Podcast: Brewing Success with Miro: Delivering value, customer engagement, and strategic selling

In today’s episode of The Pipeline Brew podcast, host Matt Hummel, VP Marketing at Pipeline360 welcomes Zach Diamond, Strategic Program Manager at Miro, who shares his exciting journey from food tech to championing innovation workspaces.

Miro, formerly known as RealtimeBoard, is a digital collaboration platform designed to facilitate remote and distributed team communication and project management. Having been with the organization for nearly four years, Zach discusses his role and how personalized customer engagement and strategic discovery can significantly impact demand generation and product marketing. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding customers’ specific needs and using that insight to create value-driven, bespoke solutions that resonate on a deeper level than traditional metrics might indicate.

Additionally, Matt & Zach talk about Miro’s Discovery Center, an innovative space designed to foster deep customer relationships and immersive experiences. By offering a unique blend of in-person and remote engagements, the Discovery Center has become a crucial tool in Miro’s approach to building trust and loyalty among its clients.

Be sure to stick around to the end of the episode to learn about one of Zach’s other passions…caviar (get 20% in-cart at Shag Caviar)!

Zach Diamond is a Strategic Program Manager at Miro, a leading online collaboration platform based in Austin, Texas. In his role, he focuses on enhancing customer relationships and driving strategic initiatives within the Miro Discovery Center, where he works to optimize user experiences and maximize client value.

With a strong background in software development, Zach effectively bridges the gap between technical teams and business stakeholders. His expertise in program management and demand generation allows him to identify growth opportunities and implement strategies that enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.

Passionate about fostering collaboration and innovation, Zach emphasizes open communication and teamwork within his projects. Outside of work, he enjoys exploring Austin’s vibrant culture and staying updated on the latest trends in technology and business, reflecting his commitment to continuous learning and personal growth.

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 Zach Diamond, Discovery Leader at Miro, the innovation workspace where teams manage projects, design products, and build the future together. Zach spent much of his early career in foodtech, before stepping into his role at Miro where he’s been for nearly four years now. I had the pleasure of working with Zach earlier in my career and can say he’s one of the most passionate and talented people I’ve worked with.

Welcome to the show, Zach. How are you doing today?

Zach Diamond: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

Matt Hummel: Absolutely. So we like to start off each show with a little icebreaker. Are you ready for that?

Zach Diamond: I’m ready. 

Matt Hummel: All right. So what is your go to beverage when you need a little pick me up?

Zach Diamond: So I recently got an espresso machine, which a pick me up might be a little bit of an understatement because I’m just like bee-lining caffeine all day now, hyped up, but it’s been really fun trying to figure out how to pull the perfect espresso shot. And that’s been my newest thing.

Matt Hummel: Well, that’s intriguing. So I’ve been interested in getting an espresso machine, but I’ve been worried because there’s so many options out there. There’s so many ways you can mess it up. And I feel like cleaning the thing is probably a ton of work. What’s your take?

Zach Diamond: That’s honestly the biggest thing is having to clean it because I’m, I want to be lazy about it, but it gets so gross up there. I mean, it’s a journey. You have to be ready for it. It’s nice because you can pull a shot pretty quickly, but tinkering with it and everything is, it’s quite a process. So only if you’re ready for that.

Matt Hummel: Well, I can appreciate it. I do a pour over coffee every morning. I timed myself this morning. It took 20 minutes, start to finish. It’s worth it.  So you’re grinding your own beans. Where do you get your beans from?

Zach Diamond: A local coffee roaster called Greater Goods is my go-to. They’re in Austin. But the problem is, so I used to do pour overs, which is easy, low maintenance, easy cleanup. But now my caffeine tolerance is so high that when I make a pour over coffee, I’m like, it doesn’t do it for me.

Matt Hummel: It’s like drinking water. Yeah. Well, I guess you could make a pour over with a couple shots in it.

Zach Diamond: Oof. Yeah. I don’t know.

Matt Hummel: I think they call that like a red eye. Well, very cool. All right. Well, I want to dig into your role at Miro. There may be some folks listening who aren’t familiar with Miro. So, Can you explain a little bit more about what the company does and what your role is there?

Zach Diamond: So Miro is, we’re calling it an innovation workspace now. It’s a collaborative platform where we centralize team productivity. So, on one hand, you can map out diagrams and run workshops, host design sprints, really see the product delivery cycle from conception to execution. And on the other hand, we’re making work more transparent across an organization.

