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Josh Schachter:
Welcome, everybody. I’m Josh Schachter, your host of Unchurned, and welcome to the special revenue series of our podcast. I’m really excited to be here today with Mickey Howell. Mickey is the chief revenue officer, the CRO of Marigold. Mickey, welcome to the program.

MIcki Howl:
Thanks for having me, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
First off, tell us a little bit about Marigold. You guys are a big company. You’re well established. You’re you’re you’re you’ve got great trajectory as well, and a bunch of products within the suite. So tell us a little bit more.

MIcki Howl:
Yeah. So, Marigold is our parent company name, and we have, quite a range of marketing, technology products. Lots of folks have been customers of ours and, you know, under other names, Experian, Cheap Digital, Celigent, Sale Through. We like to joke that Marigold loves the GoodRi brand, so chances are you’ve interacted with us at some point. And if you haven’t been, a customer, you’ve probably been an end user. We have, really incredible customers that span all types of industries. We help Starbucks with their, loyalty app and offer management. We help American Airlines with their email and push notifications.

MIcki Howl:
So, there is a a piece of it of communication coming from Marigold and ending up in one of your digital channels depending on, what customers you’re interacting with. So that’s You’re you’re,

Josh Schachter:
like, in everybody’s pocket. I mean, the the the Starbucks thing is the most humble brag you could do. Right? Because that’s, like No. Well the most popular loyalty program in the world? Commit.

MIcki Howl:
I don’t mean it as a humble brag. I’ve just gotten used to using it

Josh Schachter:
to be,

MIcki Howl:
like, well, because literally my mom will be like, what do you do again? And I’m like, mom, Starbucks. And she’s like, right. Okay. Like, that’s literally how she can tell her friends what the heck I do.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Oh, I mean, you try telling your mom that you run a a generative AI startup and and see how that can far get tickets. Yeah. We’ll get back to the AI stuff a little bit later. So, so you’re the chief revenue officer. You guys are well, actually, before we go into to your role, give give me a little bit of sense, the size, the the stage of the company, those sorts of metrics.

MIcki Howl:
Yeah. So we’ve been around a very long time. Some of our tech is, you know, 30 we’ve got we’ve got 30 years under our belt of incredible technology for marketers. We’re doing about half a 1000000000 in revenue a year. We have we’re in, gosh, global, 2,000 plus employees. We have localized teams in France, Spain, Germany, Tokyo, Japan, really all over the place. So we’ve got a good presence.

Josh Schachter:
So so you’re kinda like the the biggest company that you’ve never heard of in some way? A

MIcki Howl:
little bit. Yes. Yes. Definitely have interacted with the tech. Maybe didn’t know what the what the holding company name was.

Josh Schachter:
Have Have you ever been, like, at a conference and somebody’s, like, kinda talking down to you a little bit or, like, not talking down to you, but, like, you know, oh, oh, cool. Tell them to send me a little bit about Marigold. You know? If you need any help, let me know. And you’re like, well, actually, I’ve got, you know, a 1,000 reports underneath me.

MIcki Howl:
We definitely have had to work a lot on that, tight elevator pitch and how we show up at conferences. You know, do we wanna go with the Marigold? And, we’ve played around with you know, we’ll bring Cheetah Digital, buy Marigold, or Marigold Loyalty. We’ve tried out different things to really figure out what resonates with folks. People like the Marigold story. It’s a story about having a technology within your business that can grow with you and whether that’s grow your customer base or grow you as a marketer. It kinda works both ways. So it’s a it’s a really great name and narrative. Marigolds are companion plants when they’re planted in gardens, so they help everything around them grow.

MIcki Howl:
So again, just from like a a visual and a go to market narrative, it it works really well, but it’s definitely been a challenge to figure out how to show up and how to get people to very quickly understand who we are and what we do.

