Podcast: Create Personality for Your B2B Brand

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How to create a personality for your B2B brand

In this episode, host Shahin Hoda speaks with Ansarada’s Global Chief Marketing & Chief Creative Officer, Justin Smith to go deep into how B2B organisations can create a brand personality.

Shahin and Justin go through the origins of Ansarada and provide great insights on why brands should focus on distinction, instead of differentiation. This episode is a unique opportunity to get inspiration from real actions taken by a B2B Fintech company. 

This episode’s guest:

• [00:39] About Ansarada and Justin's career
• [04:12] Justin on why B2B brands might avoid distinction, when they shouldn't
• [07:45] Why distinction is more important than differentiation
• [12:51] Building distinction in Ansarada and what a brand is
• [19:45] How to measure a brand's growth
• [23:04] Creativity comes from a problem
• [27:03] Where to start building a brand's personality
• [32:21] Why marketers should not take consistency for granted
• [33:56] The challenges for B2B people
  

Resources mentioned on this episode:

• About Ansarada
  
• Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry book by Marc Benioff
• Les Binet’s study on B2B Marketing
• Ansarada’s Pathfinder series
• Ansarada’s M&A game
  
• Ansarada’s playlists on Spotify
• About YouTube surveys
  
• Drift’s pricing page
  
• Let My People Go Surfing book
  

About the Growth Colony Podcast:

On this podcast you'll be hearing from B2B founders, CMOs, marketing & sales leaders about their successes, failures, what is working for them today in the B2B marketing world and everything in between.

Hosted by Shahin Hoda & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth

Get in touch!

We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

Episode Full Transcript:

[00:22] Shahin Hoda  Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Growth Colony. I'm Shahin Hoda with xGrowth. And today, I'm talking to Justin Smith, CMO at Ansarada, about how to create a personality for your B2B brand and stand out in saturated markets. 

[00:37] Justin Smith  Hi, it's good to be here.

[00:39] Shahin Hoda  Justin, for those who might not be familiar with yourself or Ansarada, can you give us a quick background and intro? 

[00:46] Justin Smith  Yeah, Ansarada is a fintech business. We help companies raise, protect and realise their potential. And that can be all sorts of forms of you utilising technology to help them on their journey when they come to a critical juncture in their business. So that could be raising capital through equity, or cash. Or it could be a merger and acquisition, or it could be an IPO, or it could be a divesture, you know, all sorts of transactional natures, we provide technology, such as virtual data rooms, and a complete platform that helps companies on their complete lifecycle. So everything in Information Governance from, as I said, an M&A to a CFO using us for doing their audit, and keeping their information always on, always relevant, and always ready to act if an opportunity should strike. 

[01:41] Justin Smith  So we create, we think we've got the world's best fintech technology that helps advisors in their companies. Companies in their advisors realised that potential. Now, that's true all sorts of AI technology, sifting through documents, understanding how bidders are looking at your documentation. Helping companies in this time of need, you know, so we see huge waves of the trends that happen in business you really see on our platform. So you know, we know, the past is a lot of raising capital through equity, you know, trying to survive these challenging times, to, you know, waves of insolvency, they all utilise our platform, to share that information with due diligence to third parties. So  that's us in a nutshell. 

[02:33] Shahin Hoda  Very fascinating. And tell us give us a little bit of background about yourself, I know you have a very interesting background. 

[02:40] Justin Smith  You know probably not what you call a traditional marketing background CMO. I've sort of worn a lot of hats. Started out more in the creative field. My career has been divided into two parts, whereas really in the UK, and in Australia. I've been working agency land as an advisor for 15 of my 30 years of my career. And working on the corporate side on the inside as well. I've owned an agency, marketing agency and creative agency for 10 years, exited that I've owned fitness businesses with the Commando, who was, you know, Channel 10's Fitness Pro, and we had a fitness platform for some time. And now, helping on the inside, you know, is a really great challenge. Because as in the agency land, you're often advising, you know, and you're building brands, and you're advising on strategy. But really, you're not really living, you're not really living it each day as you do on the inside. And that's where I sort of shifted to the corporate side to feel that challenge, thrive in that challenge and help businesses on the inside because I believe brands are live from the inside. So it's been over about 30 years, I've helped some of the world's leading brands such as Visa, Molton Brown in the UK, to the blue chip, Australian customers in Australia and now into technology and FinTech. 

