Today we are joined by David Berkowitz, a Serial Marketer generating demand for breakthrough B2B businesses; Serial Marketers community founder. Guest speaker at MIT Sloan School of Business, Yale School of Management, NYU, and many more.
In this episode, Alex and David discuss ageism in the corporate world, how can a startup earn your trust and more!
For more information, links, social media profiles, and much more, please visit our website.
Listen now on all major podcasting platforms!
Today we are joined by David Berkowitz, a Serial Marketer generating demand for breakthrough B2B businesses; Serial Marketers community founder. Guest speaker at MIT Sloan School of Business, Yale School of Management, NYU, and many more.
In this episode, Alex and David discuss ageism in the corporate world, how can a startup earn your trust and more!
For more information, links, social media profiles, and much more, please visit our website.
Listen now on all major podcasting platforms!
Alex Romanovich (00:00):
Hi, this is Alex Romanovich, and welcome to Global Edge Talk. Today, February 9th, 2021. We're talking with David Berkowitz who is a serial marketer, is a former and current chief marketing officer, and the founder of the Serial Marketers community. Welcome, David.
David Berkowitz (00:21):
Thank you. Great to be here, Alex.
Alex Romanovich (00:24):
First, a couple of words about David and what his journey has been. We will talk about some of the interesting and controversial at times marketing topics, but David started as a technical writer and marketing writer. He then was a researcher and editor of a company called E-marketer very famous marketing research and statistics outfit. And then he spent some of his time in very well-known agencies like 360i, MRY. He was a chief strategy officer for a fairly well-known platform company called Sysomos, a social media marketing company. And then the head of marketing for Storyhunter, Dedicated.ai, Vestorly, and a number of other companies as a full-time and part-time chief marketing officer, but he is well-known for his community called Serial Marketers as a community and as a destination. And we will talk more about this. So David, welcome to our studio and let's talk about marketing in 2021.
David Berkowitz (01:45):
That's great. I'm excited.
Alex Romanovich (01:48):
First of all, you have a thousand-plus-member community of Serial Marketers. Tell us more about this, what serial marketing is all about? Why is it different from regular marketing or any other type of marketing and what it took you to actually build such an interesting community?
David Berkowitz (02:08):
Well, I'm, actually, proud to say just this month crossed the 2000 member mark. So, in 2020 we grew by a hundred members a month, and it's just really taken off in a great way. And I started this in the summer of 2018 and I was actually just leaving Storyhunter, and I had this idea for a while. I was like maybe now is the right time. And I wanted a place for people where Serial Marketers is something just more of a way that people identify themselves. And actually it's funny, this isn't necessarily the advice that someone would give you, but I started the community initially based on the name where I use the name of serial marketer myself for a whole other reason starting in 26.
David Berkowitz (03:01):
But as soon as I started running with that, I was like, wait, tons of people use the term serial entrepreneurs. There are so many people who apply that mindset where they're doing this with marketing. They're in a series of marketing roles. Maybe they shift into a founder role, or strategy role, or sales role, but marketing is a huge part of their DNA. They're constantly trying to learn. They want to share what they know with others. They want to be around people like that. And so Slack seemed like a really good way to organize these conversations. And I started this, I had the motto Learn, Try, Share. I had a guy on Fiverr from Indonesia offered me $5 to create the logo for it that I still use today. I've given him some much bigger projects since then. So I think he got a decent deal. And it's just been one of those things where slowly for a while, first it's just attracted more of the right kinds of members and people who've been a tremendous resource for each other. People are doing business with each other, creating partnerships, just giving really useful advice, tech recommendations, hiring each other for their jobs. It's been far more than anything I expected in 2018 when I started this.
Alex Romanovich (04:21):
Very, very interesting story, but let's talk about marketing in general and where we are in 2021. It seems to me, as a member of a very interesting community, the Chief Marketing Officers community, it seems to me that CMOs are continuing to be a very volatile type of a position within the company. They come and go. I think the latest research that we had, I mean, maybe the tenure is increasing a little bit, but anywhere between 18 and 24 months on the job, and then you're onto the next thing. Very few percentages actually stick with the company for a very long term. 2020 also showed us that there's a lot more volatility in the discipline and also showed us that everybody became a personal marketer. So what can you say about this in terms of the state for the discipline of marketing?