Josh Schachter:
I like the name. I like the name. It’s it’s got the softness to it, and and I I love the, the description or the origin of that that they they’re are companion plant. I didn’t know what that was. But so one of the reasons that we do the podcast, we do it for a few reasons. We, we we wanna showcase executives like yourself like yourself that have had an illustrious career and frankly are in a position and place where many people want to be and want to aspire towards. As you may know, you know, my my focus, these days tends to be, on both sales and post sales, but really a predominant focus on post sales. And so we like to talk to the sales side to understand kind of the relationships between the 2, and then we can can banter about some other stuff too.

Josh Schachter:
As I look at your resume, at least at Marigold over the past 5 plus years, You were the VP of success services operations and planning, so your LinkedIn says, which sounds kind of like a VP of post sales in many ways. Mhmm. Then you were chief of staff, and the senior vice president of of biz ops. So I assume you were kind of just, you know, right hand woman to the CEO sort of thing.

MIcki Howl:
That’s exactly right.

Josh Schachter:
And then you were operating chief operating officer, COO, and now CRO. I don’t even know where to start with that. Which one is a promotion over the others? But

MIcki Howl:
I know. Honestly, I used that you know that AI tool or the plug in that kind of was like, you know, they they wrote a funny version of your LinkedIn resume? It said something like, you’ve collected a lot of titles in over a weekend, which, it actually, like, physically hurt me when it spit back where it wrote about me. But, yes, I look. I I came I came up through the customer success side. I love that. But we were we were a business that was growing very fast and doing a lot of acquisitions and needing to integrate them into the business. I enjoyed that process. We’d had a successful, I’ll say, integration from the acquisition I came through, which was LiveClicker, a real time dynamic personalization piece of tech that tacks on to our, email, sending.

MIcki Howl:
And, the the CEO said, look. We’re we’re gonna do this a few more times. I’d like you to help me rinse and repeat. And so moving into the chief of staff role really gave me the visibility into the other functions of the business and kinda how they all need to work together.

Josh Schachter:
Just to be clear, you you were, you were, like, a a a senior AE manager. Like, a it was like a team manager effectively at LiveClicker back 5, 6 years ago?

MIcki Howl:
It’s more like 7 or 8 now.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. 7 or 8. Okay. I don’t I don’t mean to to, to age you. And what is LiveClicker approximately was or were their ARR?

MIcki Howl:
Just surpassed 10,000,000 in revenue, and that was when the founders wanted to sell. So they were ready to to, get out. And at the time, it was the company was called Centimeters Group, and they had, sale through as the email service provider was really the core product along with a self serve product called Campaign Monitor. And the live clicker piece of tech was gonna be a really great plugin, alongside the ESP, an opportunity to cross sell into the base and bring dynamic personalization into content blocks. So the the the story was there. It was a good acquisition.

Josh Schachter:
I don’t care about the acquisition. I don’t care about the acquisition. What I what I what I care about is that I’m not gonna make an assumption here. You were you were, like, a team manager of, like, 10 people or something at this $10,000,000 series b startup, blah blah, you know, something like that. And and now 7 years later, you are the CRO. And even prior to that, you were already the the COO, etcetera. Of how many people report to you ultimately?

MIcki Howl:
350.

Josh Schachter:
Of 350. And as COO, how many people reported to you?

MIcki Howl:
It was about the same. We’ve just kind of done some horse trading on groups.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So within 5 years, because that’s when you were, you know, COO Mhmm. How do you do that? How do you how how do you go from, you know, from you know, high performing but modest team manager of a Series B to, C Suite at a 2 1,000 person company that has an amazing portfolio of products? Because this sounds like, you know, dreams can come true. You know? If, you know, for all those listening out there, just work your butt off for 5 years, and you can take leaps and bounds. But I wanna get to, like, the magic, really, of of what has allowed you to to defy this gravity. And I do not want to hear you say that it’s the people around you. I am

MIcki Howl:
it’s totally fair because that’s not helpful advice for folks.

Josh Schachter:
No. Right?

