Marketing = REVENUE | E114 with Karen Lloyd

Why are we still having to prove that marketing contributes to revenue? 😅
 In this episode of Blame It On Marketing, Emma and Ruta are joined by Karen Lloyd, podcast host, recruiter, headhunter and founder of Armstrong Lloyd, to finally give revenue the dedicated airtime it deserves.

We talk about why marketing needs to be commercially accountable, how to prove contribution without getting lost in attribution drama, and what happens when sales and marketing stop trusting each other.

Marketing confession of the episode:
 Karen over-scripted an early podcast episode so much that her guest was visibly shaking. They ditched the script, had a real conversation, and it became one of the best-performing episodes. A lesson in letting things breathe.

We get into:
 ✅ Why marketing has to contribute to revenue if it wants a seat at the table
 ✅ The danger of being seen as the “colouring-in department”
 ✅ Attribution fights: events vs digital vs sales touchpoints
 ✅ Why every marketer needs access to the CRM
 ✅ What to do when you don’t trust the data
 ✅ Short-term revenue vs long-term revenue: why you need both brand and demand
 ✅ Why “the sales cycle is three months” usually ignores the whole marketing journey
 ✅ Sales and marketing politics: what happens when trust breaks down
 ✅ Why the CEO or founder has to help fix the sales-marketing relationship
 ✅ The importance of having receipts when you need to challenge bad behaviour
 ✅ Commercial acumen: why marketers need to understand revenue, pipeline and business impact
 ✅ AI gossip: why asking Claude to make strategic marketing and hiring decisions is not the flex some founders think it is

If you’ve ever been asked to prove ROI while being blocked from the CRM, or watched sales ring the bell for a deal marketing helped create six months ago, this one’s for you.

Like, subscribe, and comment with your biggest “where did the revenue come from?” battle.

#B2BMarketing #MarketingStrategy #RevenueMarketing #SalesAndMarketing #MarketingLeadership #CRM #Attribution #MarketingROI

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone and welcome back to Blame It on Marketing with Emma and Ruta. And I can't believe it's taken this long. Ruta and I were having to look through what was it, a hundred plus episodes to see if we'd had an episode just on revenue and we haven't so I'm very excited to be visiting or revisiting this topic and then it gets some dedicated airtime and we are joined by the awesome Karen Lloyd. So Karen please introduce yourself. Hello, I'm Karen Lloyd. I'm also a podcast host and I host Spotlight and Marketing and Emma and Ruta have been on my podcast, which you'll be able to hear soon. So that's great. But I'm really excited to be on this today. My other day job is also being a recruiter and a headhunter and also business owner and a marketeer of Armstrong Lloyd, my own company. And we specialize in marketing recruitment and sales before we can dive into that, of course, we need to know what your marketing confession is or something you've messed up and maybe something that changed how you look at things or do things. Yep, so I've been doing 48 podcasts now and when I first started doing them, I was actually petrified. I interview people for a living, so I don't know how I was and it wasn't live, but my legs were shaking and I was shaking and I had a set of generic questions that I used to use to ask everybody and then I started re-listening back to them and I thought... everybody's saying the same thing. So maybe I should start to theme the podcast a bit more. And so the first time I themed it, I scripted it with an inch of its life. And the first person I had on the podcast, she'd never done a podcast before. She was literally shaking. Luckily, I wasn't so nervous now, because I'd probably done about 10 or 12. And she was literally shaking. And I was like, why are you so nervous? And she said, well, it's so scripted. And I was like, that's it. And in the end, we ditched the script and we talked. And I got to the end of the podcast and I thought, do you know what? This is going to be an awful one. I don't know if we're going to be able to even air it. Once it was edited, it was our best podcast we'd ever done. And it was one of the ones that had the highest traction and some real natural things came out from it. So now... It's helped me learn because when I do a podcast, sometimes I now know people love it to be scripted and they come and they don't want to deviate and other people, they literally wing it and they don't want to be scripted. So, hey ho, I've learnt something. We're definitely we're definitely those ones who prefer to wing it. I think it's interesting actually 'cause we've not really had anyone that's been particularly scripted, but I think you can I think the best conversations are the ones that are free flowing. In my opinion, I know some people like to prepare, but I do think you generally have a more honest conversation when it's unscripted, I think. So we are going to talk all about revenue. we're excited to do this. Ruta and I were actually reminiscing yesterday, Karen, on our live stream when we were asking our lovely audience about the questions. that I used to we used to pretend when we worked at Clear Review together to dress up as this guy called Andre, who was some sort of like Russian gangster, and he used to ask everyone where the revenue was. And I was like, maybe that's the answer to to gang. to getting like people on