In our inaugural episode of The Pipeline Brew podcast, host Matt Hummel, VP Marketing at Pipeline360 sits down with Howard Sewell, President and Founder of Spear Marketing Group, to discuss the foundational principles that drive successful marketing strategies.
Howard brings 25 years of B2B marketing experience to the table to discuss topics spanning content, account-based marketing (ABM), demand gen, AI, and more. Throughout the interview, you’ll hear an emphasis on the importance of providing value to your customer. Whether you’re creating surveys, white papers, promoting analyst reports, or even podcasts, your goal should always be to address the consumer’s pain points and offer insightful solutions.
Matt also leverages Howard’s knowledge from Spear to discuss what enables the most powerful client-agency relationships. To any teams out there looking to supercharge the work they create with their agency, Howard suggests rethinking the relationship to be akin to a true partnership. It’s not all about churning out content; it’s about crafting innovative, solution-driven ideas that resonate. Successful marketing hinges on these symbiotic partnerships that encourage creativity and strategic thinking.
Lastly, Matt and Howard share their thoughts on the blending of demand generation and account-based marketing. By combining broad outreach with targeted, personalized tactics, you can better engage and convert leads.
The takeaway? Your marketing can only benefit from being versatile and adaptable. Clear, value-driven content will not only capture attention but also build lasting connections with your audience.
Listen here:
Table of contents:
Read the Transcript:
Intro: Hey everyone and welcome to an episode of The Pipeline Brew, the podcast that meets at the intersection of people and pipeline. We’re bringing you fun yet insightful conversations where you’ll not only hear from marketing experts, but also get to know them as well.
Matt Hummel: Hey everyone. Today I am super excited to be joined by Howard Sewell, President and Founder of Spear Marketing Group. Howard is a marketing veteran with more than 25 years of experience in all things B2B marketing, specializing in demand, creative, and MarTech. Beyond that, I’ve personally known Howard for years now, and I’ve also worked with him at two stops along my career. Welcome to the show, Howard. How are you doing today?
Howard Sewell: Thank you, Matt. Very well, thank you. Appreciate it.
Matt Hummel: Well, we like to kick off each episode with a little icebreaker just to get the ball rolling. You ready for that?
Howard Sewell: Ready as I’ll ever be.
Matt Hummel: All right. So what is your go-to beverage when you need a little pick me up?
Howard Sewell: Well, I’m sitting here with a large cup of freshly brewed Sumatra from the excellent coffee shop that’s next to my office building. I have a coffee shop on one side and a pub on the other. So two of the major food groups. I’m in a great spot. I love my coffee, but I’m also British, so I have to have a cup of tea first thing in the morning because I’ve done that since I was like six. So, equal opportunity caffeine consumption on my part.
Matt Hummel: Well, as a fellow caffeine aficionado, I can appreciate that. Yeah, I was going to say, I’m not totally surprised that you’re drinking coffee because you are stateside now, but I have spent some time in London recently and tea seems to be the thing. And what was new to me was that they add milk to their tea. And that was a first for me. Do you still partake in the milk?
Howard Sewell: Absolutely, yes. And we could probably spend the entire podcast discussing whether milk goes in before the tea or after, because there’s a whole religion around that topic, but also the coffee. I’m fortunate enough to go. We have two kids studying in the UK, so we get to go back with some frequency and actually the coffee scene over there, English coffee used to be (and any Brit would agree with me on this) really bad. And that’s changed dramatically in the last decade or two. And the coffee scene, particularly in London and in most large cities, is pretty great. I mean, you can get some really, really good coffee as well. So we’re good at both.
Matt Hummel: That’s awesome. Well, as I mentioned earlier, Howard, you’ve been in the space for over 25 years and have extensive experience on the agency side of things. So I’d love to hear, walk me through a background of your agency, both your agency’s areas of expertise, but also your own.
