just I could go off-script for probably another hour. I want to ask you about career advice. A lot of our listeners tend to be, like I said, early career marketers. What's one piece of career advice that you’ve got? Tell us a story if you don't mind.

[00:31:01] Liz Egan: One. I have two that are coming to mind, but I'll start with one.

[00:31:04] Sunny Manivannan: Okay. Two sounds great.

[00:31:06] Liz Egan: My first one here is leadership advice. I remember very early Howard Lerman, who I mentioned a few times, Co-Founder and CEO of Yext. It was very early in my time at Yext. I was super young. I remember him sitting in a room with me and just being like, “If I made you CEO tomorrow, what would you do?” I was like, “Well, I don't know. Give people a raise.” He said, “No. You want to give people a vision because that is what motivates people. That is what people buy into, and that's what helps people endure the ups and downs and stick with you for the long run.”

He is a leader who leads that way, very focused on vision and long-term thinking. That's something that I try to imbue in my leadership with my team. Make it really clear what are we trying to accomplish. Why? Why does this – how does this impact them? How does this impact the company? What does this mean for their careers, all of that? That context setting and motivation I find to be really effective. I encourage people at every level to really think about both going through the exercise of thinking through getting the vision, right? That’s half of it, but then also communicating that way.

[00:32:14] Sunny Manivannan: What was the second piece of career advice?

[00:32:16] Liz Egan: I don't know if I've said this yet, but I don't actually identify as a marketer, which is super weird for a CMO to say and someone who spent their life or career in marketing. But I feel I am a company builder, and so I think that that has given me an advantage, particularly in these longer-term – like Yext for 10 years. My hat I was wearing was always the company hat, and it allowed me to make better decisions that impacted us all in a better way.

I encourage people to really keep the company hat on and make decisions that way because, generally, if the company you work for is successful, you are going to be successful. If you can also then accelerate your career within that company, that's how you get the super speed, if that's what you're looking for. Make your company successful, and then you will.

[00:33:03] Sunny Manivannan: That's a great way to put it. You're fluent in marketing, but you're conversational in a whole bunch of other languages. That's what really constitutes company builder is fluency in one thing and then just really conversational ability to go traverse different worlds sometimes in the same day.

[00:33:18] Liz Egan: Yep, yep, yep.

[00:33:20] Sunny Manivannan: It’s great. Fabulous. Okay, I want to switch to a session that we call SaaS talk where, as marketers, we talk about things that we like in SaaS marketing and things like that. Let ask you. What is your favourite software company homepage other than any of the companies that you work for?

[00:33:37] Liz Egan: I love Vercel. I think that there's something very simple about the way that they – you should pull it up – but simple about the way they communicate. I love the visuals. It’s a very design-oriented company. There's some nice interaction. I think the organization is laid out nicely. It creates – I like the energy that it imbues.

I always also look at Figma. They change their homepage fairly often, so I always am curious to see what they've evolved. But I go to them for inspiration a lot. I think that they're very effective at their product marketing and, obviously, their design.

[00:34:12] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. Yes, the design does make a difference. I think we can all tell. I always say I can spot a great design when I see it. I just have no idea how to create it.

[00:34:22] Liz Egan: We can teach you. I mean, I can't move pixels around, but I know what to look for.

[00:34:27] Sunny Manivannan: I'll take that class, no doubt. Let me ask you about technologies that you use both personally and at work, so your favourite app for personal use and your favourite app for business use. What comes to mind?

[00:34:38] Liz Egan: The first thing that comes to mind for personal is I really like the Apple Health app. I don't have an Apple Watch. I don't have an Oura ring or anything because I think I would get too obsessed. But I like that the Apple Health is just the right amount of obsession for me where I'm like, “Oh, what are my steps? How many flights of stairs have I done?” And all of this. It just is like the right level of functionality for me, so I like that app. Easy to use. 

I also – for a news app, there was an app called Artifact which was founded by actually the co-founders of Instagram but also the co-founder of Stamped where I worked. I was an early user of it, but it was awesome news app using AI and all this. Yahoo acquired it. If you use Yahoo News, it's Artifact. I now use Yahoo News.

[00:35:22] Sunny Manivannan: Oh. No, wait. I didn't know that. I knew that they got acquired –

[00:35:25] Liz Egan: I didn't really – I talked to Mike Creger recently, and he told me this, and I was like, “Wait, what?” I immediately went and downloaded Yahoo News.

[00:35:32] Sunny Manivannan: It's incredible. Yahoo News, okay. Yahoo News, I mean, this is such a millennial thing to say, but that's your favourite app?

[00:35:40] Liz Egan: Who would have thought?

