Episode 14 Transcript | Tracy Thayne of Digital Exhaust

Peter Stevenson

Welcome to buy subject, the silicon slopes brand and marketing podcast. I’m your host Peter Stevenson. I’m here with my co host Alicia Smith, managing partner at modernate and agency. And our guest today is Tracy Thane, co founder and director of strategy at digital exhaust. Welcome.

Tracy Thayne

Hey. Thank you.

Peter Stevenson

So tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re where you grew up, what’s your path into the world?

Tracy Thayne

Oh, path into the world?

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Tracy Thayne

Well, I come out of northeastern Utah, actually.

Peter Stevenson

Really?

Tracy Thayne

From the una basin. Grew up on a farm there, worked construction most of my what kind of farming? Alfalfa. Really? Of course.

Peter Stevenson

Talk about that anymore.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, the biggest problem to our water issues here in Utah, but, yeah, cattle farm. Cattle ranch as well.

Peter Stevenson

Amazing. And then so then you mentioned construction. So you got into construction. What kind of construction?

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, my father owned a construction company, and so I spent my young years learning how to run backhoes excavators. So until I was probably 20 years old, I worked in construction, building dams, freeways, all kinds of things.

Peter Stevenson

That’s amazing. So you got to work, like, big construction equipment from a pretty young age, like, how old were you?

Tracy Thayne

Started when I was probably 14.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, wow.

Tracy Thayne

Running my dad’s equipment and then worked on union projects, running everything from front end loaders, big haul trucks, name it.

Alysha Smith

Do those skills carry over now? Do you get to apply those skills anytime in your life these days?

Tracy Thayne

That’s a really good question. I can tell you that. When I need to relax, I’ll go get on one of my dad’s excavators, and it just clears my head. So I go out, work on his ranch a little bit with him.

Peter Stevenson

So you still have the same ranch up where you grew up?

Tracy Thayne

Yes, same ranch. It was a ranch that my grandfather homesteaded when he was young and was handed down to my father and some of my uncles and aunts. And now we have that farm.

Peter Stevenson

That’s amazing. What a fun childhood. Hardworking, but fun.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah. And I think that’s probably where this all applies to marketing, right. Probably not the equipment operator, but in terms of hard work, that’s always been something that I guess I pride myself on.

Alysha Smith

Right.

Peter Stevenson

Amazing. Okay, so you did construction till you route 20, and then what?

Tracy Thayne

When I was right around 20, I decided that I wanted in fact, I did a ceremonial burning of my boots and everything.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, really?

Tracy Thayne

I need to get out of construction. I want to do something fun. And so I joined a little company called word perfect.

Peter Stevenson

What year was that? We’re going to date you a little bit.

Tracy Thayne

Well, I don’t know the year, but I was supporting word perfect 3.2.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

And so the dos based word processing.

Peter Stevenson

So how many people were there with.

Alysha Smith

The Ashton, and how did you get into it?

Tracy Thayne

Well, that’s a really good question, too, because I was putting natural gas into the Word Perfect campus. So I was running a backhoe, and they had one building. So Word Perfect had one building at the time. And I told my supervisor, one of these days I’m going to work for that company, and he just laughed at me. He said, yeah, that’ll never happen. You’re a ditch digger, and you just got to accept that. So I would say probably three years later, I had been working for them in their customer support department for about two years, and then I got a job as a sales exec at Word Perfect. At Word Perfect. So they moved me from just kind of understanding the product to out in the field in Dayton, Ohio, where I was a sales guy, forward Perfect.

Alysha Smith

So I have two follow up questions to that. When you were on that excavator backco, or whatever you call it, what was it about it that made that was intriguing to you?

Tracy Thayne

The building was beautiful.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

And the people driving up in their cars, and here I was just covered in dirt, and I just thought, there’s got to be something.

Alysha Smith

Working your way from what were you doing? At first?

Tracy Thayne

The customers.

Peter Stevenson

Customers?

Alysha Smith

Yeah. So how did you support like, how did you move up how did you move up to that position?