Howard Sewell: Sure, yeah, I’ve been in the agency business for more years than I care to count. I started my marketing career at Oracle in the software space. So worked there for a few years. I was in sales briefly prior to that. Started my own shop. I won’t tell you when, because it’ll date me. But ran that for 15 years or so. And then started Spear with my business partner, Matt Randolph in 2009. So we’ve been going for almost 15 years now and we’re really very much a demand gen shop. So I like to say about half the work we do is sort of top of funnel lead gen, anything that generates a lead we do and all the things that you would imagine would fit into that category. And then the other half of the work, roughly speaking is sort of mid funnel and beyond. So we’re heavily involved in lead nurture, customer marketing, partner marketing is a big area for us right now. But anything that sort of drives engagement, downloads, leads, registrations, getting people to events, that sort of thing. We’re not really a branding agency. We’re not going to necessarily design a new website for you, but if you need to kind of make the phone ring, as they used to say. That’s very much kind of our sweet spot and we work pretty exclusively with B2B technology companies. That’s kind of our core focus.
Matt Hummel: There’s something I want to touch on – you use the word leads and about half the time, agency wise has spent on more of that top of funnel lead gen. Lead gen or just leads in general seems to have a bad rap in certain circles. Are leads still important to marketers today? What’s your two cents on
Howard Sewell: Yeah, I definitely think they’re important. I think particularly when you work in tech, as we both do, I think marketers and their sales counterparts tend to operate on very short -term horizons. So there’s always sort of that pressure to generate results that are going to hit the bottom line in a short timeframe. And I think the consequence of that is there’s pressure on marketers to generate the types of leads that are going to convert very rapidly. And you and I both know, particularly if you’re operating in categories and spaces where your sales cycles, six, nine months, et cetera, that’s a hard thing to do. And one of the things that we preach – and you and I have talked about this in the past – is this notion of full funnel marketing where yes, lead generation is important and it’s always important to be filling that top end of the lead lifecycle. But just as important is what happens after someone downloads that white paper, registers for the webinar, et cetera. And I think that’s an area where there’s lots of opportunity for improvement at a lot of companies. But it doesn’t get the attention of generating net new leads. So it’s still vitally important, but I would say just as important is what happens after the lead and what can companies do to educate, nurture, and ultimately convert those leads into people that are going to engage with sales.
Matt Hummel: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. You hear a lot about ABM, buying groups, and this notion of lead gen, you know, full funnel marketing, and the previous sense as it was known is, is dead. It’s not really a thing anymore, but could you expand on that in terms of, you, do you believe the traditional funnel model? I mean, I get, I get your point on leads and I, I wholeheartedly agree.
You can start to call leads account engagement and people are like, “yeah, I love that. It’s really important.” And then you say, “lead gen,” and they’re like, “that’s terrible. I don’t, why would I want to generate leads? I have an account based marketing strategy.” What’s your take on the funnel? How does it align with today’s nonlinear buying journey?
Howard Sewell: I think it’s still very much real and valid and a legitimate way to look at marketing. Having said that, ABM and account-based marketing is very much a key strategy for a lot of our clients, but it’s the rare client, that we have anyway, that is wholly dedicated to an account-based strategy without some form of broad-based demand gen in kind of a support role. So clearly it depends on the type of solution you have and your target market and that sort of thing. But for the majority of clients, I would suggest broad-based demand gen or demand gen that’s focused on specific categories or account types. There are thought leaders in our space whose entire role in life is declaring things dead. And lead gen is declared dead every couple of years, and the funnel too. People have long said that MQLs are not a thing and now it’s about buying groups and that sort of thing. And yet, the practitioners amongst us know differently. And I think the funnel is still a legitimate way to go about it. And for that matter, the way most of our clients approach their lead goals and demand gen in general. For me, to ABM, it’s not an all or nothing proposition, or at least it’s not for most companies. Most of our clients operate on sort of a hybrid strategy that might involve some account-based activity. But focused on tier one accounts, key accounts, key industries, but almost always with some element of more broad-based, funnel-based demand.
