Humans, Humanity & How We Are Wired | Seth Temko

Justin Keller: Welcome to Revenue Talks, the show where we get real about what it takes to build pipeline and drive expansion as a go to market team. I'm Justin Keller, the vice President of Revenue Marketing at Drift. And on this show, I'm here talking to folks across the entire go to market organization, which means marketing, sales, and customer success. About how these conversations, technology and cross- functional alignment to build more pipeline and drive expansion. Because revenue, it's everyone's business now. Hey, it's Justin. Welcome back to Revenue Talks. Today I'm joined by Seth Temko, the CMO of PAR Technology, and they are a global provider of software systems and service solutions for the restaurant and retail industries. I bet you've run into them before, even if you didn't know you did. Seth has been in the marketing game for just a few minutes. He's had stints at companies like Xenial, Yext and now PAR and today, Seth and I are going to talk about a wide array of marketing topics as is tradition here on revenue talks. But I think I particularly juicy topic that C- Suites are having lots of conversations right now are around the topic of efficiency. And Seth is a marketer that cares deeply about the customer experience. And so I'm really eager to learn his views on how you enable a great customer experience with tech, but also doing it in a way where your CFO's head doesn't explode for paying for that tech. So Seth, I'm very stoked to have you on here to talk about that, but also because I think you might be the first fellow Midwesterner I've had on this show. I'm in Indianapolis right now and you're joining us from Nashville, right?

Seth Temko: Yes. Yes sir. And thank you for having me on the show.

Justin Keller: Of course. I mean, actually maybe that's the first question is Nashville considered the Midwest or the South?

Seth Temko: It's considered the South actually.

Justin Keller: Is it?

Seth Temko: Even though we're in the central inaudible.

Justin Keller: Okay, well no worries. But you're from Chicago?

Seth Temko: Yes, sir.

Justin Keller: Okay. Well your Midwesterner card is still valid on the show, so now that you're in the South, no worries there. So anyways, diving into the meat of the topic, in doing a little research for the show, I noticed that you had a whole bunch of people that were giving you credit, particularly for understanding the value of technology and technology partnerships in driving productivity and overall process improvements. And in the current climate that we are all in. You, me, the people listening to this podcast, I think marketing technology is getting scrutinized a lot. I know that I've had a few conversations with our finance team being like, " Hey, do you really need to do this? Can we shrink this contract size? What can we do here?" But as a fellow marketer, I believe very strongly that if you can get the alchemy of your tech stack right, you can get these tools to interact the right way. The output way outweighs the investment. So I guess two questions. One, what are the tools that you just can't live without in your tech stack? And then maybe jumping off of that, what are you doing with those tools that makes one plus one equal three?