Tracy Thayne

Well, I learned how to turn on a computer just to get that job.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Tracy Thayne

So I had no idea anything about technology. I studied a 3.2 dos manual, studied a Word Perfect manual, and went in, turned on this IBM machine, got the job. But I really connected with technology, and within a year, I was already looking at becoming a macro developer. So kind of on the development side. But then I realized, no, I don’t like development. I can do it a little bit, but I don’t like it. So I took a hard right and went out into sales.

Peter Stevenson

And so you landed in sales in Ohio. And so what was the area that you were covering?

Tracy Thayne

I covered all of Cincinnati, Dayton, Ohio, into Lexicon, Kentucky, as well as Evansville, Indiana. So it was kind of a little tri state region right there.

Peter Stevenson

And Evansville, that’s a college town, right?

Tracy Thayne

It is. There’s University, I believe. University of Miami. No, that’s in Ohio. Miami of Ohio.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

But across the border.

Peter Stevenson

Sure.

Tracy Thayne

Evansville is known for caskets, of all things. They were one of our clients.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. You would know all the different stuff that was being sold in that area.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, I worked with one of my clients. Was Chiquita Banana Republic, Ohio. Yeah, right.

Alysha Smith

Not Hawaii.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, not Costa Rica. Cincinnati, Ohio.

Peter Stevenson

Amazing. So, okay, so you jump into sales, and did you love it?

Tracy Thayne

No, I hate it.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

I am the worst sales guy in the world. It was really about relationships and not hard selling, but back in those days, it was all about hard selling. I guess it always has been for salespeople, but I just did not align to that. I like to talk to people, build relationships. I didn’t like to sell them things.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, so you dove into that and you hated it, but you were there.

Tracy Thayne

Did well, did really well. Hated it, but really loved the technology. Novell came in and purchased word perfect. And so part of that acquisition, I was brought in.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so the Novell acquisition of Word Perfect, you were brought in where, back from Ohio?

Tracy Thayne

Well, I was doing sales and then a position opened up in Utah on the marketing team.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

And so I’m like, I’m all over this, I want to go back to Utah anyway. But unfortunately I didn’t get the job. Oh, no, I went anyway. Got involved in a little company called Novonics, which was a startup developed by Mark Andreessen at Netscape and Novell to really develop Internet capabilities. With Novell and getting involved there, I got involved heavily on the marketing side.

Peter Stevenson

So how big was that company when you jumped on? Was it a small startup at that point?

Tracy Thayne

Small startup. There probably were five developers and maybe three or four salespeople and a couple of marketers.

Peter Stevenson

Was this your first marketing role then?

Tracy Thayne

It was my first marketing.

Alysha Smith

And what was it about marketing that seemed intriguing?

Tracy Thayne

That’s also a good question. What I hated about sales is I had to figure out how to sell to people. And the tools were the packages that were given to me from the marketing team. Never worked. It was usually we called the Fantastic Five or Sacred Seven or whatever. It was just like a brochure, a flyer, a presentation of this or that, and they never worked. And so I was building my own kind of engagement campaigns at a really early time before marketers were really doing that.

Alysha Smith

I’d love to hear an example of what that was. What was something that was different that you created to make your job easier?

Tracy Thayne

So where it started was so I had a big responsibility for resellers. Novell leveraged heavily third party resellers to really drive their products into market. And so in Cincinnati specifically, I had a really strong base of resellers. The thing about resellers, though, is you always have to stay in front of them. So I probably had maybe 100 or so resellers that I had to stay in front of. Novell had acquired Word Perfect, and in the process had also acquired GroupWise, which was an email marketing package that was actually a little more intelligent than most tools out there. And so I was able to start using that and using rules and macros and things like that to queue up drip campaigns. So this is way before marketing automation ever became a thing. I was already creating kind of a series of communications with timed cadences that would go out to my base of partners. That’s where I really got started.

Alysha Smith

So you invented marketing automation.

Tracy Thayne

I guess I kind of am the godfather of marketing automation in a way.

Peter Stevenson

Well, that’s unbelievable. How did you figure that out that that was something you wanted to do? Were you just like, I have to send 100 emails and I don’t want to do all of them automatically?