Matt Hummel: That makes perfect sense, Howard. And I kind of want to fall upon a point you made, which is a hybrid strategy. You hear a lot of people too say, “all B2B marketing is ABM because it is account-based marketing.” How do you think about the difference in what you would consider ABM versus more of that broad or traditional demand gen approach?
Howard Sewell: I mean, ABM – target account marketing has been around for years, almost as long as I’ve been doing marketing, certainly. And ABM is just a smarter, more strategic, more scalable, more automated way of going about it. So again, I look at clients that we work with today, enterprise, SAS clients in particular who have broad -based demand gen strategies, be it search or content syndication or paid social, running on an always-on basis. Certainly not without some sort of target criteria to make sure that they’re reaching the right companies, but they’ve got that sort of broad-based demand gen activity in place. As much as anything, just to make sure that regardless of where their target audience they maximize their chances to engage with people that are out there actively searching for information. Whereas I think the account-based strategy as a compliment to that is about defining a very, tightly defined group of accounts and going after those accounts in a very sort of personalized, more proactive, more outbound kind of way. But I it’s very difficult, I would suggest most companies to operate on that model exclusively, not the least because you can’t create demand where there’s not that interest. So it’s inbound and more broad-based strategies need to be part of the mix just simply because of the way the buying cycle works in my view. And again, I may be more of a traditionalist in that sense, but I’m really a proponent for kind of the more mix and match strategy for the two.
Matt Hummel: Yeah, I mean, I think I’d mentioned this to you last time we caught up, but I’ve been out on the road meeting with almost a hundred customers over the last two, three months. And by and large, that hybrid approach is what I’ve seen across most of the larger organizations. And it’s not that there’s not a relationship between the two, you know, leveraging content, some tactics, even some resources, but I think in terms of the overall approach, the amount of investment, et cetera, that they’re putting into one versus the other. They are uniquely different. Call us both traditionalists, but it seems like the market agrees with what you’re saying.
Howard Sewell: Yeah. And I think ABM has written kind of the curve that you see a lot of like new approaches and new strategies, right? When it first came out, it was the hot new thing. And a lot of the vendor-driven conversation in that space was, is like, marketing is dead. This is what marketing is now. Everyone needs to go into this wholesale. Nothing else matters. And inevitably what has happened over some period of time is that people realize, this is a smart thing to do, but it’s not an all or nothing proposition. It’s just another strategy that we can bring to bear and have as part of the mix. And that’s the way most clients and people that I talk to see ABM. It’s just part of the overall demand gen mix.
Matt Hummel: You mentioned Spear is not a branding agency, but you also talked about this notion of you can’t create demand where demand doesn’t exist. So, what’s your take on the role of brand as it relates to demand? And a follow-on question would be, how do you think demand marketers should be thinking about brand. Should they care about what their brand departments are doing and putting out a market as relates to their ability to, or how they’re thinking about ultimately driving demand.
Howard Sewell: I think everyone should care about brand. I’ve been a demand marketer since day one, back when it was sort of direct marketing and not demand generation. So, I’m a little bit of a cynic when it comes to branding. And like ABM, I think branding is one of those things that cyclically comes into the forefront in the marketing echo chamber that you and I kind of participate in on a day-to-day basis. Look, a good brand will help you more than it hurts you, right? So a good brand will increase awareness, increase trust, increase credibility, make people more likely to engage with your company at whatever stage of the selling cycle. Where I have an issue with brand is when people are advocating for companies to invest in brand in a very tangible way. We all have different definitions of what branding is. Brand to me is something that infects and informs everything you do as a marketer. It’s how you represent your company to the marketplace. And it’s something that should drive consistency whether it’s a webinar invitation or a website or a piece of content.