board. Yeah, yeah. Hahaha I don't know. but I think we should start off with by asking you, you know, like why do we still need to talk about like the idea that marketing contributes to revenue and why we should be targeted against revenue? Like why are we still having this conversation? because ultimately if marketing aren't bringing the revenue in then they can't really prove that they're a valued worth worthy to be part of it. They are the colouring in department, they are the department that sits in the corner and does the events and goes and books the sales travel side. So if you want to seat at the table and you want to be seen to being part of the business then you need to be bringing and contributing something. So when the sales team are being slapped on their back and everyone's going well done. we got that deal, you might not need to have the back slapping but you could go well there we go I know that that that deal came from X, Y and Z you know we've had so many touch points we've had so many things you know we saw them at an event they followed up we've had this person you know the mapping behind that and you know that you've contributed to that revenue. And why do you think some teams are still And do you shying away from that? It's interesting actually, I was talking to somebody earlier in the week that has just left an organisation and I sort of said, what do you think has gone wrong here? And he said, it's about how we track the revenue. So he said, their CMO at the time used to wake up in the middle of the morning at four in the morning and she would know all of the revenue figures off by heart where everything come from. She was absolutely OCD and then she left the business. So then the other people weren't so good at the data and the revenue and they were all a bit loosey goosey and they'd turn up to a meeting and then they'd all be arguing over, well it come from an event, well it came from digital, you know, and then the marketing department in themselves actually were in so because of it. So I think that's, I think I've answered the question, but I think that's where the key is, is that you've got the clarity and people know where they're going and they've got the evidence to show it. Yeah, absolutely. When you speak to marketers who do struggle with that, like in that scenario, and people say, yeah, but it's really complicated because of attribution or sales cycles, do you think that's just kind of an excuse for avoiding the topic? Or do you think there's more to it than that? I think it's a lot of it. I think it depends on the individual. So some people will have their mindset. I don't really like data. I'm not very good at it. I don't know how to log into it. It's not my team. It's someone else's. But I think, you know, anybody, you know, if you're, if you're, you're in that situation and you're going, don't know where it came from, then you really need to resolve that yourself. You need to educate yourself. If someone else in the company can't help you find that information, this is a fundamental blocker for you. If you're not going to be able to do this. But I think the problems often come in really big siloed organisations. So there was one marketeer who I spoke to and I said, right, have you gone and checked your CRM? And she went, I'm not allowed to log into the CRM. And I said, why aren't you allowed to log into the CRM? And she said, I don't know. And I said, well, you need to go and resolve that instantly. And that's something you need to go and you need to find out why. she well, it's because the company's a certain way in a certain division. But having access to the CRM, knowing your way around it, even if, you know, you're not the marketing ops person, you should still go and watch a YouTube video and make sure you know all the fields and know all the attribution and be able to do that and see how it's mapping through because quite often I think a lot of the reason people don't believe in the data is that in their heart they think the data is wrong. Yeah. I do that myself, I look I'm not going at it and I think, yeah, well, I know that that figure isn't right or that attribution piece isn't right, so the rest of the stuff is probably wrong. Yeah, not being able to rely That's a really good one. on the on the CRM is a big one. I think one suggestion and it's a really simple suggestion and it's harder in a scalar company, but if you're, I think. Sometimes it's something really simple. When the deal is done or you're attributing, go back and speak to the salesperson and together like have a partnership and go, well, what did, I mean, I do this all the time in my team. know, whenever we get a deal through, the first thing I say is what were the things that we did to win this deal? You know, like when was the first person we spoke to them? How many years? We were talking to that person for two years. We've met them at an event and I make everybody in my team map it through. because the reason I do that is people are always really consumed with the short-term revenue, aren't they? Everything I'm doing now needs to come next month. But sometimes I think it's really important to see the bigger team, the bigger picture of all the little tiny touch points and things you do over the years and how they map out. And the thing is, is none of that is repeatable necessarily. It's not a silver bullet. Just because you met someone at event, you took them for a coffee, you then got the demo. you then, you you did various other things, you had them for