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, it’s pretty much that. And with the background that I had in feature support of Word Perfect and also having used GroupWise from the very beginning of its from the very beginning I knew how to use the functionality and I also had kind of a programming background where I could get in and do a few things with it that most people in Ms Dos yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Type in macros, backslash, bass, Run, comma, all that stuff. Yeah, I remember those days. I first learned to code on that when I was like eight, seven, maybe even younger than that, I think back now and I was like, how did I get anything to do anything? That’s a crazy language.

Tracy Thayne

It really is.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so you go into marketing and did you love it?

Tracy Thayne

I loved it from the very beginning, although I didn’t really understand it.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. Okay.

Tracy Thayne

Because I just did it my way. Right. I remember the first time. So this company, Novonics, got pulled back into Novell.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

And so I was then on the Internet marketing team. There was no Internet marketing team at Novell before this. So having that background of the Andreessen Netscape background, they brought me in to really focus on, they called it Internet Marketing at the time, but that’s where I focused.

Peter Stevenson

And did you report up to a CMO or how did they pull you into the marketing team?

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, I did. The CMO at Novell at that time was Darren Richens, just an incredible man, and I think it was more of a sympathy kind of guy. Let’s put this guy in. Don’t know what to do with him. And I learned a lot. I mean, I remember him talking about below the fold and I’m like, I don’t even know what that means, but I’m going to pretend I do and just have this conversation. But he did end up hiring me and asking me to lead this Internet marketing group.

Peter Stevenson

So what was Internet marketing like at this point? What were the channels that you were using? What were you thinking about doing? What options did you have?

Tracy Thayne

Well, if you recall with Novell, novell did not have a great protocol for Internet. Right. So everything was going down the IP path. TCP IP.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

And so really what our intention was, is how do we make Novell NetWare and Novell tools and technologies appear to be and feel more Internet or online friendly.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Tracy Thayne

And there was a lot of development going into these tools to give it that capability. And our responsibility is get that out to market.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, as an Internet marketer, what were you doing?

Tracy Thayne

Mostly product marketing okay, so it’s taking all of these technologies and making them or preparing them for people to understand how they would support their Internet needs.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah. So it’s mostly product marketing, mob product.

Peter Stevenson

Marketing type of stuff. So then where do you go from there? So you’re at Novell for how long?

Tracy Thayne

Well, all told, I mean, with the word perfect in Novell, it’s over ten years. Twelve years. So it’s quite a while there.

Peter Stevenson

And so did you take on additional responsibilities at Novell, or what did you do as well, besides Internet marketing?

Tracy Thayne

Yeah. Over time took on more responsibility. At one point was responsible for all of NetWare marketing. Okay. So again, it was something that I really loved. I became really excited about. I love technology, but I stayed incredibly focused on Internet type of technologies. And during the time, Novell was trying to figure out how do we become more relevant in that space? And so as a part of a for lack of a better way of describing a tiger team responsible for going out and looking at potential acquisitions that would give us more capabilities in the Internet space. And that’s when we went out. And I was part of the team that evaluated Susalinx out of Nuremberg, Germany, and eventually supported that acquisition.

Peter Stevenson

It seems like there’s been a huge portion of, your know, at Novell that was in strategy, not in just know. Is that true? Were you leaned on heavily there in some strategy roles, too?

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is because I was very technology forward. I love technology. And I would say back in the old days of marketing, a lot of marketers were I mean, think about it, we were responsible for T shirts and coffee mugs. Right? So it went from being a group of people that creative, of course, got involved in making sure events went off without a hitch.

Peter Stevenson

Sure.

Tracy Thayne

That launches, product launches were cool and exciting to where I really stood was, how do I actually use technology to drive better engagement and to really I’ve always been about creating demand, because going back to my sales roots, I felt like I didn’t have that support from marketing. And so my whole purpose as being a marketer is how do I enable and empower these salespeople with the things they actually need? And how do I really support the partner community with tools and information as funny.

Peter Stevenson

You know, you were recommended to come on this podcast introduced by Jen Jenki, and she shared almost the exact same, know, hated sales, but loved the idea of making salespeople the heroes. That idea, it’s really interesting how much the best marketers that we’ve had an opportunity to talk to all have come from sales and hated it. And then realized, well, I just want to make salespeople’s jobs easier. And now that’s what they do.

Tracy Thayne

We.

