Key Highlights:
Summary:
In this engaging episode, Christopher Mitchell, a seasoned demand generation expert in cybersecurity, shares his insights on the evolving B2B marketing landscape. Mitchell, currently with Google Cloud, discusses the challenges posed by recent email restrictions from Google and Yahoo, emphasizing the need for more strategic and targeted outreach. He also delves into the role of AI in marketing, explaining how tools like BARD and Jasper AI are being evaluated for their practical applications.
Mitchell emphasizes the importance of quality over quantity in sales interactions and provides valuable perspectives on the future of AI in marketing.
[Read the full transcript]
pharosIQ: Welcome, welcome, welcome B2B marketers to this week's version of pharosIQ’s podcast. Another episode, another week where we bring you unboring marketing campaign ideas and insights from your peers and leaders in B2B marketing and demand gen. This week, really, really pumped to have Christopher Mitchell, the data driven revenue marketer with over seven years of experience in marketing and over five years of experience specifically in the cybersecurity industry.
Christopher has a strong background in demand gen. With a track record of success, implementing and scaling digital programs across nurture webinars, advertising and more recent recipient of the 2020 killer content award for best nurture campaign presented by the demand gen report. Um, really exciting.
We'll probably hear about that one later. Um, in his free time, he enjoys staying active, snowboarding, rock climbing, and, uh, leading his corporate coed softball teams to victory. So before we get going, what position do you play on said softball team? Inquiring minds need to know.
Chris Mitchell: Well, thanks for having me.
Um, I play anywhere and everywhere. Uh, typically alternate between shortstop and centerfield. I
pharosIQ: was going to say you have a center fielder vibe about you, kind of that, you know, catch all anything, you know, so are you, uh, are you the power guy in the lineup, right? The home run guy? Are you the, are you the get on base, you know, for the power guy,
Chris Mitchell: uh, a little bit of both.
Um, you know, I hit a few home runs, but I mostly hit like doubles and triples. So I do my best to get on base for the big guys.
pharosIQ: So I'm really exciting stuff. There's been a lot going on and B2B revenue teams and marketing this week, um, and just over the past couple of weeks. So, you know, I don't know if you've recently saw some of the press coming out about, um, you know, uh, both Google and Yahoo.
Interesting restrictions on volume outbound mail, right? So, um, I'm curious if you saw the news and what do you think it means for the market to come in 2024?
Chris Mitchell: Yeah, I think it'll really force, uh, both marketers and, you know, sales, sales, uh, people to be more strategic with their emails and with their outreach.
Uh, I know now that I'm a part of Google, uh, you know, we, uh, I'm, I'm part of the cyber security division under Google Cloud, and I'm constantly, you know, fighting a million. Marketers, um, to send emails, even just within Google. Cause we have the security cloud, the data cloud, the analytics cloud, the developer cloud, there's so many different divisions within Google cloud.
And we're all trying to, you know, email roughly the same people. And so just internally, I'm competing. So I have to be very strategic with my emails. I have to get very targeted, very segmented, um, really, you know, hone in on that experience. And honestly, with some of my campaigns, I almost operate assuming that email's not even gonna happen.
Um, like if, if I'm able to get an email out, great. But I, I want to make sure that in the event it doesn't happen, I'm, I'm still ensuring my programs are successful. Um, but all of this is to say, I think, you know, there's always room for improvement with email marketing. And, uh, I do think too this will have potentially an even bigger impact on really B2C companies, because they're the ones sending like trillions of emails on a daily basis to everyone.
But.
pharosIQ: It's interesting. I never thought about, you know, in large multi product, you know, diverse organizations, right. You're all. Generally, again, you mentioned generally reaching that it decision maker or that similar person, but with, I don't want to say competing, but again, the, the, the, the, the end user still sees the email coming from the one part, the one company.
So it feels like getting bombarded by the same company, but really it's very individualized messaging. That's gotta be challenging. So who is there like a single person who like orchestrates that overlap in your work? Or is it, you just. Responsible for like communicating with each other to make sure there isn't an overlap.
Chris Mitchell: Yeah, there has to be a lot of communication so we have internally what we call our activation team, which is really just a powerful marketing operations org and so Each division sort of has their activation managers So I work with the security activation managers and they're the ones who have Ownership over Marketo, and they're the individuals who communicate with one another to make sure that, uh, we're not overlapping audiences, that we're managing email sends, and I was gonna say, like, we have pretty strict, um, email limit rules within, like, built into Marketo anyways, like, you can't receive more than one email a day and more than, like, two a week, so, um, you know, there's that, like, sort of default rules.