[04:12] Shahin Hoda  And now Ansarada. I really like that, and I, that was the main reason that I wanted us to have this chat because of your creative background. And now, you know, really working in a B2B FinTech in the B2B FinTech scene, because I feel like in the market, there are a lot of B2B brands that are absolutely bland and if you kind of take the logo off their website or some collateral of theirs, you can't really tell the difference. Why do you think there are so many bland B2B brands out there? 

[04:45] Justin Smith  I always believe marketing is only as boring as the team executing. So you know, it's about, you know, I look at not the word bland but I look at the opposite of that being distinct is the key to anything, you know, people talk about differentiation, I talked about distinction. And because the opposite of bland is distinction, and people are probably bland, because, you know, whole era of risk averse, was traditionally in a space of B2B wasn't seen as the sexy part of being marketing, you know, B2C was always the sexy part where you could be irreverent, you could be flamboyant, you could engage with people, but if we look at that, they're dealing with humans, they're dealing with the new generations of how they're going about, just like B2B. B2B is selling to a person.  

[05:40] Justin Smith  So I think it comes from a heritage of risk of the old days of suit and tie. You know, most B2B public companies so reporting to shareholders, which was seen as you don't wanna be standing out being distinct, you wanted to be accountable in a way that didn't stand out, was bland, you didn't really want to be standing out in a public market. So I think it comes from that day, and I think maybe, for me, a lot of that B2B marketing, a lot of weight is on the go-to-market team. So there's a lot of responsibility that goes with supporting a business from influencing the whole customer's buying journey, and their behaviors to driving retention, advocacy, revenue. And I think that responsibility has driven risk and risk averse people drive blandness, you don't want to be distinct, you don't want to stand out. 

[06:44] Justin Smith  I think that's been a, you know, it's gone over time. And, you know, I actually encourage other competitors to be bland, because it is only enough distinction that can happen. So you need blend play. But yeah, I think that's the reason why it comes about and I think, you know, if we go forward thinking about distinction, you know, everybody's got a blog, everybody is on social, everybody's on video, everyone's doing podcast. So what makes you distinct? And I think people get mixed up with trying to be, they think there needs to be different. And different can be copied. Distinction cannot be copied, I believe. And  that's the key to standing out amongst the blandness is what makes you distinct, and you have to work out and define that, encourage that, nurture that to really stand out in the sea of blandness? 

[07:45] Shahin Hoda  I really like that I really like. I mean, I was gonna ask, why is it important for B2B brands to have a personality and you kind of phrase it as distinctiveness, which is, you know, that also recent discussion of distinctiveness versus differentiation, which is I think it's also a very, very important conversation. You know, you kind of brought it up, why do you think differentiation and distinctiveness is more important than differentiation? marketers have always been talking about differentiation, right? What is your differentiating, you know, attributions, what is your unique value proposition, right, that is going to differentiate you from everybody else? Why do you think the distinction is more important than differentiation? 

[08:27] Justin Smith  Whether it's more important is probably, I think it's more, how many can be different now? How many can really be truly different? There's probably a handful. You know, when we see someone, you know, renegades go into a market and challenge that market and turn it upside down. There's a few players that play like that. And then the 97 other percent what do they do? That's why distinctions are really important, because there can be only so many disruptors, everybody wants to be a disruptor, you know, a number of years ago and being different and disrupting. But I feel that you can actually succeed being distinct. And the majority, you know, that aren't don't really have a different product from their competitors. 