Peter Stevenson

Try to do well. Yeah, you can’t always succeed. Of course. Okay, so you’re at Novell, you end up there about ten years and then where to next?

Tracy Thayne

So then I jumped from Novell and went to HP.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

And to your point about strategy, I was involved in really helping craft Novell’s response to this real big push into more of the internet space. Right. And there were some acquisitions made, some things done, but I think that Novell was always tormented by this idea that they have this cash cow and NetWare and anything that we sold that was like Open Source or Linux enabled represented a lot less revenue.

Peter Stevenson

Revenue, yeah.

Tracy Thayne

And so there was always this challenge that they were really struggling with and I realized that and I was really excited about digital and online.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

I mean, I’ve always really jumped into the forefront of things and so I found out that HP was looking for someone to help drive Open Source and Linux strategy from a go to market perspective. So I jumped at the opportunity and enjoyed that for a few years.

Peter Stevenson

And so did you end up in California then?

Tracy Thayne

I commuted into California quite a bit, but I stayed here in Utah.

Peter Stevenson

So you started to do the work from home thing?

Tracy Thayne

Work from home thing, but I spent more time in California than I did. Right, of course, just on a plane like every Friday and Sunday.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, and so what was that like? You’re in the Bay Area in the 90s, late 90s?

Tracy Thayne

Yes. Well, actually kind of early 2000.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so what was that like? What was that area like? What was it like being in Utah, working for a California company? What was that experience?

Tracy Thayne

Know, it was a little bit overwhelming to be honest. My team, so I had a team of people and they were distributed around the know, think about it, Linux and Open Source was not HP’s primary products. What we had to do is come up with a way, how can we prove that the work that we’re doing around Open Source and Linux is actually going to lead to growth for HP? So we put a lot of different measures in place and the big thing we wanted to track is what is the attached revenue associated with our efforts around Open Source and Linux. So we were able to track the number of servers that were being sold and where maybe Red Hat or Sousa or any other kind of Linux sat in that environment. And within a few years we were able to recognize that this little group, this little division was driving in the neighborhood of close to 10 billion in revenue attached revenue.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

All that hardware and software and services added on to what is typically not.

Peter Stevenson

Free, but all the combo meals essentially exactly of what you’re doing. And this was your team that was running it? You were running strategy for this team that was generating yeah, I worked for.

Tracy Thayne

Someone who ran the team. This team was responsible for a lot of different types of technology, kind of leading edge technology. And my responsibility was all open source and Linux.

Peter Stevenson

What was open source like? You mentioned Red Hat was around at that point. And what was open source and Linux community like in the Bay area at that time?

Tracy Thayne

Very strong. And in fact, I would say even here in Utah it was really strong. Open source has always been interesting to me because it provides accessibility to organizations who may not have the ability to do everything by themselves. So I’ve always really enjoyed that. Even in my own kind of startups and efforts, I look at opportunities where I can leverage something that the community has put out there and that we can use. I mean, you look at what’s going on with AI today, there’s huge communities of folks that are most of this is very much open source and everyone’s working on it together.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, I don’t want to dive into AI because that’ll get us off for an hour or two. Okay. But I do want to jump ahead to what you’re working on now and maybe we can work our way backwards to some of your roles between now and then. But tell us about digital exhaust and what you’re working on today. How long ago did you found it? What are you doing?

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, so digital exhaust is it was conceived seven years ago.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

When you think about building personas, buyer personas. Yeah. I have been brought into organizations wanting a buyer persona. And at times I could charge upwards of 125,000 for a fully built out buyer persona. Documented. That would be the moment I handed it over, it would already be out of date. Right. So seven years ago, my good friend Carlos Hidalgo and I were talking about digital personas. Like, how can we create a persona that’s dynamic and that we’re using AI and bots and all kinds of things to continually update these personas. And so seven years ago we got started. We were building bots and scrapers and all kinds of things because when you think about a persona, a persona has relevance across the entire business arc. Right. So from a strategy and business perspective, you’re trying to build products that these personas will buy. And so there is a cut of a persona that needs to be understood at a business level. And then you get into product development and now you have to understand how these personas are going to use the technology or use the solution that you’re planning. So there’s facet of a persona there. Again, going through sales, marketing and even customer service, everyone uses a persona. But what everyone was doing is marketing would have meek build one. The product and development teams would probably go hire another consultant to come in and build a persona for them. So they were all looking at different things. We went down the road of building digital persona that actually was dynamic and would self update seven years ago. And then we launched this business two months ago.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, wow.