MIcki Howl:
I’ll be I’ll be brutally honest. It’s a lot of hard work, and quite frankly, it’s a little bit of luck too. I mean, I’ll just be totally frank. Like, if my, you know, husband was in the room right now, he’d be like, please don’t say that. That’s that’s not true. No. It it actually is. You you gotta be right place, right time, and you gotta be noticed by certain people.

MIcki Howl:
It could very well have been there are a lot of smart people that I work with. It could have not been me. It could have been somebody else. So I I do

Josh Schachter:
love not helpful. That’s equally not helpful as, like, oh, it was my team that made these shine.

MIcki Howl:
A 100%. But I also don’t want people to get frustrated when they’re working their ass and they don’t feel like they’re getting what their due is. Right? It could just be that you haven’t connected with the right person yet who’s willing to invest in you because and that’s what the great thing about the chief of staff role does is a CEO is willing to invest in you and and really round out your skill set. That is the the entire point of being in a chief of staff role. I encourage folks to look that up.

Josh Schachter:
I thought it was to take meeting minutes.

MIcki Howl:
Nope. It’s not at all. That’s a that’s a different type of role, especially in the in the tech space. The chief of staff really wears a corp dev hat. They do all of the board relations. They’re responsible for putting together the entire, board deck with all of the data, which gives you incredible p and l fluency. And working with the the finance partners, you get to sit in and understand from a strategic perspective how the board is thinking, how the other executives are thinking. You get to play a little politics behind the scenes and understand and navigate how you can influence the CEO’s vision and the execution that he needs by going to the other folks and and really building a rapport with them.

MIcki Howl:
So there’s a lot of pieces that go into that chief of being a successful chief of staff that can really round you out to be an executive at some point, and that’s that’s the path that, a lot of chief of staffs are on.

Josh Schachter:
So you’re kinda like the highest individual contributor in the company effectively as a chief of staff?

MIcki Howl:
Correct. Yep. You have no direct reports, but you’re responsible for all the functions and all the metrics.

Josh Schachter:
How how political is it? I mean, how much of a diplomat do you have to be to to function in that role?

MIcki Howl:
You have to be a diplomat. You I I would say the balance that you need to strike is being ultimately very transparent with folks, especially when you’re in a live conversation. So if there’s something that you’re being told that you know you’re going to go and need to tell the CEO, you you let that person know. You say, look. I’m just so you know, I’m gonna go I’m gonna go use this information in this way. It’s my job to help you accomplish a b c. I can’t do that without filtering the information through in in this way. Are you comfortable with that? Can we have a follow on conversation? How can I set you up for success? So being open and transparent, but there there is a lot of politics there.

MIcki Howl:
You know, when you’re going through acquisitions and you’re bringing in new executive team members, and then you’ve got I think at one point I was sitting in a room, there were 12 executives, which is insane, but you know 6 are going to get exited. Right?

Josh Schachter:
And

MIcki Howl:
you kind of you get you get the visibility from the board, and and sitting in with the CEO who’s going to move into what seat, and you you understand how that really plays out. And so that was incredibly interesting, but there’s there’s a there’s a high level of politics at play in that role for sure.

Josh Schachter:
Lot of politics, a lot of trust, a lot of accountability. Probably some accountability and some information he didn’t want to have. He didn’t wanna have,

MIcki Howl:
necessary possible deniability. And I’ve done that before where where I’ve had a CEO say to me, you know, hey. I want you to interview this person because I’m thinking of them for that role, and I’ve act I’ve pulled myself out of that process. I’m like, look. Like, I I I’m I’ve done a lot for you, willing to do a lot. This is just one I can’t do. And so and have you know, having your personal boundaries is good too.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Okay. So so you you so you were lucky. You should play the lotto more often. So, like but but but but I believe I do believe in luck, but I also believe genuinely, but I also believe that you position yourself to take advantage of that lock. Right? When it comes around, you’re you’re ready to strike at it. So what what do you think and you mentioned hard work. It might be that.

