“A good well-rounded CMO is going to be someone who understands the full buyer’s journey…the full marketing-sales funnel.”
As a Fractional CMO and GTM Strategist, Corey brings a 25-year track record of extraordinary success as an entrepreneur, sales leader, and CMO for a $150M+ agency called Scorpion (where he was the 1st marketing hire and grew the team to 30 people before leaving). Today, he helps B2B SaaS and Agencies grow from 7 figures to 8 by doing less, not more.
Questions and topics we covered include:
And more!
Say hello to Corey on Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyquinn/
Check out his podcast here – https://www.coreyquinn.com/podcasts/the-vertical-go-to-market-podcast
And he has a newsletter – https://www.coreyquinn.com/newsletter
Our Podcast Partner – MarketerHire
If you’re looking to hire expert freelance talent this year to scale your business (and impress your boss), check out MarketerHire. MarketerHire vets freelance talent so when you hire an SEO expert, Email Marketer, or even a Fractional CMO—you’re not wasting your money or your time. You can hire your first freelancer and get a $500 credit by visiting: www.kennysoto.com/hire
Kenny Soto 0:02
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the people of digital marketing podcast with your host, Kenny Soto, and today’s special guest, Corey Quinn. Hi, Cory. How are you?
Corey Quinn 0:15
What’s up, Kenny? Super excited to be here.
Kenny Soto 0:17
So, before we hit record, I was explaining the context of the podcast, how it got started, what’s what it’s all about. And I always like to start each episode off by giving listeners more context on who the guest is. So my first question for you, Cory, is how did you get into digital marketing in the first place?
Corey Quinn 0:40
I was introduced to digital marketing by my mother, actually, of all people. So she is a therapist in private practice. So she has a therapy practice. And she is a very innovative person and very sort of up on things. And she told me about this thing a long time ago, called Google AdWords. And she was really excited because she could buy keywords back in the day for her business for about five cents a click.
That’s super cheap. Yeah, back in the day. Exactly. So she told me about this. And when I found out about it, I explored it logged in, and started playing around with it. I thought it was a pretty powerful thing at the time, and kind of opened my eyes to the world of digital marketing. And that’s, that’s where it started.
Kenny Soto 1:33
And from that point, when did you start working in the corporate world? How did you get to your CMO gig and all that?
Corey Quinn 1:43
Well, it’s kind of a long story. I’ll keep it short here for the listeners. But I was out of college, and I started a business with my best friend, and we raised $3 million to start a streaming media business, which included marketing, I was the sort of the business CEO, and my partner was the technology partner and did that for a little bit. I was a digital marketing consultant over the years off and on just helping local businesses with SEO and PPC and website design. But, my foray into more of the corporate world happened after I finished business school, I went to USC, here in Los Angeles for my master’s, and my MBA.
And it was at a time when I wanted to really step into digital back into digital because I left that world and started as a business development representative for a company that sold enterprise-level SEO and PPC services to large brands like Lululemon Hyundai REMAX. And so I stepped into the digital agency space, as a seller, I was it was again, enterprise-level selling, which is more of a sort of a longer sales cycle consultative selling, and made my way up through that organization to a vice president of business development.
And I began to transition my role into a marketing role they had launched a new product and I got involved in helping to launch that which I loved, which was sort of my first real foray into a b2b marketing type of role, which led me to eventually be hired at a company called the scorpion. And Scorpion at the time, was a $20 million-a-year agency targeting SMBs, small, medium-sized businesses, local service businesses back in 2015, I was hired as their first chief marketing officer.
And I helped to grow the business from 20 million to 150 million in about six years as their CMO. So I had a tremendous ride there. I learned a lot it was a great experience working a lot of hours, but, but really had some wonderful career-based experiences, by the way, for the listeners, I was the first marketing hire there at the agency focused on growing the agency. And by the time I left, I had a team of 30 people.
Kenny Soto 4:11
There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to your story at the scorpion. But you mentioned two things that I want to follow up on. The first thing is the MBA. So a lot of previous guests have MBAs. I’ve asked them whether or not there are advantages. And there, there are clear advantages. But I’m going to shift gears here and ask, do you think MBAs are still as valuable today as they were back then?