Matt Hummel: I’ve used Miro a few times. It’s an awesome product. Although you might have multiple products, but I imagine that COVID provided some pretty good tailwinds for your business. Fair to say?

Zach Diamond: Very fair to say. I joined in the middle of it, I guess, December, 2020, when we were going through absolute hypergrowth, which as a marketer was amazing because all my campaigns were working, you know, tons of ROI.

It was also a bit of a difficulty because, since everything was working, I had no data to go off against in terms of where to put my dollars. So it was funny to see just customers coming in so organically, or actually organically isn’t the right word. It was more for, from referrals.

There were so many referral users coming in that it was like, no matter what campaign I ran, it felt like it was under shadowed by the product.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. That’s interesting. And so everything was working so smoothly. You didn’t know if it was a result of what you were doing or the market or combination.

So I could see that being challenging to know, especially as we’ve come out of COVID and you’re trying to figure out what works and kind of what’s next. So awesome. Well, as I understand your role, Zach, you kind of sit between Demand Gen and Evangelist roles. Is that correct?

Zach Diamond: Sort of. So I started at Miro in Demand Gen. My first role was overseeing the transformation from product led to sales led. So as all these campaigns were working, most of it coming through the product, I was working on things like lead scoring, account segmentation, audience cohorts, really things to start funneling in high intent, high unfit leads. So that we are filtering out the smaller companies where maybe they didn’t need an enterprise plan.

I guess a little bit of background, Miro is free to use for a single user, and it gets more expensive as you add more team members. So my whole goal as a demand gen marketer was to convert our strategic accounts.

So large enterprises that were trying to get on a global unlimited licenses deal. About a year ago, I switched teams. I sit under Product Marketing now, which is interesting. We can talk about that. But I joined the Strategic Engagement programs team, which oversees our customer advisory board and our executive briefing center.

And we call that the Miro Discovery Center. And now I sit on that team and the Evangelist team. So really working on direct customer engagement with decision makers, fostering relationships. We are the people that come in to show you the why behind the how. So I think learning how to use Miro is actually pretty straightforward.

It’s not the most technical product. And if we want to get more technical, we can, in terms of like developing custom tools or integrating it to more, more technical workflows, but that doesn’t necessarily need to be done by the evangelist team or by the Miro Discovery Center team, we are the people providing the thought leadership and the strategic consulting behind how the company works or ways of working with employees, so that they have a better rationalization in terms of why they’re doing these things.

Matt Hummel: That makes sense. And that’s awesome. There’s so much in there. I want to unpack starting with, I mean, if you’re front lines with customers, I assume that means you’re pretty familiar, if not, an expert with, within your own products, fair to say again?

Zach Diamond: Definitely. And again, Miro’s not the most technical product we have evangelists. For example, we have an agile evangelist. His name’s Dave Ross, I’ll give him a shout out. But he knows everything about Agile workflows and Agile methodology. And he can be very, very technical in terms of how to transform a business to be more Agile-minded.

Matt Hummel: Okay.

Zach Diamond: That is a realm above where I stand. So I’m very good at using the product. I use it every day, but I’m more aligned to improving employee experience and more general use cases.

Matt Hummel: Gotcha. Now, did you have experience with PLG before Miro? 

Zach Diamond: Well, a little bit, I’ll say. And you did leave out one part of the background, which is that you were a huge mentor of mine back in the Social Solutions days. You’re the one that taught me how to reverse engineer a funnel and really come up with a campaign. And figure out how many leads were going to come in and how many were going to MQL. So a huge part of my marketing career, I owe to you, Matt.

Matt Hummel: I appreciate that. 

Zach Diamond: In the social solutions days, we did have the free trial, 30 day free trial, which one interesting part of that is we, we tested the 14 day free trial. Remember this? And we actually found that it converted at a higher rate than 30 days. So I feel like our north star as marketers in a lot of ways there was to secure the free trial. It’s a little different in the sense that Miro is totally self-serve to set up. So, you know, you can go sign up, log in, start using it on your own.

There’s a Miro Academy with, with a help center on how to use the product. With that PLG motion, with the free trial, it’s still more sales led in the sense like we can set you up with a product and you can start using it, but you do need to talk to a sales rep.

Matt Hummel: Gotcha. That’s so interesting. You know, we see a lot of data and I think you hear from customers that more and more folks during the buying process want to talk less and less to sales reps, right? They want to get almost to the finish line, if you will, before they have to engage sales, if at all. Do you think, knowing what you know now from a PLG perspective, do you think more tech companies should look at how they can adopt more of a PLG type model.