Josh Schachter:
It might be some other factors. You know, taking away your your humility hat here, What do you think positioned you to make the most out of those lucky opportunities?

MIcki Howl:
Yeah. So, I think it was my background. What what let me tell you what I originally wanted to do. I actually started my career at E Entertainment Television as a producer on reality show.

Josh Schachter:
Is it still around?

MIcki Howl:
Yeah. Yeah. You may have heard of it. I and I won’t tell you which reality shows because it was, like, season 1, and then that will age me, and you’ll know exactly

Josh Schachter:
where talk soup.

MIcki Howl:
Yes. Oh, was it no. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
No. You’re not that old. You’re not that old.

MIcki Howl:
I no. It was the soup when I worked

Josh Schachter:
in. Soup.

MIcki Howl:
Okay. Graduated from talk soup to the soup, but Okay. I definitely witnessed the first season of the Kardashians getting made. So you know? But look, I what I wanted to do was I wanted to be a showrunner because I was fascinated by how everything comes together and how there can be one person really responsible for pulling all the strings together and understanding from an operations perspective how it all works, how what this person does over here affects the output over there. And it’s no different for any type of operations or revenue role. You have to have that mindset. And if you don’t have that mindset, it’s not gonna be the right path for you. So understanding how all the pieces fit together and then wanting to be the quite frankly, I just wanted to be the person that helped bring them all together and then was able to push them.

MIcki Howl:
Right? I’m also not afraid of an accountability framework. That doesn’t mean that I’m mean or cool or or, you know, skewer people when they just absolutely miss a number, but I’m not afraid of an accountability framework from my CEO to me. Right? In fact, I told him the other day, I said, hey. I love it when you come splash in my pond. Do that more often. Push me because it helps me push the team and it makes us better. But I’m a big I’m a big proponent of having an equal accountability framework and being, being in a place where where everyone is held to to the same standards and the same goals and objectives, that’s where I have been successful is when, when I’m working with a leadership team that that fully buys into that. And, again, going back to the law

Josh Schachter:
Translate that, though. Translate that for me. So is that is that your that’s your communication style? It’s it’s your tone. It’s it’s it’s a framework that you have in place for accountability or a racing model or something like what’s

MIcki Howl:
Yeah. So I think from the revenue perspective, and I I think your audience will understand this, it’s it’s it’s my chief product officers, my chief technology officer knowing at any point in time, you could actually call them up right now and you could say, how much has Mickey done in in bookings this quarter? What’s her budget and what’s her sales target and what’s her path there. And they they would all know that because revenue isn’t just my responsibility, it’s all of our responsibilities. Customer satisfaction isn’t just my responsibility, it’s all of our responsibilities. And so you can come to one of our product offsites and actually see bookings, retention, churn analysis put up on the board.

Josh Schachter:
But that’s not accountability. That’s that’s you that’s you being able to to, communicate properly.

MIcki Howl:
That everyone carries everyone carries the revenue target. Everyone does in the organization.

Josh Schachter:
I see. I see. It’s also just good cross functional collaboration and being able to to stakeholder, right, and and share the messaging. I’m thinking more of accountability of, you know, hey, you guys were 10 10% below target this past quarter, this past month, or, you know, this campaign is not working. Or is there are there ways that you’re kind of in the weeds in that sense that your your frameworks that you apply to your team?

MIcki Howl:
Correct. I mean, it yes. So yes. We always we run a a really tight OKR framework again from the operational perspective, and we cascade all the way down to the individual contributors. And we don’t get caught up on individual contributors really having tasks more than I call them objectives and key results. People like to get hung up on what those words actually mean. Just don’t. If people are saying I’m gonna go do this and rolls up to the larger objective, let them go and do, and then check-in.

MIcki Howl:
Is this working and is it moving the needle in the right direction? And if it’s not, that’s okay. It just means we need to pivot from a tactical perspective. So taking the emotions out of it and agreeing on tactics. Hey. We all agreed we were going to go, you know, close off the funnel or redefine our ICP. What that’s resulted in is less sales than before. We all held hands and did that together. Now we might wanna make a change, and that’s okay.