Seth Temko: So that's a great question, I'm kind of old school. So I got involved with restaurant hospitality technology back in Web 1. 0, so in the late nineties. And I can tell you that when I was in grad school and I was working as a hall director running a dormitory that paid for grad school, I was getting an MBA, was focusing on marketing. I was such a nerd. I was working on the computer labs, I was building computers for fun. I was learning Novell networking. Apparently they were going to lose the battle of Microsoft, but I didn't know it at the time. And I had conducted a survey, a research survey for grad school, and it was on women's fashion preferences. So this is January in the Chicago suburbs, freezing cold, minus wind chill temperatures. So all the students in my class were going out to the metro station, the main commuter rail to Chicago, and they're going to bother people when it's freezing out in the morning and say, " Hey, can you answer this?" So what I did instead was I went to the library and I got a book called the Yellow Pages of email addresses, and I pulled out all the women's names as I identify them as women, as best I could. Put them in a simple program randomly selected and I spammed them. Now at the time, spam as a definition was just happening, but here was the wonderful thing. I did that from a warm room and a couple of hours, I had my results within 24 hours and all the other students were lamenting the freezing experience they had out there. And when that happened, I said, " There's something to this internet, I think it's going to be commercialized, I think it has business value." And that was just before Windows was releasing the gooey interface to compete with Apple. And they started saying at the end of an ad go to www. microsoft. com. And I threw up my hands, I'm like, " Woo." And my wife is like, " Why are you so excited?" I'm like, " The Internet's being commercialized." And I was so excited with that. I went to Barnes and Noble and I bought all three books on internet marketing and I was an expert by the end of that weekend. And so I just tell you that simple story to say that I've seen this evolution really from the beginning. And I was determined that when I finished grad school, the first position I would take would be marketing and marketing related to the internet. And I was able to do that. And then connection through that led me to knowing and working with people with startups. And then that got me into startups and that created a progression. So I had felt in the early part of my career, I could really understand internet marketing really in totality and understand what was most important and then what tools to select to do that. Flash forward to today, I don't even know how many books on internet marketing and sales on the internet there is. I imagine there's thousands. And I know that we started crossing into the over 50, 000 different companies with software products or startups specifically around marketing and how to enable marketing. And so your question is really important from the perspective of how do I select a few nuggets, those golden nuggets from that vast array? And what I would say is I have tried purposefully to not repetitively use tools again and again because I believe that the towering figures of today are not necessarily the innovators for tomorrow. And I actually do this. I am a closet at appsumo. com junkie. So for those who do not know, AppSumo is a site where they bring in deals, usually lifetime deals who pay one price. And they're typically newer marketing tech companies. Sometimes it's just a different version of something bigger, quote, unquote" better", in the industry. And I will sign up for deals all the time, and I would say nine out of 10 I don't use in the long run, but the one in 10, there's something about them. They're easy to use, they provide ongoing value, they have a definitive roadmap. They're listening to their customers, they're developing and investing along the way to do that. So why am I bringing this up? Well, I'm saying in any technology you select, do you see those same characteristics with those vendors? And I don't care how big they are, they can be Salesforce. Are they really innovating or are they incrementally innovating or are they really just really marketing and what does that look like? And then there's a second cautionary tale with technology, which is I'd say be cautious in surrendering your processes to the software. So if you think of a digital marketing maturity continuum or matrix, and actually I've gone through that with PAR currently where we have acquired companies. And so I'm the first CMO brought on board and I am given a corporate mandate. So before, we had companies with products and agile teams working to promote and generate revenue around particular products. Now I've been brought in to create a marketing department. And what does that look like? Well, the first thing you do is you talk to everybody. Who are you? What do you do? What do you like to do? What don't you do? What do you wish you were doing? What's the do do, stuff that you're doing that you got forced to do but really you shouldn't be doing? And you define those things and then you start looking beyond people and you say, " What are processes? How do we do things? What is the relationship with sales? What is the relationship with product and product management? How do we release products? How do we onboard customers? How do we support customers?" And you look for the similarities and the differences, and then you start saying, " What is it that we want to do as processes? What are the technologies that will support that?" Some individuals, departments or companies that would say, they say, " I don't want to figure that all out. I'm just going to get a technology and it's best practices." Why? Because they say it is. Imagine that a software company saying, " We know best practices, and it's reflection of-"

Justin Keller: Oh sorry, yes, you should see the world from our point of view and that makes you want to buy our software, exactly.

Seth Temko: Right. And then if you're like, " Well, there's a gap." They go, " Oh, well you just didn't buy enough. You need to buy these other modules." And hence you buy more and more and more. But what I think you find in marketing technologies, marketing automation, and I think it's reflected in CRMs in a big way, in a major way, is that the best practices start forcing or shoehorning process practices into your business. And then what happens is you start covering the gaps with people and spreadsheets and things outside of a centralized system. And the challenge there is, I think in the nirvana or the ideal of digital marketing, if you go to a CFO and you say, " What do you want from digital marketing?" They will say to you, " You spend a dollar. I want to know how many dollars we get back." Right? And the answer is, well, that's great aspiration. Different companies can do that to different degrees. The more complex the company, the more diversified the systems, the more different differentiation in the processes in the products, in the segmentation and the personas and in your marketing programs and your sales processes and people, the harder that is to do so a company that has a singular product and a singular market and a main geography has a world of advantage in doing that. And when I was at TouchBistro, that was a scenario where we did that very well. PAR is multiple large enterprise products, sold a different personas in different ways. And so to get to that state, we have to have uniformity people process, and then the systems come into play. We're actually working on that right now. We have multiple CRMs and we're moving to one primary marketing automation tool.