lunch. It doesn't mean to say if you do that, it will be the same for the next person. But I think seeing that it wasn't simple and straightforward and mapping that long term out with the short term, I think it's a good way of balancing it and also building a bridge with the sales team. I was gonna ask you that actually, Karen. How do you balance that kind of like short term thinking? You know, like the ability for revenue to come in and the sales team get to ring the bell and everyone's like, Woo, new business, versus sort of like more longer term thinking. especially like maybe where deals have been in the either the pipeline for a long time, or I don't know, they disappeared and came back, or that it's actually like a renewal, even because like people are not particularly excited about renewals, but they should be. I- They absolutely should be. And I think there's lots to unpack in that actually, and I've got lots of different thoughts, but I'll start with the long-term, short-term side. So basically, it's not really a balance. One can't happen with the other. So if you don't get the short-term deal, you can't get the long-term business. It has to start somewhere. But with the short-term side and the person ringing the bell and the slapping in the back, if you've chosen the wrong IPC or the wrong client and you've just closed any deal and the product doesn't fulfill what the customer needs or you haven't met the customer expectations, that's never going to lead to long-term money. So closing any deal if it's not relevant to the product is just going to, you know, we've done it before, we take a job on, we know it might not be in our wheelhouse, we have a sense that the client's not going to be, you know, the best long-term client for us but we give it a shot and eventually we go, right, we've learned from that, we're not going to do that again because that client doesn't attribute to our values and, you know, we're not right for them, they're not right for us and that's the same with product-led companies. I've met people and they've said, I've said like you know what's why why isn't your company growing why isn't it going out there and they're like because our product isn't isn't what they're selling. They're selling one thing, but the product doesn't actually do that. And then the customer buys it, they get frustrated with it. Obviously, we're trying to then close them and then we're not getting the repeat business and basically we're losing. So all we are is winning new clients who hate us and then they leave and then my job is to win more new clients who are going to hate us and leave. So if you're not going to keep the renewal and the pipeline and keep your clients, then basically you're on a hiding to nothing really. You're on a pipeline into a drain. Yeah. It's interesting though because so many people, so many of the conversations are we just need more and actually we did do an episode on episode on this, didn't we, Ruta, about just needing more pipeline and not really caring about the outcome of that. That seems to be, dare I say this, Karen, you can tell me off if you think this is wrong, but it seems to be a bit more of a sales mentality than a marketing mentality. Is that fair to say? Yeah, it is very much, it would be on the set. It would be, I think that's when sales, that's a good example of when sales and marketing aren't working together. So they're not listening to the IPC. They're not listening to what the sales team, the marketing team have said and the sales team have gone off and they've just got the pressure. And actually probably when they've rung the bell, I mean, everybody's basically, everybody's been happy because they're probably working in a company where got people breathing down their neck and they need the revenue and And there are some companies out there that are two deals away from bankruptcy. Yeah. And some people who I interview in technology, they're like, we know, we know. I know I'm the marketing person. I know that our product doesn't really work. And that's why I want to leave because I feel like I'm a liar because I'm marketing stuff that I know is going to come back and slap me on the face. So I think it's a joint proposition actually, that side, that's where if you put the pressure on marketing to bring the revenue in with sales, then everybody contributing to that wrong IPC, close the deal regardless of the product. So one of the other problems is that because revenue is a is the end of the cycle and anything that you do, sometimes it takes a little bit of time to get to revenue. So how do we account for revenue that's happening right now versus revenue that we are working for in the future that maybe's not visible at the moment? Yeah. I think for me it's about having the pipeline rather than just looking at the revenue now and it's looking at the pipeline and the other attributes. And one of the biggest challenges I think marketeers face in this day and age is that because of AI and because of the ability to research, sometimes you don't even know your buyers are in the market buying right till the last minute. you know, they might, you I know when I'm buying software, I personally will, I won't, I'll either I'll look at it or Google a researcher. I'll only speak to the salesperson at the point of purchase because I don't want them to keep chasing me and it being harassing. I want to make an informed decision. And because I've also sold software in the past myself that when I've gone on and I've seen the person