If you’re series B startup tech company and you’re just looking to drive revenue and generate opportunities and make it to the next round, I can’t see the point in investing significant dollars in branding in an explicit way because I can’t see it’s a priority. I may go to Starbucks in the morning because I like the brand and I like what they represent and I have an emotional connection with that company. I don’t believe people buy enterprise software that way.
So having said that, there’s a way to represent your company that can benefit whatever else you’re doing in marketing. I have trouble with the notion that brand is an area of investment. I think it’s just a smart way of doing marketing.
Matt Hummel: It makes perfect sense. That’s a really interesting take. So when you think about the funnel, the top of the funnel, are you thinking about accounts that are aware that they have a problem? Not necessarily more of that true brand messaging.
Howard Sewell: Not necessarily. I think that can be a big component of it, but there are lots of companies that we work with in the tech space that are solving problems people don’t know they have. Where people have solutions or technologies that are improving on the status quo, but people don’t necessarily know that the status quo isn’t something they need to settle for.
So in those situations, top of funnel marketing is as much about market education and creating awareness for a problem or an opportunity as it is about finding people that are ready to buy X type of software. But that to me is still not branding. That’s as much demand generation as someone downloading an analyst report because they’re shopping for software in category X.
Putting out a white paper or a survey report about trends in XYZ as a means of bringing awareness to a particular opportunity, challenge, problem out there that people aren’t necessarily maybe thinking of. That’s demand gen. Demand gen is finding people that have the pain that you can solve, whether or not they know they have that pain.
But branding is, you put 40 marketers in a room and everyone’s going to have a different definition of what branding is. So that’s how I think about it, but I have my demand hat on.
Matt Hummel: Well, it’s funny you mentioned the term status quo. I remember this is probably 10 years ago, but I was talking to somebody about how our greatest competitor is that we’re selling against a status quo. I think this was a sales leader and they said, you know, I’ve not heard of that competitor. I should look into them and I’m like, no, no, no, not it. And the light bulb went off and they realized the error of their ways, but it is true.
Very often as demand marketers, we tend to think about our competitors being the direct competitors that show up against us in sales cycles. But the first and foremost competitor is always status quo. I would say number two competitor most often then is Microsoft Excel. So it just seems like they show up all the time.
Well, I mentioned I’d been on the road and there’s two questions that I’ve gotten from a lot of folks that I’ve met with that I would love to get your take on. One is around agencies, which obviously you’ve got a ton of experience around, and the other is around content messaging. So I’ll start with the agency question. So it’s a two parter again. And first part is, from your experience, what increases the odds of a successful client that’s working with you?
Howard Sewell: I think the clients where we have the most success with – and this is going to sound a little bit like a cliche, so apologies in advance – but typically when we bring on a new client, you can tell very early in the relationship that it’s either a strategic partnership, where there’s an equal exchange of ideas and people want to hear your opinion and what are other companies doing and what do think we should do here? And not that they’re looking to be clients looking to be told what to do, but there’s a genuine kind of hunger and appetite for, you know, a fresh set of eyes and a third-party opinion versus the more sort of vendor relationship, where the client is really looking for, an agency to execute on a set of ideas and deliverables that are already kind of predefined. And look, there’s a lot of good work to be done within that latter sort of construct. There are clients that we have where we’re basically their de facto demand gen team and we’re very much a seat at the table and we’re kind of bringing strategies to bear.
And other companies, particularly our larger clients that just need help getting stuff done and looking for a team to help them execute. I don’t mean to portray one or the other as good versus bad, but I think the clients where we as an agency add most value and ultimately drive better results is where there’s that appetite for a real partnership.
One of the primary reasons to hire an agency is because you’re looking for that fresh set of eyes. You’re looking for someone that this is all they do; they work with a bunch of other companies like us. Let’s bring that set of viewpoints and that collective experience and see if there’s things that we could do better. So if there’s an appetite for that and a desire to hear that opinion, that’s typically a recipe for success in our business.
