Mar 5, 2018
How does a scrappy SaaS startup successfully take on the established giants in an industry?
In this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, commonsku Co-Founder Mark Graham shares how he and his wife (and Co-Founder) Catherine successfully grew commonsku and disrupted an industry dominated by large, entrenched, very well funded players.
Listen to the podcast to learn more about how Commonsku's obsessive devotion to its customers, laser focus on its target audience, and commitment to the creation of great quality and a truly inbound approach contributed to its success, or read the transcript below.
Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome to The Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth and I am your host. This week, my guest is Mark Graham the co-founder of commonsku. Welcome Mark.
Mark Graham
(guest): Hey Kathleen, thank you. I'm really excited
to be here. This is something I've been looking forward to.
Kathleen: I'm really excited to have you.
I've known you for quite some time but I would suspect that there
are many people in the audience who don't. Can you tell us a little
bit about yourself and about commonsku?
Mark: Yes, I am one of the co-founders of
commonsku. commonsku is a CRM and order
management and team collaboration tool that was designed
specifically for the promotional products industry. For folks that
may not the promotional products industry, it's an industry
sometimes known as SWAG. Kathleen, of course, you were in the
business formerly. It's a huge, $22 billion dollar industry that's
filled with a bunch of suppliers and distributors that are all
producing great promotional products for great marketers that need
to advertise themselves through product. commonsku is the platform
that makes that all streamlined and organized for people who are in
this business.
Kathleen: Background for listeners, I first
met Mark ... I'm going to have to guess what year it was, but if I
had to guess, I would say it was probably 2012 maybe? 2013?
Mark: Yeah, I'd say it's five, six.
Kathleen: Maybe earlier.
Mark: I woulds say six or seven years ago,
yeah.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Mark: When you were at the ASI
show.
Kathleen: I don't know if my memory goes back
that far these days. But we met several years ago when we were both
on the speaking circuit, speaking at the ASI
shows, which is the series of conferences/trade shows for the
promotional products industry. At the time, I owned a digital
marketing agency that also was a promotional products
distributor. Mark owned a promotional products distributorship as
well, called RIGHTSLEEVE. At the time, commonsku was like the
twinkle in his eye.
It's been fun to watch
the company grow. I'd love for you to share how you came up with
the idea for commonsku and what made you go from having one
business, your promotional products distributorship, which was
doing quite well, to starting another at the same time?
Mark: I think any interesting business is
usually started by the founder or co-founder scratching their own
itch. In my case, I still own RIGHTSLEEVE, it's still a thriving
distributorship till this day. But at the time, this was going back
actually, about 15 years ago. Sorry, 2005 is the time. At that
point, we, as a distributorship, were looking to grow and scale our
business. We were looking for a piece of software that would allow
us to streamline all of our customer communication, streamline all
of our orders, and streamline all of our communication between
suppliers, and all the people who worked at the company.
There wasn't any one system that allowed us to do that so we chose to design our own software. We thought, "How hard could this be?" and of course, it turned out to be really hard, but we just ended up continuing because we were fascinated by it. That was 2005.
Fast forward to about 2010, and we had established this piece of software internally at RIGHTSLEEVE, as a very powerful part of our business. By this point, we had received a lot press within the industry. We had a lot of people that were coming to us asking us about technological advice. We thought to ourselves, "Well, we know this business pretty well, maybe there's an opportunity for us to spin this off as a separate company and become a software company providing CRM and order management solutions to other people like RIGHTSLEEVE."
That was around 2011 and we wrote a business plan and then spun out this company from the RIGHTSLEEVE software IP into a separate company servicing the entire industry. We scratched our own itch, we knew what the problem was. The itch for us was, was too many systems, duplication of information, taking way too long to submit an order, the customer experience was suffering. We said, "There's gotta be something we can do about this because nothing in our industry exists to our standards." That's how it was born.
Now, fast forward to
2018. We've now grown the business to about a $400 million market
size within the industry, that's the amount of revenue that goes
through the platform. It's been really exciting to be helping steer
that growth.