Tracy Thayne

With what we have just going back seven years, the technology was not available. Everything was brute force. Everything we built, the crawlers, the scrapers, everything was just so brute force and difficult. Therefore, it was pretty expensive. So it was very hard to find any buyers for our digital persona. Right?

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Tracy Thayne

But now with where technology is, it’s all magically there. So all the advancements happened in the last seven years has made this possible. So digital exhaust, we’re able to do things like go out and look at an individual, see what they’re doing online. So we kind of suck up all their digital exhaust. Everywhere you go, you’re leaving traces of yourself. Sure, we suck that all up and we can analyze that. We’re looking at things that are untraditional, so we’re looking for other types of buying attributes. We can determine someone’s cognitive style based on what we are able to pull in and analyze so we can tell whether you are conceptual minded or whether you’re really structured. Right. And so think about how that applies then to go to market. If I can look at your prospect database and I can segment them into groups of cognitive style, all of a sudden, I can be hyper personalized in my approach to marketing to them. Because we found through all of our studies that decisions aren’t made. Or you can’t predict how a decision is going to be made based on someone’s role.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

You can predict how a decision is going to be made based on their personality and cognitive style. So that’s what we look at. We pull all this information in. We can enrich your contact data with these key pieces of information so that when you build your campaigns, your campaigns can be built very much contextually and in a way that when I approach you, I’m approaching you on the way you problem solve, not on the way I think you should problem solve.

Alysha Smith

Fascinating. Did you moonlight doing this for a while or for the last seven years?

Tracy Thayne

We had it on ice a little bit and then now with the technology that’s available, we are partnering with some great platforms out there that are already available. No sense in recreating everything from ground up. We were able to scrap a lot of the heavy lifting that we were doing and really take on some of these other technologies that folks have been working on. But in terms of really cognitive style, all the modeling and the algorithms that go into all of that, that’s where we add significant value. Right. So we’re able to build these models and deploy these models on our machine learning platforms and really give insights to people that they haven’t had access to before.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, it sounds a little bit like some of the stuff that was coming out of those mid 2010s Facebook poll days of, like, we’re going to tell you everybody’s five factor personality test. Right? Is it sort of like next level about that kind of data that you’re pulling? Like, helping people to understand their specific personality test and then understanding all of those other buyer input data sets? Is that kind of the idea?

Tracy Thayne

That is the idea now. It’s been augmented quite a bit, though. So when you think about the various personality types, right, personality can lead you toward understanding cognitive style. Sure, but it’s not going to give you the full clue. So working with other people who have been studying neuroscience and just cognition for years and years, we’re taking a lot of that knowledge, and we’re building it into our models so that we can have the benefit of both. Maybe a hybrid of the different personality types that have been put in, kind of pulled together, but then augmenting it with that cognitive science. Right.

Peter Stevenson

It’s such an interesting idea that you came about. Like, I’m charging a lot of money for these personality for these buyer personas, and now I’m going to make them cheaper. So why do that? What was the drive of taking something that you clearly were very successful at and turning it into something that is going to be a little bit more democratic?

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, well, what it comes down to is the old way of doing personas doesn’t work, right? And I think that it’s becoming more and more obvious. And so instead of perpetuating that problem, it’s like, how do we create an environment that’s going to just automatically update and upgrade your buyer personas? I mean, when you think about little things like if you’re looking at, say, cybersecurity, as you’re looking at various decision makers around cybersecurity decision, that world changes so quickly. And you think about the regulations that are being added across around the world. Right. What we wanted to do is find a way that when something impacted a buyer persona, that it would automatically be fed into our environment. And then recommendations could go out to anyone who maybe had subscribed to that persona. So a recommendation would be, hey, this new regulation passed in France, and therefore here are some speaking points that you probably should go out to all of your clients about. And if you know their cognitive style, you want to approach it this way versus that way so that you don’t create any kind of panic.