doing the demo or whatever, I'm almost like, I'm like, you know, they don't even know their product, I can tell, you know, and so I'd rather go and ask someone that's using it. So I think that's the big problem at the moment is that attribution, you know, is knowing when someone's actually ready to buy and spotting that. And that's why you need to have a long-term campaign. You know, I was, someone said it to me two years, about five or six years ago, I remember someone saying to me, I was hiring for a DemandGen role and the person said to me, Karen, like this company, they're small, they're going to go wrong if they're just going for DemandGen. And I was like, oh, okay. You know, like, and he was really passionate. He said, I've run a marketing business for like 20 years. and he said, it's two pillars, always brand awareness and always demand gen together. And one of them might be bigger need than the other at any time, but you need to be running both and you need to have a long-term, short-term campaign. So it's about things like our podcast that we do, that's our long-term game, isn't it? No one's going to listen to our podcast and phone us up and give us business that day, but it's about, well, maybe. But the thought leadership Please. side of things. And just having yourself out there in your mind and then constantly growing and touching those people as well as then obviously chasing down the bottom of the funnel and making sure the salesperson is not letting something slip because someone didn't follow that person up. If someone puts their hand up for a demo and then the salespeople don't respond, well, there we go, you've lost that client, haven't you? Think there's two interesting things I want to pick on there, Karen, if you don't mind. The first thing is the like it's it's this really weird thing where some people think that they can pick certain parts of marketing and just skip to the good part. And Ruta and I always say on this podcast, we're like, well, if we could just do that, if we could just turn on ads and generate demand, that's what we would do. but that is never, that's never that's highly unlikely. To actually to work. So that's the that's the first thing. and then I think the second thing as well is that it does go back into that sort of like, what do you consider? I think it's really dangerous when businesses sort of live and die by the sales cycle. So people will say the sales cycle's three months. And you're like, no, it's not. Because if you add on the marketing part of that, you could be adding 400 days. Said they want to buy something, it's three months. That's that's a very to like Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. how long they've been considering. Yeah, absolutely. And like how much nurture and how much energy and effort and the cost that's gone into that. I always find it really funny when people are like, yeah, the sales cycle's three months and I'm like, and what's the cost of acquisition? And they're like, What do you mean? And I'm like, Well, it's not just the salesperson's time, is it, that's gone into that? What did it actually cost from a marketing point of view? If you met someone at an event and they were in your fun if they were in the cycle, the funnel, the nurture sequences for four hundred plus days, that's not a cheap, quick thing that's happened. Well, in particular at the moment as well. Like if you go into an any insert your choice of AI tool right now and you say, How much does Riverside cost? Well, we actually know because Riverside have it on their website, so the information that comes back is fine. If that's not there, what do you think the L L M's gonna serve you up? It's gonna be people chatting shit about you on Reddit. So and how expensive you are or whatever, or how much you know, all of those sorts of things. So you really kind of are at the mercy then of the people who have been through your kind of like sales and marketing funnel and like Ruta says, if the information's not there, it's not great. so let's talk a bit about the politics between sales and marketing. Obviously I know we've touched on this already, but let's let's get into a little bit more. like what happens if there's kind of like no transparency or there are there is politics between sales and marketing? I the follow-up to that, Karen, is like what do you do if people aren't gonna share the information you need?'Cause you talked about an instance there of like a big business. not sharing information, but actually Ruta and I speak to a lot of one person marketing teams where they just can't get the information they need and a lot of that is blocked by the founder. So I'd love your take on that on that. The biggest thing about the politics and when it goes wrong is that people start to hate each other and then they start to think the person is a liar and they're cheating and then they start to not do it. And it could be that the salesperson, if it's a very small business, it could be that they've got their book of business. And they feel that if they work with marketing, they're going to feel that marketing are going to take them over and they're going to be made redundant. So, but if they can carry on being the hero to the CEO and have the ear of the then basically, fundamentally, that's why they're not going to work with the marketing team and they won't give it. So the main thing is building that trust up that, you know, we are working together. in partnership and basically, you know, almost celebrating the wins