David Berkowitz (05:28):
Well, it's a mess in a lot of ways. I mean, just so many things are so messy right now. And one of the challenges why it seems even more chaotic than it would be, is so many people are busy marketing themselves often for the first time. And this is not an easy skill, and there are some people, who are excited to go and look under every rock and tell everyone they know. For a lot of people it's really uncomfortable too. I feel so fortunate that I first started consulting in any form in 2016. And even if I took a couple of full-time roles since then, where at least like I'm still learning a ton and I have not gotten all of this figured out yet, but having a few, your head start to sort through those initial challenges of what it's like to start setting up a business and be out on your own, doing projects on your own, not having teams to rely on round the clock, not having like someone to handle things like invoice and clients, and just the fundamentals of doing business.
David Berkowitz (06:42):
That's a lot to learn in a hurry. And even with a lot of the member growth zero marketers, there are so many people who are now in business for themselves for the first time. And really most of the people are not doing this by choice.
Alex Romanovich (06:57):
And that's exactly true. We're also seeing tremendous growth of a variety of different platforms. We have TIk Tok. Now we have Clubhouse. We have a number of other platforms that are becoming a little bit more controversial, such as Facebook and so forth. So, not only we have everyone doing self-promotion and sitting at home in 2020 and spilling over into 2021, sitting at home, doing home videos, buying expensive cameras, expensive microphones, and talking about everything and promoting themselves as knowing everything. I've never seen so many strategists, so many coaches, so many strategy experts in their twenties and thirties, nothing not to say that they're not smart and so forth, but what does it leave folks who are in the business, in the career of marketing, who have been doing this for a very long time, and now are finding themselves to be in competition with so many other folks?
David Berkowitz (08:17):
Well, this also touches on an interesting factor of ageism. And funny is that people in marketing are experiencing ageism in their thirties, which sounds laughable, but it's true. This stuff happens all the time. When you see someone who doesn't want to hire someone with more than 10 years of experience, that means you could be capping your idea of that hire at age 31 to 32, which is insane. And the idea that someone would hire someone with 20, or 30, or 40 years of experience is that's too much experience now. The other thing that I've also had to tell some folks who are trying to hire someone for a given product because I make recommendations about folks to hire for various gaves that needs all the time.
David Berkowitz (09:21):
And I'll send someone a LinkedIn profile and they'll be like I can never afford them. I'm like it is, you have no idea because, first of all, some of these folks can do in 10 hours, what a 25-year-old could do in a hundred hours. So you're actually getting a better yet. It's not like there are so many of people who are hungry to just work and take on meaningful projects right now. And there are folks who will do these things that it might be a few hours a day or a few hours a week that they never would have touched before. They'll give a sweetheart deal to the person hiring just because they liked the project, and not everyone needs to have these like five-six-figure projects.
David Berkowitz (10:08):
So, there's experienced talent. That's willing to take on things that they're interested in, but they're getting something out of it too. They're not going to work for 10 bucks an hour. But they'll be able to do a lot more than you think for a lot less. And I think that in time that's an education process and it's something that I think everyone's going to get a lot more used to, but experienced folks do have advantages that are just really hard to exploit right now.
Alex Romanovich (10:46):
Excellent points. So there is a lot of fragmentation that we're experiencing here as well. Ageism, I totally agree that there's quite a bit of that globally, not just in the United States. Do you think the United States as a market, as a destination, do you think it's still a very attractive type of destination for a lot of folks globally? I mean somebody in China, Canada, or Europe, or the Middle East that all of a sudden they don't have to travel anywhere because nobody's traveling. So they have a very equal shot at targeting the audience in the United States, for example, or any other country for that matter. But the USA was always a very attractive destination. Do you think that that is still a way to go, USA is still an attractive destination, even though digital and social is the only way that you can do this right now?
David Berkowitz (11:54):
There's still a lot of creativity here. There's still a lot of the US dictating so much of media usage is happening. I mean the purchasing power is here, consumerism is here, the openness of doing business. Even when the US has been at its absolute worst in so many ways that not always an easy country to deal with that's for sure. But you don't need a permit to go and talk to the CMO of a 400-500 company. There's some of that accessibility, even when we've had so many challenges with our economy, with our healthcare system, with the federal government down to the local levels. I think there's a lot of that innovation entrepreneurialism.
David Berkowitz (12:56):
And there's so much of that, that is pretty exciting. And we're going to go and find our way a little bit more. So, as we get on the other side of the pandemic, I think that there's going to be a lot of this hunger. Now, what I think is still really important though, is that there is this rise of the rest. And so, someone who is in a 20 or 40-million person country, it's like to be a big player there, maybe you don't need to go after the 300-million person like trillion-dollar spending market. And I think that the US is going to have to work harder to entice other entrepreneurs and others to come to our shores to go and make sure that they know that this is the place where they're going to be welcomed, where they can build a business and make a real impact.
