Brewing Success with Writer: Generative AI, Customer-Focus, and Human Connection

Today on The Pipeline Brew podcast, Matt Hummel is joined by Andrew Racine, VP of Demand Gen and Growth at Writer, the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises.

Andrew shares the journey he’s taken through the SaaS industry to where he is today, including how he got his start with HubSpot originally as an SDR. His transition to other major organizations such as MongoDB and Fivetran are a reminder of how career paths are seldom linear, especially in marketing.

One consistent highlight from their conversation is Andrew’s emphasis on the importance of human connection in marketing, a refreshing take in an era dominated by automation and data-driven strategies. Andrew underscores the necessity of understanding customer needs deeply, distinguishing Writer’s approach to create GenAI applications that can tackle business problems and amplify human effort, not replace it. 

Marketers looking to level up their own career should keep an ear out for two pieces of advice: the power of empathy and the long-term importance of brand over short-term metrics. Also stay tuned to hear about baseball, parenting, and the west coast. 

Andrew Racine is a seasoned marketing professional currently serving as the VP of Demand Gen and Growth at Writer, a leading generative AI platform. With a robust background in demand generation, he has previously held significant roles at Fivetran, Turbonomic (an IBM company), and MongoDB. Racine’s expertise lies in helping companies scale their marketing efforts effectively, leveraging his experience from various high-profile organizations. He holds an MBA from Babson College and has a history of driving growth through innovative marketing strategies.

Matt Hummel: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Pipeline Brew, the podcast that meets at the intersection of people and pipeline. We’re bringing you fun yet insightful conversations where you’ll not only hear from marketing experts, but also get to know them as well.

Matt Hummel: Hey everyone, today I am super excited to be joined by Andrew Racine. Andrew is the VP of DemandGen and Growth for Writer, the full stack generative AI platform for enterprises. Andrew is a veteran in this space, having been with organizations such as HubSpot, MongoDB, Turbonomic, Fivetran, and more where he has consistently driven growth.

Matt Hummel: Welcome to the show, Andrew. How are you? 

Andrew Racine: Thanks, Matt. I’m doing great. How are you? 

Matt Hummel: Doing well, thank you. It’s great to have you on the show. 

Andrew Racine: Yeah, it’s great to be here. 

Matt Hummel: We like to start each show with a little bit of an icebreaker, if you’re up for that.

Andrew Racine: Yeah, let’s do

Matt Hummel: it. So, what is your favorite pick me up beverage?

Andrew Racine: Oh, I’d say an iced coffee. And not a cold brew, that sometimes gets me too pick-me-upped, but just a straight up iced coffee. And it’s ironic because I find myself now being on the west coast, not being able to find just a regular old iced coffee. Back on the East Coast in Boston, there was a Dunkin Donuts in every corner and it was much easier.

Andrew Racine: But I can still make my own or find it at a couple select places around here.

Matt Hummel: I have to ask because you are from the East Coast and I’ve learned from my East Coast friends that iced coffee is what you guys generally consider coffee, which is weird to me because I grew up in Texas. I now live in Colorado, which I’m not sure if that’s West Coast, Central, we don’t really know, but iced coffee is sort of an enigma to me still. So is iced coffee just coffee poured over ice?

Andrew Racine: Yeah, typically it’s already brewed warm coffee that is allowed to cool down. I make it myself. I’ll brew myself a whole thing of regular coffee.

Andrew Racine: I’ll put it in the fridge overnight and then just pour it over ice the next day. So it is coffee just chilled. But I think where some people get it wrong is they take the hot coffee and they pour it over the ice and it just doesn’t work. So you got to let it chill. You got to put it in the refrigerator for at least a couple hours and get it down to drinking temperature.

Matt Hummel: Right. So you’re out in California now, correct? 

Andrew Racine:That’s right. Yeah. I’ve been here for about three years. 

Matt Hummel: Right on. So Duncan is more of an East coast thing. Is Starbucks sort of the Duncan of the West coast?

Andrew Racine: Yeah, completely. A lot of Starbucks here and then a lot of great craft coffee places too. So a lot of, I’ve learned to appreciate the local brands, but they’re very fancy. You can’t just get a regular old, iced coffee, I found. And cold brew’s all the rage, right? They love cold brew. And I feel like it’s at least five times the caffeine. I don’t have any data to back this up. But I feel like every time I have a cold brew, I’m amped up pretty good.

Andrew Racine: So in some situations, you know, maybe before a podcast, it’s great. Other situations, maybe you want to dial it down a bit.

Matt Hummel: 100%. I agree. Well, good stuff. Well, before we talk about what you’re up to today, I’d love for you to tell the audience a bit more about yourself and your background. So I know you’ve worked in various industries before you joined Writer.

Matt Hummel: What highlights can you share with us?