Corey Quinn 4:40
I think the value of an MBA is probably different than what most people expect to get out of an MBA. What I found in getting my MBA was that I was able to have a shared experience with a group of people, my classmates for about two years. That was super intense. And we learned a lot, we experienced a lot, we partied a lot, and we bonded.
And that is the real asset from the business school is that connection, because what you find is that you get, you get around a bunch of super ambitious smart people. And that alone getting access to that group of people, whether or not it is a, you know, turns into business directly or indirectly, that is a great asset to have as a growing entrepreneur, or, or employee or business person.
Kenny Soto 5:36
And then the second thing that I want to touch on is your story, I was able to see that you had a lot of different experiences around the different functions of marketing, as well as sales, which is very interesting to see. To what degree does that generalist approach help you today?
Corey Quinn 6:01
Well, it’s interesting, because a lot of the work I do right now is helping businesses to become specialists. And so it’s interesting that you frame it that way, I hadn’t thought of it as a generalist. But I would say in my role as a chief marketing officer at a company that has a sales team, my sales background really helped to allow me to really connect with the salespeople and sales in businesses that have a sales team as part of the go-to-market.
Being able to be a marketer that can also speak to the sales team, as a person who understands sales comes from a sales background had to do the cold calling and all that, for me, gave me a real advantage. And being able to be effective in deploying campaigns and really, sort of joining forces with the sales team, versus someone who maybe just came up through marketing didn’t have a direct experience with sales.
Kenny Soto 7:00
When you explained your quick narrative slash summary of narrative for how you grew Scorpion, one quick thing that came to my mind was, how were you measured as a CMO? And is it just revenue coming in revenue growth? or were there other metrics that leadership was looking at you for like, that measurement?
Corey Quinn 7:26
The expectation of me as the chief marketing officer was top-line growth. I was measured on that I was bonused. on that. There was less of a focus on, you know, very tactical metrics around cost per acquisition, or cost per channel and things like that. At the time at Scorpion, we were just in full long growth mode. And so it was more about like, where do we find revenue? Where do we find growth in the channels that we’re trying to grow? And so there was primarily a large focus just on growing the business.
Kenny Soto 8:05
Now, I’m sure there were many channels that you pulled and many tactics that you leveraged, especially when you grew your team to 30 people. Before we even get into any of that. My next question would just be when it came to scaling your team, what qualities, skills, etc, do you look for in potential job candidates?
Corey Quinn 8:29
Because I came from an entrepreneurial background, I know that for myself, I don’t like to be micromanaged. I like to be given a clear goal expectation and the tools to be able to be successful, successful. And I’ll go get it, I’ll go get the goal, I’ll go achieve it. And so I was looking for people who had similar personalities that were very much about having ownership taking ownership of their role of the expectations of their role, without a lot of expectation of a lot of hand holding.
And so that’s the type of person that I like working with. I don’t want to micromanage them, they probably don’t want to be micromanaged by me. But I’m looking for effective people. So, people who have what I would consider an ambitious attitude that’s demonstrated through their career, they can demonstrate that through the story that they could share with me as a potential employee on my team, team member. And someone who really is a little competitive. I like that and really want to win. Because I like that energy.
And that’s the kind of energy that we fostered at the company and the folks that were not that competitive or didn’t really want to be a part of something that was really big, probably didn’t last long the company.
Kenny Soto 9:51
Winning a million to 150 million in six years is nothing to scoff at. It’s very difficult in those six years. Can you recount any of the most difficult moments in achieving that goal? Like what was the hardest moment that you had to overcome? To get there? Was it a specific moment? Was it a series of moments?
Corey Quinn 10:16
Good question, Kenny. Let me think here because I want to give you a real answer, I would see what comes to mind as part of growing really quickly was a lack of alignment at the executive level. And so therefore, some of the things that we ended up doing or wanting to do, were never fully embraced, because we were unable to get buy-in from various folks on the executive team.
So there was a level of, I would say, waste as a result of just alternately ultra-fast growth. And that was a challenge that we had, but eventually, we worked it out. But there were periods during that six years, where we spent time, money, effort, blood, sweat, and tears into building something that never saw the light of day. So that was, that was challenging.