Justin Keller: I think you really hit on a pretty monolithic instance for us marketers where I think way too many of us let the tail wag the dog. And by that I mean we have come up with technology. We assume that all businesses run on technology and that we need to make our processes and people fit into the tech stack that we've got. And when you say it like that, it is so backwards. We need to start with what are we trying to solve for the business and then we need to make the technology work for us.

Elizabeth: Hey, it's Elizabeth, the producer of the Drift Podcast network. I hope you're enjoying this episode of Revenue Talks. If you're looking for even more go- to- market best practices, check out our ebook GTM Lab. You'll get go- to- market hot takes and secrets from the industry's brightest minds on how to ignite every phase of your strategy, giving you even more ways to energize your marketing and sales efforts. Give it a read at drift. ly/ gtmbook. Now, back to the show.

Justin Keller: It's a good cautionary tale because it's so easy to fall into that trap of best practices. Well, the marketing tool that I pay$ 180,000 a year for says I should do it like this and I'm not paying that kind of money for nothing. So I'm just going to follow what they say. When really we need to be taking a beat and looking outside and saying, " Okay, what does the company need? And then how can I put tech to work for me?"

Seth Temko: I think there's some red flags. Take a flag, throw it on the field. Some of the red flags are like when you have to use other tools with your main tool, chances are your main tool is not reflective of your processes and your people and your business goals and objectives. You hear this commonly with reporting. If you are taking half a day, a day, multiple days to do a month end evaluation of spend, revenue realization pipeline, SAL, SQL. MQL to SQL attribution models, whatever you're doing, and it's literally person days involved to do that, chances are that's a flag on the field, Something wrong, something broken.

Justin Keller: And how do you square that with... So you are inaudible way on the edge of being an early adopter for a new tech. And so you're dealing with a lot of, not necessarily beta, but early kind of not fully realized roadmap products. Let's call that. How do you bring those into the company and make them work for you, even though they may not be fully baked? How do you get the team on board? Or is it something where you just have a little laboratory that you're experimenting with on the side?

Seth Temko: Well, I'm big into agile, so I haven't done marketing through my whole career and I've been a CTO at a startup and employee number one, and you never have enough budget. And so I was applying agile principles before there was agile as a book and agile as a certification on the rest. I think marketers that just jump from, we don't have a plan and known, our market segmentation. We understand our value proposition, we understand how we sell, why people buy, et cetera. And instead you jump and say, " We're going to go from a zero to a one. We're going to get this big hairy system, we're going to go and implement that." I'd say, " Wow, learn your market, your buyers, why they buy, why they don't bu, where you live in that ecosystem of alternatives." Once you've done that, you're in a position of sports sales. You can do your decks, you can do your pitches, you can do your promotions. Now you're in a position to do content marketing. Now you can really dig into personas, you can do your white papers, you can do the value add, the attention getting things, but in a positive way that touches on the needs of the customer. I think once you have that, then you're in position to deploy more of demand generation marketing automation tools. You need the first two to then implement that. I think in B2B marketing and almost all of my marketing has been B2B marketing, then you can start looking at account based marketing, very strategic and tactical. And by the way, I think all these things that I've talked about, you don't put in systems, you create the content and you test so that you can change that quickly. And then you find what works, where you get traction. You stay viciously, paranoid that your assumptions are wrong.

Justin Keller: I like that.

Seth Temko: Cause hubris will bite you in the butt every time. And that you also say, stay paranoid that what works today will not work tomorrow. What is cheap today will be expensive tomorrow. What few are doing today, everyone will do tomorrow. And by the way, I've been in this so long, I just see it go in cycles. And so I go, " What stopped working five years ago may very well work today." And I'll give an example. Outdoor billboards, they go in cycles of expensive and ineffective to inexpensive, ineffective and circle through. A lot of modern marketers don't think about it. I think there's a place and a position for all different types of marketing channels. And oh by the way, if you can integrate them, if you can make them work together and reinforce, if you can have multiple touches and different positioning with similar people and personas, you're going to have that one plus one equals some number larger. And I haven't even talked about the systems yet, but what I'm saying is when you know those things, the systems to use will become very apparent and obvious.

Justin Keller: Yes.