Zach Diamond: I a hundred percent think so. And when I advise other companies, I really push them on how to get customers in the door without a sales rep. And I think the exception to the rule would be if you’re doing like hardware or data storage or something like cloud architecture, where you really do need to be face-to-face or, you know, talking to a person, but if you’re talking about a software platform, I think of it as what gated content used to be, right? You’d have a white paper, it would be something that you really need to read, and the only way to read it is to put your email in. And now, like, gated content, I think, except for a few cases, is pretty bad.

Universally accepted as over, like we’re done with the whole just download content engine, at least at the top of the funnel. So now I think having some sort of entry point or beachhead to a product where you know that the customer has some sort of fit. And I think fit is the key word there because a lot of PLG minded companies get this wrong where they assume product usage is intent.

In the same way that like a down funnel white paper is a signal of intent. And actually it’s not because this is where you really have to understand your customer and the user because in most cases the individual contributor who’s using your product is not the [00:10:00] one who has any say in buying it. So what you’re actually doing is saying this company is using my product, which means I have a general sense that there is fit here, and now I need to drive intent from whoever the decision maker is that may never even see my product.

Matt Hummel: I see. So it’s almost like the user has now been defined or identified as part of your ICP based on fit, but doesn’t necessarily mean intent to buy because they don’t necessarily have the budget or decision making.

Zach Diamond: Exactly. So back in the 2020 and 2021 days, when we’re trying to figure out that sales led motion for Miro, I was launching lead scoring and usage at an account was the baseline for account fit for that ICP.

So if there wasn’t any usage at the account and we grew crazy fast, so we had, I think at that point now it’s a hundred percent, but at that point it was 99 percent of the Fortune 500 had some sort of footprint with Miro. So if you didn’t [00:11:00] have a Miro footprint, that either meant that you’re bought into a five year deal with a competitor and it wasn’t worth our time or you weren’t ever going to use us.

So it was more like who has good fit and then out of that, who can we suss out that has intent to convert to an enterprise plan?

Matt Hummel: No, that makes sense. And I think if more organizations can really start to adopt and get their arms around this, I think it’ll really help with the way companies are moving, which is to be more lean, more agile, to use your term from earlier, more adapted to today’s environment.

And, frankly, at the end of the day, what really matters is it’s orienting around the customer and their preferences, which is what we all, especially as marketers should be doing.

Zach Diamond: Totally. And it creates a better feedback loop with the product development team as well. Because if you’re creating a product that isn’t sticky enough to offer for free and get people using it, then maybe there’s something on that side that you should look at.

Matt Hummel: Zach, no, no.

Zach Diamond: Sorry. I’ll stay in my lane.

Matt Hummel: That’s awesome. Well, I want to dig into your role as an evangelist a little bit more. I’ve talked to some folks who, you know, when they think about, oh gosh, should we do more customer marketing? Should we do more evangelist type marketing community building?

And the question that always comes up is how do we do this in a way that doesn’t come across as completely self-serving. And I think the reality is anything that we’re doing as an organization is in essence for the benefit of our own company. But at the end of the day, I think the intent is for it to add value to our customers.

How do you kind of strike a balance? Or how do you think about that in a way that ultimately is not coming across as that kind of self-serving Zach -first, or, or your company-first type of mentality or approach?

Zach Diamond: Yeah, so I think the way that I switched from demand gen into this more strategic engagement role was because I was running our ABM programs.

We had a list of 20 accounts at a time, and this was very, very high intelligence across the accounts, like creating detective style maps of who’s who and who we need to reach and really trying to drive that intent that we talked about earlier. And what I realized was I was getting to know the account so well and all their problems and what their use cases were, customizing content.

And then I was turning it over to the sales rep to run. And I was like, wait, I should be talking to this customer. You know, like I know this, what we do now with the Miro Discovery Center and with our evangelist programs is we do a lot of pre discovery work. So what tools are they using?

Are they a JIRA house? Are they using Figma? Are they using Adobe, Microsoft? Like what are their ways of working currently? Do they go into the office? That’s a big one. And then we reverse engineer that into how we can help them. So obviously we have to stay in our lane a little bit. Like if it comes to technical diagramming or agile workflows, that’s something we can really help with hybrid work, something we can help with.

