CXChronicles Podcast 167 with Chuck Frydenborg, CEO at MarketMuse

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #167 we welcomed Chuck Frydenborg, CEO at MarketMuse.

MarketMuse uses AI to accelerate content planning, creation and optimization. The MarketMuse platform identifies content quality issues on your site and builds blueprints that show you exactly how to write to cover a topic comprehensively.

Publishers, content creators and e-commerce managers use MarketMuse to realize improvements in search performance.

This is yet another potential tool that customer focused business leaders can add to their arsenal to create world-class customer experiences in their growing business.

People often forget that brand new customers start the very beginning of their customer experience with a company or brand by engaging with their content. White-papers, case studies, blogs, industry reports and podcasts are becoming the new normal for modern marketing efforts to get new people into your sales funnel or customer journey.

In this episode Chuck and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout his career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for the team at MarketMuse as they've grown their customer portfolio & revenues.

**Episode #167 Highlight Reel:**

1. Why we are going to see more CX/CS leaders joining the C-Suite in the future
2. How your content often kicks off your entire customer experience with new customers
3. Improving the way that your company proves your time to value (TTV) 
4. Ensuring your company has the right customer focused leader setting you up for success
5. Why communications & expectations setting is paramount for every leadership team

Huge thanks to Chuck for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his team's work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and content optimization space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Chuck Frydenborg

Click here to learn more about MarketMuse


If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future customer focused business leaders to tune into our weekly podcast. 

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel with all of our video episodes & customer focused business leader content!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

#167 -- Chuck Frydenborg, CEO at MarketMuse joins The CXChronicles Podcast

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:02) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the cxchronicles podcast. Super excited. We have Chuck fried and board CEO of MarketMuse. Joyous day. Chuck, why don't you say hello to the CX nation? My friend. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:00:13) - Hi everybody. Adrian. It's great to be here. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:16) - So we're, we're pumped to have each other. We're pumped to kind of get into the weeds today, um, in terms of some of the things that you and the team over market muse are building super cool company. Super cool business, super cool focus area to jug. So why don't you take a couple of minutes, go ahead and set the stage for the listeners. Give them a sense for who you are certain a little bit, a bit about your background and set the stage for some of the things that you guys are doing over at market news today. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:00:40) - Okay, well, um, for me, uh, Chuck Frydenberg, I'm actually career, uh, sales professional, um, graduated from college, um, looking, uh, in a very perplexed, perplexed way at all the people that knew exactly what they wanted to do. Um, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up, uh, and, and, you know, started trying to, you know, search my wet, um, had an opportunity to, uh, to join, uh, a sales organization for a really exciting up and coming company based in Stanford, Connecticut called Gartner. Um, I talked to them about joining sales. They laughed at me, um, you know, they were like, do you have any experience? I was like, no. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:01:29) - And they 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:01:29) - Were like, we'll go get some. Um, and I went and did that. Uh, I worked in various, uh, roles in the organization for about three years first learning the business, uh, research and advisory services and familiarizing myself with, with the tech issues that, uh, Gartner helped its clients solve. Uh, then moved into a couple of different client facing roles that, that were not, uh, quota bearing. And then, uh, and then they gave me my shot. Um, it was a struggle initially. I, I think the best, most positive way to say it is that, uh, early on I outworked my mistakes, uh, but figured out, uh, in a short time that I'd kind of found my place and had, uh, uh, a pretty good amount of success, uh, for a couple of years as an individual contributor, uh, and then moved into leadership and, uh, have been in, in, had been in sales leadership from then, uh, up until three years ago. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:02:31) - Uh, when, uh, I was asked to move into the CEO role, uh, at market muse, um, it's been the honor of my career. Uh, I've found with a company this stage so much of it is about all those things that I, I focused on to ensure the success of my sales teams, my sales organizations, you know, discipline, uh, putting in a plan, executing on that, holding yourself accountable, uh, measuring, uh, introspection, trying to figure out every day what you can do as a group to be better. And, uh, I learned a ton and it's been a lot of fun. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:03:10) - I love a jug. I think, you know, a couple of things. Number one, I think we're going to have way more customer focused business leaders in the future coming from the sales world. Absolutely no doubt, no doubt about it in my mind. I think that there is just number one. You've got individuals that have already gotten used to just some of the day-to-day items that go into managing customers, managing customer expectations, having customer conversations. Um, you just mentioned planning, executing on planning, success, planning. These are all things that some of the best salespeople in the world and some of the best guys and gals that are driving revenue at their given companies, they do exceptionally well. It's where you build trust. It's where you build relationships. It's where honestly, some of the best sales people in the world it's rebuilt friendships, right? Chuck it's like literally where you become friends with some of the people that you're doing business with, or that you're you're, you're, you're, you're partnering with. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:03:58) - And I think it's amazing to kind of hear how more and more of the future of CX and CS leadership. It derives from that type of place. It comes from sales, or there's a lot of people that you just mentioned, you kind of hinted at it, but like, you know, some, it can be, not everybody can manage the constant, um, the goal bearing type of stuff that you, you kind of hinted towards, right? Like some people kind of, there's other things that drive them. There's other things that get them up in the morning to want to go to work and do their best job. And I get it, the measurement, the management, the goal setting, it can be, it's a huge part of the game. No doubt about it. But some people like, kind of thinking about some of the more customer success oriented measures or some of the more, a relationship or account-based management success measures instead of the constant quota bearing stuff that you kind of hit the point. So I love it. Um, I, I, uh, first, first question, before we dive into the pillars, though, Chuck is, you mentioned the last three years building the team and market muse, take a minute or two to set the stage before we even jump into the pillars. Give folks a sense for who you guys are at market muse. What type of customers or ICP is you're serving and what are some of the big problem areas or some of the big challenges that you're working with your customers to solve every single solitary day.

