sue holub:

If your customers don't know why you over somebody else, it means that you're not differentiated. I think bold moves in the market, create winners and I, I've seen a lot of leadership teams take too long to make those bold changes. Any CEO who is not working hard to become AI native very quickly is going to get left behind.

matt pennebaker:

[00:00:32] Ever wonder how a brain surgeon uses seven orphaned acquisitions into an AI powered juggernaut? Then flips it for a king's ransom meets Sue Hollow DSL, trailblazer, Lexmark Transformation Architect, and the Growth Chief who skyrocketed sales productivity 60% while turning unsolved into the engine behind every Amber Alert.

matt pennebaker:

[00:00:52] Get ready. Her change playbook is pure rocket fuel.

ward pennebaker:

[00:00:59] Well, Sue, [00:01:00] it's so wonderful to have you here. Thank you for joining us for Rethink Change. I've worked with you since 2009 and we've gone through lots of changes as different companies. You're onto a new consulting gig and I'm going to talk about all of that, so welcome, so excited to have you here.

sue holub:

[00:01:17] Thank you Ward. Thanks Matt. It is great to be with you. Uh, yeah, it has been that long, over 15 years. We started together at a staffing company, multi-billion dollar staffing company, and we had the opportunity to reimagine that organization, uh, for all of North America. And, and it was really fun, uh, from a brand perspective, go to market perspective.

sue holub:

[00:01:39] Then, uh, we connected again at Lexmark International. And obviously that was a, a global, uh, company, uh, multi-billion dollar as well and then wrapped it up most recently at Unsolved, where uh, we ended up rebranding that company and had a successful exit last year. So, uh, you [00:02:00] guys knew to be the Good luck, char,

ward pennebaker:

[00:02:01] you like that?

ward pennebaker:

[00:02:02] We like being the good luck charm.

matt pennebaker:

[00:02:03] So to kick things off, why don't you kind of fill us in on the cliff notes of the arc of your, your career so far.

sue holub:

[00:02:10] I, you know, started my career in public relations. I worked at one of the top firms in the world. I did that for a little over five years and realized I'd rather work with agencies than via ad agencies.

sue holub:

[00:02:20] Uh, and so I went corporate for, uh, bell South. Which is now part of at t and I had the privilege of launching the country's first residential DSL service. So that was really fun, uh, for the southeast. Uh, that was back in the late nineties. Then I went over to a company named CheckFree, uh, which was eventually acquired by Fiser, which is one of the largest companies in FinTech today.

sue holub:

[00:02:43] Again, another exciting, uh, arena of online billing and payment. And so kind of bringing that to the norm of everybody's life, paying their bills online. After that, I tried a start up, we'll, we'll go through that one quickly 'cause it was, uh, about a year long and I realized I'm not a startup person and careers are about as much [00:03:00] as about what you are, is what you're not and, and, and, and owning that ended up in enterprise technology, specifically software.

sue holub:

[00:03:06] So, uh, internet of things. And then, uh, SaaS companies. So at, at Core Wireless and, and Salves and Lexmark. So, uh, a lot of enterprise software and technology. Uh, most recently I'm consulting for a, a company that is in the Internet of Things space and helping them as a, as they carve out from a multi-billion dollar company.

sue holub:

[00:03:27] So I tend to stay in that technology, SaaS and services arena.

ward pennebaker:

[00:03:31] When we started working with you at Unsolved, which was such an interesting business model and, and in an interesting industry, can you describe what the company was and kind of what it was facing when you called us?

sue holub:

[00:03:45] Yes. So as a CMO Chief Marketing Officer, which is what I've been, and, and now I'm, uh, presently in conversations to become a Chief Executive officer at different companies, but as a CMO, when you come into a company, the first thing you wanna understand is [00:04:00] what are the opportunities, what are the challenges unsolved outta the gate?

sue holub:

[00:04:04] Was a branding challenge. Uh, I was hired by the executive chairman and it was our first conversation That company had come together through acquisition, and so it was, it was a fiefdom situation, not uncommon. And how do you unify that business internally and to the market under the brand name unsolved?

sue holub:

[00:04:25] The secondary and, and equally challenging opportunity was how do you make the name unsolved mean something? How do make it stand for something in the market? When we started working together, we had made the decision at that point to stick with the name unsolved because the first question I asked was, yeah, hey, is that on the table?

sue holub:

[00:04:43] And you have to think through those things as you have with your clients before, is you know, the cost to change that. It's not just the physical cost, the financial cost, it's how long does it take for that name to really mean something in the market? And can you afford that time to build a net new name?

sue holub:

[00:04:58] Out in the space. It, [00:05:00] the answer for unsolved was no, it didn't make sense to do so now it was, okay, let's make rain with what we have. And so, uh, at that point, I, uh, I put in a call to you and said, this is more than a rebranding. This is finding an identity that everybody internally and externally can understand and rally around.

sue holub:

[00:05:22] And so that was, that was the mission there.

matt pennebaker:

[00:05:24] Did the leadership team see the extent of the problem initially?

sue holub:

[00:05:28] Yes. Uh, and the reason for that was because the company had multiple platforms as well. So for every brand you had, you had technology behind it. And so, whereas my remit was how do you bring the organization, uh, and the brand together, you know, culturally in a marketing perspective, et cetera.

sue holub:

[00:05:48] I had a peer, uh, our CTO, who had to do the same thing with the technology and make that make sense to our customers and the market. And so it was certainly an iceberg size [00:06:00] challenge, uh, with things lurking underneath the ocean surface to try and, and move that to where we needed it to be.

ward pennebaker:

[00:06:07] So just for context, could you explain what Unsolved did?

sue holub:

[00:06:11] Uh, unsolved, uh, is a leader in critical event management. And so that was comprised of mass notifications, uh, risk intelligence, travel risk management, so things like that. And so what we did, for example, in in plain English is if you've ever received an Amber alert on salt, sent it. So while the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children identifies with law enforcement when a child has gone missing, they don't have the technology and the capability to geotarget and geo communicate those alerts.

sue holub:

[00:06:40] And so odds solve has that capability on a global scale. We would serve price customers Fortune 500 government, all from federal, down to local, uh, and small businesses to, uh, assist with that.

ward pennebaker:

[00:06:52] In that organization you have by acquisition, as is so often the case, if you've got [00:07:00] seven acquisitions, you have now seven distinct cultures.

sue holub:

[00:07:03] Yes.

ward pennebaker:

[00:07:04] And, uh, the company is so much larger than it was before. You have the seven cultures. So how did you address. First and foremost, bringing those cultures together and defining what the culture should be.

sue holub:

[00:07:16] Yeah. So you, when I join any organization, I do kind of the listen, learn, observe, tour. Uh, you meet people and they've got very strong opinions about their offering, their brand, their why, it should be the lead brand, those kinds of things.

sue holub:

[00:07:31] And I think it's, it's a little bit like a marketing hippocratic oath, right? Seek first, you know, do no harm. And take all that in. And when we were working with you, part of the opportunity of the process, the, uh, guardrails process that you have is the opportunity for input. That input was critical because I would go around the company and and say to people, we want your input.

sue holub:

[00:07:54] This isn't gonna happen to you. This is gonna happen with you, but we need to understand some things. In [00:08:00] doing that, we were able to soften people to the idea of change because any branding project, at least that I've ever worked on, only succeeds when you start internally first. If you don't get the employees on board with what you're doing, then the moment the customer or the prospect or the partner, whoever engages with your company, your brand, and what you've said to the market, doesn't match their experience with your employees.

sue holub:

[00:08:25] So we knew getting employees on board was critical. It doesn't mean they'd all have a say. It doesn't mean they'd all like it, but they'd understand how it came to be. That's part of that change management and, and kind of as you say, rethinking change is how do you bring them on that journey And working with you gave us some opportunities to do that so that there was milestones of people understanding, oh, okay, I, I see how we got here.

sue holub:

[00:08:53] Versus, you know, behind the curtain. And then you do the big reveal, which also rarely works in

ward pennebaker:

[00:08:59] branding. [00:09:00] It's really hard to move a ship, uh, in this transition process. How did this one go One

sue holub:

[00:09:05] nautical

ward pennebaker:

[00:09:06] mile

sue holub:

[00:09:06] at a time? Um, it, it, uh, it went great. The outcome, uh, exceeded expectations. And, you know, sometimes when you're doing these things, there's kind of a couple moments that happen where you, you kind of know, okay, I got it.

sue holub:

[00:09:20] The first one was the reaction to the employees when it started to unify. In the manner that we had it strategically intended. We knew we had struggled there through the work we did with you. The second part was this was, uh, unsolved rebrand was in the first quarter of 2021, which if you'll remember back at that time, was COVID.

sue holub:

[00:09:41] And it is the first, and I hope only time I launch a brand to an empty auditorium. So we had rented out a hotel because we normally do kickoff and all the things, and so we had the hotel, so we ended up simulcasting from the stage at the hotel. But because of COVID, nobody could come. So there were 20 [00:10:00] people in the room.

sue holub:

[00:10:00] That was it. I'm broadcasting out to all of the employees at home and I have no idea how this logo and reveal and brand messaging platform and everything is, is resonating. And so I come to find out that the chat in the platform that we're using to broadcast is blowing up. People are opening their swag boxes.

sue holub:

[00:10:24] People are going, this is amazing. I love the logo, I love this, I love that. It all makes sense. I can see myself in it. Our customers are gonna love this. And so it was a strange moment because you're, you're not getting any real time feedback. Uh, but then come to find out later that the employees really saw themselves in what we'd done and felt enabled and empowered and excited to carry that forward to their customers.

sue holub:

[00:10:50] And that was when I knew we'd done it.

matt pennebaker:

[00:10:52] You've gone through several of these rebrands and when you unveil it internally, a lot of people don't think about how you unveil it. Are there any [00:11:00] sort of insights or lessons learned that you can give?

sue holub:

[00:11:03] I would say so. First of all, you have to have a process. I. When you're, when you're spending this level of money and you're changing the face of a company, it is one of the most significant things a chief marketing officer will do.

sue holub:

[00:11:16] It impacts everything from customer support to the UI of a software product to packaging of toner. It doesn't matter what it is, it's everything. And so there's gonna be a lot of opinions and a lot of, not anxiousness, but interest. And how does this come about? I think you have to have a clear process, a methodical process to something that seems not methodical to everybody else.

sue holub:

[00:11:41] When they think about brands, they think of logos and colors, and, and, and that's actually the last thing you do in a proper branding process. You do all the hard work first around, well, things like guardrails, right? Who you are, why do you exist, what value do you bring, and to whom do you bring that value?

sue holub:

[00:11:59] And so [00:12:00] taking people on that journey is mission critical because otherwise they don't get how you got there. And then it becomes a very subjective conversation. I like it or I don't like it, versus I understand it and it will resonate in our marketplace or not. It's actually the more objective of a branding process you do, the better it will go.

sue holub:

[00:12:24] Otherwise, you're getting into, I like this color, I don't like this color, and it's, that's all the wrong way. So that would, that would be my big takeaway is no big reveals, like you see in the movies and and on TV and things like that. It's actually a lot of data and science behind the art of branding.

matt pennebaker:

[00:12:41] A lot of marketing is focused around exposure and just awareness of who you are and the growth in, in the sales side is more how quickly and efficiently can you actually close the business.

matt pennebaker:

[00:12:51] How did you approach optimizing unsolved close rate

sue holub:

[00:12:56] data? So just having this conversation with somebody yesterday, uh, [00:13:00] you know, a lot of times people focus on systems and not the data in the systems, and that is an oversight because the integrity of that data. Will tell you, uh, a lot about what's happening in the business.

sue holub:

[00:13:13] I'm a firm believer that you never believe everything hook, line, and sinker. That's in an Excel spreadsheet. It, it's a two dimensional view of a human being. They are performant, they are not. They did this, they did that, but there's always a story as, as Pennebaker has taught me over the years, right?

sue holub:

[00:13:28] There's always a story in there. And so in this case, there's always a story of why that person is. Performant or not performant, or do they do something unique as compared to their peers? Or do they have something going on in their personal life and maybe they're distracted? And so for me it was putting in not only the systems, but the data and the ability to look at it and gain insight from it, actionable insight from it.

sue holub:

[00:13:49] That allowed me to say, start to say, I noticed when our deals get to this rate, this stage of the sales funnel, they seem to drop precipitously. Why is that? So [00:14:00] it's, again, it's breaking it down into those components that allow you to start to see the real insights of why something is or isn't going as you expected.

ward pennebaker:

[00:14:10] In each of these companies, the CEO who hires you says, yeah, we go do your thing, and you come back and say, this is what we're gonna do. And they're invariably thinking, this is not that big a deal. So how do you get across that? This is a very big deal.

sue holub:

[00:14:26] Yeah, so I think it's, it's that process again that, you know, we started it in, in our times together with the Guard.

sue holub:

[00:14:32] Strategic guardrails at Unsolved was a great example. I had a lot of trust and a lot of latitude from my CEO, but at the same time when I, I took him through kind of, here's kind of the major chunks of how we're gonna do this. It was about a six month process, and the first question I got was, why don't it take so long?

sue holub:

[00:14:51] It's always a little harder than it looked, and it takes longer than it themes. If you do it right, uh, you can always make things go faster. That doesn't mean they go better. And [00:15:00] so in this case it was explaining well, here's why. Right? Here's the market research. We're gonna do the outside in data, we're gonna get, uh, here's the internal input we have to go around and get.

sue holub:

[00:15:12] Here's the alignment we have to drive across the leadership team and the board. Before we get to any of this stuff you're thinking of as branding, which is. The kinda the marketeering, if you will, equally important, but not where you start. And so a lot of times I liken it to like when you're building a building, if you're driving by the highway and you see that big hole and they're down there, put laying the rebar and they seem to be down there for laying the rebar.

sue holub:

[00:15:39] Like they've been working on that building, you know, for quite some time. And then one day you drive by and it seems like the building goes up overnight. I. That's because you put the effort into the foundation, and if you get the foundation right, then the rest of it can scale pretty quickly. If you get the foundation wrong, you end up with a leaning tower pizza.

sue holub:

[00:15:59] So it, [00:16:00] the idea is to spend the time in the rebar, if you will, and really make sure that you've not only. Teased it through, but you've aligned the key stakeholders on it, and then you can move into the external focused, uh, marketing to bring it to life.

matt pennebaker:

[00:16:17] How'd you get such alignment with the leadership team?

matt pennebaker:

[00:16:20] You know, you've got a lot of people and executives in the room who really have no marketing experience of any kind, don't understand branding, don't understand the process. Can you talk about how really you got everybody on the same page towards the centralized vision?

sue holub:

[00:16:35] I'd say there were three things.

sue holub:

[00:16:36] The first was, uh, and I was fortunate in this case, it, it was a kind of mandate, right? The, the part of my coming to the business was the, the business knew it had a branding problem. The board knew it had a branding problem with the company growing through acquisition. So I. That's always ideal versus you're having to convince people that, you know, a change needs to occur.

sue holub:

[00:16:59] So, uh, [00:17:00] the second part is kind of what I call forced participation. Any branding initiative will only succeed if it is supported at the top by the CEO. Really any major marketing initiative, uh, the CMO can do things till they're blue in their face. But if the CEO doesn't endorse and is actively engaged and aligned, it will be viewed as just that, a flash in the pan versus a strategic imperative and catalyst of how our business is gonna go forward.

sue holub:

[00:17:27] Starting from the top down and aligning the leadership team and taking them through the process, making them sit in the room. Do those, you know, really is this meeting need to be three hours long? Yes, it does. And then next thing you know, at the end of the meeting, it's three hours and they're still talking.

sue holub:

[00:17:41] And so they don't realize all that needs to come out to bring them together and unearth the insights, those little nuggets that end up being the things that you operate the brand around, build the brand around. And I think the third is pure fascination. Uh, there is a lot of fascination around [00:18:00] the concept of branding because most people, to your point, Matt, don't know how it comes about, and so now they're fascinated to have the opportunity to learn and go through a bottoms up brand process to understand strategically how they come about.

sue holub:

[00:18:19] They want to go through it because they don't, it's, it's a rare opportunity, you know, you only do it ideally once in a company's life, and so it's a, it's a chance for them to open their leadership aperture and be a part of something functionally they normally wouldn't. And so there was a lot of engagement from that perspective as well.