Kathleen: It's very interesting, because as
somebody who used to own a distributorship, I was feeling that pain
as well. You say, "Well, there was nothing out there that met our
standards." What most people probably don't realize is that there
were solutions out there and they were funded by, what I would
characterize as a couple of 800-pound gorillas in the industry,
with a lot of financial backing, huge existing captive customer
bases, and other elements to their business that made it very hard
to detach yourself as a user.
It's interesting because
on the surface, it looked like an opportunity where you could enter
an unserved market but, I think from the outside looking in, at
least it seems to me, that part of the challenge you faced was the
challenge of perception. People thought they had a solution, they
didn't necessarily realize that their solution was inadequate. I
imagine some of your early challenge was essentially making them
know what they didn't know.
Mark: Yes. That was a huge challenge but I
think that the way that we overcame it is, we knew at the very
beginning that we were going to be smart by targeting a very small
group of initial users. Because we had a product that, while it was
very well-tested within the RIGHTSLEEVE environment, was not
well-tested in the larger enterprise market or just the larger
promotional products industry.
Our first plan of attack was to surround ourselves with early adopters, the kinds of people that were just drawn to what we were doing. They were curious people. They were also people who felt that the existing industry solutions did not meet their standards as well. We were a part of this little ragtag, crazy club. It was a very very small club at the time.
We worked with them to
validate the product, to debug the product. From there, we were
then able to go and market the product to a larger group of
customers within the industry. That was probably the most important
thing in our earlier stage - not so much trying to go out to the
mainstream market and convince all these people who though they
already had a good solution. Had we done that right from the very
beginning, I think we would have been dead in the water. But by
starting with those initial users in the very loud user base, we
were then able to validate the product and they were able to help
us kind of cross that chasm, so to speak.
Kathleen: Yeah, I thought your approach was
interesting because it's an industry that is not, I would say,
generally known as a very technologically savvy industry. There are
very low barriers to entry for people who become distributors and
so, sometimes you get retired folks who are looking for something
they can do in their free time. It's just an interesting industry
demographically and so, I think it was really smart of you all to
start with the subset that was those innovators/early adopters.
Mark: I think another thing I would say about
that Kathleen, believe me, we've made a lot of mistakes so, if I'm
giving answers that suggest that I'm an expert here, I would hate
to misguide you. But what made it, I think a little easier for us
at the beginning, is that we were going after people like us. I
would say we had a lot of obstacles. There's no question. The big,
well financed, very well entrenched competitors in the industry,
they're scary.
But for us, we had intimate knowledge of the problem that we were solving and we really understood who we had designed the product for. The first customer was RIGHTSLEEVE and RIGHTSLEEVE as a company from a trade perspective, highly entrepreneurial, high growth-oriented, highly creative, highly curious. When we designed commonsku, we designed it for people who are like RIGHTSLEEVE - creative, entrepreneurial people that were interested in growing their business.
If you segment the promotional products industry, like you making some comments about it not being particularly technologically advanced, you've got a lot of part-timers. You also have a lot of independent sales people that are within the promotional products industry and they're the ones who are primarily serviced by our core competition, the people that you mentioned at the beginning.
When we first started we
said, "Are we reinventing the wheel with just something that's a
little bit nicer for that mainstream market? Or are we creating a
brand new product that is servicing the entrepreneur who has not
had software like this to allow them to scale their business." By
doing that and saying that we were servicing the creative
entrepreneur, it meant that we were able to go after a part of the
market that was underserved so we could use them as kind of a
beachhead to then go after the mainstream market. I think that,
from a strategic positioning standpoint, was smart for us because
we knew that we didn't have to convince that entrepreneur in the
same way that we would have to convince maybe that part-time
salesperson that you referred to before, who already had a solution
that was free, by the way. We're convincing people to pay for our
software. It's pretty tough when you're having to go up against a
free solution.
Kathleen: We talk a lot about inbound marketing in this
podcast. In a lot of ways, you can only really do inbound marketing
well if you've already figured out your brand positioning and messaging.