with the salesperson and proving your value. And I know a slightly larger company organization, the marketing person was being hired as head of marketing and he went into the business and he said, I'm, you know, joining, I'm having the first interview actually, the final interviews with the sales lead. And the sales lead came straight on and said, I don't really know why they've got me involved because I hate them, the marketing team. And he went, I know. he said, he said, okay. He said, why do you hate the marketing team? And he said, well, basically we went on to event and the marketing team refused to come to the event. So we went alone as a sales team. And basically we uploaded, we scanned all the stuff that was scanned. We uploaded it. We came back, we pumped it into the CRM. The marketing team looked at it and basically thought that it was not very And so they deleted it. So we lost all of our leads. So that's when things like that happen. I know. I mean, that is beyond insane behaviour. Misconduct like Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And funny, Yeah. well, it is, it is. So, and then this person, they phoned me up afterwards and said, did you realize it was that bad? And I was like, no, I had no idea that it was that bad in the organization. do know they were restructuring and I knew there was some stuff, but I didn't realize it was that bad. But hats off to the company for actually getting the salesperson talking to the future marketing person. and being really, really transparent and saying, you know, like, this is the problem I have with the company, rather than them coming in and it being like, he could come in, he could have waited three months for that information and wondered why they were giving them the cold shoulder. But instead, he came straight in and then what do think the very first thing he did? He turned up an event, didn't he? And he, you Yeah. know, made sure that sales and marketing software were together. you know, it was a really good example how he did build the bridges with them. It's really interesting though, because like I don't know, Ruta, you can you can agree or disagree with me, but I have obviously Ruta and I consult, so we go into a lot of different businesses. And generally we go in when the marketing's not worked quite the way it Like we're the kind of the cleanup crew. and generally the relationship with sales is quite sour, but I find there is more animosity on the sales side than the marketing side. I feel like there's a lot more willingness on the marketing side to repair bad damaged relationships than there is on the sales side. I feel like when I've encountered a lot of sales leaders, some of which have not then lasted the course due to the attitude. it's definitely been like, why would we listen to what you guys say and what you guys think because we're the ones that make the money. You know, there's that there's that kind of mentality. just interested in your guys' take on that in particular because obviously like we don't believe that, we believe like it's a it like we both collaborate and we both contribute. But when there is that attitude, what would you do? Yeah, and I think it does, it really depends. The big piece here is the founder. So the founder Yeah. is the person who can resolve this. if the founder, you know, is always, and the founder needs to accept this, but if the founder's always, you know, they believe in sales and they've always gone, well, this person has always been the one that's bought in the three million, you know, a year, and they've done that. And if we lose that person, then basically our business is going to be wrong already. that's the balance that they're going to be going into with the company and all the decisions they're going to make about marketing. They're going to have that balance. So the founder really does need to say, you know, that they really need to make the salesperson feel secure, but they also need to make them feel that basically it's going to be beneficial when they're going to make more money and they're going to do more deals and it's going to be more of a team. But it's been very hard if the founder, you know, and some founders I've worked in a company where I sold software and the founder used to regularly say to me, right, you better beat this person this month, you better beat that person or I'm sure you're going better than that. And he'd be like saying, and he'd be telling me personal things about the other person as though like they were my competition. And I was almost like, I don't really care Yeah. about anybody else. I just care about my, know, selfishly, my commission scheme, me building up my business for my company. If I had a marketing person who would help me, I would be delighted. And actually I was a high performer in their business. So really they should have wanted people more like me in their company, whereas I think they get to a point where some people in anyway I've waffled on too much. No, no. Carry on. We like it. Yeah, very quick. With the salespeople it's that side, it's the salespeople... It's to do with how sales are remunerated and how the CEO and the sales team all work together basically is a fundamental factor Yeah, no, no. and also understanding that also don't get the marketing team doing disrespectful things. Yeah. you know, I had someone, another person phoned me and they said, I'm not very happy I've been here for weeks. And I said, gosh, okay, that's quite short. What's happened? And they said, well, I