Seth Temko: And I think for those in a position where companies are just getting started, holy cow, doors are wide open and you can choose pretty much anything. Just know that the longer you use it, the bigger the database, the more the users, the more enforcement and integration within your systems, the harder it is to change and remove. And I think most marketers, including myself, instead, you inherit a tech stack and then you have to go through the whole unbundling to understand where you are at. So what I mean by that is it quote, unquote, " working or not working?" Is there perceived value to the business or not? What are you doing outside of the software as a compromise? What are the systems issues? What resolution can your demand gen go down to? And if you've gone through acquisition processes, you may find that the smaller companies that were acquired actually are farther along on digital capabilities because they have had the advantage of less legacy and the ability to choose a more modern or more appropriate technology. But it is a false assumption to say, " Oh, we can just take that and now bring it into the larger organization," because most marketing technologies do not live on an island. And they must be connected and integrated to other systems. And once you do that, the threads are there. Hey, I sell enterprise software, I know how it works. So once we integrate our technology and we have multiple technologies at play with a customer, our value realization should go up. But also the challenge to remove or significantly change that, that's a major challenge. Can't be ignored.

Justin Keller: It is. And I think that is one of those things where if you do inherit a tech stack or you are dealing with legacy tools that do have, the change cost becomes very high. Then all of a sudden it's almost inaudible the tiger situation. We need to drive efficiencies. How much is driving that efficiency going to cost us? And you almost end up in no one situation. So am I hearing you right? You did say this, you need to be constantly paranoid about this. You need to be constantly fighting these things, which I think makes a lot of sense. One thing you touched on briefly is on this kind of call it continuum, starting out with your message, moving into your demand gen and then evolving into ABM. One thing I have noticed, I've talked a lot about that I think is interesting is when people get to the point of ABM, it's almost becomes this mantra of well, okay, we don't need tech from ABM, right? ABM is just about a coordinated sales and marketing play, which I think is true at the end of the day. You just need to get the right message to that person. You don't necessarily need tech for it. Tech for sure helps to enable that. But it's almost like we, without knowing it, B2B marketers are like, " Hey, we should get back to basics on this. We should just get back to telling a story and working alongside sales to create opportunities with the right people." How do you feel about that? Do you think there's any truth to that or are we....

Seth Temko: I think that all marketing fundamentally is non- dependent on technology until we want certain levels of efficiency and scale, in which case we have no choice. So if you were a company where you said, you had these mega contracts, multi billions of dollars, and there's defense contractors in other industries where that's very common, you would literally take the companies that you need to penetrate, which would be a few of them. You would deconstruct them, you would know all the players, you would know all the executives, you would know their backgrounds, their preferences, their histories. You would deconstruct that and you would say, " How do we make contact? How do we engage? How do we begin conversation? How do we show value? How do we then start connecting the threads and understanding behind the scene what's going on? What's their pain points?" I mean, ideally we would be able to do that with every single customer. And I would say to some extent we have as marketers said, " Well sales will do that." Well in account based marketing, no, that should be done on front. You should have a profile and an understanding, and not just the politics and the structure and the evolution of acquisitions and positioning of their products in the marketplace, but who are they as people? What are they as a culture? What's being said about them on Glassdoor? All of those things you can do without technology. I think what it gets into though is now, how do you consistently create these cadences of touchpoints in that? And that's where software comes into play. And so we're doing that at PAR. Sharon is really great with demand gen and she has been working with our loyalty products and the sales teams there, creating an ABM program. We are doing that through manual means, but that takes a lot of proctoring, shepherding, sticks, carrots, all those things for people to do that behavior. Will we move to an automated system? Sure we will, but we need to get some other things in place and at the same time we can do things to learn, super important, to then know what is most important in a system, How can a system best help us?

Justin Keller: Yep. I love that. And I think that's like we've talked so much about the tech side and I think that is only half the equation. And one thing as I was creeping on your LinkedIn profile that hit me square between the eyes was the phrase that you talk about combining the science of digital technology with the artistic value of humanistic experiences, which I just love. It's the art and the science of marketing is both sides. And I feel like you have gotten quite a strong grip on the tech side of things. How do you balance that out with the human side, with the creative and art side and make sure you're feeding into those systems, the right messages and things that people want to hear?