[00:35:40] Sunny Manivannan: And you're not back in 2007. Thank you for bringing us back 17 years.

[00:35:46] Liz Egan: Okay, then business.

[00:35:48] Sunny Manivannan: Business.

[00:35:49] Liz Egan: My lame answer is – I was telling you at the start of this. I’ve just started using Arc from The Browser Company, which is my new browser, which is personal and business. I'm going to put it in here. It's changed the way I think about tab management and how I think about using the internet, I guess, at the highest level. Their web browser actually has this thing where instead of doing research where you go to Google and you find your sites, they actually have this thing where it says like, “Do the research for me,” and it looks through eight different sites. Then it gives you a summary. It's cool. It saves you a ton of time.

[00:36:22] Sunny Manivannan: That's incredible. I mean, technology is just going so far so fast these days. You would be the first guest to talk to us about Arc, so it's not lame. You're actually quite cool –

[00:36:33] Liz Egan: Yes. I was told I am a hipster for using it, and I'm going to take that as a compliment because I’m not a hipster.

[00:36:39] Sunny Manivannan: Yes, exactly. You're going to learn Python next, and then you're going to be coding. That's a transformation from marketer all the way to engineer.

[00:36:45] Liz Egan: Yes.

[00:36:48] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. Exactly, exactly. All right, last section of the podcast is what we call Peerbound talk. The idea is we're all influenced by our peers, and so this is your chance to influence your peers and also tell us who you're influenced by. The first question is can you tell us about a book or a movie or a TV show that you want to recommend to everybody and why?

[00:37:08] Liz Egan: I can. It's funny. Sunday night, I did some prep a couple of weeks ago for this, and I felt cool mentioning the show. Now, it just won all these Emmys, so everyone knows about it now. Shogun. It’s in Japanese which means if you're trying to multitask, it ain't a good show for you. But I think because you have to pay attention, you really get sucked in. Just the level of production and storytelling is unbelievable.

[00:37:32] Sunny Manivannan: Everything is just gorgeous, and the visuals are incredible and, yes, very just amazing show. I love that recommendation, and you get to keep your cool brand.

[00:37:41] Liz Egan: Although since then, my husband and I have gotten really into Slow Horses. It's on Apple TV. So good. There's four seasons.

[00:37:50] Sunny Manivannan: What’s that about?

[00:37:51] Liz Egan: It’s a British spy drama, but it's funny. It's great.

[00:37:56] Sunny Manivannan: Sold. Okay, sold. Done. Yes. See. That's one that nobody's talking to me about, so here we go.

[00:38:01] Liz Egan: Here we go.

[00:38:03] Sunny Manivannan: You're going to influence a lot of people. All right. Last question is who are your favourite marketers, and why? I know this is a loaded question to ask to any marketing leader because I'm sure you have several. But who are some of the people that you find yourself influenced by?

[00:38:17] Liz Egan: Yes. I don't have a favourite. But who do I find myself influenced by? I love Emily Kramer. Market1 or MKT1, I follow their work really closely. I collaborated with Emily on a bunch of things. Actually, Katie Mitchell, who works with Emily on that was on my team at Sprig and was the original Sprig marketer. I have an extra amount of love for them, but I just think that they are experts in their craft and then are very effective at communicating best practices to help other people learn. It's oriented a little bit towards earlier stage versus later stage, but I think that the principles apply to everyone.

[00:38:55] Sunny Manivannan: Incredible. Funny story is that I've known Emily Kramer since 2009 because we were both at business school together in the same section. We sat in the same classroom for all of first year, which I didn't tell you because we were rushing through prep, but that's true. Even then, I can tell you very straight-up, brilliant, incredible thinker, just very creative, and just knew how to cut to the chase. No surprise that she's done all the amazing things he’s done.

[00:39:21] Liz Egan: Okay, here's my Emily Kramer story. Here’s my Emily Kramer story. Her childhood like summer camp best friend is my son's son’s best friend. Does that make sense? The mom of my son's son. No, I got that wrong, but you get it. There's like a childhood camp friend kid thing.

[00:39:40] Sunny Manivannan: Incredible.

[00:39:41] Liz Egan: Yes.

[00:39:41] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. Yes. Our kids do bring us back to our networks in some way, shape, or form always.

[00:39:46] Liz Egan: I know.

[00:39:47] Sunny Manivannan: So good. Our world is small, and you have just done such incredible things in your career. I think I learned a lot and certainly could have talked to you from another hour easily and learned even more. But thank you so, so much for stopping by and taking some of your valuable time to share your lessons learned with us and, yes, wonderful episode. Thank you.

[00:40:09] Liz Egan: Thank you. So happy to be here.