Matt Hummel: I love that. And that certainly aligns with my experience with you and your team. If we set those expectations early, we align on the role and we give you guys freedom to bring ideas to the table and really be not just an extension of our team, but truly have that seat at the table. I’ve seen that make all the difference. So appreciate that.
The follow up to that question is, there’s been a lot of ebbs and flows in the market over the past several years. And it seems almost based on the direction of the wind, it either is beneficial for agencies or detrimental to agencies in certain cases. And at the same time, you have companies who are in some cases looking to bring all the work in from agencies. And then there’s others who, given resource constraints and whatnot, have had to put more into agencies.
What are you seeing and where do you see the future of agencies? Do you see that evolving over time?
Howard Sewell: I think the agency business will always evolve and that’s not a bad thing. I mean, I’ve been doing it for 30 plus years and the agency that I help run today is very different from the one that we ran 10 years ago and 20 years ago. So it’s going to continue to evolve. There’s a lot of dynamics in the marketplace right now that can drive companies and clients in different directions. The tech business that we work in has definitely had its challenges the last couple of years. And so people are cutting back – that can work against and in favor of service providers like us. When companies have to lay off talented marketers and still need to get work done, that can be a good opportunity for us.
But when the budgets aren’t there, that can just as easily be a reason to cut back on agency spend. The other dynamic right now that, especially in the last six months to a year that we’re seeing is AI. And I think AI has only, I was going to say exacerbated, but I’ll correct myself midstream and say accelerated a kind do it yourself trend in marketing, where I think it’s agencies are having to convince clients that hiring an outside firm to write an email, create a LinkedIn ad, create a piece of content, is more of a challenge now.
I still think there’s value add that a company like ours brings to the table, but you’re hearing a lot of, well, the manager thinks we can just ask ChatGPT to spit out a case study for us. I’ve had clients tell me firsthand that ChatGPT is writing 50 webinar emails a quarter for them. I’ve held myself back from asking what those emails look like and how they read and how they’re performing. But you and I, you’ve worked on the client side as well. I’m going to sound like kind of the old man marketer here and kind of grumpy, but so much of what you and I know to be marketing has become this question of efficiency. And how quickly and how efficiently can we sort of produce content and produce emails and hey, I’ve got this nurture program I need to put together and it’s four streams and it’s six emails each. And what’s the quickest, cheapest way to produce that body of work, right? It’s good on the one hand, and we all want to be efficient, but ultimately, as you said, it’s about effectiveness.
And I really think in this maelstrom that AI is creating in our business right now, a lot of that is being sort of lost in the shuffle. It’s become, let’s do it with AI. Just ask ChatGPT. And, again, I don’t want to come across as a Luddite here and I use ChatGPT and our creative team does. Not to create content per se, but for ideation and inspiration and to come up with alternatives and those sorts of things and all the things that it’s good for. But it’s become – we talked about competition a moment ago – it’s become a very real competitor for agencies like us because there’s this notion, particularly in upper management where, “hey, let’s have AI do it.”
In old days, well before our time, Matt, as the two young people that we are, when advertising and marketing was a full page newspaper ad, no one was saying, “Hey, it’s a newspaper ad. It’s only 40 words. Why do we need an agency to do that?” That question did not come up, but now those are the conversations that we face. It’s an email. It’s 200 words. I write emails all day. How difficult can it be? And so I think the challenge for us as an agency is to communicate that value and what we bring to the table and why you want to hire a professional writer to write that email and not just your 23 year old intern with an AI license to do it. That’s a big dynamic for us in the market that we’re having to evolve and deal with. Because AI is not going away.
Matt Hummel: No, it’s not. Well, I feel like we could have an entire follow-up session on AI.
Howard Sewell: Yeah, so I went on my soapbox there. So my apologies.