Peter Stevenson

Man okay, this is fascinating. So maybe if you could maybe give the listeners a couple of points about how to go about building their own buyer personas if they haven’t done that before, what is it? Something a simple couple of three or.

Tracy Thayne

Four questions that they should do in building buyer personas? The one thing you cannot get away from, I think, is being able to do your qualitative research. So a lot of AI tools and deep learning, machine learning, type of capabilities will give you a lot of the demographics, fermographics, just kind of those elements. But what those all lack would be really being able to fill the gaps and really understand. When do you get involved in a purchasing decision? How large is the buying group? We know that B, two B buying groups are real and that it’s on average seven to ten people are involved in a purchase decision. Right? And so think about that for a second. Seven different personalities, maybe of that four or five different cognitive styles. And I’m supposed to get them all convinced at the same time, right. So part of what we do is when we look at buyer personas, we also want to look at the larger group of buyer, that committee, that buying committee interesting. And we’re able to kind of understand, and this is typically from a role perspective, what their responsibility is to that decision, what information are they presenting. Because everyone kind of has their own facet, their own lens that they’re looking through, so that when they come together and share their perspectives, they can come to the best decision. But what I’m getting back to is that that quantitative research is really important because it gives you an opportunity to actually talk to your audience and really validate everything you’re talking about.

Peter Stevenson

So doing one on one or small group interviews with focus group focus groups with those buyers?

Tracy Thayne

Yes, absolutely. We still do that and there’s no getting around that. Now in order to add kind of that cognitive style personality layer, AI is helping us get there a lot better. So when you think about psychographics, psychographics are actually more important than demographics when it comes to understanding a buyer.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, we talk about that a lot with buyers. Like with our customers, that the age of the person buying the gender, the race almost has very little to do with the buying decision, but there are other factors that are way more important in a buying decision. So those psychographic ideas for sure.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah. And the other thing that we’re able to do using the technology, again, I’m big into data and technology, but using the technology, you’re able to understand how close they are to a purchasing decision. Now when someone is really knowledgeable about a topic, the jargon they use is also you can tell, right, if they’re not using the right words, they’re kind of early in their journey and they’re just trying to make sense of status quo. So we’re in status quo, we know we have problems, we need to make a change, but we don’t quite know where to go. And so that’s why marketing campaigns do done. Right. You’re kind of giving them higher level information at first, but you’re getting very detailed later on in the journey. Now using the AI tools and things like that, we’re able to listen to what the words that they’re using online and we know. Are they further along in the process because of the words that are they’re more educated? The more educated the more educated they are, the more knowledgeable they are. And you can also tell whether or not their understanding aligns with, I guess, your brand promise or your brand ideals. Right. And you also would be able to tell where do I need to reeducate a little bit to get them more in line with our solution being kind of that default?

Peter Stevenson

Is anybody using this tool for account based marketing? Like very specific, like this organization? That organization. Tell me about this specific person.

Tracy Thayne

Absolutely.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Tracy Thayne

In fact, what we’re able to do with technology today, it’s pretty simple. Anyone can do it is really augmenting their contact list with everyone in the buying group and then being able to then parse that out and get very personalized in the play or the approach that you make. So these technologies and tools are absolutely what is needed for ABM to actually work.

Peter Stevenson

I can’t even imagine the ability and how successful ABM will be with this type of data, this type of analysis going into it. Are there other companies doing similar work as this? Or do you feel like it’s a pretty competitive marketplace for you or are you kind of solo in this?

Tracy Thayne

I think it’s very competitive. I think there are a lot of solutions out there. And you look at some of these account based platforms like Six Sense and Terminus Demandbase, all these tools are really grabbing hold of AI and utilizing it in support of their approach to account based marketing. I would say where we sort of stand out is that all of those platforms kind of give you intent data at an account level. What it doesn’t give you is all of the other things that we are delivering, which is cognitive style, personality. So how does the individual align to that purchasing decision and how is their engagement and how is that engagement aligned to the intent of the account? So we’re adding more information into that so that if you have a customer data platform, a CDP, you’re able to pull in all of those different data sources, evaluate it, and have that much more enlightenment. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges to marketers today.

Peter Stevenson

Right?

