Marketing Matters

Welcome, welcome. This is Marketing Matters. It's the show where we get to interview and learn from some of the brightest minds of marketing.

And on today's show is my friend Scott Horn.

Scott is the Chief Marketing Officer for Prism HR.

And before Prism HR, he was also the CMO at 24-7 AI and Seagate. And I actually had the pleasure of working with him at both those places, which is what we're talking about just before the call.

So welcome to the show, Scott. Thank you. It's great to be here.

I'm excited to do it. You're looking well, Rick. Thank you. Thank you.

Surviving on the West Coast. Yeah, yeah. You know, the COVID thing is keeping us keeping us crazy.

But I'm getting pretty good at like getting out and getting exercise and, you know, getting out of the house at least a couple times a day, taking the dog for a walk, that sort of thing.

There you go. My Peloton is six feet away, so I make sure I do that.

Nice. Now, you know, one of the things I love asking on this recording is, you know, everybody's kind of got an origin story.

And I know you're a comic book buff. I'm a comic book buff. And so every superhero has got one, you know, every supervillain has one.

So why don't you talk to us about your origin story and how you ended up in marketing?

Because you didn't start there.

Yeah, that's funny. So originally, when I was a kid, I was a comic book geek, wanted to do wanted to be a comic book artist originally.

And I had two realizations early on one, I wasn't very good artist.

I was not even the second best person in my high school, which was like, and the second thing is, I looked, I went to the career counselor's office and looked at how much most people made back then for Marvel movies and said, Yeah, I can't even eat a sandwich on that.

So I got hooked on computers, because my high school was the first one in my district to actually have computers.

And it turned out I loved programming. So my original goal was, I went and got a computer science degree actually wrote code for a bunch of years, which is kind of unusual.

I don't run into a lot of CMOs and CROs.

And I've done both who do that. And I was fortunate in that when I was taking my courses at university, I got a job programming the Atlanta TV guide for a small shop.

And it was good job paid the grand total of 10 bucks an hour, which seemed like a lot of money.

But I was basically in a room by myself all day. And I started getting a lot involved on the side with a lot of campus activities found out I liked working with people versus sitting in a room just coding.

But I mean, nothing against it.

There are people who just want to sit in a room and code. I just happen to be one of them.

And I got more and more excited about hey, marketing is really about strategy.

It's really about understanding people, understanding customers, understanding why they do what they do.

And that got more and more exciting to me.

So that's why I went into marketing. And it's been fun. And as Rick knows, I've kind of done a bunch of different things.

I've done marketing, I've done engineering, even in the last 25 years, I've done sales most recently.

So I've done a whole bunch of different things.

So to me, it's more about the journey than the destination.

But that's what got me into marketing. So yeah, it's been fun.

I came up through product management, too, didn't you? Well, what I did is when I first joined Microsoft, way back when Microsoft I came in as what we would call a product marketer today.

But I switched after three years over to the product management side, they call it program management, and actually led engineering teams.

By the way, it was a great experience. I would tell marketers, if you ever get the opportunity to work as part of a product team, it's a wonderful experience.

Because you know, the typical thing is the marketing person shows up and says, I need 27 features.

And you know, the engineering team's like, what are you talking about?

We're about to ship this thing. So the nice thing for me is number one, it proved to me personally that I had the technical chops to do some of the most complex technical products.

That was where I got my first management experience. The other thing that's really nice is it makes you more understanding and attuned to the entire product development process.

I mean, typically marketing, most cases gets involved and intersects the product development process pretty far into it.

You know, so I've done that.

I also did a stint doing just solely product planning, which was looking beyond the current product to product plus one, plus two, plus three.

I did that at Microsoft, which I describe as one of my most enriching jobs and also one of my most frustrating jobs, because I learned as much as I did in any other job.

But you basically had to sit around and wait for a team to get freed up to act on your thinking.

You know what's interesting? I talked to, so obviously I know you, I know a lot of other marketing executives go to a lot of events and talk to them there as well.

And things go through cycles and trends. And one of the trends I've been seeing probably for the last three, four, maybe five years is a lot of marketing leaders, particularly the CMOs, have come up through the same track where you did, where maybe they weren't an engineer, but they were in product management or product marketing.

And then they came up to an actually a CMO kind of role.