You know, functionality built in to make sure that we're not going over the top anyways.
pharosIQ: Fascinating. And again, I've only worked at smaller ish orgs, right? I mean, you know, 500 people, but you know, and, and smaller marketing orgs. I never thought of, because obviously email is such a, such a, So it's been a strong tool for marketers for many, many years, right?
So it's interesting to kind of balance that. I think, I think the bigger impact will be on the selling side of the fence. You know, so many, so many automation platforms have been built, right. That, that create the ability to send those quote unquote, one to one emails, you know, across automation with very little thought.
So, you know, sellers used went from sending, you know, 25, 30 well written emails a day to 2700 generalized emails a day and, and, you know, add, add the amount of sellers in a space on and people's inboxes are just being overwhelmed by automation and that. So I, I think it'll slow that industry down a bit. I hope, um, you know, which will bring, which will bring a little bit more natural selling back into the game versus just this volume blast and see what falls off the tree.
Chris Mitchell: Yeah, I completely agree and I have never worked in sales So, you know take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I think again, you know, it's gonna force Sellers to be more thoughtful with their outreach And and you know, hopefully like you said, you know more genuine with the selling and i'm a big proponent of quantity or uh quality over quantity, I know to a degree obviously like sales and marketing is a numbers game, but uh, I think You know, having those more meaningful interactions.
And I mean, basically like if you can attain the same amount of opportunities and sales with 30 meaningful, uh, you know, inner activities a day versus, you know, 120 meaningless activities a day, then, you know, I think that's a worthwhile transition to
pharosIQ: work on. Well, I've always told my team a good rep can do quality.
A good rep can do quantity, right? A great rep. Can do quantity and quality and they can figure out the identity. That's the one percenters, right? People are like what what separates the reps that are at the very top and the ones that are in the middle and it's usually The ability to do both right to be able to be creative genuine, but also Efficient and manage your time well enough to be able to do both sides of that I think it's it's very similar across the thing.
So you've been You know, looking at your LinkedIn profile, you've been through a couple of acquisitions over here, right? Which is happening more and more, right? As the, as the VC and PE markets slow down a bit, there's more strategic acquisition happening. And I think that will happen a bit more as we approach 2024, 2025.
So, you know, that's not easy. What advice do you have for, you know, marketers? Um, who may be, you know, may have a merger or acquisition coming or are going through one now and how to best kind of, you know, handle that scenario.
Chris Mitchell: Yeah, I think you just have to, um, get comfortable with the unknown and be able to quote unquote thrive in ambiguity.
Uh, it's like one of Google's taglines. So early in my career, I joined Carbon Black, which was in the cybersecurity space. Um, I wasn't trying to get into cybersecurity. I just happened to have some friends from college who worked there. So, and they had an opening. Um, but after I joined, uh, like a few weeks later, we went public, which was really cool.
And then a year and a half later, we got acquired by VMware. And that acquisition was, uh, like, honestly, just like a little less fun. Um, we were a public company and so we found out like via the news, like everyone else that we were getting acquired, you know, we had no prior knowledge that it was coming and then.
You know, because they have to go through, like, DOJ approval and, like, all of these government regulations, you know, there were a solid three to five months where, uh, the deal hadn't officially closed yet, so we didn't know what our fate was going to be, we didn't know if we were going to get full time offers, if we were going to get severance packages, like, you know, what the long term, uh, like, trajection of the company was going to be, so there was a lot to it.
Of just unknown and we sort of had to just operate in that and be okay with that. And then I think once it did close, that's when we found out sort of, you know, who was staying, who was. You know, ultimately getting short term contracts basically, uh, just to transition their work over and, you know, typically G& A functions are the most in trouble, like the HR, finance, things that can be centralized, but also marketing is kind of the low man on the totem pole in go to market orgs.
Um, so that's also a big area for impact. So, you know, I think it's, like I said, it's just like thriving in that unknown, um, taking advantage of the opportunities you have. And then just also accepting that this is out of your control. If something negative happens, it's not because you're bad at your job.
It's just because someone who saw you as a number on a spreadsheet made a decision and. You know, to just, you know, from there, if ultimately you do get like a severance package, for example, to, you know, leverage your network, um, and, you know, hopefully find an even better opportunity going forward. Um, I know for me at VMware, like, my role and responsibilities were dramatically shrinking and becoming more narrow and focused at VMware.