Kenny Soto 11:13
I want to dive a little deeper into this, because I know some of the listeners or some of the listeners, excuse me, aren’t at the executive table. They’re not having these conversations. How does that misalignment at the executive level affect the people who are working on day-to-day marketing? How is the marketing team specifically affected? Not just yourself?
Corey Quinn 11:32
Yeah, no, it’s horrible. In fact, that’s where the biggest impact is, because if you work behind the scenes, air quotes, on developing an idea, I’ll give you an example. So one of the things that we were really passionate about, was creating a user event, for lack of a better term. So we serviced attorneys, and we went, we serve as home service businesses. And one of the things that were missing from our short portfolio of marketing.
Focus was bringing the community of our clients together either online or in person, experiencing experience to further our relationship and build additional trust, and all those great things that happen with user conferences. And what ended up happening in this specific situation is we went far down the road, developing this concept of developing plans, and, you know, a lot of time and effort out, you know, 10s of Wednesday, hundreds of hours, but 10s of hours were spent on this, people were fully dedicated, put their heart into it.
And there was, unfortunately, a change in direction at the top. That basically didn’t allow us to move forward on this, despite the perception at all levels, that this was the thing we were doing. So that was, it’s very disappointing. And part of my job as a leader is, to be honest, and tell my team where we’re at with things and also, you know, help them to understand that, you know, regardless of whether or not this thing went forward, they’re, they’re valued number one, and that their disappointment is real, and that I feel their disappointment to
Kenny Soto 13:16
To what degree was word of mouth important? At scorpion?
Corey Quinn 13:25
I think word of mouth is ultimately what allowed us to grow so quickly. And I’ll qualify that and I’ll help explain what I mean. Scorpion when I joined in 2015, we focused primarily on attorneys in the business primarily personal injury attorneys. We were doing websites and SEO and PPC for these personal injury attorneys and other types of attorneys.
And as a result of having that vertical focus, a couple of things happened number one, a lot of people knew who we were in the market, but number two, we were able to go much deeper than just a vendor relationship. So in marketing, if you have experience in servicing or working with local service businesses, what you will know especially attorneys, but most of them, don’t like marketing, they don’t trust agencies, they don’t understand PPC and SEO, and, and, you know, they’d much rather be in the courtroom arguing a case to a judge.
And so what you end up having is attorneys really depend on agencies to really take care of them. Because we were specialists in the world of not only marketing but also marketing for attorneys. We were able to not only provide the services, but we were able to really understand their business at a much deeper level. So I’ll give an example.
When when you do PPC marketing for an attorney, what you’re effectively doing is driving leads right and the attorney would spend the leads, but they would come in and maybe they didn’t turn into clients, for the attorney. So they’re spending $300, a click or $500, a lead, whatever it is driving these leads, what we understood after a short period of time pretty quickly is that the quality of the intake process was really important.
So a phone with a ring at the law firm with a lead that was coming from Google, they just paid for, if the receptionist or the person who’s answering the phone didn’t wasn’t trained, or didn’t understand how to bring that person into their process, then that lead was dead. So we actually expanded the scope of what we were doing into not just sending leads, but also consulting them on the best practices for the call intake taking leads in, and qualifying them those types of things, we didn’t charge for those services.
But as a result of going above and beyond, those attorneys got a lot of value, in fact, a lot more value from us than what they’re paying for. Right. And so you do that long enough. You do that consistently over a long enough period of time, which generates that differential between what they’re paying and what they’re getting, which creates word of mouth.
Kenny Soto 16:10
And can that word of mouth become predictable over time?
Corey Quinn 16:15
I would say that if you’re continuously providing more value for your specific customer over a long enough period of time, then you will generate positive word of mouth. The other benefit of working with vertical versus just you know, sort of any SMB is that they have associations, they have conferences, they have natural ways that they get together as a community, and that those relationships within the let’s say, the personal injury space, those relationships foster an opportunity at a much greater level for word of mouth and referrals than if you were just marketing to any kind of small, local business.
Kenny Soto 16:58
Let’s dive a little deeper into the agency slash-client relationship. So my next question is, why should marketers stop saying yes to their clients?