David Berkowitz (13:59):
But even if you look at things like Clubhouse, you look at stuff, that innovations that are happening, like on a subscription front, like Substack. I think, Onlyfans is one of the most fascinating companies to come out of here in years. And as that shifts from being this spot for R- and maybe X-rated content to being something that's like an innovative subscription business. I think that there are things like that, that can happen here, like a lot of the other places you think of are not going to be able to adapt a business model from the porn industry and then make this like the spot that's like having small businesses going set up a subscription service, like brilliant stuff. And we're not the only ones, I mean, just look at Shopify out of Canada, innovations happening from everywhere. We didn't invent Tik To. But there's still a lot going for it here.
Alex Romanovich (15:04):
I totally agree with you that it's becoming a lot more diverse. Let's talk about other topics that are pertinent to small, medium-sized businesses, and also to scale-ups, startups that are trying to get a beachhead with some of the audience that they're trying to target, they're trying to sell to and so forth. Now, prior to COVID we had conferences, we had face-to-face, we had from handshakes, we had presentations in the boardrooms and so forth, and so on. All of that has been replaced now by Zoom. How does a business, small, medium-sized business, that is not established a startup, a scale-up, how did they gain the trust, the credibility in this very much digital and social world that we're living right now without the conferences, without the handshakes, without the face-to-face, without a body language, and all those wonderful human things that we're used to? So, what do they do?
David Berkowitz (16:10):
Well, it's, it's tough as hell. It's funny looking at your background right now. I am physically around the corner from the Empire State Building. So, I might be able to actually see my building in the background of your image right there, right by Koreatown on 32nd street, which it had been my favorite place to take people from all around the city, from all around the world. Friends came in from Vietnam, and I had lunch a hundred feet away from me. So to be able to break bread with people in the middle of the most vibrant city in the country. I miss that. I can count on two hands the number of times of eating out over the past year, and be able to really break bread with people.
David Berkowitz (16:59):
And I feel that pain so much because that was my life. And it was my lifeblood, and I had all that access right here. I got totally cut off now. What I think is exciting though is that this absolutely is fueled some of the growth in my own community. I'm just 2000 people. You look at Clubhouse and they've got millions of people who are joining this thing. I joke the other day on Twitter, that I only logged into Clubhouse to invite people to Clubhouse. And as more friends except my invites - great. I'll just keep inviting more people. I actually really suck Clubhouse. I'm not good at an audio-only networks. If for some of the reasons you met, I need to see people.
David Berkowitz (17:51):
I'm really good, I'm a writer. So, I feel very at home in texts, I can build relationships over texts that maybe are very hard for other people, but that's me. But that's also why my own community. I started weekly video chats. I started speed networking on this platform that I love called upstream, highly, highly recommend going on there. And so, there are ways to go and meet people to build relationships. There are members of my own community who I've never met, but who I feel extremely close to them. There's a guy in Seattle I talked to all the time, and we're working on an event together. I hope to get to meet him sometime, but I don't know when that'll be. And I care less about whether a marketer joins my community.
David Berkowitz (18:42):
I don't think everyone needs to join Clubhouse. I don't think everyone needs to do whatever that next day is that everyone says you need to do, but to take a little bit of time and say like for 10 or 15 minutes a day this doesn't have to be a crazy amount of time. This is going to be your tribe that you just try to hang with, people you're trying to learn from. And maybe it's something that you know really well, that you can contribute to. Maybe it's something that you're really just trying to learn. And you're willing to open yourself up as the new kid there. Even if you're a kid who's been doing this for 50 years then find it, and also being okay saying, if Facebook groups are your thing, if LinkedIn groups are your thing, just double down on that, go where you want to spend time.
David Berkowitz (19:33):
But with that focus of learning what you can share what you know, trying to give more than you take, and you can build a lot of relationships. I think, the conference survey does hurt B2B businesses, not to be able to have this and especially to target a lot of the buyers that you want to go after. It's much easier for a CMO to hide when they're not on stage at a conference, it's a lot easier for them to hide. It's a lot harder for you to find them. But you can build enough of those relationships to get you a hell of a lot closer. And if you can provide value to that CMOs, director of marketing, who is scrambling right now and trying to make do with a 30% budget cut, and some of their team members laid off, or maybe even perished during COVID.
David Berkowitz (20:25):
All kinds of people dealing with all kinds of problems right now in their jobs and their families and everything. If you can just help someone do their job a little bit better, and you're coming at that sincerely, like I've worked with business coaches myself, why never would've hired for anything beforehand. I need help. They were able to help me, and I invested that. And that has helped me. I think that's happening at every level. How can you genuinely help someone and not just market to or sell to someone?