Tracy Thayne

There are all these platforms, right? And these platforms are generating incredible amounts of data, but what are they doing with it?

Peter Stevenson

I mean, mostly nothing. Mostly nothing because it’s hard and confusing and you really do need somebody to have the knowledge about what to do with it. And there are not very many people who do know. There are young kids who decided to figure it out and then some marketers like yourself who’ve developed tools, but then you’re trying to figure out which tool is the right one and then you get stuck in like, well, I don’t know which one, so maybe I’ll pick none. That’s kind of where we’re at. So we got only a couple more minutes here. But I do want to know what kind of companies should be reaching out to you. What kind of marketers should you hear from to try to utilize these tools?

Tracy Thayne

I think the short answer to that is anyone who needs to know how to utilize their data better.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

Right. Because what we’re trying to do is provide a service and a platform that is accessible. I enjoy working with mid market, smaller organizations. Mid market mean, over my career, I’ve worked with so many big companies. I used to head up global Demand generation for Schneider Electric out of Paris.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

So this is a I don’t know what they are now, but probably a 70 billion euro company.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Tracy Thayne

Right. And so the challenge with some of these big organizations is that there’s just so much red tape, there’s just so many groups, and being able to access that data is difficult. Right. It’s crazy how difficult it is to access data.

Peter Stevenson

Sure.

Tracy Thayne

Mid market organizations that don’t have all of the complexity and all of the little fiefdoms that are involved are just so much easier to work with. So we really enjoy working with smaller organizations, getting them a good, solid foundation, and help them become more data driven.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Tracy Thayne

At Schneider Electric, I think I was one of the only executives, marketing executives in the world that had my own data science team.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

And I learned early that having access to data and then using it the way that a data scientist uses it to identify opportunities rather than look in the review, what did we do right or wrong? And so early on in my career, I’ve just always been focused on the data. So that’s what we offer. We offer a more affordable and flexible way of gaining access, or at least gaining access to the insights of your data.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

As long as an organization has this data, has it accessible, we can really help them.

Peter Stevenson

That’s amazing. And we skipped a lot of years of your incredible career.

Tracy Thayne

I’m old, so that’s okay.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. Well, I was just too fascinated by the early part and the end part. We skipped over anything, but any interesting stories from the middle part of your career that you think would be that you’re like, oh, I love this story. I should tell this one.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah. Other than going back to Jen, there was a part of my career, I think, that I really wanted to pass on all of this information that I was learning. And so I became more of a mentor. I didn’t like doing the marketing job.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Tracy Thayne

I wanted to be a mentor. I wanted to help marketers. And so I look at all the marketers that I’ve worked with and no credit to myself. I feel like I’ve given them the opportunity to really think about things differently, but really support their interest in really growing and becoming different from a lot of the mainstream marketers out there. So during kind of that middle part of my career, I ran into people like Jen Heather at Canopy, other people, adam Gunn, pluralsight, I don’t know if you know him, but just some really amazing people. And when I Crystal Lee Webbeck comic mean, these people were just amazing people and I recognized that and gave them all kinds of opportunities. I think I have I’m going to take little credit for this, but I think that I have at least four CMOS, two CEOs, and probably ten or twelve heads of marketing that I worked with when they were in their early days. And I just love giving opportunities to young people, give them a chance to really shine.

Alysha Smith

When you were giving these opportunities, was it all kind of under within the organization that you were working for? Did you do something outside of your nine to five to give these mentorships or was it all just within where you were?

Tracy Thayne

It was mostly within where I worked. My network is not in Utah, so with my career I’ve been all over the world and so I would say that the majority of the marketers that I’ve worked with are not here. It’s only the few little stops that I made. Market star at in contact was a place that I stopped for a moment expert voice, I stopped for a hot second. But in all of these areas is where I ran into these amazing people in my career with HP and Schneider electric, those folks are all scattered all over the world and I didn’t really go outside of just my own backyard every time.

Alysha Smith

And what did that look like for setting up these kind of mentorships? Was it like you said, giving them opportunities? But what were those opportunities like? Or how did you do know?