[09:20] Justin Smith  They're going to be doing it through their distinction of their brand and you talked about personality. I think they're hand in hand when you talk about the modern day brand and personality is the same thing. Personality is a brand. You know, what was his name Marc Benioff of Salesforce. He talked about that brand is their greatest asset at Salesforce. Because you can copy the stats, you can copy the speed, you can copy the product, the price, the quality even, but what you cannot copy is a brand and brand is personality in your distinction that goes in. Because you might think about a brand as a living entity. It's everything cumulatively over time. A 1000 gestures happening each and every day. It's like how you answer the phone, how you write an email? What does your brand identity look like? What does your advertising say about your website? 

[10:22] Justin Smith  Now, endless customer success conversations that happen. All of that together, orchestrated together is what makes strong brands distinct. And I think a lot of people get mixed up with brand is the visual identity and that element, but it's I call it a living entity. It's hard. We haven't cloned humans yet have we, really? You know, we were trying, but it's really hard to copy that distinction and that personality of what makes a brand. I think that's where I see the difference between distinction and differentiation is you can be different for being distinct. And I think that's where we should be looking at playing because we're looking at a total different buyer now than model when I started 30 years ago, you know. 

[11:15] Justin Smith  The B2B buyer is completely different. You know, you look at the pipelines, I think that they're shrinking. The pipes are shrinking, because the customer is already doing their own research. They're making their own calls to their colleagues. They're investigating your presence in the marketplace. In this journey far more than you ever have control before. And then they're making a decision before they talk to a salesperson, or before they go and Ecom. They've all they've already got in their mindset. 

[11:48] Justin Smith  That's the new challenge. And that's why I read the studies that when we first came about, and we first met Les Binet's study on B2B marketing and the difference between sales. You know, the perfect balance between sales activation and brand building. I live and breathe this because I think it is the future of how B2B brands will thrive. We're in a different buying space. We've got different generations coming up. It's completely different. And then when I first started out and we're in for new challenges, I think people want authenticity. 

[12:21] Shahin Hoda  Yeah. 

[12:22] Justin Smith  They don't want to buy off a sales pitch. 

[12:24] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, that, you're right. That report was absolutely fascinating when they talked about the the 54-46 divide between activation brand for B2B industry. 

[12:51] Shahin Hoda  Tell us a little bit about how you're going about implementing this and building a personality, building a brand, building distinction in Ansarada. 

[13:42] Justin Smith  The first challenge was stripping away all our synthetics. So anything that didn't feel real. That's where we started with, we went through you know, I look at the greats like Patagonia. And you know, these brands that have lived on being human and real and talk like this, let's just talk like humans do. Let's not butter up with a sales pitch on a website that nobody is buying anymore. The new generation is not buying there. I remember, I can't remember his name, the Patagonia's founder, he's had one great line that says, "writing fiction is much more difficult than nonfiction." And I think that is so true. 

[14:29] Justin Smith  You know, I worked in the advertising industry for 15 years in creating fiction. I think that's a lot harder to do. What I tried to do when we came to Ansarada was, is strip away all that what we thought we should be selling. And let's connect with customers in a way that's real to them. Because an investment banker is my customer. I see CFO, a CEO. I promise you they're looking at Instagram, their kids are on Glitch watching YouTube and gaming really goes. They're buying consumer goods exactly the same way they're buying, they're thinking about brands in a B2B space. Yeah, the sales cycle is different. But the brand can be completely the same. 

[15:20] Justin Smith  So I looked at doing, let's try to strip out where we, we're still not perfect, we're still stripping out things that happen throughout an organisation, where you are that synthetic style of trying to be what you think the customer wants to hear. And you think that there are the corporate nature so you believe that you should write your copywriting like this, or you should have stopped photography of somebody shaking hands and doing, you know those cliche things. I tried to strip that away. And one of the things that I one of the initial things that I did when I entered was try strip away all that sort of synthetic visual stuff that the verbal, and then looked at, why don't we communicate our brand through our customers voice.