So we have to stay in our areas of expertise, but what my team does is show instead of tell. So I always bring it back to why are you doing this? Not how do you do it? So we start off every session with a session called voice of the customer. And this is just strategic questioning. And it’s one of my favorite parts of the job because it snowballs into a massive conversation.

Like you get the customer talking and you just say, so you just opened a new office and you’re required to go three days a week. Like, how’s that going? How’s it going with the, with your other offices and different time zones, just questions like that. And then it just cascades into real discussion around what their problems are, what challenges they’re facing, what’s working well, what do they love about their job?

And from then it’s so easy to just be like, well, here’s what we do. Here’s what our other customers do. And here’s a quick fix. And sometimes it’s the most simple thing. Like you have this meeting every single day. Have you thought about making it an asynchronous update to provide, to get people time back on their calendar?

Sometimes it’s so simple, but being able to see the direct value it drives is huge. So in that example, where we’re genuinely helping them with a challenge and Miro happens to be a vehicle. So we’re talking about asynchronous work. They can do that in Miro, but the way that we’re presenting it is much more aligned with their current workflows rather than trying to add something else.

Like, Hey, you can solve this problem by doing this, this, and this, and showing product functionality features – that never lands well, cause you’re pushing it too hard. And I think having like, again, so myself, the evangelist team, the strategic engagement program team. We all sit under product marketing, which is I think fascinating because we’re not on sales, even though we’re direct customer engagement, we’re not sales folks. There’s no true commission structure. So we can be that neutral third party that’s simply there to help.

Matt Hummel: I would think you not having, you know, a commission being tied to sales is actually what allows you to do that. Because in a way, what you described as a form of strategic selling is And asking the why and then just getting them to open up so that then you can sort of orient.

What you’re talking about and how you can help them around that, which is, I don’t want to say one on one because there’s so many sales reps who don’t understand that none that I work with, of course, and same for you, but, but no, I think that’s so interesting. So I love that. The other part of your role that you mentioned is the Miro Discovery Center, which sounds a lot like an executive briefing center.

My wife used to work at Dell’s EBC, and so I’ve got some familiarity, but my understanding is EBCs typically exist at companies, you know, Microsoft, Dell, much larger organizations, and not that Miro’s tiny, but they’re not of the same size, certainly, as some of the larger companies. What was the genesis of your Discovery Center?

Zach Diamond: Yeah, so the global head of the Discovery Center, his name is Sid van Wijk. He came up with this idea to really directly engage our customer base and take a more consultative approach to the product, to Miro. He is an absolute creative minded genius. Like he thinks about experiences in a way that he wants it to be totally immersive and I don’t even know if this is his philosophy, but it becomes a brand activation play where you’re coming in, everything’s tied back to this idea of creative collaboration, of messy play.

And it’s such a bespoke experience that’s unique to Miro that it works really well. And we are a very small company to have a briefing center. And when we meet with other briefing programs, it’s sometimes it feels like we’re talking different languages. Like Dell, as an example. They have a massive program where it’s just part of their selling motion that if they have a large account coming in, they’re going to go visit the briefing center.

They’re going to see what a server looks like. They’re going to see what the hardware looks like. For us, it’s much more of a relationship building tool where it’s, Hey, we’re about to sign a multi-year deal. You’re working with the salesperson on this. You know, we appreciate you as a customer. We appreciate you taking us this far. Why don’t you come on in? We’re going to meet face to face, which I think also the juxtaposition that we create of being a remote collaboration tool, or at least that’s our perception, is to know actually we’re going to shut laptops, we’re going to meet face-to-face, and we’re going to collaborate the old school way.

It really shows who we’re trying to be as a company. And the results, I mean, just being able to have an in-person experience with your account team as a customer or with our discussion leaders, we bring in our executives to lead sessions. Our customers leave and just. feel so much more faith in us or are so much warmer to us.

It just does a great job shifting the perception of who Miro is as a company.

Matt Hummel: It’s so cool. And I mean, obviously we all exist in more of a digital first environment today and you know, buyers are getting younger. 2030, I think 90 percent of buyers will be either Gen Z or millennial. And so the way that they’ve been accustomed to buying is, you know, on their phone through a social app.

And so I think you use the perfect word, the juxtaposition between what your solution enables versus how you sort of create this real life in-person experience. And it’s really cool. And I think it’s so interesting, especially as companies try to figure out how do I stand out because the number of products, you know, software solutions, even in MarTech alone, especially with the advancement of AI, the list is growing.