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:05:05) - Sure, thank you for that. Um, and yeah, market muse, really cool place. And what makes this place magic is the differentiated value, uh, that it provides. Um, what we help our clients do is, is create the most comprehensive content that they possibly can. That is best in class for topical authority. Um, why is that important? Uh, topical authority is, is the primary foundation of the criteria that Google and the other search algorithm Jews to, to determine, you know, how, how content is going to, uh, perform. Um, it's a crowded space, uh, but we have a very unique, um, value prop. Um, if somebody just wants to get a bunch of keywords so that they can build out a piece of content and, and have that search, have that piece of content satisfy that search algorithm criteria, there are tens and hundreds of different SEO agencies that they can go out to. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:06:15) - But to us that only solves half of the problem. Yes, you want to make your content visible to your target audience, but what happens when they say, oh, I see this, let me engage with this piece of content. What happens then? Is it aligned with their intent? Does it answer the questions that they were seeking an answer to when they did the search in the first place? Does it inform them, does it reflect positively on your brand? And most importantly, does it drive that desired action or outcome, whatever that is, click through conversion rate purchasing action. What we're focused on is ensuring not only can they find it, but what happens once they do 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:07:06) - Love it? I love it. It's it's Chuck it's like for our listeners, talk about game changer in today's world, right? Especially if you're a growth focused business. And you're thinking about how you can disrupt a given space, how you can go out and find, uh, uh, your, your, your first army of promoters, it's going to help get them off fire, build, get them to the initial batch of revenue coming in, allow you to build out your team, allow you to build more of that content. I love how market muse helps with the acceleration of some of that content curation, that content research. You just give us a bunch of ideas in terms of why it's so critical and why companies need to be thinking about this. But the, the, the one part I want to hit on is just like you nailed the Chuck. It's like, there's so many growth companies that are so focused on going and finding the next logo, finding the next badge, finding the next deal, making the next deal, squeal that they forget that there is all of these touch points before you're ever going to get to that point before even the best salesperson in your company is going to even have a shot at getting the deal signed. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:08:00) - There's all these different touch points around attraction awareness consideration. How does, how does a potential leader opportunity to even think about considering you as a potential solution to their business? And this is some of the, this is some of the stuff that you guys are helping, uh, all of your customers working with. And this is some of the, or another way of thinking about them and the why I was excited about diving in with you today. This is a key part of the customer journey that so many founders and so many leaders, and so many individuals that are focused on growing the companies. It's easy to forget this stuff. Chuck, it's easy to forget about some of the touch points that lead up to the deal or to the sale or to the revenue creation event. And, and it just like anything else in life, man, taking a step back, zoom in the camera back a little bit, looking at the bigger picture and seeing which stepping stones get you to that point. And that's how you can start unlocking some gold for your business and start thinking about easy ways of increasing your conversions, increasing your ability to sell more deals and getting more people onboard with your product or your service. So I love that. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:08:55) - Yeah. And, uh, let me just build off that a second, if I may, because what you, what you just talked about about those touch points that happen before a purchase, right? Let me set up a relative comparison with my background that I just shared with you, right. Starting my, my sales career in, in the late nineties. Yeah. It's been that long. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:09:18) - It's crazy, man. How did it happen? It just went by so fast. Right. But you know, you were in a pretty good, pretty good position. You know, I, I mentioned I was, I was selling a garden, right? If a potential buyer of gardener at that time wanted pricing information, there was no internet, right. They had to pick up the phone and call and say, I need to speak to a sales person. If they wanted a case study a testimonial or reference, they had to come to me, whatever they wanted, as they were gathering the information that they, they wanted to review to make a purchasing decision, whatever information they got. It was because I gave him.