Andrew Racine: Yeah, I’ve been lucky to be at some amazing companies over my career. Ironically. It took me a bit to even find my way into SaaS and into software and technology. I started out in the newspaper industry of all places. Worked at great companies like the Boston Globe and USA Today and was on the business side of the house.

Andrew Racine: But realized maybe it wasn’t hyper growth that I was experiencing. It was actually hyper decline. So I was lucky when I was at USA Today I had a boss who got their MBA at Babson college. And so I went back at nights and I read a great case study while I was in there about HubSpot and I said, Whoa, these guys know a lot about marketing, maybe even more than I’m learning currently.

Andrew Racine: I needed to try and get a job there. And I went after the role, I thought I wanted to be an account executive. I famously bombed my role play, but they brought me back and said, Hey, we think there’s something here. Do you want to try and help us do some outbound cold calling as an SDR? I said, I’ve never done it, but let’s try it.

Andrew Racine: And so the inbound marketing company offered me a job to do outbound cold calling and, you know, four years later and about five different jobs, none of which were on the marketing team. I got my start in SaaS and then I was able to get it picked up and lead some marketing teams, really got into demand generation.

Andrew Racine: I love the numbers and the math and also the art and science behind driving demand and leads and real outcomes. And so, you know, being able to be part of that HubSpot rocket ship really launched me to be able to participate in some early growth at companies like MongoDB and Fivetran and now here at Writer.

Andrew Racine: And so each place I’ve tried to pick up something that I’ve learned, whether it’s something that I was involved in or just something that the company was exploring and focusing on at the time. And I think it’s served me well just to give some different perspectives on how to do growth and how you can do it in this changing landscape that we’re all in now.

Matt Hummel: Well, that’s so interesting. There’s so much to unpack with what you just shared. So let me get this right. You bombed your AE interview, but they wanted to bring you on as a BDR. You wanted to be in marketing. They didn’t put you in marketing, but you’re at a marketing company. And you had multiple jobs at the same company, none of which were marketing.

Matt Hummel: Did I get that right?

Andrew Racine: That’s right. It’s the perfect straight line that everyone draws up when they’re picturing their career, right?

Matt Hummel: Well, ironically, it kind of sounds like HubSpot’s growth story as well, because I think I’ve seen their case study unpacked at an event, and it sort of took them a minute to figure out.

Matt Hummel: So, the real secret to driving growth, and I think if memory serves me correctly, it was actually focusing in on growing their existing customers. So, interesting parallels between your early career experience with them and their own growth story.

Andrew Racine: Yeah, that’s right. They knew their personas, their key personas, their target audiences, their customers.

Andrew Racine: Better than anyone. And yeah, early days, I was put on different task forces to retain those customers and to make them successful. So in practice, we were launching marketing campaigns for them to help them drive results. And so the act of doing that got me really interested in, Hey, I wonder if I could do this for, instead of a bunch of really great customers, do it in an independent company where I could help them grow.

Andrew Racine: And that’s really what led me down the path.

Matt Hummel: Yeah, that’s cool. Well, similar to you, I didn’t start my career in SaaS or tech marketing. I started in professional services, which definitely not a declining industry, but a different industry. I still have a lot of lessons I learned, like relationship marketing was instrumental there, which is kind of now what we call ABM.

Matt Hummel: If you think back to your days at whether it’s Boston Globe or USA Today, is there anything that you took away from that sort of helped you with where you’re at today.

Andrew Racine: Yeah. I again, come back to the customers. Uh, I was account managers and I was working with wholesalers and working with folks on the frontline, also people higher up and really it came down to a lot of, especially in that industry, a lot of the relationships that you were able to build, um, there’s a lot of different options.

Andrew Racine: There was a lot of different noise, even at that time. And it wasn’t always clear for these customers what the best direction would go to. And so, having that constant-state approach, actually having some empathy towards their problems and trying to understand them one by one really taught me that that customer centricity that I was always drawn to as a part of my personality could actually be put into practice to help companies grow and to make their customers even more successful.

Andrew Racine: And I think it was that spirit that I took from the early days of print media and was able to transition it over to digital.

Matt Hummel: I love that. I think empathy is a lost art when it comes to marketing. And yet, much like meeting with customers, one of the most important things that marketers can bring to the table.

Matt Hummel: So that’s really cool. You brought that forward. I want to transition to your current company at Writer. Tell me a little bit more about what Writer does, you know, the platform, and what ultimately brought you to join that team.

Andrew Racine: Yeah, Writer’s a great story. I’ve been here for about 15 months, and it’s been an amazing ride already in this short amount of time.

Andrew Racine: We are the platform for generative AI for the enterprise. And so the way we differentiate ourselves is we build our own LLMs, we build our own knowledge graph, we build our own app layer that customers can build all the generative and we really have this platform positioned and differentiated from a privacy and security standpoint that really resonates with large scale enterprises.