 [16:05] Justin Smith  I started this thing called the Pathfinder's series, and we have a product called pathways. That's why it was named pathways. And I went and created 30 or 40 stories about customers. And now these aren't case studies, these are stories, we've had drones going over servers, we've been in Thai boxing gyms, we've been everywhere. Telling the story of their personal story of the customer, because people buy from other people they respect, and people buy from somebody that they think they relate to. So why not create a whole brand around who our customer is. In showing that an advisor and an accountant, a CFO, a CEO that's in charge of billions of dollars, still goes surfing, still goes boxing, still does craft, whatever they were into. 

[16:57] Justin Smith  I wanted to highlight that and not be so much of a sell, about Ansarada are selling about. We are about empowering and protecting our customers is all about our customers. So I've tried to create the whole brand around this idea of doing this in the brand around what is now possible for them being in a relationship with us at Ansarada. And so, our driver is now UK, it's a simple colloquial term. Now you can do this, now they can do that, you know, etc. And it's raw, we show what's possible now. And that's how I really tried to transform the brand. 

[17:41] Justin Smith  That brand assets and the core assets such as a logo in green, or before my time, I've just handed some and said, that's what we should always be, we should have our core assets and that makes us distinct. And our brand personality I just added on to the giants that were before me to, you know, make a really distinct brand in our market. We've got those bland competitors, and I encourage them to continue to be bland. You know, we just re-releasing tomorrow, New York is version two of our M&A game.  

[18:18] Justin Smith  So we created an app. That's an M&A game for bankers to play off site. They compete all over the world, they compete against you. They grow building day by merging cell companies on a game app. And it's, it gets published in the New York Times and it makes us distinct. And that's one of the many things we align with Spotify, we do Spotify playlists with all that customers. We've done cookbooks, we've done all sorts of things that are enhancing their lives definitely in these challenging times. And that's what brand is.

 [18:52] Justin Smith  Brand is building relationships in your human personality. It's just like other personalities, some you like to be around, some you don't. And I think in a sea of downloadable white papers that can really stand out. My challenge was that a traditional space that you play in B2B is the cut payback on that. I've gone and advised companies for 20 years saying that you're going to get 4% conversion, and that could take you three to four years to get payback. Why do we continue to continually invest in this because we're looking for vanity metrics. We're going to report to boards. You know, brand is hard to quantify, you know, you can measure search volume, you can measure your share of market, you know, it's a long term game and I think it does pay off. 

[19:45] Shahin Hoda  Let's talk about that. Brand being a long term game. I think that's what, and being hard to measure in that long term period, right? How do you go about educating people? You know, how did you go about educating the team that you were supposed to sell this. That, hey, you're not going to get, and like, there's not going to be much that's going to come out of this in the first two years, maybe three years. That's hard. For some people, they're like, well, you know what, I'm going to just buy you on your word for three years. What's the process with that? Like how do you go about and convince someone that they should invest in for that period of time? 

[20:27] Justin Smith  Well, I go back to Les Binet's study. So, you can show studies that's done over 15 years of measuring B2B brands, and what made them grow. And brand is a proven avenue and aspect, as we know that, you know, the ratio that they defined is built in B2B 45%, around 55% on sales activations. Those activation, those lead gen elements, which you need both, you have to do both. So showing studies, I have the privilege at Ansarada working with a CEO who's very innovative, who's a disrupter. So I don't have to convince him. But I do have to educate others on how you measure that. 

[21:12] Justin Smith  So we measure that through measuring our share of voice, you can do that for a number of ways through studies, you can do it through YouTube surveys. We measure that all the time. How many recall seeing our brand and our advertising? We measure in search volumes. So one of the challenges I had when we joined was people were searching for the generic term of our category, which in one of our products is the virtual data room. So then you compete on PPC and search and your competitors, and it drives up the price. And any one person that makes money is Google, and it can cost you $3,000 a click, you know, it's very expensive. 