And so while I was fortunate enough to receive a full time offer, I was instantly less excited about. What I was doing on a day to day as well as what my, you know, upward mobility and, you know, prospects within the organization looked like. So I started passively looking at other opportunities. Uh, and that's actually when I came across simplify.
They're another vendor in the cyber security space. They were a smaller startup. I interviewed with the hiring manager, CEO, and I instantly knew, like, this is a company, like, I fully believe in their vision. I know I will learn a tremendous amount from this leadership team. I will be challenged on a day to day basis.
Like, it just seemed like, too good of an opportunity to pass up, and so that's when I joined Simplify. And then after two plus years there, we got acquired by Google. Um, a much different outcome, uh, than getting acquired by VMware. At, uh, it was pretty funny, because, you know, we were, we heard rumblings internally that we were, uh, potentially going to be acquired, and my manager and I, at the time, had a very candid conversation in our one on one, and we were like, We love working together.
This has been an amazing two plus years post acquisition. You know, we'll just leave and join another startup and rebuild the demand gen team from the ground up again. Do the same thing. Keep working together like we had this whole plan in place. And then when we found out it was gonna be Google, we were like, All right, maybe we stay.
Maybe, maybe you see how this goes. It's um, kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity to join Google. So we stuck around.
pharosIQ: Awesome. I mean, it's awesome. It's never easy, but I think you're, I think you're thriving ambiguity, right? Which, you know, is, is good, right? And I, and I, and Any situation, right? There's always going to be tough situations, but understanding that you just don't have a full length of control into it.
You do the best you can do with the cards you have. And it's a really great advice. And I think something we can all take away from that, you know, but working at a big company. That has like a very significant brand in a very specific segment, right? Cause people think Google first, they think, you know, search and display and ads, and then they probably think cloud, right.
But, you know, the security segment of Google isn't as big, right. And there's not as, you know, so like, do you find it more challenging to kind of like, to market a smaller segment of a larger company for, you know, and, and just battling kind of that you're almost battling your own personal brand, if you will.
Chris Mitchell: Yeah, I think it comes with a completely different set of challenges versus being at a startup, you know, at a startup, you just want your voice heard. Um, but I guess, you know, I still want my voice heard, but in a different way, uh, because at the end of the day, like security, it's important, but it's not.
The biggest division of Google Cloud. It's not the top priority of Google Cloud, so, you know, it's a lot of competing internally, you know, for that promotion space, like I mentioned with sending emails, but then also to, like, the entire security division within Google Cloud has basically just been one acquisition after another.
We acquired Recaptcha, we acquired VirusTotal, we acquired Chronicle, Simplify, we just acquired Mandiant at the end of last year. Um, so it's really, we're trying to just bring together a bunch of different teams, uh, and create a cohesive, you know, team and product suite and message, um, That we're, we're bringing to market.
And, and so yeah, so it's, it's a completely different set of challenges. And I think too, one of the biggest challenges is just the internal processes and, you know, going through, getting something approved by marketing, leadership, sales, leadership, legal, finance. Like, there's just so many people and, and groups and organizations that need to approve anything I'm doing externally.
And so I need to plan for a program at least two to three months in advance. And if anything happens in those two to three months, I, I can't really adapt or change too much on the fly, unfortunately. So, it's just very interesting, and I know actually, specifically in the cybersecurity space, like, anytime there's a breach, Right, like there's things in the news constantly that you, you want to be able to adapt to and so we're actually in the process of like building brand new processes internal to Google where like there's an exception if there's like a time sensitive, like breach related, we need to get something out the door type of uh, response basically.
So it's, I don't know, it's cool, it's cool being a part of this. But it definitely has its, you know, own set of challenges.
pharosIQ: I mean, a lot of times I've seen, especially in the security space, you know, attaching marketing messages to those big breaches can be, you know, I mean, for, I mean, I'm sure that I'm sure one of them was the, the big MGM, the big MGM hit that hit Vegas, what, a month or two ago, where, you know, the seven casinos and all of the, all of it was shut down by a breach on that side.
So I don't know. It's a, it's a good move. I'm glad you were able to kind of push to get that like that inserted into the process.
Chris Mitchell: Yeah, it is. It's a delicate balance because you don't want to be like ambulance chasing. You want to say like, hey, if you had our product, you could have avoided this breach altogether.
It's more just going to market and saying, like, especially with Mandiant, which is an incident response services company, you know, having saying like, you know, this breach was in the news, you know, let's break it down. Here's what happened. Here were the attack vectors that. You know, the nefarious criminals took advantage of this is what happened.