Andrew Racine: Think financial services, think healthcare, think retail, and even B2B tech. This wasn’t always the case for Writer. Back right before I joined, we were just really focused on marketing use cases for mid-sized companies. We were helping a lot of content marketers with their work. But the nature and the decisions that our founders made about how to architect the product really enabled us as the market became more sophisticated and as our product developed to really start to appeal to a broader] audience.

Andrew Racine: And so we’ve really spent the last year plus going after folks in the CIO’s office and IT. So that when we do present a case to consider Writer for their enterprise, they can think of us more from a platform perspective for any department that could be interested in using generative AI to solve some real business problems.

Matt Hummel: That’s super cool. A couple kind of follow on questions to that. So, Writer, inherently the name speaks to how a lot of marketers use Gen AI, which is to support content development. Has the name of your company created a challenge as you have become the enterprise generative AI platform?

Andrew Racine: Yeah, it’s always asked about, which I find really interesting because the brand perception is everything, especially in this generative AI market.

Andrew Racine: There’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of disillusionment, there’s a lot of things, claims made. And a lot of times, even when I’m working with our analysts, they always come back to, you know, do you think that the Writer’s going to hold you back? And, fortunately our visionary CEO, May Habib, has a clear plan out to weave our current brand and our current company name into the future.

Andrew Racine: And really the way we’re starting to do that is by explaining to folks, and also getting their feedback on, we believe that business users, or developers, or IT leaders, or really anyone in an organization, will be able to write their own generative AI apps, and it won’t need a bunch of code. You can actually use prompts, and you can use real language, and that is going to be the instrument that people can then scale business process and tools, and create their own workflows, and automate everything.

Andrew Racine: And so, really all you’ll need to be able to do is write. In order to actually solve some of these really gnarly problems that companies have been doing the same way for decades. So there is a path there. We have a ways to go in order to get that perception and get the market to there. But I can see the glimmers of it, which.

Andrew Racine: You know, maybe six, 12 months ago, it was much harder to see.

Matt Hummel: Well, for what it’s worth, I think you guys are doing a great job. When I’ve talked to other folks, internally, externally around Writer, the general consensus is, Oh, they’re, you know, the broader AI platform. Maybe they don’t know exactly what you do, but they know you’re not, you know, just another gen AI enabled content creation tool.

Matt Hummel: So you guys are certainly on the right path. That’s great to hear. Which is awesome. Yeah. And then the other question I had, you know, you think about a lot of companies who start maybe in the SMB space or the mid market space. And then they create a product that’s really, it’s easy to use. It’s, you know, unlike a lot of enterprise technologies, the UX, the UI, it’s, it’s really easy.

Matt Hummel: It’s not complicated. It’s not complex. The implementations it’s all, it’s almost like a PLG motion, right? Yeah. But then they try to move upstream where they’ve built off that strong product reputation, and then they try to move up into the enterprise space. Do you think in a way where you guys started out with sort of that singular use case or more narrow focus where you really leaned into that and became the best in class at that enabled you to then start to expand to where you are today?

Andrew Racine: Yeah. I think it was part of it. One of the big bets that we placed again, even before I joined, but certainly the things that I’ve doubled down on since joining in the past 15 months is that in person experience in that attention to detail for our customers, a lot of gen AI is. Get you into the product and good luck and hopefully you can solve your problem.

Andrew Racine: And we really want to take a different approach, not only from a product onboarding standpoint, but from a marketing standpoint. So from a product standpoint, we really try to understand our customers’ use cases and then we will help them build the app to get it into production in a fraction of the time.

Andrew Racine: A lot of our customers come to us, they’ve been trying to do it for months. Without success. So we wanted that same feeling of like, Hey, we’re in it with you. We’re not just going to give you a product-led experience and say, good luck. Now we are going to get there into the weeds with you, understand all of the different data points you need to coming in.

Andrew Racine: And get this app shipped. And so from a marketing perspective, we did want people to have that access to the product, but we also wanted to meet them out in the real world. And so field marketing for us has been that way that we can apply the same level of customer service or customer attention or customer connection in our, uh, onboarding with that top of funnel motion.

Andrew Racine: And so we spend probably about half our program budget just on field marketing. And that’s, you know, attending trade shows that we know our target audience will be in. Creating our own events, bespoke events that are exclusive and invite only for executives and things of that nature. So we try to have that amazing experience from the first time they hear about us, whether it is through the product or it’s at an event, to the first time that they launch their first generative AI app with us.

Matt Hummel: I love that. You obviously have a background that goes beyond Writer when it comes to demand gen. Is this, and by this I mean more emphasis on field marketing, is that new or different for you from what you’ve experienced previously

Andrew Racine: It’s always been a focus, and it’s always been a part of the mix, but I think here, in the way that we think about it at Writer, it is even more of a priority.