Tracy Thayne

It was super casual at first and it was more just witnessing a passion or a desire or an interest. Travis Clemens, another really great guy. I don’t know if you’ve worked with him before, but Travis, he knows martech like nobody’s business. And I think when I first met know at first this guy’s really analytical and so let me see if I can give him some opportunities around technology because I think he’d really like it. So just recognizing these things later on in my career, I actually formalized it.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Tracy Thayne

And I put together mentorship programs where people in my organization, we would all assign ourselves at least three to five young marketers and just work with them. We wanted to have at least one conversation a week and really just share everything. Working as a consultant, I’ve worked in a couple of consultancies and what I love about that is really putting together a program where a young person is forced to do all the heavy lifting before going into a client. We would have young associates come in and deliver the entire pitch, for example, or the entire strategy. And we would know, give them feedback, they would go out and refine it, bring it back. So really forcing them to do the work and giving them the opportunities to stand up in front of Boston Consulting Group, for example. Right.

Alysha Smith

Well, that’s hard too, because you think, well, I could probably do it better myself, but I have to find a way somehow. So I’ve got to let go of that control.

Tracy Thayne

That was the hardest part. I think. That’s why it took me a while to formalize a program. I wanted it done right. And especially when you’re in a consultancy and you’ve got one of my clients was Fidelity. And so how do I make sure Fidelity gets their money’s worth? Right? And so they’re putting those associates in place early, getting them doing all of the work early and then presenting back to people who have the experience so that we can just point out areas of opportunity. It works out pretty well.

Alysha Smith

Makes sense. So I guess on the note of mentorship, if you were to give a marketing your favorite marketing tips to our audience, something that you’ve learned over the years, what would that be?

Tracy Thayne

Data first. Always start with data. It’s the hardest place to start because most marketers don’t have access to it, but force it. I think especially now. Right. When you see the proliferation of AI and people being able to just generate content and push it out, it’s kind of crazy how that’s becoming. And so I think having doing your due diligence and looking at the information, understanding the data, so that when you do go out to market with something that it’s appropriate. It’s actually true that’s I think super important now more than ever. And I would encourage marketers who don’t have access to data, force the issue, gain access and be data driven. Cool.

Peter Stevenson

And my favorite question is where should people go for coffee, food, drinks? Where should people go? Where’s your favorite places?

Tracy Thayne

Well, in Dubai.

Peter Stevenson

No, here in the city.

Tracy Thayne

Here in the city. I’m not a big restaurant guy, and I know there’s a lot of pressure on me because when I know you guys ask this question, but coffee I do. Coffee and Public is my favorite coffee place.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, we were talking earlier and you love the public and the avenues.

Tracy Thayne

And the avenues. It’s really quiet.

Alysha Smith

Do you get a walk?

Tracy Thayne

I can walk there.

Alysha Smith

Yeah. That’s a sweet spot.

Tracy Thayne

It is incredible. Yeah. And when it comes to coffee, I don’t like to take my laptop. I just like to go don’t get it in a takeaway cup. Yeah, get it. Sit down, be in the moment.

Alysha Smith

It’s a small space there. And there are a lot of people with laptops.

Tracy Thayne

Yes, there are.

Peter Stevenson

You ever get the toast while you’re there?

Tracy Thayne

Oh, I love the toast.

Peter Stevenson

Exactly.

Tracy Thayne

The avocado toast, my favorite.

Peter Stevenson

You need to try Public Kitchen. I know you don’t like restaurants, but.

Tracy Thayne

Public Kitchen, 9th and 9th reopened after.

Alysha Smith

A couple of years of being closed.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, and I have been there before. Really liked it.

Alysha Smith

Beautiful.

Peter Stevenson

Same vibe, but just like more options, more toast options.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, I used to live I had a house just two blocks from you.

Alysha Smith

Got rid of that.

Tracy Thayne

I don’t know, kicking myself.

Peter Stevenson

Well, thank you so much for joining us and we’ll see you on the next episode.

Tracy Thayne

Yeah, thank you.

Peter Stevenson

By Subject is a production of modern eight agency and Silicon Slopes. Executive Producers are Alicia Smith and Peter Stevenson editor and Producer is Dave Meekham video production by Connor Mitchell development production by Eric Dahl production management by Shelby Sandlin original music composed by Josh Johnson website designed by Modernate Please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends and your enemies. Thanks for joining us.