basically joined as a global organisation organisation, you wouldn't believe this. I owned a global organisation and I've been asked to book the sales team's event. All of the admin around the event, I was booking their hotel, I've been doing their research, I've been filling in their expense claim forms and she said, you know, I'm not getting time to do my stuff, I'm being paid £120,000 a year and you know, this is a senior I'm doing the admin that they could get someone to do. understand why. I did I did leave a job, didn't I, router after six months for the same reason. So I was basically just ordering swag and I was like, I am a senior marketer, I'm not here to order swag for people. That's not my job. ~ so I I Yeah. I can kind of I can understand when that happens. I I've also got a really good example of where I was working with a CRO who basically said to me when I joined the organization, as director of marketing, you your job is to generate the leads. You don't need to like you don't need to do anything else. I'm not interested in anything else you want to do. Just generate the leads and hand them over to sales and let me worry about it. Meanwhile the sales team were having nervous breakdowns, people were off on like literally off work unwell That's right. Yeah. from for for mental health reasons. they obviously weren't you know like producing the kind of like conversions and demos and things like that that they needed to do because she was just hounding them. They didn't follow up on leads, she was messaging them within about two minutes, being like, That lead's not been followed up on. You know, really kind of micromanaging and like making everyone's lives very difficult, but at the same time, you know, really pushing the marketing team away. and you know, that person did end up exiting the business after a few conversations. But I I think I really tried my best. What I what I wanted to say was I had to take the attitude of I need to be squeaky clean. So I can't fight this is not I'm a Gemini. We love to fight fire with fire. We just do. But I was like, this is not one of those times. This is one of those times where I have to present myself as like the picture of I will do everything by the absolute book, every process is documented, I have got all of the email receipts. I have, you know, I'm doing everything that I possibly can to be, you know, the best marketing director possible. So that then when I go to the CEO and I have a conversation with them about this person and the damage that this person is potentially going to cause to the reputation of the business, I am squeaky clean. So yeah, I just I wanted to share that because I think a lot of people feel like that's a hopeless scenario and it's not. But you do then have to kind of have to play the game. I don't know if that's a fair way to put it. And I really appreciate Karen that you said like it is the CEOs or the founder's job to make sure that relationship is the way it's supposed to And if it's not, then it is for them to make sure that, you know, everything is done and everything is as fair and as as as it can be. Emma's example is really good though because I think what you did is you you didn't just blow up and say, You and do that. You basically said, right, I'm building my case up, I'm building my evidence, I'm showing what's going well, I'm showing what isn't, and then you went to that person. And sometimes a CEO might not even realise because, you know, they've always had the, the sales team, the sales team, they didn't realise that. And then they realise the bigger picture and they can see it and they could, it depends on whether they've got a learning attitude and they're willing to listen. And I think it's always worth your own mentality, having a shot and going and doing that. And if they don't listen, then you've got your decision and you probably know that nothing's ever going to change in that business. But I think evoking change and trying is also a learning curve for you, isn't it? Because you're learning Yeah. how to tackle someone in another company and situation. being uncomfortable is not a reason not to do something. But you've got to have the I think that the the most important thing is that you've got to have the receipts. You've got to like build up the case. Like if there's a real if there is no hope for the relationship, like if the sales and marketing relationship has broken down so far that un you know, it's unfixable, and you're sure it's not on your side, you had better have the evidence to back that up because that conversation is not a pleasant one with a CEO or a founder, because naturally when you go to them and you say, This is my concern, you've got to you've got to have like the justification for that conversation, which I did in the case. and also I I really did lean into what the CEO and the founder cared about. Like he cared about the reputation of his of his business because of what they did. I know a lot a lot do, but but others will be a little bit like, yeah, but they are salespeople. They couldn't, you know, there's more flexibility. Whereas with this business, there's absolutely no no justification for that of behaviour because of what they delivered. from a service perspective. So yeah, you really do have to make sure you have that information to hand. equally I think one of the things that I quite enjoy doing is setting up reporting and then if the reporting at the end can't show the path through to pipeline and revenue, that again is a