But what do you think about that? How does that better prepare them?

Well, I think it really varies. I think you see that more on, first of all, if you're in Silicon Valley, I think you see a lot more of that, number one.

I think you also see more of it in the B2B space than the B2C space. I think the B2C space, in fact, when I, it's funny, I say this, when I see a lot of like Wall Street Journal, when I see the Wall Street Journal, it's about CMOs, it's almost all B2C stuff.

It's basically an advertising column. So I think you see more of that in B2B.

I think you see more of that in tech. I actually, like I said, I'm a big fan of that.

I'm a big fan of doing a lot of things. You know, in fact, I think more and more the things that I want to talk to CEOs and talk to recruiters and things when I, because I've done two or three job searches over my career, you know, yes, you do need messaging, positioning chops, you need strategy chops, but really the ability to understand the product.

In fact, as Rick knows, you know, I've been offered jobs where, oh, you'll be the CMO, but you want a product marketing.

I'm like, well, no, thank you. I don't want that job. Because, you know, it's like, you're responsible for the revenue, you're responsible for the brand, but you don't have the product messaging.

How's that going to work? So I think it's a good thing.

In fact, my advice to people is, I think it's good to do a lot of things over the course of your career.

And I tell people all the time, and I'm not joking, there's no way you could draw a straight line through my career, but it's been really good.

I've learned a bunch of things. You know, I can sit with our product management and our head of engineering and have a really good conversation about things and, you know, be a respected part of that conversation because I've been there, done some of that stuff.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because there are commonalities between, you know, how you got to where you are and me.

I mean, I'm, you know, as you know, I'm also on the technical side, I came up for the technical side, right?

One of the things I loved about you, you know, dad was a civil engineer, right?

So, you know, I had like the technical side, but as opposed to you kind of embraced it, I actually went down the design path.

And, you know, I ended up with a graphic design degree and all that.

It kind of came back around to it.

And so it's interesting how I think in a lot of these cases, what's super compelling is having that left brain, right brain, you know, that creative side and the, you know, the 100% or analytical side.

Well, it's like I tell people, I mean, for anybody who's a CMO on your audience or aspiring, I mean, the amount of tech you deal with, it's like my CFO just pinged me the other day, because he's trying to hire a corporate applications director.

He's like, tell me about your marketing stack.

I'm like, you know, you really don't even want to think about it.

I said, there's so much stuff in there. I said, you'll never find anybody who knows what you need them to do, which is Slack and, you know, Zoom and all these things.

And that, so I think as a CMO these days, there's a lot of tech. I think as people know, there's a sea of data and analytics.

And one thing that that technical background I find helps on is you can parse through that stuff, right?

You know, one thing I've observed over the years is people don't have technical backgrounds, rush to embrace technology as the first solution.

And as you know, because we've talked about it many a time over the years, you got to get the process right, then add the tech.

You don't start with the tech and then figure out the process.

That's true. And so, you know, it's a tough time for people, especially kids who have just finished their degree, right?

I mean, if they just graduated in June, they came out in the middle of a, you know, pandemic in the middle of this COVID thing, but you're still hiring, we're still hiring.

What kind of advice do you give them?

How do they go get out there and find a job? Yeah, so the first thing I'd say is, number one, this is not the first time the economy's done, I mean, this is unprecedented, but, you know, I mean, heck, I was out there in the 87 crash, the dot-com crash.

We were trying to hire, you know, 2008, yeah, the housing falling apart.

So there will be future crashes. So I'd say if I were giving advice is, number one, one of the great things about, I mean, if there's a silver lining COVID, I think it's proven that people can work from anywhere.

Like if you would ask me, and Rick and I have talked about this, if you'd ask me, I'm hiring an ops leader right now, and I'm hoping to get my final acceptance tomorrow or the day after.

But if you had asked me, you know, a year ago, where's that person going to be?

I was going to say, I would say right next door to me in the office. Now I'm hiring somebody from the West Coast, you know, because it's, you know, great talent.

So I'd say, first of all, you can work from anywhere. Second thing I'd say is, look, even if you're not getting paid, it's better to do something than nothing.

You know, I mean, if you're coming out of school right now, frankly, you're in an apartment or you're at your folks' house.