[21:51] Justin Smith  So what we did was we looked at measuring what the search volumes on Ansarada. Now, we're going to invest in this for the next six months on advertising, brand advertising. We're not even gonna ask for anything. We're just gonna talk about a brand, what our brand is about. We're going to do all these interesting things like align with Spotify, and then we're going to measure again in six months, and we had a 20% growth of searching for our term. So now in the Australian market, we have 50% of the search volume searching for our name out of our market, which is a pretty awesome place to be. 

[22:26] Shahin Hoda  Amazing. 

[22:26] Justin Smith  We, you know, we have challenges in other new markets, they're my challenges at the moment. Wherein Europe, we're doing well, America with very small players, so I've got the challenges. There are different types of challenges. So you need to build a brand again in those spaces. And why would I go looking for likely competitors? Why would I go in and do exactly what they're doing? I'm not gonna have any distinction. I need to go in and create new features, new distinctions in a new everything that's going to make me stand out from the place. Or I'm going to go in and be a price buyer. And that's not what we play, we're a premium product. 

[23:04] Shahin Hoda  Yeah. Justin, where do you get your ideas for, for distinctive brand moves? You know, your Spotify move, you're the customer founders, that kind of story. But where did you get these ideas? How do you, do you have a process for kind of developing these ideas? Or is it more like the creative side, it just comes to you, as you, you know, looking at things and you put pieces together? How does it work? 

[23:34] Justin Smith  Yeah, I think, well, creativity comes from a problem. You know, like, for myself, I've always been a creative person. So I've been lucky in that sense of how that comes about. But it's usually facing problems, like talking about creativity is Spotify, and all that is great. And it's more engaging to talk about a podcast, but the metrics in the studies and looking at your segmentation, looking at your market actually give the problem to be creative, too. So and then doing that I just hunger, thirst and thrive on looking at all brands out there. Reading books, podcasts, such as yourself, anything and everything to consume, how others are doing it. 

[24:21] Justin Smith  I think we've always been in a tradition in B2B to be saying, I just look at my category or they're irrelevant to me. They're not in my category, or they're B2C, they're not relevant to me in my category. I think the opposite. I think that's where I want to be looking. I want to be looking at how they connect so well with that customer? But how did they grow that share? I can never copy their distinction. But I can definitely learn from the tactics or you know, I've got to have my own strategy, but I can definitely learn from, you know, creative tactics that can connect with humans. And I think it's just, like I've mentioned a few people that I look at. And I look at, you just look at brands, you just look at how brands and how they thrive, what made them strong. 

[25:10] Justin Smith  I think what people do is they try to copy, you know. And that's not, you've got to find what creative avenue fits the problem. And I think that's where a lot of us go wrong. There's a set system on marketers, their vanity metrics, they're going to report on those, I think the MQL killed creativity to be honest, you know the last 10 years. It's important. I am, as much as I'm creative, I study metrics of how things are being executed, but what's not what's not working in the pipe, what's working in the pipe. So you're equally doing that. But I think you get so obsessed with reporting on metrics, that that kills creativity. That kills what really connects because if you've got a number you've got to meet, it's about that number, not about connecting with that customer to get that sale, or to get that acquisition, whatever your day-to-day operations is.

[26:15] Justin Smith  And I'm looking way more now into talking to the category as a brand, and then really honing in on creative execution on personalisation. You know, you're talking about ABM for a long time. But really, that's his marketing. I've always thought just a word for marketing, knowing the personalisation. I think I look at that. And I look at other great companies that are doing those two parts of that game, you know, which is making it personal enough that I think it's about me but making the brand. So I feel like I want to learn that's about what I believe in. That's how I like them, they feel innovative, or they feel safe, whatever it is that you're doing there. And it comes back to being a personality and being distinct. 

[27:03] Shahin Hoda  I really like that. I like that approach of hyper-personalisation. The other thing that I want to ask is, you've touched on this a little bit. You touched on, you know, how you look at brands, and you study them. My question is, you know, what would be your advice to someone who is thinking, who wants to start building a proper personality for their brand, right? What will be your advice in terms of where they should start? 