Corey Quinn 17:10
So what I’ve found, and I experienced at Scorpion was that if you say yes to clients, and any business that comes in the door, after a while, it begins to work against you. However, as an early-stage business, you have to say, yes, you have to get the business going, you have to understand how to service clients and kind of get off the ground. And I’m in favor of that. But what happens is, there are three things that happen when you say yes, too often. Number one, your cost per acquisition gets too high.
That’s typical because if you’re marketing to just any small, medium-sized business, the costs are too high. Typically, for paid media, PPC keeps going up paid Facebook, all these channels are just they’re very expensive. And so the challenge is that the cost per acquisition, to generate those leads is very high, there’s a lot of competition, you may be hiring a third party provider who may be doing cold calls or LinkedIn, prospecting, all that stuff is very, very expensive.
And so if you are, if your cost per acquisition is too high, that means you’re probably not saying no enough. If your customer churn is too high, you’re probably not saying no enough. And then the third thing is if you’re not innovating enough, as a business, then you’re probably not saying no enough, you’re saying yes, too often. So if you look at your business, for the listeners, if you look at your business, you have these three things, high cost per acquisition, high customer churn, and not enough innovation, creating innovating for your customers.
And you may be saying yes too often. So the result of or, the thing that I coach my clients on is when they are in this situation, the right next step is to learn how to start saying no, at Scorpion, we serviced initially just attorneys. And of course, we had ambitious sailors who would eventually sell, you know, the local pool man, you know, a website, Scorpion website or whatever. And the way that we ran our business was very much like a conveyor belt. It’s a horrible metaphor, but we call it the conveyor belt, where every client that came in, would get a new website. Well, what is how you create a website? Well, you have to design it, you have to copy it. You have to do all these things.
And there’s a step-by-step process, right? Anytime that we would put a sort of a pull man or some non-attorney into the conveyor belt, it screwed up the whole assembly line, right? And as a result that created chaos, right? So we got very good at saying no. Over time, we weren’t perfect, but over time, we got very good at saying no, which allowed us to really scale up the business from 20 million to 100-50 million. Right. There are a lot of things that go into that but that was the basis for it being very disappointing in saying no to anything that wasn’t exactly our target kind of Customer.
Kenny Soto 20:01
Aside from that discipline of saying no, I want to hone in on one of the effects of saying yes too much, which is high customer churn, and retention issues. Regardless of your business model really like it’s the most important thing, if you’re the way I equate it as performance, marketing, and marketing overall, that really helps get books into the door acquisition is always important.
That’s like dating, right? And then you have your brand, you have your customer service, you have upselling, cross-selling, etc, that leads to the marriage, which is that retention over time. Aside from that discipline of saying, no, what other tactics, what other frameworks, and ideas that you bring to the table for your clients, that help them with retention in general?
Corey Quinn 20:50
For me, it starts and ends with being a specialist in that vertical. So the thing that helps Scorpion be so successful and continues to be successful is that they are they take a vertical approach today, they’re multi-vertical, but they started with attorneys. So the way that they combat churn, and when I joined, they were at 93%, customer retention. And they were about that today, even at this massive size today.
And so the way that they do that is because they’ve specialized with attorneys, they’re able to understand, as I mentioned earlier, understand the attorney’s business at a much deeper level than most other vendors or agencies out there. And so not only do you get great word of mouth, but people stay with you for a long period of time, they may leave because they believe the grass is greener, but they come back, right? And because what they ended up finding is that the value that they’re getting in Scorpion, in this case, is something that can’t get elsewhere.
A big another big benefit of vertical slicing is you really begin to not only understand the business that you’re serving, but you can understand the people as well, any vertical that you target, there’s a relatively small world, you begin to really become familiar with their world at a, I would say at a human level. And that’s something that transcends, you know, month-to-month marketing performance, if we had a bad month, for whatever reasons, some of these things are out of our control, they would give us the benefit of the doubt because we would really treat them as people with a lot of care. And that really helped us through I’d say rough times.
Kenny Soto 22:34
Earlier in my career, I want to say probably my third year, the fourth year being in marketing, I used to be terrified if I had a bad month. When I had to talk to a client or even if I was internally reporting to a manager, just for some reason, it gave me anxiety, and the pivot that I had in my mind helped me realize that bad moms are okay, bad moms are only Okay, under two conditions. One, ideally, it’s not consistent.
