- Hi friends. It's time to record episode 9 of "The Cerebrations Podcast." We've covered a fairly diverse set of topics so far some more pertinent to sales others more focused on marketing.

- Today, we'll go deeper into the marketing terrain and cover one of the quintessential questions that each marketing executive has to address on a regular basis. When should you hire a marketing agency and when should you build in-house marketing capabilities?

- I've invited a good friend of mine, Caroline Lane, she brings a very well-rounded perspective on this topic, because she has been an in-house marketer for many years before joining a high growth agency called ProperExpression.

- I always enjoy picking Caroline's brain on marketing topics, and look forward to today's discussion. Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome Caroline Lane to the virtual stage.

- Hi Caroline, how are you doing?

- Hi, Emil, I'm great. How are you?

- I'm doing great, thanks. I really appreciate you're joining me for our podcast episodes.

- Same, thank you for having me.

- Oh yeah, absolutely. I know that everyone that attends these podcast episodes is curious about the guests and they'd like to know a little bit more about 'em. So, as usual, I'm gonna push here a little call to action at the bottom that anyone who's interested can go to Cerebrations.info and learn more about you. And maybe as we discuss, if there is some specific topics and links that may be relevant, we will post them there too. But in general, people can find a way to contact you if they want to continue the conversation and also, find interviews with other guests that I've hosted here on this podcast. So in general, it's always good to check out on Cerebrations.info once in a while to see what's new. But without further ado, we wanted to dig into this interview. And the first question I'm gonna ask is, how you actually ended up at a marketing agency. What's your journey? I know you've gone through many different roles so how did you get there?

- Yeah, it's a funny story actually, because I used to despise agencies. Seriously, I would go into rants. So I was like, "Agencies are useless. I never want to hire one again. It's terrible, don't waste your money." And I was obviously, I was in-house at the time. I've been in a few in-house roles where I was leading marketing and my boss at the time who was the VP of sales tells me, "Hey, I hear you, I hear you but there's this great agency I know, they're awesome, and you should really go and talk to them." And I do it. And then, I met my CEO and founder Nick Ilev over there and he was leading marketing and we worked together for a few years. I was his client and it was just really different from what I experienced before. And I felt like I really had my counterpart in the marketing agency I was working with. And it brought me a lot of perspective in my role in addition to the actual deliverables they were producing. And fast forward, the white letter had switched jobs and I was looking for something else and Nick heard about it and he called me. And then I was like, "Oh, actually, yes, an agency with you. I would work there." And so, grew ProperExpression together.

- Great, well, it's an interesting story, because it just shows how you never know. You meet people throughout your professional career at different stages and you never know when you're gonna cross paths again and how you may actually start partnering with someone that before that you just know on the periphery of your network. So it's a great story. Thank you for providing that. Well, you also offered a little bit of a segue to my next question, and that's related to your having had experience on both sides corporate marketing or in-house as you called it and then marketing agency. So what are the main differences? How is it different?

- Yeah, I think it's really different. I think, as a marketer, what you get out of it is very different. Your experience is very different. So I would say in corporate marketing then you really get to understand how the company works, because you can work with a lot of different departments and also you really get to influence the company as a whole. It's like you can contribute more than just your marketing contribution and be more of a strategic partner to the entire company. And you get to understand more about the product and the market and really and the positioning. You can really dedicate more attention to all of this. While in an agency you don't have this luxury. You can't say, "Hey, I'm gonna spend three days learning everything about this one product and this one market. This is just not something you can do. But on the flip-side, especially when I worked at fairly small companies, when I was in-house and you don't get a lot of exposure to peers, really, because marketing teams are usually much like one of the smallest teams at companies. So you don't have a lot of peers in your company and it's difficult to develop skills, it's difficult to also develop assurance in your skills. You don't have anybody to compare yourself to and/or to learn from. And I think at an agency you have that, you only work with marketers day in and day out and all of them end up inspiring you. You can learn from your clients, you can learn from your staff, you really learn from so many people. And I think your understanding of marketing gets deeper and broader at the same time when you have this experience.

- I see, I see, okay? And that's kind of my impression myself, in terms of, I've been a consultant in the past, not an agency person, but I think it's that ability to benchmark, because you're surrounded by people that are pretty much this is their livelihood, they have to be on top of the latest and greatest, because that's what they're selling professionally to their clients. So, I mean, you mentioned in the beginning that before you joined an agency there was a time when you kind of hated agencies. And I, to a point I'll tell you a secret, I kind of share that sentiment, not with your agency, but in general. I've always been a little skeptical, and I'm gonna dive into that a little later when I ask you specifically about what doesn't work very well. But let's start first on the positive side. So, what are marketing agencies consistently best at?

- Yeah, well, I think good marketing agencies would be best at more technical areas of marketing, things like ads, things like SU, things like email. They should be better, they should be better than your internal staff by leaps and bounds, because this is what they do all day every day. And they do it on so many clients, no matter what your staff can't develop the same experience, running a 10 to 20K ad budget as people who spend millions every month on ads. Their experience is just gonna be much deeper. But there are plenty of agencies that will sell you services and not be good at it. So, you need to find the right partner.