That's kind of a precursor to it. What you're really talking about
is laying the foundation for what would later be the marketing
strategy.
There's somebody I very
much admire who's done great work on positioning. Her name
is April Dunford. She has a whole
positioning model and-
Mark: She spoke at Skucon in January.
Kathleen: ... Yeah, she's great. What I hear
you describing is what I think she terms, "reframe the market." The
example she always gives is Tesla, where there was an
electric car market. The value prop when it was just Prius was all about like, "how long is your
battery going to last?" Everybody was competing on battery life
until Tesla came along and said, "Well, of course we're going to
give you good battery life, but what you really care about is how
fast does it go and how sexy is the design?" All of a sudden,
nobody was talking about battery life anymore. They're all talking
about "how fast does it go and how sexy is the design?" It reminds
me a little bit of that where, it's a great way to unseat an
incumbent, by just changing the conversation essentially.
Mark: I think that's an interesting
observation. I think that we knew, from the beginning, that there
was no way we could outspend our entrenched competitors who've got
a great product and great hold on the market. I think for us, if we
could lead with a great brand that stood for something, that
focused on a particular part of the market, that was one thing we
could do.
Content, I
know is a big part of what you talk about in this podcast and
within inbound
marketing. We also knew that we were pretty good at
generating content. We understood social media, that was something we
did very well at RIGHTSLEEVE. We were able to bring that kind of
content side into the commonsku business and we knew that if we
could educate our customers as to what commonsku was about, why you
would want to pay for the software, what it meant to be a
growth-oriented entrepreneur in this business, and really
communicating in a language that made sense to distributors, we
felt we could win them over the mid to long-term. It would never be
a quick sale, but you have to keep in mind though, commonsku, if
you're a distributor coming onto the platform, we're running your
business. It's your business, we're a software company, it's not
like a franchise or anything, but your business runs on
commonsku.
Kathleen: You're the ERP basically.
Mark: It's exactly like an ERP. It's a huge
huge decision for a distributor-owner to make a switch from
Platform A to Platform B.
For us, it would never be
a quick sale so, we had to instill a sense of aspiration, a sense
of trust, a sense that we knew what we were doing, that we had the
entrepreneur's back, and that we were one of them. When we looked
at our competitors, they weren't one of us. They were successful
people who provided search databases, and very successful at that,
but we knew that we could come at it from a different angle, then
build a tribe of people who loved what we were doing, so that they
would go and talk about us, and be really proud of their
association with us. That was a very emotional start because we
knew that that's what we could do better than anyone else.
Kathleen: Building on that - the concept of
having a tribe - very early on in commonsku's existence, one of the
functionalities that you built into the platform was
a community,
which the other platforms did not have actually. That was a key
point of differentiation very early on. How much of your success in
building that tribe and creating that connection early on do you
attribute to having the community element in the platform?
Mark: It was huge. I can't underestimate it.
It was absolutely an integral part of the software because one of
the core values of commonsku is around collaboration, around
sharing, around transparency of information inside the platform
that allowed for this growth-oriented distributor to have all of
their team members accessing the same information so that they
could all work together to close business. Of course, you see that
with a product like Salesforce which has got
their Chatter product and Facebook has their
Workplace product. commonsku has got a similar vibe to it.
Kathleen: commonsku's community, at least to
me, the difference was really, it's not a community of people
within your organization. I think with Salesforce and even with
Facebook, you're still talking to people within your own company,
whereas with commonsku, it's more like the broad Facebook or the
broad LinkedIn, where you're speaking with people outside
as well.
Mark: Absolutely. Well, it's both right? We
created that collaborative, transparent work environment within a
company but then we saw that if we could create it between
networks, so between RIGHTSLEEVE, and Distributor A and Distributor
B, and Distributor C, that we're all in the system, that each of
them have their own private networks but they could come together,
because we recognize that they all had something in
common.
That, I think, was a very
interesting way of approaching things because now we were able to
create a tribe of basically, competitors, but competitors that saw
the world through this transparent, collaborative lens, and
recognized that the more they could share with one another, that
would make the industry better and would make each other better.