Andrew Racine: It’s really not because we think we’re onto something, it’s more about what we’ve heard back from our prospects. When you talk to CIOs and you talk to IT leaders and you talk to other executives, you know, they value that connection. They value that networking and they value their time. And so to be able to get them to actually attend something that is valuable to them is a really big challenge.

Andrew Racine: And a lot of people don’t have the stamina, the budget, the bandwidth to do it. And so if you can. Make these bets and you can invest and produce something that is truly worth their time and valuable to them. Not just to hear about Writer, but to make connections with other people that are in their industry, to hear from successful customers, to make some partner connections, then you’re really adding value.

Andrew Racine: And yes, we selfishly hope that Writer is a beneficiary of that event and that they will consider us. But really, we just learned that you can’t just all go in on digital. You can’t all just go in on. The trade show booths, you really need to extend yourself more so for them. And in doing so, you should get that reciprocity back.

Matt Hummel: A hundred percent agree. We take a similar approach here at Pipeline360, so I can attest to what you’re sharing, which is awesome. So. Obviously, you guys do a ton of work outside of marketing. You mentioned, you know, IT and finance, for example, but our audience primarily being marketers, are there use cases beyond think content development, content personalization, maybe some content ideation that You’re seeing in terms of the types of engagements that Writer’s taken on or the work you guys are doing.

Andrew Racine: Yeah, we try to drink our own champagne as much as possible. And because we have this awesome product, we do want to make sure we’re repurposing and generating content at a good clip. But we’ve figured out some other really interesting use cases. One of my favorites is just for sales enablement. And I think that’s something that any marker can use.

Andrew Racine: And a lot of times the challenge that we’re being put forth by our leadership is like, Hey marketing, great that you can create content and campaigns, but can you actually create generative AI apps for the rest of the company? And you be the leader in that effort, not just expect everyone to have the bandwidth and the stamina to do it because the marketers are early in this game.

Andrew Racine: They were the first ones to start using this and to use chat GPT and other solutions out there to streamline their work, take the boring work off their plate so they can spend time on higher value activities. And so anyway. One example of that is through sales enablement. And so we partner with our sales enablement team, our operations team to ingest all of our content, all of our product launch information, all of our case studies, all of our.

Andrew Racine: Survey data, all of our campaigns into a knowledge graph inside a writer. Basically that connects a chat bot like chat GPT to all of our data so that sales reps can ask questions. We can also role play with them within the app. And so from an onboarding standpoint, and we need to double our sales team in the next year, it becomes an issue of scale.

Andrew Racine: How do you actually get everyone using the same data, the same top tracks, the same case studies, the same product information. And so. It’s certainly not the only way we’re doing it, but one way that the marketing team has been able to help make our sales team more productive is to build this app. And make sure that our latest and greatest is in there.

Andrew Racine: Uh, so that as they’re getting on board and as they’re on real life calls, they can query and ask questions of this, of the, our information and always have the confidence to know that they’re using the latest and greatest.

Matt Hummel: That is such a great. I think marketing often forgets the importance of sales enablement, but absent of it, all the great work that marketers are doing around messaging, product launch, anything, you’re kind of missing that last piece of the mile, if you will, to really get sales amped, to get them speaking the same language.

Matt Hummel: And so, super cool that you’ve created this model where you can adjust all that. So I love to hear that. The other thing that I want to comment on what you said is that you said drink your own champagne, which I love because for two reasons, one, I think it’s one of the best ways marketers can market, you know, just use your own product and then go tell that story.

Matt Hummel: But I also, I used to work at a company where someone said, Oh, we need to eat our own dog food. I’m like, no, no, no, no. Let’s drink our own champagne. Let’s no one, no one needs to. Yeah. No one wants to eat dog food. So thank you for, uh, saying champagne.

Andrew Racine: My pleasure.

Matt Hummel: Obviously you just walked us through a use case, which is super cool.

Matt Hummel: Outside of that. You know, what’s it like working at an AI driven organization? Do you feel like you’re always on the cutting edge of the latest and greatest tools and technology? Is there greater pressure on you? Do you feel that yourself? Yeah. Kind of walk me through your thoughts on that.

Andrew Racine: Yes. To all of it.

Andrew Racine: And it was the reason, one of the reasons I wanted to join a company like Writer because I wanted a front row seat. I knew it was changing generative AI, the technology in general, it was just changing the way we work at scale and to get a front row seat was something that I was really, really amped up about and was fortunate enough to get an opportunity to do it and it is intense.