matt pennebaker:

[00:18:37] You mentioned that the CEO knew that you had a branding problem for other organizations. What are the signals that listeners could into to really determine. Do I have a branding problem or not?

sue holub:

[00:18:49] Uh, so the first one is really your customers. If, if your customers don't know who you are or why they bought from you, why you over somebody else?

sue holub:

[00:18:59] If [00:19:00] you're starting to see a lot of competition in your renewal cycles, for example, it means that you're not differentiated. If you are struggling to carve out a leadership voice in the market, thought leadership. You're struggling to be differentiated, and so when you struggle to be differentiated, it starts to have impact to your sales team, and any wise marketing leader will know that the first thing you need to do to start to get a voice and a conversation going around, is this something we need to consider, is to bring in your sales leader as your partner?

sue holub:

[00:19:35] What are you experiencing in the market? It could be account managers around existing accounts. It could be, uh, new business pursuit. It could be partnerships, strategic alliances. But if they're starting to report headwinds around confusion, lack of differentiation, inability to charge the price that you think you're worth, that usually means [00:20:00] commoditization has occurred to you.

sue holub:

[00:20:01] Therefore you need to step back and ask yourself, why are we different better than everybody else? And it's, it's usually not just a marketing thing or branding thing. It might need, you need to consider what's happening in your product or your offering. Uh, it might be how your team is trained. I. To carry your company's message to the market.

sue holub:

[00:20:19] But all of those things tend to be where sales and marketing lock arms to go to a CEO and say, we think we have a a potential brand issue here, and here's how it's manifesting in the business. Because if you don't have those results, those hard anecdotes or results to bring to that conversation, it's usually going to be a short conversation.

matt pennebaker:

[00:20:40] There's a brand element obviously, that we worked with you guys on Unsolved for, but there's also, on the flip side, there's a communication, especially with technology, it's so easy to get into the weeds of the commodity language, the commodity messaging, speaking the same. Everybody talking, we got the best technology, we have the best people, you know?

matt pennebaker:

[00:20:57] That's our differentiation. How did you address. [00:21:00] Having it developing a positioning that was unique in the marketplace.

sue holub:

[00:21:03] Always the toughest part, right? How do you make sense in a space yet sound unique and differentiated. And I think one of my favorite parts of our process together was that you break it down into almost like molecules.

sue holub:

[00:21:18] Of, of how we're going to address each part, whether it's target audiences and ideal clients, whether it's what are you really good at, you know, if you disappeared off the earth tomorrow, what? What would no longer happen? So kind of taking this mystery of branding and turning it into real plain English and human experiences for people to understand how a brand resonates.

sue holub:

[00:21:44] What makes it unique and different? Why you over somebody else? And making our leadership team go through those conversations, not just as, as as we've seen in some other instances, A CMO. It's a leadership exercise, [00:22:00] not a CMO exercise By working with our leadership from the CEO down. We were able to really tease out with you where we shine and differentiate compared to somewhere else.

sue holub:

[00:22:11] And so that was very successful because it, we anchored to the concepts of ai, which was truly in our product. We were an AI product or headed that direction, and the fact that we took it out of the technology and made it about why buy it in the first place. What does it do? You know, taglines are taglines, but that's where when every moment counts, it's a lot can happen in 90 seconds.

sue holub:

[00:22:33] It's suddenly taking that prospect, if you will, or that customer, and putting them in the moment of when our technology comes to life and that intersection, and that was how you were able to differentiate us as compared to everyone else who talked about features and functions, et cetera. If

ward pennebaker:

[00:22:49] you were to look five years out at the role of A CMO, will it look different than it does today?

sue holub:

[00:22:57] Unconditionally. It has to, uh, it gets back [00:23:00] to curiosity, gets back to being an agile learner. Let me give you a an example. There's a, a presentation I, I tend to do around digital marketing because a lot of people don't understand that either. You know, how do you rank in Google and, and things like that.

sue holub:

[00:23:13] Five years ago, AI wasn't even a thing. So if you were to do a search today and you pulled up a page, most of that page is the AI answer about a certain topic five years ago that didn't exist. So imagine what it'll be. Five years from now, we're going to start to also change how we access technology.