I think we’re up to over 14,000 now. Again, with AI, I think it’s growing by the hundreds every day. And so how can a company stand out? And I think whether it’s creating what you guys have done or not, I think it’s, at the end of the day, it’s creating something that’s meaningful and done with intention and also differentiates you.

So I think kudos to you guys for getting this off the ground. It’s really fascinating. So that’s awesome.

Zach Diamond: Thank you. Yeah, I think you said it with sales folks struggling to strategically sell or leading with value. In a lot of ways, we’ve forgotten the gift of the gab. We got so used to selling over Zoom calls and not going in-person that we’ve forgotten how much that matters to a customer who’s trusting you with a ton of money every year.

And our briefing center, the Miro Discovery Center, we’ve allocated a section of our office that we’ve created a customer experience around that only exists when a customer is in the office. Otherwise, it’s just a conference room, right? Yeah. So when a customer comes in, we set up the tables differently.

We bring in different technology. We put desk pads at every seat with swag and a, you know, notebook and all these things. And we bring out a coffee cart with snacks and coffee. We, you know, have like breakfast catered, like pretty basic stuff. Like we don’t have a separate campus the way a lot of larger companies do where you bring customers in and it’s a huge investment of architecture and real estate.

We’ve just taken a part of our office and we also have an on the road experience. So we offer workshops and we go to the customer as well. So I think to your point of making a company stand out, I think we can replicate what these larger companies are doing much more easily than we think. And you don’t need to focus on the structure of a building nearly as much as the experience and what the customer remembers.

Matt Hummel: Yeah, love it. Well, great. I want to transition into your transition. So you started out your early career in food tech and I was reminding myself of your background and you had roles in neuroscience, agriculture, you know, even specifically on bees. What led you to becoming a marketer even in the first place?

Zach Diamond: Yeah, it was quite a whirlwind of a few years there, but I always, so I studied neuroscience and I always wanted to go into research around decision-making. So my undergrad thesis was actually with the economics department because I was really interested in consumer behavior. I read a few books, Predictably Irrational.

Dan Ariely was a big one just around how psychology plays a role in consumer decisions. So my thesis with the economics department was on game theory. So you take participants and you make them make financial decisions. And for what I wanted to do, there’s a, there’s a chemical called oxytocin, a neurochemical, that makes you feel more connected. It’s very mammalian. So when women breastfeed, it’s released with their babies because it makes them connected. And one thing that makes you release oxytocin is hugging. So I originally wanted to do a nasal spray of oxytocin and see if, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t get the clearance.

They wouldn’t let, you know, a 22 year old give people chemical nasal sprays. So instead. I had people hug before making financial decisions and the results were, the paper was published, but the results weren’t great, but that’s so interesting though. I know. So, during that period, I started doing digital ad work on the side in college standing up Google ads for companies.

And when I graduated, I was offered a role at a tech company leading marketing, so somehow shifted. And then I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to give the biology career one last shot. So I did go work in the B lab in Wisconsin for a year, which the switch from Charleston, South Carolina, where I went to undergrad to Madison, Wisconsin was the biggest culture shock I’ve ever had in my life, but ended up deciding the scientist’s life is not for me, so I’ll go into tech marketing instead.

Matt Hummel: Well, there you go. I’ve got some friends in Madison, and I think it was recently named like a top place to live. What was your experience like? You said it was quite a transition, quite a culture shock from Charleston.

Zach Diamond: So I’ll give Madison some credit. It’s a very cool city, but I was there, I got there in August and left in May. So I just like, couldn’t have planned it out more poorly, like missed the best months of the year. So going from Charleston, beach town, to brutal cold, and I’m from the South, so, something I’ve never experienced before. I remember the lake froze over in Madison and people start driving their trucks out onto the lake to ice fish. And I was like, guys, don’t do that.

Matt Hummel: That’s awesome. So when did you move to Austin where you are now?

Zach Diamond: Austin was 2018.

Matt Hummel: And how’s that been for you?

Zach Diamond: It’s been great. It’s definitely changed a lot in the past six years. Just especially as a tech hub. When I moved here, it was already a place where people were moving.

And there were a ton of jobs. It was very easy to find tech jobs, but now it’s such a go-to-market hub, which is interesting because it’s a tech hub, but not in the same way that San Francisco is where you have so many product people or so many people focused [00:25:00] on AI or the software.

It’s very technical. And in Austin, it’s very sales. So you have like, you have a bunch of tech companies that have hubs here, but it’s always the sales force, not necessarily the development team.