You know, here's a patch to, you know, prevent that vulnerability going forward on your own network. It's more like, you know, just trying to be helpful more than, you know, salesy, if that makes sense.
pharosIQ: That's very cool. Very, very cool approach. I'm sure everybody kind of geeks out on that stuff, too. And as far as how it happened, you know, even I read a lot of it, too, and I'm not even an IT guy.
So reaching that point where it's November. Um, you know, almost December, you know, so what are your, what are your big predictions? Big, bold predictions for 2024 could be across anything, by the way, doesn't have to be marketing or sales, or it could just be any, I mean, marketing would be great, but if you have any, just generalize big, bold predictions, like somebody's winning the Superbowl or something, feel free to throw those out there as well.
Chris Mitchell: That's fun. Uh, the Patriots will not be winning the Super Bowl, I'll tell you that right now. But, but, uh, I think this is probably a very stereotypical answer, but I just think that AI is gonna be everywhere. Um, Both from, like, if you work in software, I'm sure your company is going to be talking about AI externally, and then also as a marketer, using new and innovative AI tools to do your job.
So I know, obviously, here at Google, we have BARD, um, so we're, which is, uh, like, our equivalent to chat GPT, and so we're encouraged In marketing to just experiment with Bard, whether it's, you know, for messaging or a promotional copy or what have you, we're just strongly encouraged to use it. And then I know there's actually like a team internally that's evaluating, uh, different marketing AI tools to see, you know, You know, what's going to be legitimately helpful, potentially, you know, what's just hype at the moment and sort of what it would be worth bringing in and taking advantage of as a team.
And so, like, I know one solution, for example, that we're exploring and, um, uh, Not interviewing, but evaluating is Jasper AI. Um, so I just, I just think that, you know, there's going to be a lot of AI stuff next year. There, I mean, there's already a ton this year, but I think it's just going to continue to get bigger and bigger next year.
pharosIQ: Yeah, it's interesting. I think it'll be really interesting to see where AI goes, depending on how the courts rule on large language models of copyright, right? Because you either have a coalition of, you know, large language models that are scouring that, or what I believe you'll see is a whole lot of mini AIs.
Right. Many large language models based on very core data sets. Right. So like, you know, X company will, will build their own model based on their data. And then it'll be very segmented AI batches that, so it'll be, that I think will be the turning point in AI and where it really goes. Will it be a kind of everyone gets to use language model that'll just be like all about how, you know, who's, you know, whose AI is, is writing the best or is the most recent or is the fastest or what.
You know, use case it's being evaluated or will be, will we be having as users start evaluating models, right? If we want to do something like what vendor do we go to, to access what data? And I think that's where the, the really interesting AI dissect will come in the short term and probably feasibly the longterm once the courts rule, how.
How, you know, large language models and copyright kind of interact with each other in this new space.
Chris Mitchell: Yeah. And I think honestly, as of today, there's pretty limited practical applications for a lot of this. Um, a lot of it is hype. I mean, it's valid hype, but it's still hype like, uh, Airbnb this week just acquired a stealth AI company.
And a lot of people said they're really only doing it to make Airbnb look more attractive. Because they're potentially going to get bought. And so I think, you know, I still think we're a little bit of ways away from like, they're actually being practical applications. Like, I don't think anyone's going to be losing their job anytime soon.
Anything that you do with AI still needs like a human to review it. Like the language is, is often broken English. Like, you know, I still think we're a ways away from it being, you know, an everyday leverageable tool.
pharosIQ: I think for me, it's been, and I don't know in marketing, how you, I use it is kind of like the You never have that where you need to write something.
You have either a piece of copy or an email or a message to a cu, you know, customer or the team, and you're like just staring at the dot, that's just blinking, you know, and you have nothing's coming to you. I've found that I've used, you know, some of the AI models, you know, just to be like, just type in, like write me an email on this topic, just to kind of get some sort of inspiration flowing and then.
My brain kind of kicks in after I read something kind of written almost, I don't want to say poorly, but just kind of, you know, rudimentarily. So that's, that's, that's been my primary use case to date is the, is the like, just get my brain going on a topic that I need to write or execute on. Yeah, definitely.
It's really interesting. It's a really cool time to be in in the B2B or just in the in the in the business space as well, just because there's just so many applications and all of that. So awesome. So now we've we've reached the time that everyone's favorite time of the podcast where we start talking campaigns, right?