Seth Temko: Sure. And by the way, I've had different roles through almost a 30 year career. I'm saying, okay, as I'm getting more mature and how do I want to finish it up? Marketing for sure. And why marketing? Because it is such a dynamic discipline. It is an amazing profession for people to get into. I encourage every young person whose undecided what to do in college or getting out of college. So you should really look at marketing because it goes from writing and design and visuals and literally touching people intellectually, emotionally, et cetera, all the way to hard science and hard data and everything in between. That is an amazing discipline. If you are bored in marketing, just make a shift to the left or right and you'll probably be reinvigorated with it. I think the heart of marketing though really comes down to humans, humanity and how we are wired. So as an example with PAR, we took two marketing teams, Punchh Loyalty and the PAR products teams, two agile teams. And one of the missions given to me was create one team, one department, so that's three sprints of 90 days of effort. The first is people structure, second is processes. I do a three bucket exercise. What do we have to do? What is nice to do and what is the do do, the crap we do because we've inherited that structure and then we make sure that our systems reflect the processes that we've prioritized. And so this is the fastest path I know to take things and bring them together into what I would call a high performing marketing organization. And we're moving along, we're getting there pretty rapidly. Not surprisingly, systems is some of the bigger challenges because then it's the conversation we just had. But one thing in getting the team together is we started talking about what is the mission focused direction of this team? What's the prioritization? And then we reorganized. So we moved from two, what I would call agile tribes, to an agency model. Where there is more of a functional focus and then we differentiated mission focus direction for each one of those sub teams. And then we start applying software like Wrike, so that we can do project management and we can also work more collaboratively with vendors who support us because it takes a village to do B2B marketing. There's just no way you're going to have enough heads or team members expertise, all the rest. Okay, so the one thing that I did though was I gave everybody a book, one book. This is my book recommendation. People love book recommendations. It's Just Listen by Goulston. And he is a PhD psychiatrist and I guarantee this book is not heavy in science, although the first chapter, he does lay out some structures of the brain and then he gives real world practical advice and recognizing state of mind, how to shift state of mind for yourself or others. It's really practical, really useful. So I'm going to take a little bit, and I'm going to use that to answer that question. So I went on this journey about 10 years ago saying, " Why do people buy things?" What is that process in everyone's mind? So what you would find from the book, Just Listen. You'd say, " Hey, 99% of humanity has the same brain structure. We have certain areas of our brain, they evolve a certain way and the other 1% just stay away because that's where a lot of scary people live." And no judgment, it's just the way it is. So I go, " Well that's a great starting point. 99% of humanity reacts to certain things and stimuli in a similar way." So how does that work? So go through the book and apply it to marketing and it goes like this. You need a trigger of interest. So 10, 000 plus marketing messages a day, you are exposed to passively or directly. And the human brain is great at filtering, identification, classification, categorization. But to use a Seth Godin term, what's the purple cow? What stands out in the field? What gets your attention? What is that trigger of interest? And so that's your amygdala, that's your lizard brain, that's your fight, flight. I must eat to survive. I must reproduce to carry on generations. That's your trigger of interest. That's very, very briefly. And then you move to your mammalian brain and that's your emotions. So I love it, I hate it. I could see this. You get into your mirroring stuff where someone throws and catches a ball and you think, you can visualize that experience, that shared connectedness. And then you get to your primate brain, which is your neocortex. And this is where you can do abstract thinking and you do your logical thought. So here's the advice I would give everyone. And when you think about fundamentals, design that journey with that in mind. This has already been done. You see it on every Facebook ad. Trigger of interest. It stops you from scrolling. A quick tagline that sounds really cool, Click here for more. And that's the intellectual layer to justify to buy. So think about how much investment is made with product purchasing experiences. You buy something and when you open the box, the first thing it says, " Congratulations, you've made a great decision." Well that's because you have buyer's remorse. Well how does that work? You have a trigger of interest and you buy on an emotional state. No one wants to admit to it. And B2B purchases, they're like, " Oh no, we went through assessments and we did ROI and we beat them up in the contract and this is a good deal." But the answer is it's a hero's journey for the buyer. How does their work easier? How do their employees congratulate them? How do they hit the revenue goals and therefore they get their big bonus and then they get a promotion. It is about them. It is an emotional decision. The intellectual part is the layer that justifies the decision that you made. So if you think about it in that way, how do you create things that address that, that embrace that say, " It's neither good nor bad, it is human."