Matt Hummel: Oh, gosh. I could see how that would have a pretty big impact on the culture. So yeah, it’s interesting.

Well, so you’ve ostensibly made transitions both in terms of, you know, industry, but also in terms of the type of role that you’re doing. Cause I know once you got into marketing, it was largely around digital and demand. Any advice or words of wisdom for those who are considering making that type of transition, whether it’s industry, role, or combination?

Zach Diamond: I think just always be selling yourself. You know, like if, if there’s something that you’re good at, it’s probably because you like doing it and to, to double down on that. And even if you don’t have years of experience that other people may have, it’s, it’s still okay to, to put yourself out there and take the risk to sell yourself.

I’m lucky that, that Miro trusted me, but then they made me work to get this, this role for sure. It wasn’t like a shoe in. Sure. So I had to reach out to a lot of people across the company to help me and to really say what I wanted to be doing. And I think by letting the motivation and passion show, they were able to trust.

So yeah, for anyone trying to make a switch, I think it’s just don’t, you don’t have to follow the status quo. And I think outside of just career switch too, when it comes to marketing, I think. People fall into a trap or marketers fall into a trap specifically of like doing something because this is what you do in this stage of a product or to, to get this metric, this is what you do.

And what I just keep consistently finding is like companies that do things differently or try to break out of molds, think outside of the box, they, they always end up having better results.

Matt Hummel: I love that. And knowing you personally, I think there’s probably an element of just being honest with yourself.

Because when I heard you had switched out of demand gen and into your new role, honestly, it didn’t surprise me. I was like, Oh, this makes complete sense for you because you love building relationships. Apparently you love to hug. You love making great coffee, which is a great relationship tool. So, all kidding aside, it made perfect sense.

And I think there is something there where, you know, it doesn’t mean if you want to make a transition to go pursue something that isn’t of interest to you, but really put energy behind where your, your heart is. So that’s super cool. I appreciate that. So one last question before we transition into, you know, some more personal stuff about, I’d love to understand, you know, for a lot of the listeners out there who are likely in more demand gen or digital marketing roles, you know, what have you learned now in your current role at Miro that if you were to go back, you know, you always say, oh, if I went back to high school, here’s what I would tell myself.

If you went back to your role as demand gen, and again, I know you’re not totally removed from that world. But do you see things differently now that if you were to go back to being a true traditional demand gem marketer, how would you do things differently?

Zach Diamond: I think the one thing I’d push myself on is not taking a one size fits all approach.

I think it’s again, like very easy to focus on the metrics. Like how do you create MQLs just as an example, but not just MQLs. It could be free trials or opportunities, whatever the metric is. And I think now that I’m meeting directly with customers, I see it so much clearly of how different they are from each other.

And then how much it matters when we’re running a workshop and they use JIRA and we’ve prepared the workshop to be all around JIRA cards. And they’re like, Oh, this is so easy. And it’s, it’s really not like, it’s not even like surprise and delight that they’re like, it’s not like appreciative. It just, it makes it easier for them to understand.

You’re speaking their language. You’re speaking their language. And I think it’s difficult to do it in a scalable way, especially if you’re like running ads or something. But when you speak a customer’s language or not even at an account level, but at a job level, like I’m going to go after design teams or product teams or, you know, you’re taking a vertical approach.

I’m going after retail companies, product teams or retail companies. Like how can you run a campaign that makes it seem like someone who worked at a company like that wrote it? Yeah. From, from my perspective, just the most successful way to get engagement. I also think probably focusing too much on the funnel health and less on direct engagement was something I missed earlier in my career where it’s like, if people are, are commenting, liking on social media or attending an event, whatever the content is.

If they’re engaging in it, like that means it’s valuable. And then you can probably figure out what the, the funnel flow is after that. Versus like. I’m going to launch a campaign  to hit this funnel metric and maybe I’m hitting the metric, but I’m not getting the engagement. And it turns out that the leads are kind of bogus, something along those lines.

Or even signups, like I’m going to drive signups to Miro and I hit the number of signups, but I didn’t get the engagement. Like that might mean that the signups weren’t what they, what they promised to be.

Matt Hummel: Yeah, it’s kind of that risk of over anchoring on any one single metric. It can be very much misleading because you’ve probably designed everything you’re doing around, you know, that one thing when in reality there’s so many other things that you would need to complement that in order to actually demonstrate success.