That was a real flag that we waved right from the very beginning
because we believe that is really, really core to what it is that
we do in this industry.
Kathleen: The rising tide lifts all
boats.
Mark: Absolutely. I think people self-select.
There are some people who go, "That's super weird. I hate my
competitors, I don't want to share any information internally."
That's great. commonsku might not be the right product for you. It
meant that we had the right people coming to us as opposed to the
wrong people coming to us.
Kathleen: You started out early on by getting
your initial core group of beta testers. You built the community
from the very beginning and you baked it into the products. Can you
share what marketing channels really produced results for you in
the early years and then take us through the timeline and what is
it that's producing results for you now? Because the world is a
markedly different place even in just the past five years, from
a digital
marketing standpoint. I am curious how your efforts have
evolved.
Mark: Yeah, that's a great question and I
would chuck it into a couple of different buckets. Number one,
investing in our community was a huge thing for us in the beginning
because it meant that by investing in this community and building
these networks, we allowed for a lot of word of mouth. There were
people that would refer us to their friends within the industry
because this was a new and novel way of running a business. We
spent a lot of time in that referral/word of mouth community
building side of things because we didn't have the big bucks to
spend on advertising. That was number one. Investing in the
community, investing in that tribe.
Number two, we've spent, right from the very beginning, a lot of time and energy in content. That has helped us a ton in SEO in terms of getting found on the search engines. I wouldn't say that we're particularly good at SEO strategies. It's definitely something that I think we could learn more of. But we get found so much because of all the native content that we're producing. We must be doing something right. But we don't have an SEO expert here at all. I think it's by function of the fact that we've got a lot of good data and content.
Social and interacting with our community on Instagram and Facebook, those have been really good platforms for us, Twitter as well. We have also spent a lot of time and energy on our podcast, where we bring in customers and we showcase what success look like.
We also spend a lot of
time speaking about tactics on our podcast, so that way, we can
really educate the entrepreneurs who are looking to become better
at what they do. As a result, our content gets shared a lot and it
becomes a really great way for us to sell to prospects. As we can
say, "Look at all of this stuff that we stand for. Look at all this
content that we're producing. Look at all the ways that we're
investing in your success as an entrepreneur." It goes well beyond
just it being a CRM and order management platform, which seems very
tactical. All those forms of content have been really, really big
for us.
Kathleen: You started podcasting a long time
ago, if I remember correctly.
Mark: Yeah, I got my start
through PromoKitchen. We still do PromoKitchen
now, but the first podcast was in 2011.
Kathleen: You were a super early adopter on
that.
Mark: Super early, yeah. No, it's been lots
of fun and I've loved it. I just love interviewing people. You're
doing a fantastic job right now.
Building upon all the content that we created, we've spent a decent amount of time on drip campaigns and inbound marketing. We use a platform called Wishpond and we set up a series of workflows that allow for us to deliver content to people at various stages in our funnel.
If we have people right at the top of the funnel, we ask ourselves, "How can we use content and the education that we've created to get this person further down the funnel to either a trial or to a demo?"
Once someone's at a trial
stage, how do we use content and drip campaigns to get them past
the trial and into a paying customer situation? We're constantly
tweaking that. I don't think that we've mastered it by any means,
but it certainly has been transformative for us as we've seen the
amount of leads really grow, quite exponentially over the years. We
attribute that to our investment in content.
Kathleen: Now, you are probably are the first
podcast guest I've had who's using Wishpond so I'd love to just
take a little side trip here and talk about, why Wishpond? What was
it about that platform that attracted you? What do you like about
it? You've used some other marketing
automation platforms, how does it compare?
Mark: Yeah, when we were making a decision
about our inbound marketing platform to use, there were two
criteria. One was, is this a product that's going to work for us as
commonsku, from a marketing perspective? That's number one. Number
two, I would say equally importantly, is this the kind of
application that we can integrate into the commonsku platform?
commonsku is very much a platform in that, yes, we've got the CRM
and the order management in the collaboration side that's baked
into it. But we're integrated with QuickBooks, we're integrated with some major search
providers within the industry. We're integrated with Shopify. We wanted to make sure that we could have
an inbound marketing platform that we could integrate with that was
reasonably priced, and accessible, and not too complicated for
people that were using our platform.
