Hey, what's up everybody, it's DG on this episode of Seeking Wisdom slash Coffee with a CMO.

We're back with another episode of it. I'm really loving this series. I've learned so much from doing it. I can't wait to do more. On this episode, I sat down with Brian Cardin. He's the CMO at Fuse. He was also the CMO at Eloqua, Forrester back in the day. Super interesting guy. I really hit it off with Brian. I actually hadn't spent a ton of time with him before, and so it was really cool to just be able to, you know, pull up a chair, grab a coffee and talk. It was a million degrees out when we filmed this one, so we just did it in our office at Drift. But I learned a ton from Brian, and I know you will too during this episode. Fun fact, my favorite thing about Brian is, So I'm a crazy guy that has this notebook and I'm just always writing down ideas and stuff in it.

Brian has a index card. He literally keeps an index card in his jacket or whatever shirt pocket where he scribbles stuff down on. So we nerded out on that and a bunch of other stuff. Here's another episode of Coffee with the CMO with Brian Cardin. I'm wired up too. You're wired up? You're wired up? Yeah, I'm wired up. Okay, cool. I'm wired up. It's just sneaky. Okay, so this is Coffee with a CMO with Brian Cardin. Hey. We were going to go outside, but it is about 200 degrees in Boston today. So I emailed you about 20 minutes ago.

Why would you just do it here? I think everybody was, we saved Gonzalo, we saved me, we save you.

I'm very grateful. It is. Just walking over here was just a Shivitz show, it was just terrible. It was brutal. Everybody was moist. So you actually told me interesting story. So we have, Joe was one of the first episodes that we've done. You have some, like, you have some early Joe Turnoff story. So I want to break into that because you were the CMO at Eloqua, 2008. You hired Joe to do PR. And this is kind of when you discovered, like, concept. Well, it's so funny, I interviewed Joe very early on.

He was a traditional PR guy, and I passed on him. I didn't think he was right. Yeah. Do you have a beard then? It's a cleaner cut. Yeah, I'm not sure if he had a beard or not. He went through sort of different phases as he continues to. So I passed on him the first time. didn't seem like a good fit. And the second time I thought it was right.

I loved his assertiveness and his strong point of view and everything.

He's not like a nod to your head kind of guy, which I loved.

And as I was telling you earlier, he joined in a more traditional communications, PR, AR role.

And then we both read Inbound by Darmesh and Brian in this around 2008, 2009.

And we just devoured it. And it totally changed how we thought about things. We were much more

traditionalists, much more outbound, cold calling, all the things that the book says is just

old school. Do you, how do you do, like, it seems like a big ship, like do you take that, because there's a lesson in there, which I think is like, you're looking for a new channel. And you told me earlier, you have, you kind of have your group, right, Megan from MongoDB and Volpe and some others. Like, is that how you get to that point where you realize you have to make a fundamental change? Because it's hard, right? Things are going well, things are working.

Like, how do you, you know, it takes guts to say, like, are we're going to try something completely new? How do you stay on top of that? Well, that was a huge shift for us. So we totally reinvented everything. And we had, literally as a change management exercise. So everyone on the team would discuss the book. We talk about how it would it affect our role.

So how would it affect the demand gen team?

How does affect content marketing?

How does it affect PR and AR? How does it affect

product marketing? So we all talked about the ramifications of the book and we sort of changed.

We realized we had to do something different. And also because it was marketing automation,

we're sort of in the spotlight marketing. So it's, if you're running

marketing at HubSpot or you're running marketing at Marquetteau or Aliqua, there's no room for

forgiveness. Like you are the role model and you're up there and the lights are on and you've got to be

...