Andrew Racine: I call and many of us at Writer call the speed in which we operate “Writer Speed” and I’ve worked at some hyper growth companies but nothing ever as fast as this. Not only in terms of the expectations of driving results and just shipping things that are valuable to our prospects and our customers, but also just the nature of the market, you know, a big part of marketing, as you know, is just understanding the market and where they’re at and what are their preconceived notions and what stage of the journey are they on?

Andrew Racine: Are they in the chasm? They out of the chasm, are they risk averse or the opposite? And so. We found and I found that there’s just a huge spectrum of people trying to understand how best to use this technology. It can be very intimidating. So we’re just trying to distill it and really focus on business outcomes.

Andrew Racine: And I think not only from a marketing perspective, but from a business perspective, that’s been really helpful. Because instead of chasing the context window sizes and the model training and all the stuff that is important, but sometimes can get a little bit noisy. We’re just really trying to get people to understand how we can help them solve a specific problem.

Andrew Racine: And then our job in marketing is just getting really good at understanding their problems and those use cases that make it a no brainer to invest in something like generative AI. So that focus, it is fast, and our CMO Diego always says that we’re fast and focused, and it’s so true because we have to keep at pace with the market.

Andrew Racine: And maybe even be a little bit of ahead of it, but we need to be focused on what really matters to folks and not get swept up into all the noise.

Matt Hummel: I love that. I like the term Writer speed. That’s super cool. And so one thing you mentioned that I thought was interesting is this idea of solving a problem.

Matt Hummel: And I think similar, but I’d love to get your take similar to how. Buyers often think about technology. They think if they buy tech, it’ll solve their problems. And they start with tech, not with the problem. Are you seeing the same thing with Gen AI, where if you start with the end in mind, or what problem are we trying to solve?

Matt Hummel: Are you seeing much higher degree of success with that train of thought or that approach?

Andrew Racine: Yeah, definitely. There’s so many options for building your own generative AI stack tool app and none of them are wrong but it really depends on your use case and to your point what you’re trying to solve and so we try to start there and then based on the requirements that we understand from our customers and our prospects We try to reverse engineer it and say, okay, well, based on what you’re telling me and the data that you need flowing in here and the number of users that you need to adopt this and the speed in which you needed this to happen and all the things, then we are either a good fit or maybe we aren’t.

Andrew Racine: And I think there’s no harm in that. Now, because we’re a platform, we tend to be able to craft anything that people want. But sometimes, yeah, if you just have like a simple use case and you’re looking to crank out some blog content. There’s no reason to go after us, and we’re happy to send people in the other direction, but we also challenge, openly challenge folks to even think bigger about their problems and get them to not just operate the way they’ve always been operating it, kind of old school challenger scales type stuff, but sometimes people are so focused and have been too close to the problems that they live with every day.

Andrew Racine: That even helping them take a step back and say, well, why do you spend 20 grand doing that right now? Or why do you outsource this to another company? You could do this yourself by hooking up some, some different tools. So, uh, sometimes it’s just getting them to reframe, uh, the problem. And then sometimes it’s just helping them solve the thing that keeps them up at night.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. Well, that certainly reinforces, you know, your approach to marketing about being out in the field because, you That level of, or that depth of conversation is so much easier to do when you’re in person. You can look someone in the eyes, you can sit across the table from them, and you can have those conversations that allow you to get to that level.

Matt Hummel: You obviously can’t do that digitally, but it’s even harder to do it. I would contend, you know, virtually too. So that’s awesome.

Andrew Racine: A hundred percent.

Matt Hummel: All right. Last question on AI and Writer before I want to transition. So, you know, one thing I saw or I’ve seen over the past few years as technology, even around account based marketing has become more sophisticated.

Matt Hummel: It’s almost like marketers, whether it’s because they have fewer resources or fewer budget, or maybe they haven’t learned sort of the fine art of true account based marketing, they’ve really relied heavily on ABM tools and tech to almost automate or over engineer the entire process. And in my mind, look, I love scale.

Matt Hummel: That’s a big part of what’s helped me grow my career. But when I think about driving growth at a enterprise organization to do that in a really meaningful way. It’s really hard to do that completely at scale and completely automated and orchestrated. You know, now you start to factor in Gen AI, which even pushes us further away from people and the human side of marketing.

Matt Hummel: So, Do you have any advice for marketers in terms of, you know, whether it’s the importance of, or how do you make sure that at the end of the day we keep marketing to people as though they are people?

Andrew Racine: Yeah, it’s such a great call on that. And we’ve seen it before, right? We saw marketing automation ruin email for everybody.

Andrew Racine: Thank you, marketers. We saw sales automation, I think ruin a lot of sales outreach from an outbound perspective. When I was in SDR, you didn’t have any sort of sequencing or cadences, right? It was. Look on a website and write a personalized email and hopefully tie it back to something that you saw on their website and go from there.