You are. 2020 killer content award winner. So I'm assuming you're going to bring some awesome stuff to us here. So tell us about, um, some non boring, non beta boring campaigns, campaign or campaigns you've run, uh, what you liked about them. Did they work and anything else you think we should know?
Chris Mitchell: Yeah, I think, uh, I mean, hopefully we'll have time to talk about a couple, but if I can only mention one, it has to be Sockstock, which was a virtual event that we ran while I was at Simplify.
The Sock, or Security Operations Center, is basically the marketing operations team for cybersecurity, and the solution we sold at Simplify is basically the equivalent to Marketo for marketers, or Salesforce to salespeople. That's what we sold to security professionals. And, uh, it was during the pandemic, obviously, like, in person events were all canceled.
And, you know, we're all trying to figure out what the best way to reach our target audiences are, and so we decided to, at the end of the year, kind of after your stereotypical event season, um, host this virtual event, Sockstock. It was a play on Woodstock. Um, it was the quote unquote grooviest, um, self termed, um, virtual event for security operations professionals, and we genuinely just wanted to make it a really cool, really educational, completely vendor agnostic event for security professionals.
So there were no product pitches, um, like we had one thought leadership pitch, Ship session throughout the day, but like we only had one session out of 25 plus sessions. Um, what we really wanted to do was just get thought leaders. So we got, you know, security professionals that worked at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, uh, Charles Schwab, like some of the biggest companies in the world to do sessions.
We got an analyst from SANS. To do a session. We had the CISO of Drizzly, the CISO of Mondelez and the CISO, uh, chief information security officer of Home Depot, like just really important people to deliver sessions to their peers. Right. Um, and most of those companies were like, by no means our customers, like we were just reaching out to cool people doing cool things to help one another.
And the event was awesome. We even had like. At the beginning, we had like a live musical guest in the middle. We had like a yoga break session. And then at the end, um, we had a comedian do some stand up. Uh, you know, we, we had a kind of like a Slack, but it wasn't, we didn't technically use Slack, um, but there was like a networking component where people could interact with one another, uh, you know, share stories, share gifts or memes, um, win prizes.
Like it was just a really, really cool. Experience. Um, you know, we were also a team of less than 10 marketers at the time. So I think pulling that off was also pretty impressive. And, you know, we were able to generate over, you know, 3000 registrants, you know, over 50 percent of people who registered attended.
It was a huge pipeline generator for us. So it's just really cool to be a part of such a unique event at the time. Um, yeah, so that was really cool.
pharosIQ: That's, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a, I mean, it was obviously a cool event if you're 3000 plus registrants with half attendance, especially in the virtual side of it without some sort of like you get a free thing or an incentive or things of that nature, but now really, really, really cool.
So, why do you think, was it anybody else in your space had done anything like that before? Or think it worked because of the topics or the people or because it was just new and it was different and that side of it? What do you think made it work?
Chris Mitchell: Yeah, I think there was a couple components, like this one was specific to just security operations, not cyber security in general.
Um, so, you know, that would be like doing something for just marketing operations as opposed to everyone in marketing from product marketing, demand gen, etc. So we really, that was really the only security operations event that existed. Um, it was also the only one that was like truly vendor neutral, um, like RSA and Black Hat, for example.
Like, Everyone, like there's a million vendors, a million booths, um, each session has like really an agenda behind it. Uh, you know, whether it's us having a customer speak on our behalf or what have you at those events, but you know, it was, it's always, It's not quite the same. So I think it was very unique in what it was at the time.
And we really, I think even just the theme being on Woodstock was, was very unique too. Like we really leaned into it. We sent all of the speakers and presenters like tie dye shirts that said Sockstock on it. And it was funny too, because even all the attendees were commenting like, where can we buy these Sockstock shirts?
Like this is the coolest thing ever. Like, um, so I think it was just like a genuine, like, We're here strictly for, uh, like education, information exchange to help one another, bring the community together. We're not selling you anything. Like, I think it was just really cool the way we were able to appropriately coordinate that.
pharosIQ: So my brain's turning curious. Did you choose sock stock given that you're the general age demographic of sock professionals and it tended to be around woodstock era type folks or you just like sock stock in general, just pick the pick the largest event ever.
Chris Mitchell: I think it's a little bit of both. Um, I think, you know.
I can't take any credit for the idea. Um, my co workers, like Dan Kaplan, Josh Greenberg, a lot of the people I worked with are some of the most creative people I've ever met and, you know, they're the ones who really were sitting in a room bouncing ideas off each other and that's what they came up with. I think it was a, you know, partially like it does help that our demographic, you know, fits the bill there.