Matt Hummel: No, I love it. We would sound really old if we didn’t at least mention AI once during this discussion. So I’m glad you snuck it in there. But I want to talk about what makes effective content. We conducted research in the first half of this year with more than 500 digital and demand marketers in the first half of this year, 2024, to understand the current state of demand. And the biggest problem identified outside of resource and budget constraints is,it’s harder to create pipeline. And as we dug into the data and had some of these conversations that added color to that, what we saw is, there’s two issues identified. One was just really crowded channels and number two was lack of differentiated messaging.
In Martech alone, there are more than 14,000 solutions. That number reminds me of when Gmail first came out and you’d go to your inbox and it just showed the number of megabytes adding of available storage – now I’m really dating myself – to your inbox. And I feel like that’s AI’s impact by and large on, on, on things like Martech.
With that said, you work with a number of different clients across different industries and you see different qualities of content, whether they’re AI generated or not. I’d love to get your take on what makes really effective content and then how do you determine what is effective content.
Howard Sewell: There’s no single answer or one silver bullet here, whereas, you know, it’s white papers, it’s video, it’s podcasts, like this one. Because especially in B2B and tech, I think people tend to obsess over form factor.
And they’re looking for, what’s that type of content that is going to really kind of set us apart and, what are people consuming today? Where I think it’s much less about, look, is it a video? Is it a white paper, is it an ebook? Is it a case study? And does that content communicate information of value? And it sounds so basic, but again, I’ll blame AI again.
I think AI has created this torrent of very ordinary content out there. And I think the opportunity for marketers is to create and develop content that really – it’s not about selling the solution, or at least it’s not in terms of like, you know, top of funnel. But it’s about creating information of value that’s going to appeal to people facing the problem that you can solve.
If you just use that as the foundation, then whether or not that translates or ends up being the white paper, ebook, video, webinar, et cetera, is much less important. Uou mentioned surveys – I’m a huge proponent of survey content. It’s a great way to tailor content to your message.
To create content that appeals to people that have at least an interest in the problem or issue that you’re trying to solve. And, and there’s all sorts of ways to kind of slice and dice survey content. You generate that survey data, you generate the report. It can be a webinar. It can be a podcast. It can be social snippets. It can be all sorts of different things. but again, I think there’s such a drive for efficiency right now in our business and doing more with less than that.
I think surveys feel like a lot to kind of take on for many clients. But that’s just one example of content that can really deliver value and help kind of attract the right kind of people into engagement with your company.
Matt Hummel: I love that. So if I were to kind of summarize what you said, it’s less around the form factor. It’s not necessarily that an ebook is better or worse than a podcast. Podcasts are obviously the best, but, it’s not form factor as much as it’s having that North Star, if you will, around it needs to add value and that’s what’s really going to drive that trust and credibility around ultimately, being someone that can deliver on an eventual promise of what you’re trying to deliver.
Howard Sewell: I’ll give you another example, Matt. I wrote a blog post a while ago about how to market analyst reports. And I think you and I probably both see these types of posts very often in our LinkedIn feed, but someone gets an analyst report. Let’s say it’s the magic quadrant or the wave or k it is. And the company’s been named as a leader, right? And that LinkedIn post is, “Hey, announcement, we’ve been named a leader, you know, find out why analyst X thinks we’re so great, download your report now.” And that’s an example of selling content simply as sort of a way to trumpet the virtues of your solution. Whereas the point I made in the blog post was the value of an analyst report is it’s a buying guide.
The value of an analyst report is if someone’s out there in the market for your kind of solution, an analyst report is a great – putting aside whatever you might think about the opinions expressed and how things get graded, et cetera – but an analyst report is a great tool for a potential buyer to get a sense of who the players are in the market, what the different advantages, pluses, minuses, et cetera. That’s how I would market an analyst report, not find out why Gartner thinks we’re so great.
I think if you approach content with that viewpoint, not how is this going to convince people to take a demo and rather, how is this going to communicate value to someone that might be in the market for what we do? Or if not in the market, feeling the pain that we can solve, then I think you’re much better off.