We initially had an
experience with HubSpot. I think that we were probably
rather uneducated when we started using HubSpot. This was
pre-Wishpond, just jumping back in time. Our experience, I would
say, was so-so with HubSpot. It was expensive, at least for us, at
the time. It was very complicated for our team to use. I think that
we got the impression that we were using a small part of it and it
felt very overwhelming to us for what we were looking to use it
for. As I say, we may have been uneducated and didn't know what we
were doing.
But at the end of the day, when we switched to Wishpond, we
switched to them because the feature set was a little bit more
limited, and more accessible, and more realistic to us, and also at
a price point that made a lot more sense. That was important for us
as then we integrated with them to make sure we could then go and
sell that product into our community as opposed to, "Hey, get on
HubSpot, it's going to be enterprise at 25 grand a year." Most
people, in our customer base, would choke at that kind of price. I
think the feature set and price point for us was really important
in making the decision with Wishpond.
From a developer's perspective, if I put my commonsku developer hat on, Wishpond had a lot more flexibility in working their API and working with their team. It was a little bit smaller and more nimble than we found the HubSpot team was. This is not a condemnation of HubSpot. I know that they are a phenomenal company and they've done a lot of amazing things. We have a lot of respect for them but just for us, it kinda fell through the cracks.
Wishpond has been a great success story for us in terms of how we've been able to integrate with them and also, how it is we've been able to create these drip campaigns, and also set up a huge amount of ROI.
Kathleen: Certainly,
every product is good for a different reason. It's all about
finding the one that's right for you.
Mark: Yeah, I think at the end of the day,
what we had found and maybe I'll get an e-mail from HubSpot
afterwards-
Kathleen: They're listening.
Mark: ... Well, I've tons of respect for what
they've done in terms of how they position themselves in the
marketplace. But I think that HubSpot is a great enterprise class
product and I don't know that it has been designed specifically
well for the very small business segment, which is the segment that
we service primarily.
I could be wrong on that. Happy to speak to the folks at HubSpot.
Although, I do find it
funny, I will say this, whether you cut this out is up to you, is
that, we still get sales calls from HubSpot to this day that are
pitching HubSpot to us as though we've never heard of them before.
I always write back and I say, "Hey Tim, thanks for your e-mail. We
were on the system if you just looked in your CRM, a year and a
half ago." They're like, "Oh, I didn't realize that." I'm like,
"Okay, well. You might want to take a look at that." Yeah. Tons of
respect for them, they've been successful for a reason. But for us,
we just ended up going with Wishpond.
Kathleen: That's very interesting, thank you
for sharing that. Now, fast forward and today, commonsku has grown
considerably. You've successfully, really, I think, taken on the
incumbents in the industry by not trying to beat them at their own
game but carving out your own niche and having your own
approach.
When you look at your
marketing today, what do you see is delivering the best results for
you, from a lead
generation and customer
acquisition standpoint?
Mark: We have created an event strategy with
commonsku. You were a very popular speaker at one of
our SkuCon events a couple of years ago so, thank
you so much for that. But the whole idea around our events was how
we could create an offline version of the commonsku community. That
was our kind of guiding principle right from the beginning. We
wanted to create an opportunity for the community to come together
to be educated, to be inspired, and also to network with other
people within the industry - other users, other people that have
been successful, so they could trade ideas. It was our version
of INBOUND or of Dreamforce.
We would look at those
conferences and say, "We should do the same thing. We've got a
vibrant, really smart community of customers. Let's bring them
together, and have an amazing time, and bring some spectacular
keynote speakers that have done some great things in their various
areas to educate and inspire the audience." We started that in 2005
and we've now run seven events in Vegas, in Palm Springs, Chicago.
We've got another one coming up in New Orleans. They've been great
at bringing people together.