I've got one kid who's taken a gap year, she's home from college, she's interning, and she was doing an unpaid internship and they just started paying her.

So I'd say getting experience even free, great thing to do.

Because, and then the last thing I'd say is, when you think about applying to companies, think about what you're bringing to the party.

Most people say, oh, you know, so if you apply for something like, and I had a bunch of people apply for my ops job, it's like, you've never done ops, you've never worked in marketing, you've not worked in a HR, you know, HR tech or a SaaS company.

So you're not bringing as much as other people in the resume stack.

That's where even doing an unpaid internship, if it was me, I would absolutely do an unpaid internship, especially if I'm living with the folks and, you know, I know where my food's coming from.

It's better to be doing something than just, you know, continually job hunting.

Yeah, you know, I think that's fair. As you know, my son is still in college.

He's a junior and he's doing the remote learning which makes a lot of sense.

But he's like, you know, should I, like, he was challenged because he was trying to find an internship and he's like, what should I do?

I said, you know, don't worry about working at a restaurant or whatever, just go get experience.

And if you have the opportunity, go move up. And so he was just telling me the other day that, you know, there's an opportunity for him to move to a manager role.

I said, look, you know, at the end of the day, if you have the opportunity to go do an internship versus the manager role, I'd tell you to do the internship every day.

I said, but take the manager role because at a minimum, it gives you the experience that you wouldn't have otherwise because not everybody's going to have management experience.

And so, you know, it's, so my advice to people right now is number one, take every advantage that's around you and rely on your network.

Like, I mean, the reason you and I worked together a couple of times is our network, right?

You know, that's how we were first introduced. That's how I came back around to you.

I was going to mention that. In fact, it's funny you beat me to it because both my kids, I helped them get both their internships, my son and my daughter.

And their initial reaction was, I don't want dad helping me.

I was like, are you kidding? You know how many people helped me in my career?

Like a million people. And then they were like, once I got the job, in fact, my son, the older one, I think you know this, he's a product manager for a tech startup in the Midwest.

He got that job because of his internship. And he got the internship because I knew some people.

So I'd say kids, and I'll say kids, kids, young people, if you're out there, yes, lean on mom and dad, you know, ask aunts and uncles and everybody, your cousins, everybody you can to help you find a job, put them to work.

That's true. And then my other one is, you know, at the end of the day, it's a numbers game.

And there's a lot more people looking right now.

So you just, you have to not be discouraged and keep beating the pavement because something's going to turn up.

But, but on the other hand, I go back to what I said, the opportunity pool is so much larger now.

Yeah. I mean, like, so for example, we're in, we're outside of Boston.

And, you know, a year ago, we were only kind of looked in the Boston area.

And then I expanded to Florida, where we have an office in Sarasota.

Now I'm like, look, I'll take somebody anywhere in the country, as long as I'm not paying, paying a crazy labor rate.

And I will say, anybody, any company in California, you pretty much go outside of California, it's cheaper.

So, you know, there's a lot of good talent out there all across the country.

It's true. It's true. So, so, you know, one of the things that I have fun with is talking to people about, you know, great projects that they've worked on.

What was the favorite project?

I've worked with you on some of them, but I actually don't know the answer to this one.

What's, what's your favorite project you've worked on?

And what did you get out of it? It's such a tough one, but I'm, you know, it's funny, because I'm going to, it's going to sound like I always hesitate to give this one, because it's my first big project.

Because it always, it always, it's going to sound like, God, you haven't done anything since then.

But I'm like, no, I was really proud of that project.

So my, my first big project, Microsoft, I had been at Microsoft about 18 months.

And the summary is, I spearheaded creating the first new version of since the original Office Standard and Office Pro, which, you know, that was like 1997.

And don't get me wrong, I had help. But I was doing all kinds of crazy lifting on it.

So the background was, you know, this is well before the days of SaaS and cloud apps.

And the idea was that anybody running a corporate application built on Word or Excel or Microsoft PowerPoint, or Microsoft Access, anybody building that anybody who used it would need a copy.

So it was like, you know, almost the runtime licensing model way before SaaS.

And the prompt, we had a bunch of problems we were trying to overcome, which were, wow, developers would go, you want me to use Office?

Why isn't there a version for me? So it was an 18 month slog.