Alex Romanovich (21:00):
Those are excellent points. I totally agree with you on belonging to a tribe, or even starting your own tribe, as you have done. And we're tribal beings, we absolutely must have the ability to be recognized, the ability to belong, the ability to have a destination, a home, something we can hold home and so forth. That brings us to another topic, which is somewhat interesting as well. How do recruiters, how do major brands or larger brands, if you will, how do they pick talent right now? How do they know what is real and what is not? Obviously, they can have a discussion like this over Zoom, and a lot of it can be staged. A lot of it could be virtualized, like the beautiful background I have in the back, but how do companies now make decisions going into 2021 and beyond in terms of who's the right resource, who's the right talent especially for the times we're living right now?
David Berkowitz (22:15):
This is where so much of it is going to come down to relationships. I was just I did a chat with the CMO of great company called Jellyfish, Sharon Harris. And she was talking to me about her job search. And what I knew, she found a job and built the team during the pandemic. She was telling me it actually was a relationship that started at CES a while back. So she was at the consumer electronic show and made some connections that led to this. And the word of mouth is for familiar with when I was talking to another marketer, who's got one of the best brand resumes I've ever seen out of Atlanta where they have some of the most fortune 500 to find anywhere in the world.
David Berkowitz (23:07):
And she was saying how there was a job she applied for. It was perfect for her, like she would have been a shoe-in. 800 people applied. She got in through a friend of hers who recommended her over there, but still never got a call back. And her friend said there were a hundred people who were referred via internal sources. So, even if you take that 800 people off the table, she had a hot one and a hundred shot. Absolutely, one child right now is it is a hirers market. And so I think one of the interesting things that hires have to figure out is how much they could, you hear a lot of lip service to soft skills. And that has arguably never been more important in a time of so much unpredictability.
David Berkowitz (24:07):
We don't know how many more strains COVID has left in it. We didn't know how many more people it's going to take out. We don't know how many things are going to impact the economy, and entertainment, and sports, and retail, and everything else. We have no idea what the end of 2021 is going to look like, let alone planning for beyond that. I hope all kinds of things are going to happen, but hope that as strategy. But the challenge is do you find folks who you know are like really nimble who have done a lot of different things and can just excel at and thrive in a lot of these odd test situations? Or do you want someone who's just so heads down doing that one job over and over, and just seems like sheer, he was just so reliable at that one thing, and it hit home on that? And I think that's what is like the latter scenario is still going to win out more often. But there's just more of an opportunity to be more creative with who you bring on to that team, so that you can try to weather whatever is happening. It's 2021, but we sure haven't seen the end of all this weirdness and craziness yet.
Alex Romanovich (25:28):
Good points, great points. Let's talk about some of the companies that have been established maybe in the mid- sized sector. I mean, it's great if you're a logistics company or you're a platform company that was involved with delivery, food delivery, and all of a sudden there's a bit more demand for food delivery. What about if you were a real estate company or commercial real estate company? What if you were in engineering and scientific firm, what if you were an accounting firm, and so forth? How do you adapt to this environment? What is your strategy, in a few words, in terms of content development, or outreach, or engaging with existing or new clients, which is even more difficult right now for some of these firms?
Alex Romanovich (26:24):
I mean, I would hate to be an airline at the moment without necessarily the funding or support from the government. There are a lot of folks on furlough. There are a lot of folks that have been misplaced and outright fired or let go. What are some of the strategies as we're entering into the middle of 2021, or maybe even the tail end of 2021 provided of course that the vaccines will be successful and slowly but surely we will be getting out of this hibernation mode?
David Berkowitz (27:01):
Right now there's such a need for some of that creativity, for some of that flexibility. So, if you're an accounting firm and you're used to dealing with a lot of larger size clients, you make up for that with making it as easy as possible for someone who's never been in business for themselves before to just get it all done for them. I love the old campaign from staples where they had that big red easy button. And I think that there are a lot of businesses that can just make things easier and more packaged and just do it for me version that so many people need right now and that people will pay for it, because that's going to save them a hell of a lot of time and hassle, and they won't need to go to comparison shop if all of this stuff is done in one place.