Kathleen: Wait, in 2005 or 2015?
Mark: 2015, sorry.
Kathleen: I was going to be like, "Wait, you
started commonsku a lot longer ago!"
Mark: 2005 was the date I gave you for when
we built the original, the precursor to commonsku.
Kathleen: That's right. Okay. Starting in
2015, you were having the events and theyr have been seven of
them.
Mark: I'm glad you're listening. Yeah, we
started in 2015 creating these events as a way to bring the
community together. We've now run seven of them. They've become
really successful ways of bring the community together but also a
great way for great PR, great buzz, great word of mouth. We have a
lot of people that now come to us because they say, "I've heard
about SkuCon. I've heard about commonsku. I hear all these people
talking about this product in a really positive way." We did that
... When I say intentional, it might sound like we architected that
in a disingenuous way, that's not what I mean. That was definitely
part of our strategy, was if we treat customer well, and we educate
them, and create a successful environment for them, then everything
else will follow.
That's what I would really say we invested in our community, we invested in our event strategy in order to create that environment where people come to us as opposed to us necessarily having to cold call them, interrupt them, and convince them. You started off convincing someone who's never has heard of your product to spend $99 a user a month when the competitor may have something that's free? That's a real hard crappy sale to make.
Much easier for that prospect to learn about you through your content, to learn about you through a respected peer of theirs in the industry that's raving about their positive experience with the software. Much better for them to come to you already pre-educated and raising their hand with the problem they're looking to have solved. We want that customer all day long.
Events, content, that's
been huge. I think the other thing that I would say from a customer
acquisition standpoint, Kathleen is, trade shows, it's a lot more
traditional but some of the bigger industry trade shows have been
successful for us just because you have a lot of high quality
distributors that are walking the aisles and they'll come and seek
us out, and we can establish some really good contact points with
them.
Kathleen: Yeah, I think it depends on what
the trade shows are and your industry. Certain industries have
really good ones that attract great attendance. This is one of
those industries for sure that people go to trade shows. Even tiny
distributors go to trade shows.
Mark: Some are better than others, there's no
question. We do pick and choose between them, but we've certainly
seen some great customer acquisition success through trade
shows.
Kathleen: That's great. When it comes to
content, what aspects of your content
strategy are performing really well? Are there particular
types of content or particular topics that you find really resonate
with your audience?
Mark: Customer
success stories, I think are always popular because people want
to see people that have been successful, whether they're successful
using commonsku or just successful with their particular approach.
I love celebrating entrepreneurs in this industry that have cool
things and unique things with their business. That translates into
SkuCon, which you've been to. It also translates into our content
because if we can put some of these people on a pedestal, to help
inspire other people in the industry as a potential way to think
about your business, that's always been the most successful for
us.
Our podcast, we have a
great amount of listenership, we have a great amount of
engagements. I love hearing from people that say, "I listen to this
podcast and it made me see the light about your product. I'm
interested now in going ahead with the trial." I love that because
the sales pitch, so to speak, happened on the customer's terms
where they were being educated and they were learning about the
product, not in some cheesy sales-y way but in a way that we were
explaining it to them that made sense. That's a customer that we
can convert much quicker and much more reliably.
Kathleen: That's just so special I think. I
mean, I go through that with my podcast because you sit in your
room where you record, and you have your podcast conversation, and
you put it up online, and you don't have contact necessarily, with
your listening audience until one of them reaches out. When that
happens, it's like, all of a sudden, things come full circle and
you realize, "Wow, there's somebody out there. They're listening.
They're getting something from it." There's a special relationship
that develops from that, I feel like.
Mark: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I think you have
to start slow. I mean, it's not like we certainly don't have the
biggest podcast out there but we have always focused on that
quality engagement. We know who our customer is and we're patient.
I think that that's ... I mean, not that you were asking for advice
about podcasting, but I think that that's what we've found is that
you just stick with it. It grows week after week and as long as
you're providing value and not disrespecting the listener, and
you're doing it from an authentic place, then, I think they'll
stick around and you'll continue to educate and inspire them.