- Okay, so then on the flip-side, where do marketing agencies most often fall short? Why did you hate them, if I can say?

- Well, yeah. I think it's interesting. The reason I hated marketing agencies was not because of the things that I think most marketing agency fall short of. I've met plenty of agencies that just didn't care. Something that is really easy for agencies to do is as we scale, we need to hire people, we need the people that started the company are not necessarily handling every client and stuff like that. And you end up with people that have no idea what's going on. That don't really care, that are there for their paycheck at the end of the day, and they're not part of your company. So they don't have any, I don't know, they don't have any buy-in, they just don't necessarily care. And I think it's getting the wrong partner that is really annoying. It's like you want the right partner. Was that your experience as well?

- Yeah, I've always thought it's hard unless, so for me, the main kind of decision has been how big am I as a customer? If I'm a huge client, of course, all these agencies are gonna give me the best personnel. I mean, they're gonna give me their best manager project manager, the best individual contributors to the project, because that's where the big bucks are. I am giving them a lot of money. It's a huge component of their overall revenue and they want my repeat business they want to keep me happy. They don't want to lose me. So I even probably get the attention of the founders or the top people within that agency. And I've worked in the past at companies most probably Rosetta Stone is the best example in that where we were spending so many millions of dollars that yes we could get a lot of attention from anyone that we wanted to. But you mentioned smaller companies, so you start working for a smaller company, they haven't even heard about you until you establish some sort of relationship with them. How much time are they gonna dedicate to learning about you, understanding really your needs and your problems especially if you're in a niche. That's where I've always been a little bit of skeptical, and you mentioned it's just a buy-in. Do they even deep inside and do they even care? Because at the end of the day, these are just projects. The survival of the company is not important for them, it's just a project. So that's how I've always looked at it. And I think I'm pleasantly surprised sometimes when I see agencies that really care, even for smaller customers. But I've always taken it with a grain of salt, because I know that my budget is not huge and my budget is not gonna make a big difference for them from a revenue perspective. So that's just my point of view.

- Yeah, yeah. I know, I think it's important when you choose your agency again, to find the right partner, if your agency doesn't consider you as an important client, it's just not gonna be successful. But then something you talked about it's about the messaging part. When you think of agencies and how well-equipped they're gonna be to really understand your company and your market and your messaging. I think this is where agencies fall short a lot of the time, especially in B2B, because they just don't have, these are things that take a lot of time. These are things that take a lot of internal conversations and it's really difficult to do this as an agency and understand the positioning properly.

- Yeah, actually you're touching on a question I was planning to ask later, but let me, I'll bring it up here, because it's a natural continuation of this. So I work in a specialized industry, highly specialized industry. It's healthcare technology and even healthcare technology is already kind of a niche, but within that, we are in a even bigger niche, 'cause we are in the oncology space, oncology informatics a sub-segment of that. So anyone that joins our company, even those that have been in the healthcare technology space for decades has a steep learning curve. People come in as subject matter experts and we look up to them as the experts and they still have a hard time in the beginning understanding all the nuances, because what we offer is more or less different from the competition, and it's kind of at the forefront of what is currently being done in these specific areas. So how can a company like mine work with an agency when this agency even if it has a generic healthcare specialty or you have healthcare clients, they're probably offering something completely different from what I'm offering. So, I mean, you kind of mentioned that a little bit. It maybe it's a little bit of a downside on their messaging side that they're trying to over-promise, but then how can we work together as a client and agency to overcome that barrier?

- Yeah, yeah. And that's a really great question. Well, I can tell you what we do and how we deal with this, because we have some clients with very complex products that are selling and clients in compliance, security, things you can't... You can't be wrong. You can't write the wrong thing. So the way we work is that it's really a collaboration. So we have frameworks for messaging that we use. We're by no means a messaging agency. Our goal is not to say, "Hey, we're going to redo your messaging." That's not it at all. What we're trying to do is understand, really, really get a good understanding of your messaging and create a framework for our team to use it in what they need, because at the end of the day, when we're running, especially, it's a little bit if you are doing a lot of blogs, a lot of white papers and stuff like this, but when you're doing more top of the funnel content, when you're doing things like emails, ads, et cetera, you just need, you need a precise understanding, but you don't need to understand all the things. I wouldn't need to understand everything that you understand, but I would need to understand maybe 20% so that my team can write the right things. So I think it's really a collaboration and making sure that we have the right checkpoints so that if I present something to you that is not accurate, you can tell it to me at the beginning of the engagement and then moving on, things start falling into place. So it's really having the right framework.

- Okay, but then, so let me ask this. What are the key attributes of a high-performing agency? What should I look for to maybe spot the agencies that can do these things that you just described versus those that cannot?

- Yeah, yeah. So it's difficult, because of the sales process and we know how people can be really good talkers and not necessarily good at executing. But I would look for a couple of things like really data-driven and process-driven agencies. The right agency, well, first of all, they're not gonna have to reinvent the wheel when you start with them, because they're gonna be able to look at your business, you look at your business problems that you're trying to solve for and tell you, okay, we can probably do these three things first, these are low-hanging fruit and we've been doing them for 50, 60 clients. They come with something that is proven to you, it has worked. So it's really process-driven. They can tell you exactly, okay, we're gonna try this lever, on this lever, on this lever, and then, does that make sense?