There were like, the first time, you know, we tried to get it done for Office 95, couldn't get it really done.

It was not enough runway. And it involved everything from, you know, what's going to be in it.

I worked, in fact, it's funny, because my first lead program manager, product manager, who didn't really want to do the project is the current CMO of Microsoft.

And I still know him 25 years later, we're friendly.

He's a great guy, Chris Caposella. Shout out to Chris.

He's a good guy. Chris was like, I don't want to do this. I'm like, come on, Chris, you really.

So we added a few features, specifically for developers, built it, made it a premium price version.

I worked with the guy named Robbie Bach also, who ran the Xbox division later on, and was one of the Microsoft, he was the director of Office.

And did all kinds of work on everything from packaging to what are we going to name it, to how do we take it to market?

You know, and it was funny because, you know, Bill Gates would literally, I remember Bill Gates sending a mail going, who's going to be able to answer these questions?

Now, and my boss came to me and said, write the answers.

But I was not senior enough to send the mail to Bill.

So I wrote the answer. But it was funny because I did the, in those days, Microsoft had manufacturing right in Washington.

And they had, you know, when it came off the line and off of Washington, the product marketer, product manager, as they called them, would do the first piece inspection.

They would bring the box to you, you'd open the boxes, write a number of floppies, right?

And my son had just been born that weekend.

And they came, it was not really a nice thing that, because I knew the manufacturing folks, and they were really gracious.

They actually came to my house, and we did first piece inspection in my living room the Monday after my son was born.

I was like, we got to be quiet because he's sleeping.

And that, I mean, and you know, honestly, to me, the reason it's so special to me is number one, it was making an impact.

We sold tens of millions of dollars on.

It also taught me, it was my first experience. It took multiple learning patience, because it was literally an eight, I mean, you'd get the mail from Bill and Bill would say, like, who's gonna be smart enough to tell me the answers thing?

I think this is a dumb project, which was classic Bill thing. Bill, I mean, Bill would challenge thinking because he wanted you to challenge back.

And that one for me was like, oh, goodness, you know, it was like, at times you'd be like, well, this is never gonna get done.

And then I learned, you know, big, hard things take time.

Totally worth it when you get there. I learned it takes a whole bunch of people helping you.

I mean, I had all kinds of help on that project, you know, from all kinds of directions.

And I was, it was really cool.

It was, I'm still, that's the one I go to. But like I say, I always hesitate to give it to people like, man, you've done nothing for the last 20 years.

Oh, no, that's not what it is.

But that was a fun one. That was really fun. I have fond memories of that.

Yeah, because some of the coolest things I did were all the way back at Palm.

So that was early in my career as well. You know, even even at Seagate, some of the some of the cool stuff that that we did for that rebrand launch.

Oh, yeah, I love that stuff. I could mention that stuff, too. But and by the way, the rebrand at Seagate, Rick and I worked closely together on rebranding Seagate, the first rebrand they've done 10 years.

That was definitely at times a slog.

Because people keep changing their minds. Do we want to do it? Do we really want to do it?

Oh, okay. All right. We'll let you do it. What were they compared to like, you know, basically an auto manufacturer in Silicon Valley, I think was the Yes, yeah.

Cleveland, Ohio manufacturing company. But I will say the team that's there, which includes a lot of reform, doing a really nice job.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true. They've done a really nice job on the marketing there. Nice to see the team do that.

Absolutely. Hey, so so you know, I want to have fun with this next one.

So a lot of times, people only focus on the good, but I've had a project or two that has just gone horribly wrong.

I can turn my back and show you all the scars.

No, I thought about this one. So this one's also a Microsoft and that was important.

So this one was and it led to a much more successful project in a different space.

So this was late 90s, you know, Bill Gates and other people.

So I was working in the Windows C group, and I was on the engineering side of the house.

And if you go back to that time, a lot of the consumer electronics manufacturers around the world, Fujitsu, Panasonic, Sony, Siemens, had in house chip architectures.

And they all wanted to be part of Windows C.

Windows C was like, originally the handheld operating system, but then it was used for a whole bunch of consumer and industrial devices.

And, you know, people would go hit Bill up.

Bill would say, sure, we could do that. At one point, we had like 18 different projects queued out over like three plus years.