So that makes sense. And it’s funny too, because there’s a lot of talk, you know, around the old playbook is dead. We need to bring out the new playbook. And in a way I don’t disagree, but on the other hand, it kind of contradicts a degree of what you’re saying, which is. There is no playbook. The playbook is, you know, what your customers need.

And I think that’s true. And again, because, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but if there’s 14,000 Martech products alone, you’re not just competing with your direct competitors. You’re competing with every other company out there who is selling you something, you know, that would take up whatever software budget you have, whatever decision making, whatever bandwidth you have to actually implement a new solution.

And so, It’s not a numbers game. And I think, you know, taking that really personalized experience and taking the time to do that is smart. It’s the hard way. And it’s funny because in a lot of ways, I think automated technology has made it so much easier, you know, even around things like personalization.

And yet those quote unquote personalized experiences really don’t feel personalized if you’re just sort of relying on the tech just to pump out stuff. And again, making it, there’s a benefit to creating scale, but to your point too, it’s an easy way to get lost in the shuffle if you’re not really putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, which I think has been a big takeaway from this conversation.

Zach Diamond: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s balancing the human experience with the metrics or the attribution. And I like, for the record, I don’t think the MQL is dead or any, anything like that. I think metrics and funnel. Are really the only way that you can gauge the success of your marketing. But when you’re looking at the creative side of things, how are you making something or putting something in the market that people actually want to do or want to engage with?

And we run a workshop with customers where we talk through collaboration because Miro is a collaboration tool and you can put sticky notes. It’s, you can use it as a whiteboard. You can, uh, you can really do like brainstorming and ideation on Miro. But we do a workshop where we talk about what would collaboration look like if you don’t have any tech.

Like, bring out the analog whiteboard, bring out pen and paper and sit in a room and what does it look like? And we forget that you can actually, like, get stuff done that way. And it’s like, okay, now that we’ve remembered that, what tools should we add in to make this a better experience? And I think the same way with marketing, it’s like, you can do marketing without any tech.

Like you, we forget that you can. Tech is good, right? But if you were going to do it without tech, how would you do it? And then what tech would you add in? And so like, you probably need a marketing automation platform, right? Like that’s probably pretty necessary. But do you need all these other tools that sit on top of that?

And then picking and choosing the leanest tech stack to, to really drive value. And then being able to measure the impact, I think is really important.

Matt Hummel: That’s cool. It’s yeah, it’s kind of two things. One, it’s, it’s starting a bit from a blank slate, which I think is hard for a lot of customers to think because they’re Only thinking within the lens of their current landscape.

And two, I think it’s also painting light to the realities, which is, you know, when I sold tech into financial services companies, our biggest competitor was Microsoft Excel. It was not another competitive solution. And so, and Excel works for so many in so many industries as a great competitor or just status quo to your, I think to your point too.

And at the end of the day, you’re not just competing against another tech, you’re really competing against no tech, or whatever they have in place. So that’s cool. All right. Well, I want to transition again to our next segment, which I call what’s on tap. So this is where we can get to know our guests a little bit more on a personal level.

Matt Hummel: So I’ve got a few questions for you. If you’re, if you’re game for it, let’s do it. All right. So at the top of the show, we talked about your go to pick me up drink, which I have major envy on, and I’m going to have to Get more details on your equipment, but what’s your favorite go to drink when you need to unwind?

Zach Diamond: So it’s actually changed pretty recently. I’ve been really on a rum kick. Yeah, which is kind of weird. I went to Puerto Rico and just started drinking rum and I was like, like tiki drinks are delicious. Like beaches that make you feel like you’re on a drink, on a beach, like they’re delicious. So my go to, which it’s Friday, maybe this evening I’ll have one is like rum, coconut water, and pineapple juice. It’s so good. It sounds refreshing. I feel like I’m on vacation and it’s like hydrating, right? Yeah. Coconut water. You got the coconut water.

Matt Hummel: It’s delicious. Oh, that’s amazing. I would not have guessed that. I would have thought you would have said like mezcal or, you know, some fancy bourbon.

Zach Diamond: I don’t know. I do love tequila. That’s been my, if you asked me like maybe a few months ago, I would have said tequila all day, but no, rum lately.

Matt Hummel: I like it. Well, very cool. Well, you know, you mentioned going to Puerto Rico. I know you’ve been, I think it was Mexico city. Is that right? So you love to travel.

If you could pick what’s been the favorite place you’ve traveled and what about it, you know, really stood out.