Andrew Racine: And it worked, but we see a similar patterns now with generative AI. It can help people take away some of the, what could be perceived as mundane work or the less gratifying work and really operate at a scale and a velocity that. Oh, then you start playing a numbers game. If I can send, instead of sending a hundred emails, imagine if I could send a thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand and they all have a level of personalization.

Andrew Racine: You know, there’s going to be people who do that, but then you see on the flip side, companies like, you know, the Googles and the Yahoo’s and Apple’s making it harder for our emails to even land in people’s inboxes. And so, yeah, I think, I think my general advice is, don’t look for the silver bullet.

Andrew Racine: Nothing ever is. We’ve seen this movie too many times before, you know, five to 10 minutes of research or networking or, yeah, truly trying to understand what the business is focused on will be way better than, you know, putting together the perfect eight point cadence. And that goes over a certain number of time.

Andrew Racine: And, people deserve that people want to be heard. They want to be understood and they want to spend their time on things that are going to help them advance. And so you need to have those in mind, not in a selfish way, but in a way that will help them achieve their goals. And if you can help them do that, hopefully they pick you again and it’s a win-win.

Andrew Racine: But I think some people and the tools are enabling us to get lazy on that and think this is fine enough. And if I just put out enough of these things, I’ll get enough in return, and I think that’s short sighted.

Matt Hummel: I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. That’s awesome. Alright, so I want to transition to a little bit more focus around just demand gen.

Matt Hummel: And I love that you have experience, although you kind of backed into it with the SDR world. But I think even just referencing how things used to be, and by the way they worked, I feel like we’re, you know, sitting in our front yards yelling at kids to get off my lawn. You know, just write your own email.

Matt Hummel: But, you know, you’ve been doing this for a while and now you’re at a hyper growth, innovative, leading company running their demand gen and growth marketing. So, you know, I’d love to get your take on what do you see as kind of the current state of demand gen and where do you see You know, it going in the future.

Andrew Racine: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m constantly surprised about where it’s going, so I can’t begin to predict the future, but I do think it ebbs and flows in terms of the mass scale of kind of what we were talking about before. You can get away with different channels and different tactics only so long and then the market catches up.

Andrew Racine: And if you’re constantly playing those growth hack games, I just think you’re constantly going to be looking for more and more silver bullets and it’ll take you away from the longterm investments. And so I think fundamentally demand gen needs to be looked at from a long term view and the one thing that I’ve learned I think most in the past few years that I think is playing a more important role today is just the importance of brand and that’s not always in the purview of a demand gen marker.

Andrew Racine: A lot of times it’s like, get me the leads and then make sure they’re followed up on and then how many of them get there and it’s, it’s very formulaic and I think sometimes that makes. Marketers lazy, again, sometimes it’s easy to juice those numbers and say, Oh, this is now an MQL and look at how many we created.

Andrew Racine: And this is our conversion right now. There’s a lot of different ways to slice and dice it, but are you actually moving the needle for the business? Are your sales reps more productive? Are they all hitting their quota? Are they landing bigger deals? If you’re not trying to influence those numbers as a demand gen marketer, you’re Then you’re really missing out and you’re going to be playing the old school game that will only take you so far, I think, because there’s really no point in demand gen marketing if, or your sales team isn’t crushing it on a quarterly basis.

Andrew Racine: And it’s not always that linear. No, it isn’t for anybody, but trying to figure out how you can play that long term game from a brand standpoint. So that if people do see your logo or they do meet you at an event. Or they see a piece of content. There is some sort of emotion that is evoked. Yes. They have an opinion.

Andrew Racine: They have a perception. And that can’t always just come in the form of email and ads. It certainly helps subconsciously, but you know, we, for example, we invested a decent amount in out of home, which I had never really done before. And, you know, that’s the, those are the comments I get most off of like, Oh, I saw your billboards.

Andrew Racine: Oh, when you were at that conference, I saw the airport takeover and people are taking pictures of it and sending it to us. And. In the past, it’s like, Oh, I can’t measure that. And so why would I ever invest in that? But there is value into making some of those strategic bets, knowing that you won’t be able to measure it perfectly.

Andrew Racine: Knowing that all attribution is faulty, but by believing in the message that you’re giving out to your target audience and believing that your target audience is going to see it and that eventually that will pay dividends and you’ll be able to measure that based in pipeline and revenue, I think it’s just having the courage to stand up for that and also the alignment with your sales leaders as well as your executive leaders.

Andrew Racine: To say, that’s okay. We don’t have to play this numbers spreadsheet game forever. We do need to have those leading indicators. We do need to have responsibility in terms of conversion rates and cost per things. But if you over rotate on that, I’ve just seen it so much in my past that you lose sight of, of really the forest in what you’re trying to do as a company, as a brand.

Andrew Racine: And that should be a much more long term version.