So my VP said to me, I need you to go find a way that we can have an outside partner, called a porting partner, port Windows C to these projects.

Now, this was really unprecedented, because Microsoft's compiler technology, get a little geeky here, when you write computer language, a compiler is what takes that, you know, parses it, turns it into machine language that the chip can actually run.

And Microsoft had a lot of tech in it.

It was actually considered one of the crown jewels.

Not to mention the fact that the source code for Windows C included a whole bunch of things that were in core Windows, like Windows Internet Explorer.

So I got the job.

And in those days, you know, unfortunately, I say this with a grimace, you know, you give me a mission and point me, I'm going to go through walls or anything to go get there.

So my VP said, go do that. So, and there was a bunch of questions, you know, people had, you know, and by the way, they were all good questions, which I was like, no, no, we're going to go do this.

We're going to do this.

Well, sure enough, I signed somebody up. And I learned some important team lessons and economic lessons.

On the team side, inevitably, when we ran into trouble, which you could almost see it from the, I should have, we ran into trouble.

And suddenly there was nobody there, you know, wanting to help. Yeah, you know, so that was the one part.

The other part I learned, which was, I should have, I now look for this, I've actually seen several patterns, is that there wasn't enough business to sustain multiple partners in that market.

So you were essentially handing a monopoly position to somebody, so they could charge whatever they wanted.

So you had unhappy partners who wanted their ports. And it was just a nightmare.

So, you know, fast forward a couple, probably a year and a half later, I was doing one of the company's first big source code projects when Microsoft did shared source.

And I was thinking back to that porting project going, I'm not doing that again.

I mean, I'm not going to just not shut people down, listen. So, you know, I took a lot of time to like get people in rooms and say, let's work through it.

You know, like everything from how we did the license to, can we put the source code in?

So it was a much more collaborative effort. And, you know, we ran technical problems later, which are inevitable in anything hard new like that, but we powered through them as a team.

There's a lot of help, you know, people jumping in and say, okay, I can help with that.

So I learned an important lesson, which is, man, if you A, first of all, you're always going to have problems in these kinds of projects.

And more importantly, B, if you don't do it as a team and bring the team along and listen to the team and, you know, take them along, it's eventually going to fail.

So, yeah, that porting project, I still look at that and go, did I really do that?

But, you know, I think I had to go through the learning to get to the other side for the source code project and many future projects, because that's been my MO ever since.

Yeah, you know, there's a quote, and I know you're much better at this than I am.

There's a quote about basically people early in the career of the youth don't know their limitations, so they accomplish the impossible because they don't know that they can't do it.

And, you know, while there are probably times in your past, in my past, where we've done that, we've just charged through everything and didn't come out with a good result, there's probably another, you know, dozen times where we did, where we accomplished something that we just didn't even know wasn't impossible.

You know, it's funny.

I don't know if I agree with that, because I'd say, I think I probably have a healthier respect for what's possible than I did even back then.

And the way I say that is, you know, I think early in your career, I think your time horizon is really short.

If I can't get this done in three months, it's impossible.

Right. And I think one of the things you learn over the course of a career is, like I said earlier, those hard, hard things, they sometimes take a while.

You know, I mean, I'm not comparing myself, but if you look at somebody like, you know, gets used a lot, Elon Musk, look at like all the things that they had to work through to get to where they are, and whether it's Tesla or SpaceX, that was not a three-month project.

You know, you had to have gone through and been tested to go, okay, I'm going to stick with this long enough, be willing to burn that much time, life effort, money to go get there.

So I do think, you know, you don't know a lot of things early.

From Zen, you know, if you study Zen Buddha, beginner's mind is always a good thing to have.

Yeah. But I do think as you go through your career, if you're fortunate, like if you're a lifelong learner, you are, I know you're that, Rick, I'm like, if you do that, I think you have more of an appreciation for what you can be done.

Now, that said, I do see people who, some, unfortunately, it's sad.

There are some people at some point in their career, they just go, I'm done. You know, I'm going to stop learning.

And those folks, I think, do get locked into the, you know, that can't be done.

Which, you know, for folks on there, if you're in a company where they tell you things can't be done all the time, go find another job.

That's right.

That's right. You know, now, I want to make sure I make time for this. One of the things that I know about you is you are a voracious reader.