David Berkowitz (28:04):
When I needed someone to set up my own LLC last year, it was like how can I just assign a couple of papers, cut a check and not look at this and spend another minute doing it. Commercial real estate. I was working with a client where commercial real estate was the client's biggest customer target last year. It's not fun. And the client was able to provide a lot of interesting value to this company, but this was a company that their salespeople were just decimated in new deals coming through. At the time there was so hunker down that they were just in full-on defensive mode, whereas trying to instead say, well, how do you work with your property owners to try to retain their tenants longer?
David Berkowitz (29:14):
How do you try to provide more value for that? How do you do more creative things with space to upgrade that, to make it easier so that you can reopen during COVID and have all the occupancy management built-in and extra safety checks, and make sure that give people peace of mind? There are businesses right now that are working on taking all these empty storefronts that are on the streets of the city behind you and every city around the world right now almost, and beautify them, turn them into ad space, because there's still a fair amount of foot traffic going on or a car traffic in the cities. And I think, more than a lot of people anticipated, how do you just add to some of the beautification or utility?
David Berkowitz (30:04):
If I go outside on the bus shelter and there's something that's telling me when the vaccine is going to be available or just how cautious I need to be right now, then I want to pay attention to that stuff. I think there are ways where it's how do you contribute, and are there some pivots that you can make, some of those are going to be long-term pivot, some of those are going to be short-term, but there's no way around the fact that that just trying to hold on and see how long the government checks are going to keep coming for. That's not a long-term strategy. I can need as much of that creative thinking right now as possible.
Alex Romanovich (31:01):
Totally agree. The dependence on the government stimulus is not going to be sustainable, obviously. We can't just continue to print money and distribute that. But at the same time, the stimulus has to work for for all the successes in all the sectors and so forth. David, it has been a really interesting conversation. What are some of the parting words to our audience in terms of top three or five advice points as to how to position yourself, whether you're a B2B or B2C business for 2021?
David Berkowitz (31:47):
Well, I think, so much of it is seeing just who you can learn from, who you can go and borrow great ideas from. I mean, there's a woman on Twitter, Amanda Goetz, who was at the knot and she started this really fascinating business in the CBD space has a wise. And ID under one point, because she was shared so much about her own family and a lot of the challenges she's facing. And there were a couple of things she said that had resonated so much with me, and I just had to take the time to go and thank her. I never met this person. She wasn't the kind of person that maybe a year ago I would have thought would have been as relevant for the kind of stuff I was doing.
David Berkowitz (32:43):
But I've learned a ton from new kinds of people. I think, trying to also figure out what are you doing that can be repeated, or what are you doing that can be packaged, that can make others jobs easier? That stuff is always going to be in demand. And also it is tough as hell right now for so many people. Most of those are not in those like thriving business demand through the roof businesses. Great for those who are wonderful. But it's still do whatever you can to just hold on to what you believe in, not cut corners, not just add to all the noise out there and not just trying to spam a million people when they're really only five people that you need to get in front of that are going to make a big impact in your business.
David Berkowitz (33:42):
And I think, that instead of trying to spend million people, if you're going after those five people and say, here is why I really want to talk to you. And when someone comes to me and says, I've seen when you built with zero marketers, I'm trying to work through some things like that, I want to know why or how you do this thing. I want to talk to them all the time and maybe they even have something to sell me, but it's like I know why they're talking to me and not you and every other person out there. And just a little bit of time to do your homework and have that personal touch. It matters because I think on that flip side people are so much more responsive to dealing with people on a human level here.
David Berkowitz (34:41):
And amputees and easy buzzword right now, but I know, if someone doesn't get back to me for a few weeks and I really want to talk to him, sometimes I reach out to them and be like, are you all right? And not like, oh, man, that's how they responded. And I know people who have got back to me a time because they've been sick, or because their loved ones have, so just being a little more accepting. Unfortunately, this is one of those things that it's brought so much of us all around the world together here. And that's one of those things that I haven't lived in the city on 9/11 and seeing how I never felt like more of a New Yorker than I did on September 12th. And seeing people just stop in the streets and cheer for the firefighters who were driving by. I think, if there are things like that, that do really bring people together. And for those of us who were here, it lasted. I hope, that that kind of a bonding on an even greater level around the world. I hope, some of that is real and sticks around
Alex Romanovich (35:59):
David Berkowitz. Thank you so much for being with us. A lot of great tips, a lot of great discussions, a lot of great insights. We're hoping to bring you back for some of the ongoing discussions, lots of luck with the Serial Marketers, and I'm sure a lot of folks will want to check it out in the audience, global audience as well, and wishing all the best.
David Berkowitz (36:25):
Thank you so much, Alex. Really thrilled to be here. I look forward to learning from other guests too.
Alex Romanovich (36:29):
Thank you.