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:10:03) - Yeah, that gave me complete control over that presale, that buyer journey, contrast that with now, right? I read something a couple months ago that said companies that are making a technology decision. Those individuals are two thirds to three quarters of the way through their purchasing decision before they make their first outreach to the companies on that short list, what is happening in that two thirds to three quarters of that time, they are up on the internet and they are accessing your content and they, and that content is either driving them closer to you or you're pushing them to a competitor. So if every piece of content isn't optimized is it, if it doesn't accurately reflect your current pricing and current packaging, if it doesn't reflect on your brand and have your brand messaging bound and tight, right? You are probably losing the majority of your pipeline before you even know it exists. Think about the impact of that on your business. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:11:12) - That's huge, man. It's absolutely a hundred percent huge. And it's this idea of we're living in a world where most consumers, right? Whether it B to B or B to C, they want value first relationships. They're going to work with vendors or providers or solutions that give that value before they ever have to spend a nickel on, uh, on their Willie or their where. And the last part is, well, you just made me think about what the gardener example there. Chuck is. You're absolutely right, man. You think about some of the smartest, um, some of the smartest buying teams or some of the individuals that are, are, are tasked or, or placed, uh, with the responsibility of going out and finding a new solution, finding a new piece of software, finding a new vendor, finding a new partner to build the business on. I'm thinking about like, think about what Gartner teed off for the world. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:11:56) - Now we have G2, we've got Capterra, we've got Gartner, we've got all of these other review sites and you're right. You're right. Check. Like, think about it. Like you can go and get, not only can you get pricing, you can get pros and cons. You can get screenshots, you can get videos. I mean, you can literally see the tool in action before you ever have to tee up the damn phone call. You're absolutely right. Like you literally get to see all of this information before you ever even think about talking to the BDR, an SDR and account executive at one of these firms, to be able to see if it's, if it is the solution that you need. So all of those thoughts, guys, just, just perfect indicators for how critical your content management, contact curation, content optimization, part of your marketing, your sales. And I would argue, this is the beginning of the customer experience right here at CHOC, right? 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:12:38) - It's like to your point, it's like when you think about a holistic customer journey, that first piece of content, that first white paper, that first case study, Chuck just nailed it. That's like the first thing that a potential customer is going to see and either make a yes or a no in their, in their minds, whether as to whether or not they want to move forward with the next step. So, so awesome stuff. So I'm, I'm pumped that we set the stage here. Chuck, let's dive into the first seeks pillar team, man, but I'd love to have you spend a couple minutes talking about the, that you've built at market news. Give us a sense for kind of the lay of the land, some of the different teams or departments that are, are coming together to not only think about content optimization and curation, but how they serve your customers today. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:13:14) - Yeah. And I'll, I'll admit that we, we have been working for a couple of years to, to dial in on, on what the ideal structure is for our customer experience. Um, when I joined the company, we had pivoted towards a real customer success, traditional customer success engagement workflow. Um, but what we found was that asking that team to also execute on, on renewals, change that dynamic between them and the customer. There's a whole different feel for when your viewed as a customer at somebody who is just personally invested to help. And when you're also the push, the person that will be driving for that renewal or, or potential upsell, um, you know, I'm a career long sales person when people perceive that your motivation is to sell, they're perhaps a bit more guarded information that they're going to share with you. Um, and they're not as, as open with you about both the positives and negatives, uh, of their experience. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:14:33) - Um, so we then split the, uh, the service organization into customer success and account management. Uh, and although there were some concerns that there would be redundancy there. What we have found is it actually works, works quite well. Uh, the customer success individuals, as I just mentioned, are simply focused on engaging the client, you know, driving value. If there are obstacles that are in the way of driving that client to adoption and maturity, we deal with those things. And that is the customer customer success workflow. We then have the account manager who is more engaged in simply the sales cycle. Um, you know, we have obviously annual subscriptions, actually. It's not obvious. We are a SAS based company, annual subscription, and they remain tethered to the account, uh, for the express purpose of a sales transaction. Uh, those two roles are tethered closely together, uh, and it's actually worked very well for us. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:15:41) - That's huge. And so, okay. So for first follow up question here and then, cause I think it's super interesting by the way, Chuck, there's been a lot more conversations that I've had offline with with different, uh, business leaders and executives around exactly what you just broke down. W what, what, what should an optimal or an ideal customer success, um, individual be responsible for and ease there a world still where you do need to have that tethering or that, that differentiation between what, when and where it's time to talk renewals, time to talk, uh, an uptake in seats, time to talk an uptaken and even the numbers, right? Check does every, every one of these software businesses they'd have to adjust your over year. So you're right. Those are different, difficult conversations that can be, uh, obviously there could be some passionate cause as soon as you start talking about some money or an uptake or an upsell or cross-sell you're right, people start to get a little bit squirrely on you, even if they're people that you have a brilliant relationship with. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:16:31) - Um, but I, how did you guys kind of figure out sort of how to compartmentalize some of the granular things that you kind of just walked us through for what your CSMs are focused on versus your account managers and then how often? So, so one of the first part of the question is just how did you break those different troches down of responsibility. But then the second question I have for you is what's the process kind of look like for the controlling or the monitoring of those two different focus areas. Cause I got, imagine every quarter you probably learn new things, hear new things, see new things that, you know, requires the marketing team to adjust or to pivot a little bit, to kind of figure out how they can keep honing those two different, um, ownership groups. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:17:09) - Well, I I'd start that, that answer by, by talking about how, how fortunate or blessed that, that I feel like I've been throughout my career, um, at, at either Gartner, uh, Rosetta stone or Acrolinx, um, every step of the way as a sales leader in those organizations, uh, I had the privilege of being partnered with exceptional customer success leaders. Um, and what I found from those, those partnerships is that there is a tendency that we all feel where you, when you're trying to figure out how to optimize a, uh, customer experience, that it it's just that one thing, right? If we just do this, then everything will be great. Yeah. There is a complexity to client relationships that not only make it clear to those of us that have to have to make sure those relationships are the way they should be, and that you're offering an optimal client experience to as many of your clients as possible. There's a complexity inherent there that it's never just one 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:18:18) - Thing. It's never, 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:18:20) - It's never one thing. And it's, it's an evergreen issue. Like if you think you've got it solved, maybe you do for a week a month, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:18:32) - But 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:18:32) - The world around you is not static. Right. You know, the needs of the marketplace, aren't static the needs of the clients. Aren't static your, your offering. Isn't static, your staff, isn't static, right? You have to come continually inspect, evaluate, and evolve. Um, and, and that's really, that's really the basis of, of what I think is, is really one of the most important, if not the most important attributes and individual or organization can have. And that's the ability to look in the mirror and see what's really there, not what you want to see, but good and bad. What are the things we're doing well? What are the things we must do better? What are our learnings? And then how do we apply them? 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:19:19) - I love it, man. I think one of the things that we see regularly with some of our client work at cxchronicles, Chuck is like, we'll do, um, updated journey maps. And one of the big parts that we kind of pull out of some of the, some of the journey mapping exercises that we do with these incredible teams is we'll, we'll start to identify these, what we call these milestone moments across the journey. And you are spot on. There is never just one milestone moment. If anything, you typically have multiple milestone moments in the marketing function of the journey, then you've got one or two key milestone moments in the sales or the actual, the actual contracting part of the journey. Then you've got a plethora of milestones in the CX.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:20:00) - The side, once you get to customer success, because I mean, you were kind of talking to joking about this earlier, before jumping into today's show. Like, you know, every piece of software, every technology company has got a totally different path and a totally different journey for how you can get your users to that mastery stay, right? How do you graduate them? Or how do you help guide them through the, the, the 30 to 60, the 90, in some cases, man, some, some pieces of technology to your point, they're constantly changing. So theoretically somebody's gotta be doing bi-weekly or monthly or minimally quarterly business reviews to make sure that you're, you're going along the right type of steps. You're, you're bringing them if they want to go north, you're bringing them north. If they want to go south, you're bringing themselves. And, and, and really, that's just such another huge place that a lot of growth focus companies, they almost miss out that guiding that journey and being that strategic advisor, being that Mariner, being that, that person that's helping to guide the customer along the journey. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:20:52) - That is where a huge part of the value piece comes in, or the time to value piece comes in. Where many of us the has focused CX people were constantly focused on time to value. And we think about it in the product, but we miss the time to value also equals the people side that you're getting to Chuck, which is like product and technology is one part of it. That's literally one part of it, but the people side of it and the relationship side of it and the expectation side of it and the, and the being a partner on the journey. That's another easy place for a lot of our listeners to be, to be thinking about how you can bring that back to your business today, or bring that back, that back to your team today and make sure that you're actually thinking about it because it's a huge part of it. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:21:29) - I agree. And you know, if you're sitting internally, the folks that are watching this and you're having conversations internally and product is saying, this is a service issue in services saying, this is a product issue. Everybody's wrong. It's both, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:21:44) - Yeah, it's both a hundred percent. And by the way, having those conversations, if you're not having those conversations across the Xes product, sales marketing, first major strike right there, because having those conversations typically leads to how you can unpack it, how you can agree upon it, and then how you can actually build an appropriate plan of action forward to make sure that you're starting to improve upon those. So I love it. Um, Chuck, I'd love to dive into the, the, the second seeks pillar tools, man. So spend a minute or two talking about some of the tools that the market use team has had to kind of use just to build your own business. And then I'd love for you to spend a minute or two kind of talking about the two, the market muse tool, and some of the, some of the ways that your customers are getting a gain and getting a benefit and getting all this, uh, additional support from marketing, managing their content, optimizing their content and thinking about how they can produce, you know, just incredible content as they grow and scale their businesses. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:22:34) - Sure. So number one, internally, um, I mean, tools are a, uh, a critical investment to make in a, so much of, of your brand that attracts people to, to your company, to work for you is, you know, uh, their evaluation of can I be successful here? And so much of being successful is harnessing the, that technology can drive, right? You have to make it easy for your employees, but more importantly, you have to make it easier for your customers. You know, I know this is a little bit of a tangent, but, you know, I, my dad was, was, you know, really successful in his career. And, and he was a sales leader. Expectation back in the day was, you know, he would come in on a Monday morning, he'd grab his travel itinerary. He, he traveled until Friday. And if everybody, anybody called, they'd be like, yeah, Charlie's out for the week. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:23:35) - He'll call you next week. Oh, you next week. Can you imagine that now the expectation of accessibility has it demands that as, as organizations, we are there for our clients when they need us, right? So whether that's Pendo, that's drift, that's Salesforce, you know, all, all the different things that are in our, our stack, what they are all about is informing our employees. So the information they need to service their clients is accessible to them at any time. And to make sure that you can service our customer in the way that they prefer, right? Whether that's email, phone, text, drift, what have you, social media, LinkedIn, how do they want to engage you? You need to be there, um, regarding market muse. Um, we help our clients throughout the, the content creation journey. So, and I'll obviously be brief about this, but content creation starts with a bunch of people in a room, right? And they're looking at each other going, what should we write about.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:25:02) - Right. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:25:03) - And, and, and the answer that question all too often is subjective based on personal experience and biased. What we do is we inject data into that decision, right? The first thing a company does when they become a client of market muse is we load their content inventory into our platform that enables them for the first time to see their content through the prison of our functionality. We're aware showing them relative to topical authority and subject matter expertise, how strong that content is. So they can very quickly identify content that they've written that given the topical authority they've created and who they are, it's written about the right thing, but it's not performing because it's not optimized. We can also highlight for them gaps in their content inventory. We're given who they are. We know that if they write comprehensively on certain topics, that content will perform. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:26:08) - So you think about that risk mitigation, where they can place bets, knowing that if they write content there, if they direct their limited resources in that direction, that they will realize the payoff for it, right? We've then moved them to the content creation part, which is that we, we provide them with that same intelligence that tells them very prescriptively. If you're writing a piece of content on this topic, number one needs to be about 2,500 words long. It needs to focus on these subtopics. This is the depth with which you need to cover each of these subtopics. These are the questions you need to answer because somebody that does a search on this, these are the answers they're looking for. We've also in our platform can even provide them with technical SEO recommendations, both internal content and potentially external, non competitive content. That if they link to that content, it's going to enhance their topical authority, enhance that, that piece of content ability to perform. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:27:14) - I love that. I think, you know, number one, wouldn't be what it immediately makes me think about. Chuck is like for so many of the folks, the guys and gals that are building a growth focused business, building a part of a early executive leadership team where let's just call it what it is eats really, really hard to get your first couple of hundred thousand dollars to get your first million dollars in there are even harder. But then typically once you kind of, once you hit some of those, those certain milestones, there's like that flywheel effect that happens, you kind of figure out what the pipeline does. You figure out who the ICP is. You figure out which milestone moments actually accelerate conversion and accelerate, you know, helping to make deals squeal. But there's my point here is this. And a lot of these growth focus companies, it's not content experts or content specialists or people that have been thinking about this stuff and kind of understand some of the granularities or some of the different ebbs and flows that you just kind of call it out for us. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:28:05) - I mean, I can, I can assure you, some of the customers we're working with right now, you've typically got heads of sales, heads of marketing. You've got heads of customer success. They're taking the things that they're living, feeling, breathing, hearing from the customers every day or from the market. And they try to bring it back. They're trying to do their articles. There are obviously positioning for some of that credibility or some of that market based positioning around. Hey, like here's some of the things that we're seeing with our customers, anyone else that wants to kind of take some of this and run with it, please feel free to use our content, but you just made me realize, and I probably, probably every one of our listeners realize this is way more scientific. It's way more mathematical. There is absolutely rights versus wrongs, best practices. And I, my, my point is what you're making me kind of realize your truck is like for some of the folks that are building these tomorrows, you know, unicorns and building these growth focused companies today, any type of help, any type of structuring and any type of templatization and or optimization path. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:28:59) - So you could be taking men and make sure it makes your work that much more meaningful. It makes you work that much more, um, you know, beneficial to try to actually do what you're doing it for. You're trying to attract attention, get another set of eyeballs, get another click, get another potential lead or opportunity in the pipeline so that you can have the conversation about what your business or what your solution or what your team can do to make their lives better, to make their make their day-to-day business. So, really awesome ideas there, man. And I think it makes a lot of sense as to why you've been able to help so many different customers kind of thinking about how they can optimize the space in their own worlds. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:29:31) - Um, and the last comment I'd make on that, everything you just said ties up to me in one sentence, which is that successful content creation requires that you create content with purpose. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:29:45) - Yes. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:29:45) - Got to create that content, not because, oh God, you know, we're supposed to publish X amount of these. What's the business goal. How do we get there? And if you do that, that will lead you to the success that you need. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:29:59) - Yep. That makes a ton of sense.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:30:01) - Purpose-based content curation has got to be something that every one of our listeners is thinking about. Chuck, I'd love to dive into the third CX pillar process. So as you guys have grown the business as you've grown the customer portfolio, and certainly as you've grown the team right now, because you've got this great team, um, uh, a market music you're building, I'd love to just kind of hear you. Some of the things that have kind of worked for you guys to sort of manage, uh, your living playbooks or manage your standard operating procedures, or how do you guys sort of Chronicle or keep track of all the different things that you're learning from your customers or learning from your internal teams on a day-to-day basis. I'd love to kind of hear you talk about process for a couple of minutes and give us some ideas for how you guys have sort of wrangled that as you've scaled the business. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:30:40) - Yeah. And I, and I think we touched on this a little bit before, um, when, when we talked about, about introspection, um, I hired, uh, or we hired in Q4 of last year, uh, Lauren Mecca, uh, to be our vice president of customer experience. Um, she was an absolute perfect fit for us and, and just a huge transformative hire. Uh, she had worked in, you know, five or six different, uh, startups leading CX in her career. And then most recently had been a CX consultant that we engaged with. Awesome. Um, and, and what she has helped instill in me more than anything is that, you know, if you've got a bunch of folks in a room, you know, talking about, um, their perception of the client experience, you're going to get it wrong. What you need to actually do is talk to the freaking client. Um, and, and we have gone out of our way over the last six months to proactively secure, uh, applying feedback. And you know, I'm not going to lie. I mean, you know, sometimes you hear great stuff, sometimes you don't. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:32:00) - Yes. Sometimes you get, you get the other direction, check. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:32:04) - Yes. Times it's like coach. Okay. Right. But you know that again, it's going back to that phrase. I used before about, about looking in the mirror and seeing what's, what's really there, right? If you don't secure client feedback until middle of October, when you reach out to that company, that's supposed to renew in December, it's too late. You're out of time. It's done, right. We, we have, we have at minimum, quarterly in depth touch points with our clients that all conclude with the same question or two questions, what do you need from us? And if you had to renew today, would 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:32:53) - You love it? 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:32:56) - All right. And again, sometimes you're like, eh, you know, like, what are they going to say? You, and it may make an uncomfortable three minutes. If they look at you and go, you know, something, I'm not sure or no, not right now. Right. But that, then that opens the conversation gate to, okay, why I have a dear friend of mine, Chris Del Torrio. Who's a sales trainer that, that talks about Y as a discovery mechanism where you just Y and they give you an answer why and keep going, not until they think you're a sketch, but You can, you can peel back several layers of the onion there to find out and find out the truth that is actionable. So you can fix things. And that's what we focus on. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:33:46) - I love that you bring that up, Chuck, because it's funny a lot, a lot of folks, they kind of, they think that there's like a one playbook fits all approach to businesses, and it's not ever the case, maybe outlines, maybe there's certain outlines or certain formatting, things that you can definitely bring across different businesses, different industries, different leadership groups. That's, that's, that's fine. Totally. But I love your point about the why's. I talk about five whys all the time. If you can go five wise, deep with somebody, typically you can unpack a lot, right? Like to your point, you're, you're, you're taking different parts of the onion apart. But the other thing too, is you're pushing on, I think, what really truly matters. Most of you're trying to hone in on, uh, on multiple wives. You're trying to hone in on the essence of why somebody thinks a thing or feels away, or, and, and, and it's funny because same thing with, with many of the teams that we've worked with, they'll want just like a high-level conversational workflow, or they'll want a high level template around customer listening tours or customer scorecards. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:34:38) - When you're trying to get better at helping a large team master their customer outreach. And I hate to say it, man, but like, this is one of those things where I do believe there's certain people that are just better suited for customer success, customer experience, customer management. And it's the conversational piece. It's the, some people call it the gift of gab or having the ability to be a conversationalist. But the reality is folks that can do that really well or enjoy doing that really well, or are just are good at it. They're doing five why's without even feeling like five, why's just happened. It's repositioning a comment. It's let me unders Chuck, let me understand. You mentioned this. Let me unpack that a little bit. And so it's like getting really good at doing that over time. You're unearthing so much gold and so much wisdom and knowledge from one of your perspective, one of your, either one of your prospects or one of your actual existing customers that it's, again, it's building that relationship. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:35:27) - It's building trust. It's building transparency and thinking about Chuck tells me three things. I'm going to tell them three things about myself that so that there's like a feeling of, he's not the only one sharing here. I'm sharing two. And I'll tell you a lot of companies, especially these growth focused companies, their founders might be good at that. That's why they, they can find acceleration and getting your, getting your traction is relatively easy. But when they start to scale managing that to a team of individuals that might not have that same skillset, that's a different, that's a different ball game. It can be hard to kind of get that, but that's why it's, it's imperative that you're constantly coaching, supporting, and managing team to think about how they can impact that, how they can up update or, or really kind of the home, the way that they're doing their conversational skills. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:36:05) - The last thing is this feedback. I love your point about looking in the mirror, man. I was going to say, like you think about, who's the most honest people in your life. It's probably your best friends in your family, right? They tell you exactly as it is. They don't care if you're a DECA millionaire. If you're a janitor at the local school, they're going to tell you exactly what they love about you. Exactly what they hate about you. Exactly what you need to do more of, less of. And sometimes we want that free advice. Sometimes we don't, but, but it's almost like you're right, man. There's something about being, self-aware looking in the mirror as an organization. I'm saying, sorry, I'm making the parallel here. But as an organization, if you're not doing those regular mirror checks or those, those regular candor checks where like there's open honest 360 type of feedback where people are kind of showing you what they see, what they hear, what they feel from a variety of different angles, awesome place to get started because it's a really easy way that you can improve like that, like overnight, just getting some of that candid feedback and having some of those near checks is a fantastic way to see how you can kind of improve and, and make the right types of pivots or changes as you move into the next quarter or the next month or the next year. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:37:00) - So awesome ideas there, Chuck 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:37:02) - And stuff. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:37:03) - Um, okay. Last I'd love to dive into the last, uh, uh, pillar of feedback. We started to hit on this and you mentioned some of the awesome things that you and the team are doing, but I'd love to kind of just get a sense for, so you mentioned regular check-ins you mentioned surveys, you mentioned, uh, some of the other ways that you're getting feedback, I'd love to just along your own journey. It doesn't even have to be marketing district, but like what have been like one or two things that have just made it so much easier for you to understand how to, as an executive, how to keep your focus. And so, like what I'm saying, and I maybe one, one of the passes, what are some things that you've seen done extremely well for the customer feedback side to keep focused? And what are some of the things that you've seen that have worked like the gym on the employee feedback side to, to, to keep focused? 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:37:47) - Okay, well, let me take the employee first and then I'll move, I'll move out to the client employee. You cannot client employees, excuse me, cannot perform at a high level and exceed expectations unless they know very clearly what those expectations are. I've been in leadership for a long time. And I have found that more often than not that the communication of expectation of expectation that leaders assume they've provided is not something that their people care. Um, I think very often employees are searching and trying to find their way, you know, I I've, I've talked off and from a performance management standpoint, but you know, if you go to put somebody on a performance improvement plan and they're surprised that's not on the employee, that's on, that's on the leader, right? So we, we have gone out and this is iterative, but we have, you know, with purpose created, um, you know, objective key results, OKR expectations, uh, for the company. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:39:03) - And, you know, it's easy to set up individual OKR. It's difficult to do it, right? Yep. All right. Because what you have to do is first set up the OKR is that reflect the company goals and then build out the departmental or leadership. Okay. Ours, and then the individual, okay. Ours and the individual contributors need to understand that what they're being measured against ties directly to the team goals, which tied directly to, uh, the corporate goals. Um, and it's been, I'm not gonna, you know, I'll be very transparent in stating that one of the things we've experienced with our OKR is being a growth stage company is that those company goals are not static. Right. They pivot as frequently, you know, a couple of times a year.