[27:31] Justin Smith  I'm going to assume that they've done the fundamentals. So they've done their market research, they've done their segmentation talking to the customers, and they sort of know that where their opportunities, so I'm gonna assume that they've done all, they know that there's sort of nowhere there's a positioning, you need to find, where is your positioning in that market? Where do you sit in that competitive set? Then what are the needs of that customer, and then you need to fit that personality space. You need to fit that distinction to stand in that space. So I would be defining where you sit against competitors, you know, I deal with all the fundamentals, then if you're going to start building your brand, and I think that's your question, I will look at what makes me distinct? 

[28:13] Justin Smith  That will be the question I will be saying, what is the personality of this business? And is it, I don't use the word authentic, but is it real? Like cause sometimes, we can go, you know, I've done millions of these brand workshops, and we're gonna be there, we're female, we're this and we're that, you know, there's a bunch of white collared men, you know, so you got, what can you actually really pull off? What is authentic? And I think, then hiring people around that are going to be that authenticity or going to be authentic to what is that positioning that you've done? And then I'll be looking at your visualisation of everything. So making sure that that is distinct as possible. 

[28:56] Justin Smith  How many times do you see a brand going to market and it's blue and they're all blue? You know, I just baffled by sometimes some of that and that's sometimes about fitting in you know, sometimes that is a tactic. You know, you just, think simple things like that and stick to them. You know, the market is tremendously changing from here to there, this. Find what makes your core asset, what makes that and stick to it and be as bold as possible in your category. And map that out and live it like on everything. So anything that goes out of the place, does that fit what we are about? 

[29:39] Justin Smith  And I think these days, you don't need huge agencies. It's great to have agencies, don't get me wrong. You know, you don't have to have huge agencies to do the real thing. You know, like if I look at the guys at Drift, their pricing page, they've got someone talking about the pricing page, how the packaging came about. They're talking about you know, like I actually look at it I got whoa, it's on the border of very infilming. You know like, but I like 'em. I like the personality. I like what they stand for. And there's raw and just saying it how it is. And I think that's their spot. You're going to find what's your spot and I think, you know, the rise of tech is helping that. 

[30:25] Justin Smith  So, yeah, that would be the things, you would define that and then you think about what different tactics can I deliver on my strategy, in looking at different avenues of connecting with people, you know, thinking about consumers, I like what my got two little girls, I watch what they're watching, I listen to see what they're doing. They completely had a different upbringing to me. They're, as I say that they're watching YouTube watching gamers play games. Now, I'm baffled by it. But now I'm thinking, hey, I need to be in on that somehow. I got to somehow eat on that, because somehow, I'm gonna make money out of that somehow.  

[31:03] Justin Smith  I don't know yet, but I'm looking, that's where they're going. And I'm looking at Instagram and the stories and sharing on thinking it's going in a direction that is far away from a white paper. It's possible. I don't think I'm not dissing white papers, we do them. But it's to the extreme where you got to your bank up, what are all the pieces of tactics you're doing to what's right for your strategy?

[31:30] Shahin Hoda  Yeah. 

[31:31] Justin Smith  And I think that's what I look at culture. Culture is constantly moving, constantly changing, and it's exhausting to keep up. To be honest, it's, but why not try this? You know, what, I just think, what is the worst thing that's gonna happen? 

[31:49] Shahin Hoda  That's a good question. That's a great question. What is the worst thing that could happen? And I think a lot of people are scared. You know, a lot of people, I think, exaggerate, what's the worst case is, and I think a lot of people in the B2B space, just like you said, before, they're worried of like, hey, you know, am I gonna get fired, if this goes wrong? And that culture, you're right, the culture is not there, the culture of experiment, it's fine. If it doesn't work, it's all good. But let's be bold, let's be out there. And the other thing that you mentioned is lift, stay consistent.