So you might have one bad month, but then it’s followed up by three, or four good months, and then there’s another bad month, etc. Because there are market dynamics at play. If that’s not the case, the second thing that you need to come to the table with is what did you learn? Right? You can’t just say, oh, in my case, because I work in SEO, oh, our average keyword positions are down. And we’re not improving in our net new keywords. It’s not just saying that you have to then say, here’s what we’re doing about it. Here’s what we’re planning on doing about it. Here’s what we’ve learned.
And I feel like if you are in an entry-level position, this is for any of the listeners that are and you’re trying to make it to a manager, let’s not even talk about director or executive. But if you’re just trying to become a manager of a team, you need to let your team know. And showing this in real-time that you know how to handle a bad month, you know how to handle a bad week. And part of that comes from not just reporting on negative metrics, but also saying, Here’s what I’ve learned. Here’s what we’re going to do.
And this is the next level. Here are potential blockers or risks that I’ve identified ahead of time, so that I can get these resources allocated to me in advance before saying, Oh, I’ve reached the deadline. And I can’t make it because of these blockers and risks that I can predict. Once you are able to do that, then you’re going on your way to the next level in your career.
Corey Quinn 24:26
I think you’re absolutely right. Because by doing that you’re communicating that you care about them. And you care about the fact that maybe these things happen, but that you’re not just letting it go or it’s like oops, you know, better luck next time. It’s like, Hey, I’m really paying attention and I care about your success, and that alone helps to buy you, you know, a little bit of grace in these moments.
Kenny Soto 24:48
Yeah, and negative moms happened, and there are many reasons why they can be seen as problems that can be seen as challenges, etc. This ties perfectly with my next question. What is the most common challenge you’re seeing your clients face this year?
Corey Quinn 25:11
So I would say my, biggest challenge is the acquisition of new clients. That’s just a challenge. And that’s for every business, right? It’s just trying to figure out how we grow. How do how we get new customers? And the role that I play in their lives as a consultant is to keep them focused on the path that we’re on, I help companies to get really focused on a specific vertical.
And in this case, one of my clients is focusing on the restaurant industry for their mobile app. And the CEO is a very great guy. But he also wants to sell his product to a lot of other businesses, right? And so it’s helping to stay focused on the one vertical and stay focused on restaurants in this case. And so that’s a challenge, though, because regardless of where your focus is, it’s expensive to acquire, and acquire new customers.
Kenny Soto 26:17
Two more questions for you. My next one has to do with the overarching path that you’ve taken in your career. A lot of the listeners, including myself, our dream is to eventually have that CMO title and then be successful as a CMO not just get the title, but also have a great tenure with that title, right? But I’m starting to see more and more.
And I’ve had guests on the show who goes from CMO. And instead of going from CMO to CMO, to CMO, and different organizations, they go from CMO to semi-retired and or consultant slash advisor. Right? How did you get started as a consultant, what would be some points of advice that an early stage marketer should be aware of as they’re heading towards that path of CMO that can better help prepare them for an advisory role when they are a consultant role? And.
Corey Quinn 27:16
So for me, I stepped out of Scorpion after six-plus years, and I had the resume to go find a job in another place as I do. There are a lot of businesses that would like to work with people who’ve done that sort of that growth. For me, it was a personal choice not to step back into that because I had realized that while I enjoyed the opportunity and the experience for me personally, I’m much more of an introvert.
And so there’s a personal choice is there that I wanted to kind of step out of that, that corporate role and step more into the consultants type of role. Now having done that for about 14 months now, a couple of things that really worked for me is really figuring out what I liked doing. So my background allowed me to do a lot of different things, from sales to traditional marketing, a direct response to product marketing, to brand positioning, messaging, all those things. The area, where I really enjoyed doing work sort of the cross, cross, sort of the areas of Product Marketing, positioning, and messaging. I love that domain.
Like if I could do that all day every day, I would absolutely love it. And so the process for me was how do I build how to build a consulting business around doing that specific job? And so I had to go in and figure out who do I want to work with? What type of businesses do I want to do I like working with Do I like working with small startups or businesses that maybe have been established are very, very large businesses, and really getting clear on who I wanted to spend my time with and help ultimately.