I remember we'd go on business trips and you'd read like two books in the span of a weekend, you know, and just, so anyways, well, so what are you reading?

What's the latest? Okay, so I'll give you a couple.

I'll give you a couple. I got marketing books I'd recommend.

So I'm reading, because I like the historian H. W. Brand's Reagan book. Nobody should read into that.

I read all kinds of presidential biographies of both stripes.

Yeah, I know that. I'm reading the Reagan book. I'm about 30% into that, just because that was interesting.

It covers a lot of periods of history. Just before that, I read, and this is a great book.

In fact, I bought copies for my team, Everybody Writes by Anne Hanley.

Okay. It's a great book. Just prior to that, I read, I've been meaning to read it for years, and I had a hard copy.

I've turned into, I do everything on Kindle, because I like the notes, and I like to read WhysApp.

Plus, my wife doesn't like me reading in bed with the light on at night.

She's like, turn the light off. So I read Olga V. on Advertising, which is a classic by David Ogilvie of Ogilvie and Mather.

Great book. And then just before that, there's another book, which he actually recommends, but I didn't know that until I read his book, which is called Scientific Advertising.

I think it's by Claude Hopkins.

That book was written in like the 20s or 30s, but it's still applicable.

It's still applicable. I mean, some of the examples he uses, like, hey, this ad for Pierce Arrow cars or locomobiles, you're like, oh, that's cute.

But there's like a lot.

So those are like, you know, those are the last three books I read before Reagan in the last couple, you know, last few weeks.

No, no, the book that you were saying you bought for your team, what was that again?

Everybody Writes.

Everybody Writes. What's the premise of that? So she is, she's written several books.

She is with marketing profs, which I'm not associated with them anyway.

But she talks about how to be great about writing stuff for marketing. Everything from the process of writing, how to think about headlines, you know, what headlines work and don't, how to write a blog, how to write a webpage, how to do white papers.

So if you're, I mean, the reality of marketing these days, particularly B2B marketing, even more so, is it's about content marketing, email, SEO, you know, basically offering value to prospects and prospective customers and getting them to opt in.

And, you know, and the classic thing of, hey, look, you know, way before they get on the phone with your salesperson, they're out there researching, looking for help.

So she talks all about all the ways you can like everything from like infographics to white papers.

And it's just a really, really good, it's first of all, she's a fun writer.

It's very easy to read. In fact, I'm going through with my team.

And one of the questions I asked them to think about, I think we're doing a get together and next week is our team meeting.

I said, take a look at the about page for Prism HR.

After you read the book, is there anything you would do differently?

You know, like she talks about what your about page should look like, or, so there's a lot of good stuff in there.

I'm kind of going through this whole thing right now, where I'm really thinking about content, advertising and messaging.

I'm about to kind of shift into a little bit of a, I want to spend a bunch of time.

I got one more, I have one more book on copywriting I want to read, because it's a skill set.

I think our team can, I think all teams can always improve.

So I want to help on that. And then I've got some, I've got a few other books on the analytics side of marketing queued up on the stack.

Cool. All right.

So we've got just about a minute left. I like to always end these lightning round.

That's right with the lightning round. Coke versus Pepsi. Coke easy.

That's good. I'm right there with you. Tough one. I think I'd go Chevy. I had a Chevy Camaro.

It's my first car. So I'd go Chevy. Yeah. You know, the only reason I would go Ford, I mean, they both make great cars.

I love Fords too. But the reason I might give Ford the tip is, you know, back in the last big recession, they were the ones that they were able to kind of carry through on their own.

It didn't need to be.

I like Fords. I've been to the Model A, but if you go into the Model T plant in Detroit, it's awesome.

See the collection. And I know the next one, Marvel versus DC.

Marvel, definitely. No question. Spider-Man rules. That's my deal.

Apple versus Microsoft. Tough one. For most of my life, given I worked at Microsoft 17 years, I would have said Microsoft, mostly an Apple guy now.

Mostly an Apple guy.

iPhone, I'm on a Mac, iPad, watch. Yeah. You know, I've got a PC over here and I've got a Mac over here.

So I, you know, I went over as they used to call them.

And actually I worked at Apple and I worked at Microsoft. I'm one of the people who's done both.

Cool. Well, thank you. You're my pleasure.