conversation starter. So if you're like, I have mapped up until this point and now I don't know. And you sit down in a room with everybody, I would include the C CFO and and people like that in that conversation because they're always very interested in the numbers. and say, I've got a huge gap. Like, can you help me get this information? CFO might be a route around that if there's a problem getting that Yeah, and Always funny enough, I don't know if you know the B2B Engage event, they did a survey and they said one of the things that most marketing people feel weak on is their commercial acumen. And so that's one of the weaker areas that most marketers have and that basically, you know, it's the area to work on that area. They don't feel that that's... they kind of went to marketing to be creative and they don't identify as someone that needs commercial acumen but if you want to go up the ranks and stay with a company, improve value and marketing and revenue which is what we've talked about for this call, it has to be commercial acumen all the way. but the thing is you can align I I will say this much. I was not someone who had that necessarily. I used to work in partnerships, so I've worked in sales and things. So you do you do have that more commercial side to your thinking when you've worked in those sorts of jobs previously. But I w when I moved across into pure marketing, I don't necessarily think I did that did. But Ruta genuinely did show me the way. Ruta was like, No, no, no, no, no. This is what we care about. And so I do think, you know, you can align yourself with people in the in a business if it if you're even if you're the only marketer that do care about that stuff and just learn. So thank you for thank for talking to us about being commercial and budget and working towards revenue. I think that's all great points. And if you learn something on this podcast then we're really, really happy. but to round up, to to finish in the blame on marketing fashion, we'd love to ask you about any marketing gossip that you have for us. So anything that you love or you hate or just you can't get out of your head either way. AI, everybody keeps saying AI is going to take over marketing people and actually most of the time I say no it's not but recently I had an example of a a CEO, a founder who basically did actually really ruin things for the marketing team because basically after six months of someone joining the business implementing a marketing campaign they weren't getting results enough so the C... EO went on to Claude and basically asked Claude what they should do and basically not only did they do two things, they Claude what they should do and basically it came up with just outreach to your whole database, one email and send it out. So there we go, well done to AI, I don't think you're going to be stealing a marketing job there. Great advice of that, thank you. Yeah. And then the other thing they did is the person was interviewing for an events person so he then took the transcript from the previous interview and the person's CV and asked Claude should be this person and and Claude came back and said no. So you know you know AI it really you know some people I mean that's one of the most extreme examples someone's ever given me of AI.~ Yeah, like literally, Yeah. you know, crazy about basically, you know, AI, don't worry, I think none of us are going to have to fear because if people are using AI in that mentality, okay, it might be like a short term nightmare for this situation, but people are never going to go forward if they're asking AI and making stupid decisions by it. I caught I caught that as I was frantically trying to answer the door, so I apologize. But it is insane the amount of people using it to especially in particular to give feedback on stuff that needs human input. Also the people that use that like dump something into chat and then ask it for feedback are the people that shouldn't be using AI because they don't understand how context windows work. And it's like you will get nothing out of this. The answers you get out of this isn't has nothing to do with with actual information that you need because you have not given it the right context to actually be able to do the job that you want it to do. And it just blows my mind. What I don't understand is why so many people have outsourced their actual thinking to AI. Like why like you d Yeah. Who wants to go through a whole website and give feedback? Nobody. The yeah, but the default is you know better. Should be you know better. And then you Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. use AI to like, you know, summarise or whatever. Yeah, dropped going, basically. Yeah. Yeah, like so worrying. Yeah, I only use AI for admin really, mostly for admin stuff, stuff finding things, Yeah, yes, same. Yeah. sorting things. Like I know some point in this conversation I said blank, can you find it? Where is it? Or, you know, can you go back? I know I said this to this person, I can't remember what it was. What was their name? You know, things like that that I use it for and, you know, bits and pieces. But most of the stuff, you know, I never use it for an ultimate decision point because I have tried it and invariably it's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much Karen. I think that was you've you came with so many great examples, Karen's links will be in the show notes. go connect with her and listen to the podcast as well. thank you so much and we'll see you on the next one.