sue holub:

[00:23:32] Already we are exploring with implantables inside of humans and things like that. So soon there'll be a collision of, of biometrics with humanity, with technology, how you market to people who can buy. Is going to continually evolve. They're bombarded with messages every day through more channels than ever available before.

sue holub:

[00:23:55] Whether that's their watch, their phone, their television, their tablet, it [00:24:00] doesn't matter. Uh, digital billboards, they're everywhere. Their car, it's everywhere. Marketers need to consider more than ever that micro targeting exact, and be very clear who you're targeting and what you want them to know or believe when you finally get their attention or do.

sue holub:

[00:24:17] Because the, the distraction factor, the, uh, overwhelming messages factor to them. Information overload factor is just gonna be extreme.

matt pennebaker:

[00:24:26] Being so ingrained in technology, what are your thoughts on ai? I mean, obviously it's exponentially growing in in the marketplace. What are your thoughts around it and its impact on business?

sue holub:

[00:24:36] I think twofold. Any CEO who is not working hard to become AI native very quickly is going to get left behind. If you're going to apply it in just pockets of your business, it's not going to be enough. Uh, I think the second thing to be thinking about as a CEO is disruption in terms of which jobs will probably be able to be [00:25:00] automated over the next five years.

sue holub:

[00:25:02] What will that mean for those companies who have those jobs? And frankly, what will it mean for unemployment? Because that will affect the economy. People need to be looking ahead at those macro trends, uh, of what those macro trends will, will do to the economy, to the world of work, to what the workplace looks like, to what culture at work looks like, to productively apply AI while still keeping the human element in the business and, and the culture.

matt pennebaker:

[00:25:29] If you could think of one application of AI for a business, a SaaS business that you'd be, you, you you'd essentially be getting into. Mm-hmm. What would the optimal utilization of AI be or the first opportunity for, for you to address potentially be hypothetically?

sue holub:

[00:25:47] Hypothetically? Uh, for me it would be customer support.

sue holub:

[00:25:50] Uh, I think you could create a knowledge base. With, uh, dynamic ai, a agen AI that, uh, 'cause most people talk about generative ai, there's [00:26:00] agen, you know, agent that can and literally take the place of humans, uh, or at least do a lot of the initial lifting before you get to a human. So it's, think of it about combining AI as a, as an agent with a, a huge knowledge base.

sue holub:

[00:26:16] And could you not solve customer support inquiries better, faster, cheaper. Then reserve your humans for more complex, uh, diagnostic and and resolution needs for your customers.

matt pennebaker:

[00:26:30] Yeah, it's amazing at pace of evolution of all of this, we're leaning in headfirst building agents, uh, our ourselves for clients, and it's, it's amazing how powerful this AI is.

ward pennebaker:

[00:26:44] Now, you currently are working toward getting a CE job. Yes. And one of the things that. Having worked with you became clear is so much of what we did in the companies we've worked with you on has been changing the [00:27:00] company, and it also happens to include branding. So you haven't gone in to say, I need a new brand.

ward pennebaker:

[00:27:06] It's like, we gotta fix the company.

sue holub:

[00:27:09] Transformation, transformation. It's, it's a lot about transformation and early innings at a company branding can serve if done properly as a real catalyst and lightning rod for that change. Because it pervades it, it cas into all of the different parts of the company, of the business.

sue holub:

[00:27:27] It's not just a marketing thing. It doesn't matter if it's hr, it doesn't matter if it's the technology stack, it doesn't matter if it's sales, it goes everywhere. It can galvanize a leadership team around, okay, this might have been who, who we've been, but this is who we wanna be going forward. A board, by the way, I did read outs to, to my board.

sue holub:

[00:27:48] I would never surprise my board around, you know, how we saw the company transforming and, and certainly its its mission and its vision and its values and its face to the world. So they all go on that journey with [00:28:00] you. Um, but at the end of the day, it is about transforming a business and branding is a catalyst to do that from the inside out.

sue holub:

[00:28:09] And so now you have this new touchstone that as you're making decisions across the business, you can say, is that in alignment with who we are and the value we're trying to deliver to the market? Yes or no? It's, it's a lot less around logos and colors and more around, this is who we said we are. This is the value we said we bring, and this is who we said we'd bring it to.

sue holub:

[00:28:30] So with that clarity, do these decisions or actions or investments make sense? One of the most important aspects of making a change stick is change management. Which is, is not, you know, marketing feeds into change management, but the concept of change management itself, I think is overlooked frequently by executive teams.

sue holub:

[00:28:50] It's often, will we mandated this change? So go do it. It, it's almost, it's very militaristic, we said, so like a parent and humans [00:29:00] don't operate like that. That's what makes culture in the first place is. Is you don't work so hierarchically and, and mandate things. You bring people along in a journey. And one of my favorite things about working with you all was it allowed me to do that, uh, in a way I wasn't really sure how I was gonna do, but it, it was very logical, it made sense and people could say, oh, okay, that makes sense.

sue holub:

[00:29:24] I can see us doing that. I can see myself in that. At the end of the day, you can mandate it, but if it doesn't stick with your employees and your customers. It didn't work. And so making sure they're able to engage in a, in a positive way with the change you're trying to drive is, is the job of the leader.

sue holub:

[00:29:41] It's the job of the C-suite.

ward pennebaker:

[00:29:42] If we've got people who are listening and you bring up the concept of change management, and they may be thinking, what exactly do you mean by that? Can you give some examples or some tips on that for them?

sue holub:

[00:29:56] Change management is the concept of [00:30:00] recognizing that humans by nature are resistant to change.

sue holub:

[00:30:05] There's different kinds of change and people are different places in a change journey, and so you kinda have to meet them where they are. It's corporate speak for, you're gonna get more bees with honey. It's really what it's right. If you unveil your decision on people versus bring them along, you're gonna get a lot further.

sue holub:

[00:30:23] If you just mandate it, if you just hot drop it on people, they don't have the ability to absorb it. They don't have the ability to see themselves in it. They don't have the ability to understand it. Even if they don't agree with it, they at least understand how it came to be, and that's what change management is about, and that's how you get people going along and supporting versus either vocally being against what you're trying to do or frankly subverting it.

ward pennebaker:

[00:30:51] When you've left one job and looking for another one, you would have lots of opportunities. And it seems like you always took the [00:31:00] jobs that they were really a big lift. That's not by chance. Yeah. So what was it you were specifically looking for both in the ones you accepted and the ones that you didn't?

sue holub:

[00:31:11] The first is intellectually interesting. You know, I don't, I don't always seek out the grind of transformation. It just ends up usually being necessary to put a business on, uh, back on a growth trajectory. Um, so the first thing I look for in a new opportunity is, is intellectual interest, is the arena that they're in.

sue holub:

[00:31:29] The area that they're in. Interesting to me is, it's something I wanna learn more about. Is it something that I think, you know, contributes to the world? Is it, is it purpose and mission driven? Um, those kinds of things. I, I gravitate toward those kinds of companies and industries. Uh, the second would be, who am I gonna work with and what does that look like?

sue holub:

[00:31:47] Because we all, you know, we've all read the things online of you leave, you don't leave a job, you leave a boss, and things like that. And so what does the, the personnel environment look like? Who are the people I'd be working with day in, day out, and are they people [00:32:00] I think I can see myself working with day in and and day out?

sue holub:

[00:32:03] And third is, can I make an impact? Is it something where I see that my unique skills, abilities, and experience can make an outsized impact against what they're trying to do? And then the last one is what I call the the worth it factor. It's like when you're at a restaurant and they, they say you wanna, you know, here's some bread, and you're like, ah.

sue holub:

[00:32:22] Is that worth it, Brad, or, or should I just leave it on the table? So for me it's, it's the worth it factor, right? Will the, the, the total compensation package and the total, you know, what we'll achieve. Will that be worth it for the time and energy? I'm 150% kind of person, you know, I go big or go home. Uh, will, will that be worth it for what we're we're trying to do together in the timeframe we're trying to do it?

matt pennebaker:

[00:32:46] It seems like the central tenant in all of that is you're a person who really seeks disruption and the, the opportunity to disrupt the status quo.

sue holub:

[00:32:54] You know, I've never phrased it that way. Uh, but I think you, you probably could. I, I [00:33:00] have a tolerance for risk and I, I like to make big changes, uh, not for change's sake, but I think bold moves in the market, create winners, and I, I've seen a lot of leadership teams take too long.

sue holub:

[00:33:13] To make those bold changes in the arc of what they're trying to do at their company. And it, I think some of these things succeed or, or meet headwinds because of the timing that's been chosen to do them. And if you wait too long to make that bold move, then uh, you're not going to get the impact that you need.

matt pennebaker:

[00:33:33] What are some of the lessons learned? And, you know, I'm really not gonna do it this way. I'm gonna do things this way. That as you go into a CEO position, you're really gonna lead the organization with that mindset.

sue holub:

[00:33:44] I think the best thing I did for myself, which, you know, it, it, it definitely came with some sleepless nights, but was midway through my tenure at Unsolved.

sue holub:

[00:33:53] I was promoted from Chief Marketing officer to Chief Growth Officer. And at that time I took over [00:34:00] responsibility for all commercial and go-to market functions. So the entire top line of the company all the way through the implementation of software. And that really opens your aperture to how things are working across the business.

sue holub:

[00:34:13] I think CMOs tend to, in certain companies, this is maybe more B2B than, than consumer product, but they, they tend to stay in their lane. That's not a marketing thing. I'm not gonna worry about that. But certainly when you have the entire top line, you know, you, you worry about everything. You, you are looking at product, you are looking at customer support, you're looking at hr, you're looking at finance, you're looking at anything that can help you achieve that number and retain that customer, expand that customer.

sue holub:

[00:34:40] And so that, I couldn't have asked for any better preparation to become A-A-C-E-O is to have expanded into that role. At the same time, it also puts things in perspective. So when you're A CMO, your world is marketing. When you're a chief growth officer, you have lots of mini worlds and you have to make them, you know, orbit like [00:35:00] a universe.

sue holub:

[00:35:00] Most people think it's sales all day, every day. To some extent it is, but it's also understanding how those other functions, like I built out a revenue operations function, can buoy sales and, and lift. Sales and make sales more optimized so that you can either win new business faster, or upskill personnel or, uh, retain customers or expand customers.

sue holub:

[00:35:23] It just really opens that aperture of how you think about a business and your role and impact inside of it. We have gone through so many fascinating shifts in the world of work, uh, since COVID, the advent of ai, the idea of a hundred percent working remote, uh, hybrid working environments. Uh, just a lot of changes to the concept of work.

sue holub:

[00:35:46] The reality is some of the oldies, but goodies don't ever go outta style. First in last out kind of thing. Listen more than you speak. Put in the extra effort to learn the topic. Stand out [00:36:00] through your excellence. Those things don't, they're evergreen. They don't ever get old. And I think while they might sound a bit trite.

sue holub:

[00:36:07] If you're an emerging leader, you're trying to get taken seriously. You're trying to be given the nod for the next step. I think the other thing you need to do is, is take the messy assignments, take the ones that nobody else wants. That's how you're gonna stand out. When, when that leader looked around for somebody to take the project and everybody else shrunk back, you leaned in and yes, it was hard and, and maybe you bumped your head a few times, but people see that.

sue holub:

[00:36:35] They see that when things need to get done, they can count on you.

ward pennebaker:

[00:36:38] Sue, this has been so fascinating. Thank you so much for leading us on this journey, and I can't wait to see where you land next. It will be an exciting hold onto your hat experience, and I can't wait to see that.

sue holub:

[00:36:53] Well, thank you. It's been really fun.

sue holub:

[00:36:55] It's been great to get together again with you and, uh, like I said, 15 years. So, uh, we'll [00:37:00] see what we do in the next several together.

ward pennebaker:

[00:37:01] Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much.

sue holub:

[00:37:04] Thank you.

matt pennebaker:

[00:37:05] Thanks for listening to Rethink Change. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it and be sure to follow the show so you don't miss a single episode.

matt pennebaker:

[00:37:13] If you're a disruptor looking to challenge a status quo and don't know where to start or what to do next. Pennebaker can help find out more@pennabaker.com.