[32:21] Shahin Hoda I think that is such a great point that you made. Because, you know, I feel like marketers work with brands for a long time. And we get tired of it, right? We get tired of the green and our logo, like oh, my God, another, I'm going to do a green again. But what we don't realise is, it's only us who experienced that so much. The market has no clue that you have a green element in your logo or in your brand. And you have to just constantly push that for people to be like, I've seen that 20 times, I feel like there is a green, I associate, simplifying but I'm associating the color green with this brand, right? I'm associating this kind of feeling used with Coca Cola that, you know, that was years and years of work and consistency for that mindset to say that? 

[33:13] Justin Smith  Absolutely, absolutely. That's the thing you, marketers take for granted. They think that every piece of communication or tactics they do means that every consumer sees it, and we're lucky if they see one, you know. That's what I just, don't don't kid yourself, you're not that great. I'd say to myself, you're not that great. Somebody may notice, say I'm going to smash it down their faces until they've seen it, you know. And just keep at it, and keep at it. And you can just vary those tactics to do what it is. And what we do is once we find something that works, we milk that dry, don't we? So why would we change that? Yeah, I'm a big believer in sticking to your core assets. You know, people got different words for I call core assets. 

[33:56] Shahin Hoda  That's amazing. Now, Justin, we covered so much and you've you've shed light on so many amazing insights around, you know, building personality and building a brand. Is there anything on that topic in the B2B space that you think I haven't covered? Or are we kind of missed? 

[34:12] Justin Smith  I think, you know, there's more to it than that. I think it's, what the challenge people have would be B2B is you've got to build your evidence, and your argument and and stand by that. And I think that's just about as B2B is a huge part of that is branding internally. So being the inspiration, being the motivator that takes everybody along the ride is really important. You don't ever want to be seen as oh, here come the marketing people you know. You want, you've got to be serving everybody in the business. Like on I'm in service to giving sales ops, I'm in service to making the CS they've got good retention. 

[34:56] Justin Smith  I'm in service to my leadership team to deliver those results that I promised. I'm in service to culture, building a brand so people want to live and come and work in this great culture. You know, you've got to be on the inside and be a celebratory part of the brand internally. And I think if you can get that, right, that's where the magic happens. And I think that is probably the biggest challenge of any marketer. We're so concerned with results on the outside.

[35:31] Justin Smith  We're so concerned with meaner metrics and delivering on that, that we sometimes forget that it's a living that your sales team are the brand. You say yes to everybody is the brand, and you need to help motivate them. So I think that's the other part I would add is be the internal motivator, and live it and breathe it. And don't be deterred. You know, you're always gonna get critics. Just like being green, you know, be that same personality and drive it forward. That's what I try to do. I'm not, you know, relatively successful, sometimes, not sometimes I am not, and you got to find the right company for you that celebrates that, I think. Yeah. 

[36:16] Shahin Hoda  And that's a great point. Okay. Now, look, this is amazing. I took away a lot, and I'm sure a lot of listeners would do the same. Now, if people want to find out more about yourself or Ansarada, what's the best way for them to do so? 

[36:32] Justin Smith  You can just connect with me on LinkedIn. Just don't try to sell me anything. 

[36:39] Shahin Hoda   You can story in LinkedIn these days? 

[36:41] Justin Smith  Yeah. Yeah. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, I think the best thing or I'm @deathofaverage on Instagram, you can connect with me there. Justin.smith@ansarada.com. And connect with me on email. 

[36:57] Shahin Hoda  All right. 

[36:57] Justin Smith  Love to continue the chats with lots of people. I love connecting with people. And as long as you're not trying to sell me something. 

[37:05] Shahin Hoda  I really appreciate it. I really appreciate it Justin. Thank you so much for your time, and for being on the podcast. 

[37:14] Justin Smith  I recommend one book that people go read. Yes. Before we wrap up, go on long. One last one. One book is Let My People Go Surfing by the founder of Patagonia. Let My People Go Surfing and that'll talk about authenticity and realness that you see how branded it. Anyway. That's a good one, too. 

[37:32] Shahin Hoda  Oh, wow. I haven't heard of that. I'm gonna check this out pretty much after our chat. Thank you very much for that. And thanks again for being on the show. 

[37:42] Justin Smith  No problem. Stay safe.