So if I had my I knew what I wanted to do and who I wanted to help, then I really had to figure out what was the problem I was trying to solve in the marketplace. And that’s really a part of the work that I’m continuing to work on is clearly articulating the specific problem that businesses are having that I can come in with my interest in Product Marketing if you will, and who I want to work with, and being able to communicate that clearly and effectively.
One thing that really helped my consulting career take off from a very practical perspective is that I had built up a strong network over the years. So when I announced that I left Scorpion, I had a lot of inbound interest, people who I’d met years ago or people who I work with regularly reached out to me with opportunities. And so a big thing that I’d recommend to your listening audience is to stay active on LinkedIn. go to conferences, and get connected with people in your industry, because you will never know where they end up.
Kenny Soto 29:59
Perfect and now my last question is hypothetical because time machines don’t exist. But if one did, and you can go back into the past, about 10 years, knowing everything you know, today, how would you specifically accelerate the speed of your career?
Corey Quinn 30:17
Gosh, that’s a good question. I would say that I’ll speak for myself, that I have always had a very entrepreneurial instinct. Personally, I’ve always wanted to run my own business. And so it was more about believing in myself earlier, taking a risk on myself was the path that I took was, build a career out, build a good resume, get a lot of experience, and then turn that into a consulting career, which is lower risk way of doing things, then stepping out and just starting type of thing, which I did a couple of times, but I don’t think I fully, I fully took enough of a jump into the deep end as I was, I would, I would have wanted to.
So that was, that’s one thing that I think about from time to time, if you’re not entrepreneurial, what I would say is, if you want to be a CMO, so if that’s the ultimate path for you, I would say get exposure to a lot of different types of marketing, get exposure to sales, maybe don’t necessarily take a sales job, but it wouldn’t hurt. But I would say become familiar with sort of all the different types of marketing, as it were.
So things like direct response, which is paid search, SEO, copywriting, those type of things, also learn content marketing, product marketing, learn to brand, and positioning, and you’ll probably find you like one of them better than the others. And that’s fine, you could have strength in that area. But a good well rounded CMO is going to be someone who understands the full sort of buyer journey or the full marketing and sales funnel, the more you can understand that on a firsthand basis, having worked in those areas, the more valuable you’ll be to any company that’s looking to hire.
Kenny Soto 32:16
One tidbit that I want to end on is I recently read an article in The Wall Street Journal about how a lot of brands right now, because of the looming recession are looking for executive CMO candidates to have more of a performance marketing background. But the author states that it’s actually more important to find someone who is well-rounded, not just in performance marketing, but who understands a brand. Because sometimes budgets get squeezed.
And if you don’t have a performance budget, but you didn’t make those brand investments in the past, and now you’re in this situation, you kind of find yourself handcuffed, and you can’t really meet the expectations that the executive board has. And it just goes to show tying back to what you just said, you need that well-rounded marketer, that full stack marketer, that T-shaped marketer if you will, to really lead a team.
Corey Quinn 33:12
I would say that one of my clients I’m advising had a CMO there who was very strong in performance marketing, but they didn’t have a performance marketing problem. They had a branding problem. And so he was unable to really focus and address that directly. And so being able to have some of that brand positioning messaging experience really is important in my perspective.
Kenny Soto 33:35
Yeah. Now, Cory, if anyone wanted to say hi to you online, where can they find you?
Corey Quinn 33:41
Well, I’m active on LinkedIn and post daily. So if you liked this type of things I’ve been sharing, if you want to just say hi, please find me on there. I also have a daily newsletter that I send out to people, specifically agency owners and executives, SAS businesses, who are looking to focus the vertical, focus their business on a vertical, and sort of do a vertical go-to-market. So you can go to my website, Cory quinn.com/newsletter. And you could sign up there as well.
Kenny Soto 34:07
Perfect, and I’ll put the newsletter and your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And again, thank you, Cory, for your time today. And thank you listener for listening to another episode of the people Digital Marketing podcast with your host Kenny Soto. And if you haven’t done so, please subscribe. And if possible, share this with all of your co-workers so that way everyone can learn alongside all the listeners that are listening right now. And as always, I hope everyone has a great week. Bye bye.