- So they already have a list of best practices they've created in the past and they can apply these to your situation. Is that what you're saying?

- Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't want to test brand new things in order of my clients, you know what I mean? I want to bring them my best ad structures and my best email campaign and give them results in the first two months. And then yes, we can add stuff we can be more creative, but why wouldn't we use our successes from the past? If they have been successful in the past they will have successes to bring to you.

- So in that case, I mean, at one point you still have to develop some of that expertise yourselves as an agency. So how can I ensure that I'm not the Guinea pig in a way where you're developing a certain type of expertise.

- Right, yeah. This one is really a tough one. I would ask precise questions like, "Oh, okay, great this idea sounds great. Can you tell me how that worked for what's the latest client who did this for? How did this, that work?" To make sure they're not making it up on the spot.

- So in, in a way it's kind of like when you interview candidates you ask behavioral questions. You ask them about a time, "Tell me about a time when you've done this, versus how would you approach this?" So it's not hypothetical, it's based on practice and experience.

- Yeah, exactly, exactly.

- Okay, I see. So one of the other concerns that oftentimes occur when an agency gets mentioned is that people on the team, in the marketing team may feel like they're just someone has a doubt in their own skills and that they're either being replaced or just substituted for that particular project. Let's not say necessarily that they're just gonna be let go, because an agency's gonna do their job, but just for that particular project, you don't trust them and that's why you want someone else to do this. How can I as an executive make everyone understand that I'm using an agency to supplement rather than to replace my staff? Or how can an agency do that in a way where it's not, it doesn't feel like they're stepping on the toes of the team members of my larger team?

- Yeah, that's a great question. Well, so sometimes having an agency is actually a great way to, again, get this exposure to other marketing people that are seeing day in and day out what's... We talk to, I don't know, I talk to personally probably at least 15 different marketers a week and probably under, with totally different skills in totally different markets. It's great to give your team exposure to people that get this exposure and can bring something new to the table. It's not only the skill they have, but also just bringing something new to the table. But also, it's just like saying, it's the World Cup soon. So imagine you have a soccer team and you have this amazing coach or PT, personal trainer that trains your team and you're like, "That's great. He can prevent injuries and whatnot." And one day your player gets injured you're not gonna ask your PT to go and fix him, you're going to send him to the doctor, because they have different skills and you can't hire a doctor in-house, because most of the time you don't need a doctor. So it's just, you need specific skill for something very specific that doesn't replace your team.

- Yeah, okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think it really depends on guests, on the members of the team as well, how they understand it. But I think for most of them, the allure of being able to learn from people that like you said, spent their time working on different projects and talking to customers all over the place and having that ability to speak to a specialist in a specific area. Should be enough for them to feel like they're actually learning something from that experience. I think at least I've always tried to position it that way as well. I was just curious if you had any other ideas, but I definitely agree with that. I can see how this is the best way of positioning it. I don't like agencies that try to tell me that they can replace my team. I just think that it's a very dangerous terrain to get into, because like you said, they would never understand what really is going on internally. They don't have the same kind of interactions with products or with sales or with anyone else within the company to be able to replace who is currently inside a team, but they can actually teach us what's going on outside of our company and outside of our industry.

- Yeah, and something I think about when I think about who should I have? Is that or I guess I used to think about is that like an in-house job or is that something that we outsource for? And honestly, as we developed our service line, we thought about this as well, but in the other way is that sometimes it's gonna be really difficult to hire a player for the position you're looking for, it's really gonna be so difficult to hire a great PPC person that is gonna manage 20K of budget a month, because great PPC people want to manage much more than that. Same for SU. if you can produce two pieces of content a month they're not gonna want to work on your website. So it's also, can I even have this skill in-house? If I can't have this skill in-house at the right level then it's good to outsource it.

- Yeah, no, yeah, you're raising a good point here. I mean, there are also some projects that are rare enough the importance strategically, but they don't happen all the time to justify having a dedicated resource that's a specialist in that particular area. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I always ask at the end of the podcast episodes to do a little bit of recap of what we discussed. So in your mind what are the key takeaways that anyone who's listened to this discussion should remember a couple of months down the road when they think about the decision whether to hire an agency or build in-house?

- Yeah, I would say anything that is product marketing, messaging, anything that's very strategic should stay in-house. It's kind of when you think about outsourcing what is strategic to your company always stays in-house. And then, anything that is very specific, very technical, very hard to hire for at a high level is what you want to outsource to an agency. And you need to take your time to find the right agency that's gonna be your real partner over years and years of working together and bring actual bottom line results.

- Yep, okay, great. Well, that concludes our conversation today. Once again, I really appreciate your joining me for my podcast episode and I look forward to speaking with you on another occasion in the future. But for now, thank you very much and I hope you have a good rest of your day.

- Thanks, Emil. Thank you so much for having me.

- Yeah, thank you. Bye-bye.

- Bye.