People who are educated and inspired often become customers, for
the right reasons.
Kathleen: I always say that I would continue
to do this podcast even if nobody listened because I learn so much
from it. I have to believe that if I'm learning something that
there's at least two or three other people out there who are. But
it's true. I really do it because I'm so fascinated to learn from
the people I talk to and that's the fun part of it.
There are two questions
that I always ask every one of my guests. I'm going to close by
asking you the same two questions. The first is, company or
individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well
right now?
Mark: There's a guy at a company
called Drift, in Boston. They are a conversational
marketing platform, which before I heard of Drift, I would have
said, "What the heck is conversational marketing?" A guy by the
name of Dave Gerhardt, who I believe is their head of marketing,
who I think is doing a phenomenal job at inbound producing great
content and producing content that educates customers about this
brand new concept, conversational marketing. I'm like "What the
heck is that?" Being able to define it in a way that makes sense
around the product that he's selling. It's a good example of
something that where we became customers of their product
exclusively through their branding and content initiatives. We
listened to them for a couple of months and said, "This is
fantastic." and then went to a trial, and then, ultimately, went on
to the product. We're generating great success. Dave Gerhardt at
Drift is my answer for you.
Kathleen: It's funny, he must be doing a
great job because my last guest said the same thing. Yeah, you're
the second person in a row.
Mark: It's good stuff and I didn't listen to
that. I would say the founder of Drift is someone by the name of
David Cancel. The two Daves spend a lot of time on generating great
content with one another. David Cancel is another person there to
take a look at. I think he's a former HubSpot guy actually. Maybe
both of them are but they've done a nice job.
Kathleen: That's a good one for people to
check out. Now the second question is the top challenge that I hear
marketers share with me, other than "Can you make the day have 40
hours?" is "How do I stay up to date on all the things that are
changing in the world of digital marketing?" "How do I stay
current, how do I continue learning?"
My second question is always, what are your go-to sources for
information that you feel keeps you up to date with what's
happening in the world of digital marketing?
Mark: Yeah, I think for me, I would describe
myself less of a digital marketing guy and more of a marketer in
general. I'm less in the weeds from a digital perspective and I'm
more focused on marketing and brand building overall. I love
listening to ... There's a great podcast, as an example,
called How I Built This with Guy Raz. I'm not
sure ... Have you listened to it before?
Kathleen: I haven't listened to that one but
I am very familiar with Guy Raz.
Mark: With the TED Radio Hour.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Mark: As an example, I'll spend a lot of time
listening to those podcasts about how the entrepreneurs and
marketers that he has on that podcast have reshaped industries. I
take tons and tons of notes about that. Seth
Godin is another great example of someone who I just spent
a lot of time listening to. I've had him on my podcast a couple of
times. I spend a lot of time listening to those authors and also
those podcasts.
Kathleen: Great. All good suggestions. Well,
thank you Mark, this has been really interesting. It's been fun to
catch up and see where commonsku is today after all those years
back when we first met and you were just thinking about launching
it. It makes me think, "Gosh, what have I done in that time?"
Mark: Well, look at what you've done, it's
been impressive.
Kathleen: Oh no, it's so cool. This isn't
about me. It's really cool what you've done and I very much admire
the businesses that you've built. It's great to hear the backstory
on it. If somebody has a question for you or wants to reach out and
learn more about some of the things you've talked about, what's the
best way for them to reach you?
Mark: You can send me an
e-mail, mark@commonsku.com or
you can find my information on commonsku.com. I'm also on LinkedIn. You can find me very easily
there and more than happy to answer any questions. I'm also
Twitter @heymarkgraham.
Kathleen: Great, and I'll put all of those
links in the show notes. That is all we have for this week. If you
listened and found value in this, we would very much appreciate a
review on the platform of your choice, whether that's iTunes,
Stitcher, or what have you. And if you know somebody doing kick ass
in inbound marketing work,please tweet me at @WorkMommyWork because I would love to
interview them.
Thanks Mark.
Mark: Awesome. Thank you Kathleen, it was so
much fun.