Matt Hummel: I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear a demand gen marketer talking about the importance of brand. It is a lost art. You know, somebody said, The best way to measure marketing is to stop marketing. And I, and it, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned all the out of home stuff, and you’re right.

Matt Hummel: I think there is this over emphasis on measure everything. Measure twice, cut once kind of a thing. And that is shaping people’s actions. And then you factor in, I think what COVID did to the market where, you know, budgets got slashed and we’re still, we’re still feeling some of those pains. And marketers said, and I think your point around sales alignment, even leadership alignment is so critical because What we were seeing from a lot of sales organizations, and I experienced this too, was forget about the brand.

Matt Hummel: Just put it all into leads, demand. We just need more demand. And I remember I was talking to a colleague one time and she said, that is so short sighted. At the end of the day, brand drives demand. Good brand makes demand easier. And I loved, you mentioned sort of the sentiment of what brands can do. I always go back to, there’s been a lot of conversation around, you know, is B2B shifting to look more like B2C?

Matt Hummel: B2C? Yes and no, but I think one of the things that we get wrong on the B2B side is that lack of. Emotion. And we try to put everything out in a way that it can be measured. Even digital advertising, right? How many clicks? The goal of display is not clicks, right? It’s to drive that sentiment, that emotional connection.

Matt Hummel: And that’s obviously just one way. But I always think about, you know, Coca Cola. My favorite commercials are their Christmas polar bear commercials, you know, where the little, the little one comes up to his mom or dad and they open a Coke and they have that moment. Every time I see that, I’m like the least emotional person as my wife will attest, but I just love that ad because I’m like, I need a Coke right now and I need a pet polar bear.

Matt Hummel: But, you know, I think B2B brands to create their own emotional connection with customers so that. You know, they will want to do business with you and you become the preferred choice, not just for what your product, at the end of the day, you know, your brand is more than your colors and your logo and the creative.

Matt Hummel: It really is. Are you delivering on the promise that you’ve put forward to your customers? And that starts with the very first touch point, but then it goes all the way through to how are you delivering on your product? How’s your product performing? How are you servicing your clients and prospects, frankly, at every touch point.

Matt Hummel: I appreciate you bringing the brand piece into this.

Andrew Racine: I love that. And to your point, it’s about authenticity and not doing brand for brand’s sake and trying to skew perceptions this way. But yeah, are you running your organization the same way you want public perception to be? The way you treat your employees, the way you incentivize them, the way that your product is engineered, it all will be put out there into the market, whether you like it or not.

Andrew Racine: Uh, and so I think it, you know, certainly what I’ve learned, especially as I progressed my career, is like how companies are run. And how employees are motivated and incentivized to do great work. That’s the best cheat code for having that awesome brand perception, because that should trickle down into the customers.

Matt Hummel: So true. I love that. All right. Well, I always like to talk to each one of my guests a little bit more than just their work. So I want to jump into our final segment, which I call what’s on tap. So you ready for this?

Andrew Racine: I’m ready.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. All right. So at the top of the show, we talked about what your favorite pick me up beverages.

Matt Hummel: I want to flip that question around. What’s your favorite drink when you need to unwind?

Andrew Racine: Oh, I would say, I’m firmly in the camp of a nice hazy IPA. Excellent.

Matt Hummel: So I had a guest on earlier. He was from London, and he’s an IPA guy. But I don’t remember if he was a hazy IPA guy. So, hazy, is that more of an East Coast thing?

Matt Hummel: It is. And then there’s the West Coast IPAs? Okay. Yeah,

Andrew Racine: you know, I had never even known that they were called hazy until I moved to the West Coast. It was just more of like an unfiltered. New England style IPA, and there’s some great ones in the Boston and New England area that I was familiar with. And then when I came out west, it was like, Oh no, these are all hazies because they have the original IPA.

Andrew Racine: So a little bit of a classic East Coast, West Coast turf war. But yeah, I think that’s that one, especially when the sun is shining is a great way for for me to unwind and You know, watch a ball game or hang out with my family.

Matt Hummel: Very cool. So what is your ball game of choice?

Andrew Racine: I’m a baseball fan first and foremost, and so it does pay me that my beloved Boston Red Sox are not in the postseason yet again, but I’ll still watch it and, uh, and root on someone else that’s not the, uh, the Yankees.

Matt Hummel: Hey, hear, hear to that. I’m born and raised in Texas. I live in Colorado now, but. Last year, Texas Rangers won the World Series, thank you, they didn’t even make the playoffs this year, but you know what? They got a championship and

Andrew Racine: that’s right, you can ride that for at least 5 10 years. Oh,

Matt Hummel: 100%, 100%. And as a Red Sox fan, you had a bit of a dry spell there, so Yeah,

Andrew Racine: 80 something years, I can’t quite remember, but, uh, yeah.