Justin Keller: Yep. I could not agree with that more. I think that is one thing that BBB marketers, we spend so much time because we have to sell to committees, we have to sell to businesses, we don't think we're selling to people. Uh- huh, we're selling to people are emotional animals and we don't spend enough time thinking about the heart. We over- rotate on the brain. And I think you see that a lot in rebrands. I think very often rebrands are done because a company gets to the point where they're like, " We're getting diminishing returns on the brain side of things and we need to start doing more heart marketing." I think it's maybe more true in B2C, but oh my god, this has been one of the more, if not most intellectually stimulating conversations I've had on Revenue Talks set. I can't thank you enough. I've got one final question for you. And this is the signature Revenue Talks question we ask every single guest. And the question is this, what is the number one thing that your team is focused on to accelerate revenue through the rest of the year?

Seth Temko: And I'm pausing because I have to think that through. We have a lot of initiatives. PAR Technology, we are going through a transformation in the company. So I want to give a little bit of background because I want to give context because without context you say, " Well why this decision or why this direction?" So here we are at PAR Technology, formed as a hardware company sort of coincidentally. It was really a government services company by formation using data intelligence in the seventies and the eighties. We think AI and all that, oh no, no, no. Goes back for decades. But it happened coincidentally that the co- founders there were very smart, genius level, very much entrepreneurs and innovators. And there was a family member that owned some McDonald's. This was back in the seventies and eighties. And they said, " Oh my gosh, employees are getting all the numbers wrong. They're collecting the wrong money, they're giving the wrong change. They don't know how to do this." And literally PAR created the first restaurant POS, which was what we would call a smart register today, pre- programmed buttons for menu items. So take the menu on a board, put it into software and hardware, press a button that automatically knows pricing and does the correct calculation of taxation and everything else. And PAR did that, put it in a very hardened format, this little quick service brand called McDonald's standardized on it. McDonald's took off.

Justin Keller: Have you heard of it?

Seth Temko: PAR took off. And PAR became a global hardware company. And then there was... Obviously PAR is known for service. Hardware and service go hand in hand for value delivery. But now we're really going through a renaissance into software. And that's started with the acquisition of Brink POS and then moving into the enterprise POS space for restaurants. And we have just mega brands and that. And then acquisition of Restaurant Magic, which is back office with Data Central and now acquisition of Punchh. And then we recently acquired MENU Technologies, which is digital ordering and dispatch. So I give you this as background to say that's a lot. So on a brand basis, there's a big effort to focus on saying how do we take what I call logo soup and turn it into a customer- centric view of the business. It's very easy, particularly with high growth companies that have a lot of complexity, especially if you go through acquisition for there to be, call it the many faces of Sybil. Who you are is depending who you talk to in the company. That's never good from a customer- centric perspective. So certainly we're going through that to really hone and focus our identity, so that's definitely one thing. And then the second thing is how do we create this coherent and scalable structure of support for a company that is growing on average, 30% compounded a year with aspirations for more, at the size that we're at, which is hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And if you look at the number of startups just in general globally who go from$ 0 to a hundred million, it's in the thousands. If you go to break 500 million, it is a couple hundred. And those that break a billion, it's fewer than a hundred. Like the pace and change at scale is a challenge. And that is what we are doing organizationally and we're doing this on multiple fronts. So we talk about we're doing a unified experience, we're doing that with our products, we're doing that with our people and our systems. And then we're also doing that with our brand. So we are getting everything in foundationally this year to be in position to execute on that for the next year.

Justin Keller: Amazing. Well God speed on that. That's incredible and truly, this is one of my favorite conversations I've had. I could spend a couple more hours just listening to you and your marketing wisdom. So Seth Temko from Par Technology, thank you so much. I do have Just Listen by Goulston in my shopping cart, just FYI. So I'm looking forward to reading that. But thank you. Thank you so much for being a guest on Revenue Talks. Appreciate you so much.

Seth Temko: Appreciate the time. Great conversation. Happy to do it again someday.

Justin Keller: Thank you so much for listening to Revenue Talks. If you like this episode, please consider leaving a review wherever you're listening. You can connect with me on Twitter @ JustinKeller and the entire Drift Podcast Network @ DriftPodcasts. Remember revenue, everyone's business now.