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:40:00) - If you're doing it right? That means everybody else's goals need to shift and change while you're continuing to provide feedback. Um, so that, you know, that internally is, is how we're managing expectations around corporate team and individual performance. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:40:20) - Chuck, before you, before you dive off that one, I love that you called this out, man, because I've seen this at so many growth focused businesses. And typically you have these leaders who came from I'm just going to be super, super directed everywhere. They come from large organized billion-dollar businesses that actually have the luxury and the ability of sitting on say a quarterly OKR set where things are already so built. So perfectly managed. So perfectly staffed. So perfectly oriented, maybe even decades of performance to show why the quarter is going to focus on these big things. When you go to a growth focused startup that is building and finding new is every damn day, you're finding different pipeline hacks. Every single solitary day, you're finding different CX and CS acts every single day. I would argue even monthly. Okay. Ours can be difficult at times because of what you're, what you're pointing out to everybody. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:41:08) - It's like, man, the ship is changing constantly in the beginning of the journey. You're you're, you're trying to get out to port to get out to sea. You're taking different canals. You're going through it. So like this I, so I love that you're bringing this up. This idea of being mindful of what type of business you are be mindful of what type of executive leadership team you are right now. If you have the ability to set a quarterly OKR set, beautiful, great. You got 90 days of focus and then kind of see what's going to be the next three months when you're building in the BioFire stage, I would love to call it. You're constantly just looking for the next piece of wood to throw on the day of fire to keep it going. So it's like, you do need to be thoughtful around sort of what that perfect cadence looks like for your business and for your leadership team. It'll make a world of difference once you start rolling these. Okay. Okay. It's out to your team and your business and trying to get people to row the boat in the right direction. So I just wanted to add that in because I couldn't agree more. I'm happy you called that up. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:41:55) - Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. And the other thing you'd mentioned to me is focused. Um, you know, I, and I think this goes back to, you know, my sales background. Um, I don't end my day and walk away from my desk until I organize the next day. Um, I mean, and people are probably going to laugh at me. I've got eight and a half and 11, We go old school, whatever. Um, but I, I don't spend the first hour of my day organizing myself for that day. I don't have that time. Right. Um, I organize my day, um, the things I got to get done, the things I hope to get done, uh, so that when I wake up, I can pin my years back and go. Yep. Um, and just that, that's my own individual process that has served me well for a while. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:42:53) - I love it. Well, Chuck look, man, this has been an absolute pleasure. I love the things that you and the team at market views are working on tons of awesome insights and just ideas for our listeners to dig right back to their businesses and to their team today. So I love it. Uh, before we wrap up, today's show a couple of things. Where can people find out more about, uh, where they can get in contact with you, sir, and where can people find out how they can learn more about the awesome things that your team is doing in market use today? 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:43:16) - Well, I'll make it make it super easy about the company. You can just jump up to our website, you know, market muse.com. Me personally. Um, my email isCharles@marketmuse.com. Couldn't be more straightforward than that. You can also hit me up on LinkedIn. Um, I give you my word. Um, I may not reply immediately, but if you reach out to me, I will, I will reply. And I'm happy to schedule time with anybody that would like to just talk and learn more. One more. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:43:47) - I love it. Chuck, thank you so much for coming on the cxchronicles podcast, sharing your story, sharing your journey. Um, awesome things you guys are working on. Plus I, I absolutely look forward to keeping our conversation moving offline because you've given me a ton of ideas today, especially about the content curation, content optimization, content, socialization ideas, guys. This is going to, if you're not, if your company or your leadership team is talking about these buzzwords, you need, this is a, this is the easiest thing Chuck and I can give to you guys today, go and tell them right now, they gotta be thinking about this stuff. This is how tomorrow's leading businesses are going to get put on the roadmap. And this is how they're going to be, uh, dominating their competition and winning customers over for the future. So I love it. Chuck, thank you so much for joining the CXE map. 

Chuck Frydenborg, MarketMuse (00:44:24) - Adrian. Appreciate the time. It's good talking to you.