Andrew Racine: Being in Boston for 2004 when they finally won it was something I’ll never forget.

Matt Hummel: Oh, that’s the year they came back from 3 0. That’s right. Is that right?

Andrew Racine: Yeah. Against the Yankees. Against the

Matt Hummel: Yankees. I will never forget that either because as a fellow Yankees hater. No offense to my Yankees friends out there.

Matt Hummel: I was so fired up rooting for the Red Sox. Then they came back. I’m like, it’s destiny. Now they’re going to win. They don’t even need to play in the, uh, in the world series. So no,

Andrew Racine: that was it. That was, that was the championship. Luckily they did carry it on. That would have been a real big downer if they didn’t carry it through the world series, but I think I actually saw that Netflix is coming out with a.

Andrew Racine: Uh, I’m going to be doing a documentary about it, uh, in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

Matt Hummel: Very cool. Well, so you didn’t mention the, uh, oh goodness, no, the, the New England Patriots. So obviously you had a few good years. I’m, I’m admittedly happy to see, uh, Tom Brady gone, but, and my Cowboys, I don’t really love the Cowboys.

Matt Hummel: They’re not the easiest team to enjoy. But I think they did beat Tom Brady in his last pro game. He wasn’t with new England, but, uh, anyways, I’ll take that as

Andrew Racine: a win.

Matt Hummel: That’s right. Well, Andrew, I’ve known you for a little while now, so you’re a fellow parent, which I appreciate. So any parenting advice or any good stories that you’d be willing to share?

Andrew Racine: Oh, wow. Yeah, I’m not sure if I’m qualified for advice or not, but yeah, I have three kids, um, a 14 year old boy, a 12 year old girl, and then a 7 year old boy. So we kind of run the gamut in terms of age ranges. I guess any advice will probably be age specific. You know, having a teenager is something that’s very interesting.

Andrew Racine: I’d say, you realize that their brain is developing and even if they’re very smart, which our teenager is, they can be really dumb as well and just make some really, really basic mistakes. But, you know, if that’s not a great corollary to life, I don’t know what is, right? They’re learning, they’re trying a bunch of things out, they’re falling on their face multiple times.

Andrew Racine: In the case of my son, he fell off his bike and sprained both his wrists for no apparent reason. But these things happen when you’re a teenager, and so you learn about bike safety and about thinking ahead and being careful. And so for any parents out there that have teenagers or about to have teenagers that just say just wait, have very low expectations going into it, and then be pleasantly surprised when they do something really amazing.

Matt Hummel: That is probably the best parenting advice I’ve ever heard. I have twin boys who are just younger than your middle child and, uh, Yeah, I think what I’ve learned from you, if the only thing I’ve take away from today is lower your expectations about your children, I would call that a win.

Matt Hummel:  Well, last question for you. So I know you mentioned you just recently moved. I think you said a few years ago to Santa Barbara. Can you share what brought you to the West coast? What, what made you leave hazy IPA and iced coffee behind?

Andrew Racine: Great question. So, you know, my wife and I have been talking about moving to the West Coast for probably more than a decade, and the time was never quite right.

Andrew Racine: She had some family out here in Santa Barbara who had been living here for probably about four or five years, and so we came to visit and said, Oh my goodness, I don’t, I don’t think we’ll be able to live in their neighborhood, but maybe we could be somewhere in the general vicinity. And COVID was the forcing function, really, for us.

Andrew Racine: We Had our, our oldest was getting closer in age. She was about 11, I guess, at the time and said. If we’re going to move, we better do it now. COVID helped us be a little bit more insular, as it did for all of us. And so we said, uh, let’s, let’s give it a try. And if we, we can’t find any place to live or if we hate it, we’ll just move back.

Andrew Racine: And fortunately for us and for our family, we’ve all loved it and haven’t looked back, you know, obviously miss our family and friends back East. But I’ve been very fortunate to, to meet some great people here and to still be around additional family. And, uh, yeah, it’s been awesome not to have to deal with winter.

Andrew Racine: I’ll say that.

Matt Hummel: Well, good for you. I’ve, I’ve not been to Santa Barbara, but I’ve heard it is magical. So it’s a

Andrew Racine: great place. Come out and visit.

Matt Hummel: I will. I will indeed. Well, Andrew, this has been an amazing conversation. I appreciate you taking the time today to join the podcast. And I know our listeners are going to get a ton out of it.

Matt Hummel: So Andrew, thank you again. Appreciate your time. Thank you, Matt. Great to be here. Well, thanks again to Andrew for joining us on today’s episode of the Pipeline Brew. I hope you all enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Please leave me a comment with your thoughts and make sure you’ve subscribed to the show so you’ll never miss an episode.

Matt Hummel: Once again, I’m Matt Hummel and I’ll see you next time.