But I also think, too, is like we were trying to think of a way, like, how can we. Bring a lot of people together, especially during, uh, you know, the pandemic, like, and, and really thinking about how people were brought together in the past. And I think like, you know, Woodstock came up as a way of just like organically bringing people together.
Uh, and I think, you know, we want It also just like naturally the word Sockstock, you know, sounded great too, which was great, but yeah, I think it just all coalesced, um, and came together in a great way.
pharosIQ: Awesome. All right, cool. One more, one more. We got time for one more because that one's killer. Um, but I know you had, you had a couple, so.
Chris Mitchell: Cool. I think one other really cool program, um, campaign, whatever you want to call it, we worked on. At Simplify, we literally built a community. So, it was kind of two fold. One, it was literally just a security operations community. We had a Slack channel. Um, you know, we had our customers, prospects, just a ton of people in there.
Uh, it was a way for, you know, customers to have a more direct line with, you know, You know, product services on our side, but also a way for, you know, them to continue to network together, communicate with one another. It was really an extension kind of of sock stock in a way. But the other, you know, part of that was we literally created a free edition of our, uh, platform, uh, that just had some limitations to it.
So instead of having unlimited integrations, you could only integrate five security solutions. Or instead of having unlimited, you know, alert ingestion, you could only, you know, ingest 100 alerts a day or what have you. So it was a really, so it was a way for prospects to start messing around with our product.
Get to know, you know, our solution and that was really cool too, because if you did download the, you know, free community edition, you are also automatically added to the community on slack and everything, but it was truly a like insane demand gen driver and sales motion for us. Uh, it was also just really cool to be a part of growing a community as well as like a product led growth marketing strategy and so we were able to incorporate like, you know in product messages like Hey, you've been using this, you know every day for the past two weeks Maybe you want to upgrade to enterprise or hey, you've reached all of your limitations Maybe you want to upgrade to enterprise like it was cool doing that like sort of In product marketing as well as like working with the sales team on their outreach to people who had downloaded The community edition and we saw, you know again Significantly higher like conversion rates, you know compared to regular marketing campaigns to those who you know Actually downloaded and engaged with the community
pharosIQ: So you're right.
I mean you're right there on on the the early precipice of what what has become product led and community led growth So, I mean I think you know, you're I mean and again both can You find that perfect balance between free and useful, right. And then also a community of, I think you hit the nail on the head, like a community of very specific individuals.
I think both events and both tactics where you nailed it. And I think our, our, our listeners can really learn a ton from is, you know, find that specific community, right? Like, you know, in my case, like. You know, we, we sell a lot to demand gen marketers, right? So instead of speaking to marketing, right?
Sometimes, sometimes you just got to speak to the demand, like to the person who, you know, is your core buyer, give them a space to feel like they're important. And they have a voice and kind of collect, you know, connect with their colleagues. And you can, you can really do some, some, some awesome things at the marketing side.
So really awesome. So you're, I mean, I appreciate your passion for those two. So like, It's, it, there's nothing better than having like a fun conversation about campaigns and things of that nature. And again, I think a lot of people listening, you know, are going to be inspired by like, Hey, can I, how do I create my own sock stock?
Right? Can it be done? Should I do it? And again, if, and if one person has that thought with themselves in their head, then we've accomplished the goal for the podcast. So. Totally appreciate you joining. Um, well, I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to, starting with my daughter, who was the last, who was the last participant on said podcast.
I'm asking people to kind of leave us with one final thought, anything that you'd like to. So what would be your final thought, Christopher Mitchell?
Chris Mitchell: Uh, I think it's just to try and be a genuine and empathetic human. And, you know, for the context of this podcast marketer, I think, you know, to your point, everyone wants to be in the community and product led growth space.
You know, it's a huge opportunity right now, but you can't just do it for the sake of doing it. You can't just do it for the sake of sales and expect it to be successful. You have to be very genuine and empathetic with what you're doing. You have to find your niche. Um, and so I think as long as you have like the best of intentions, like, you know, there's endless opportunity.
pharosIQ: Thank you so much. Really killer advice. Really killer show. This has been one of my favorite to date. Really, really love just kind of hang with you and talking, talking marketing and talking solutions. So thank you, Christopher. Um, you know, let's be in touch. Let's do it again soon and hope you have a great, you know, new year planning session.
All right.
Chris Mitchell: Awesome. Thank you, Chris. It was a pleasure to be here.
pharosIQ: Cool.