And then again, whether it’s a webinar or a podcast or a white paper that you can figure out.
Matt Hummel: For sure. Well, I think what you’ve done is probably opened up a lot of people’s eyes to how they think about analyst reports. It doesn’t have to just be a mid-to bottom-funnel piece of content. If done correctly, it’s a great way to go.
All right. Well, that’s, that’s a great one to end on, on the business side. So I like to end each segment with a little, or each podcast with a segment I call “What’s on Tap” kind of building off our Pipeline Brew name here.
I’d love to talk to each one of my guests about a little bit more of their personal life and not to get too personal even though we’re friends Howard.
Howard Sewell: Sure. I thought you were going to ask my favorite beer.
Matt Hummel: Well, since you mentioned it, what is your favorite beer?
Howard Sewell: This is very cliche, but I’m sort of an IPA man. We were in England, a few months ago, I had to re acclimate myself to room temperature, cellar temperature, English beers, but back here, give me a good hazy IPA. I’m happy.
Matt Hummel: Well I was going to ask, when you’re in London do you drink them warm? And what is the one there? Is it snake oil? I can’t remember the name of it. There’s a really popular IPA.
Howard Sewell: I think I know the one you mean, but the name escapes me. I think warm beer is a thing of the past, and again, we were talking about coffee earlier, but, boy, the beer scene in England is something else like here. There’s a of micro brews and so it’s a fun thing to partake in.
Matt Hummel: Absolutely. All right. Well on the personal front, so we both know marketing is tough. It’s not getting any easier in spite of AI. So I think the only thing that trumps marketing in terms of its difficulty is parenting. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just a terrible parent and you’ve got all the answers, but I know you’re a parent. You mentioned you’ve got a couple of kids who are in school. I’d love to hear from you, Howard. Do you have any parenting advice or stories for our listeners that you can’t forget.
Howard Sewell: Oh my goodness. Well, our two children are 21 and 23. They’re both at the university, our son’s going back for his Masters this fall. And I’ve nothing but good things to say about them. But my opportunities for parental guidance are long in the rear-view mirror.
They long have their own opinions and ways of doing things, they’re two great kids. I’m not sure I’m one to espouse pearls of wisdom in that area, Matt.
A quick story though, since you asked, our daughter, I’m going to hope she doesn’t listen to this podcast at some point, but she went to visit the parents of her boyfriend and then his dad asked her naturally enough what I do for living, and mind you I’ve been a marketer since this young lady was born, and she said he’s in marketing. That was that was as much detail as she could provide and when she was asked what kind of marketing she said, “internal marketing.” I’m not even sure what internal marketing is. Maybe it’s like internal medicine. I don’t know. So I guess one of the things I need to do better as a parent is explaining what I do for a living. So my wife and I are lucky enough to have really great kids that are going to do great things. We’ve given them just enough latitude to find themselves and been lucky enough that it’s turned out well.
Matt Hummel: Well that’s awesome. And kudos to you that you’ve got two kiddos who are on a great path, one getting their masters. So that’s awesome. And it is funny – I feel like I could start a whole separate podcast with kids just on, “Hey, what do your parents do for a living?” So I think that’d be pretty funny.
Howard, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed our discussion. Tons of insights on the role of agencies, how marketers can be thinking about their full-funnel approach, Lead gen, demand gen, ABM, what makes effective content. And, I think most importantly, what constitutes a good beer, which is cold and IPA.
Howard Sewell: Exactly. Matt, it’s been a pleasure as it always is. Thank you for the opportunity. It’s been great fun.
Matt Hummel: Well, thanks again to Howard for joining us on today’s episode of the Pipeline Brew. I hope you all enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Please leave me a comment with your thoughts and make sure you’re subscribed to the show so you’ll never miss an episode. Once again, I’m Matt Hummel and I’ll see you next time.