Zach Diamond: I love Mexico. I go to Mexico probably like twice a year. Just every single part of it is amazing. Mexico city might be my, my favorite city I’ve ever been to, but I’ve been to Oaxaca. Sayulita on the west coast, and then the place I always go back to is Merida in the Yucatan. The Yucatan is notoriously the safest place in Mexico. It has a really, really low crime rate and the people are so friendly. The food is amazing. You got the beach, you got the jungle.

Matt Hummel: That’s awesome. Well, I know you’re a bit of a foodie, and I’ve only been to Mexico once, it was definitely a beach town, Cancun or somewhere around there, so I’ve not really gotten to experience the true culture, but from my understanding, the different parts and regions of Mexico are really different, whether it’s cooking styles or food styles. Has that been your experience?

Zach Diamond: Yeah. And, and just the culture too. Like, yeah, it’s, it’s a big country, but if like West Coast is, it’s the same in the United States, but the West Coast is so different than the East Coast and Mexico City might as well be like a European town. Cause it’s just really, it’s so posh and everyone dresses really cool.

And there’s fancy like alfresco dining, things like that. And then the food, but the culture and the architecture and everything is just so diverse. I think that’s why I love Mexico so much.

Matt Hummel: That’s awesome. Well, I know you’re a bit of a foodie, so I’m sure that really resonates with you.

And you’ve done some interesting stuff. I remember one time you were showing pictures of doing like a whole hog barbecue, which is very cool. Do you still have your own sort of side business making caviar?

Zach Diamond: I do. It’s still up. I should create, I’ll create a promo code: shagcaviar.com/discount/pipelinebrew.

And you know, I love it. But yeah, I do. I do have an e-commerce site for caviar. This was, when was it? I guess 2021, something like that. I really wanted to create an e-commerce platform and run some ads and do social media. And I couldn’t keep up with the social media, that’s like so hard to do and it made me take a whole new like lens on how these B2C companies run social media.

Cause it’s hard work and I mean talk about knowing your customer, just like being consistent with the brand and selling things. 

Zach Diamond: Always on, always on. And I am not the type of person that I’m also like terrible with my phone. 

Just make a few Instagram reels. No, definitely not. So the site is still alive. I still get orders every now and then, but it’s definitely a small, small business.

Matt Hummel: That’s cool. Well, I’m a little embarrassed to say, but I had caviar for the first time, I think three or four months ago. I was in New York at a restaurant.

The only thing on the menu that looks good, I forget even what it was, but it had caviar on top. And it’s kind of like, if it’s avocado on top of like, uh, skip the avocado, which I know I should because it’s healthy or tomatoes. But I was like, you know what? I’m an adult. I can do this. And so sure enough, I tried it and I have to say it was surprisingly delicious.

Nice. Kind of like good mushrooms. If you do mushrooms, right. That’s really not, it’s not that scary.

Zach Diamond: No, it’s not. And it’s the aging process, like I would say, it’s, people think it’s going to be super fishy, but it’s probably more like a Parmesan cheese thing, you know, or it’s like, umami and salty forward.

Matt Hummel: And like Parmesan, there’s, there’s different ages or is it qualities of, is it sturgeon or are there different types of caviar?

Zach Diamond: Yeah. So cheap caviar tastes like fish bait for sure.

Matt Hummel: Okay. 

Zach Diamond: You can run into that, but if you go for the good, like aged sturgeon caviar, that’s, it’s like, they call it low salt aging.

So it’s not like hyper packed with sodium. And then you get like a nice, smooth, buttery flavor.

Matt Hummel: Well, Zach, one more question for you and then I’ll let you get out of here. Any other vacations planned for this year or what’s next for you?

Zach Diamond: I’m actually going to Brazil, but it’s to visit some customers. We’re doing some customer workshops, so I took the weekend before as vacation and then I’ll be with customers throughout the week.

Matt Hummel: Good for you. What part?

Zach Diamond: That’s my next pick. Rio. The city of God. So excited about that.

Matt Hummel: Good for you. I look forward to hearing about that. Well, Zach, thank you. This was an awesome conversation. I know our listeners will get. A ton from it. And personally, I just love always connecting with you. So thank you so much. Yeah. I appreciate that.

Matt Hummel: All right. Well, thanks again to Zach 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 a comment with your thoughts and make sure you’ve subscribed to the show so you’ll never miss an episode. Once again, I’m Matt Hummel and I’ll see you next time.