MIcki Howl:
Let’s have that conversation. That’s the leadership level of an accountability framework that brings everyone to the table and makes everyone feel like they they they have the same goals and objectives, but also they can voice their concerns. And it’s okay to try something, not work, pivot, and keep moving as long as you’re measuring.

Josh Schachter:
I I take it you’ve read John Doerr’s measure what matters?

MIcki Howl:
Mhmm.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I mean, so when you’re talking about that model, that OKR model of of, of laddering everything up, Tell us a little bit about because a lot of this audience are in customer success and post sales. How has that influenced your role today? And, you know, so the past 7 months, you’ve been CRO and then prior to that, COO. How did some of the yeah. How do some of those things influence that?

MIcki Howl:
So, you know, I, I actually liken it a lot to the this past election where you’re kind of hearing the the whys and the and the theories around stuff. And one of the prevailing theories is just like a certain group of people wasn’t listening to what another group of people were saying. And I’ve have found that a lot in customer success where you have the CSMs on the really on the front lines of getting the feedback from the customer. And in the past, past, I have seen bad models where that feedback gets up to say the CPO or the CTO or even the CEO, and it’s just like, well, they don’t understand, right, or they aren’t enabled, or look at look at what we’ve done over here, look at all the things we rolled out. Look at the look at the chart. Right? This is literally what one party did to the American beef. Right? Look at look at the chart. It’s not what you think.

MIcki Howl:
And and that that is a recipe for disaster. You have to listen to your customers, and it doesn’t matter if they are the end user that’s in the tool day to day or the C suite executive. Both pieces of input are valid. And so what I often had to be an advocate for and still do quite frankly on the customer success side is reminding folks that the people that use our tool each and every day, the marketers that log in to the UI and need to do their job effectively to help drive the business goals and objectives for their c suite executive. Like, we should consider their feedback as valid as when, you know, the CMO calls and said, hey. I’m just having a difficult time proving out the budget and tying it to ROI. Can you help me under understand that? Right? That’s a very different problem than a marketer saying. It takes me, you know, and I’m not saying this is a real example for our our tech.

MIcki Howl:
I’m just it’s an example. It takes me right? I have to talk to 7 support people or or to get this campaign out the door, I had to open 3 tickets. Like, those things are very valid. And where where I’ve seen companies really fall down is when, they either get too hyper focused on, no. We don’t just want feedback from the end user. They just don’t get it. They’re not enabled. Right? Because there’s some bigger picture that we think that they’re not a part of.

MIcki Howl:
It’s just it’s kind of absurd. So that’s that’s really where, I’m a big, proponent for my customers.

Josh Schachter:
Last question for you. So you’re you’re in the CRO role now for just over 6 months. You’re just in the beginning,

MIcki Howl:
of

Josh Schachter:
taking off now to the next level. What’s next? I I’m going to imagine that you’re a big, proponent of growth mindset and and continuous learning throughout your career in development. What’s currently number 1 on your docket for your own growth?

MIcki Howl:
For me, it is quarter on quarter improvement of our bookings. So if you if you think about being a part of an organization that’s really driving, we wanna be at 5, 10, 15% growth, best in class growth. That can get really overwhelming, very fast, especially when you have a financial model that’s handed down from, you know, the board above. Right? Here, hit this. But as long as I’m making quarter on quarter improvements, I feel like I’m getting growth. So say if it’s 5,000,000 in bookings one quarter, I’m gonna wanna do 6 the next, then I wanna do 7, then I wanna do 8. How can I scale that up to 10 up to 12?

Josh Schachter:
So what was it? So you’re you’re you’re completely outcome driven here. Just to go back to the OKRs. I mean, you’re saying, like, my growth if the company’s growing, I’m growing. Like, that’s what matters. It’s not it’s not that I my my soft skills have improved or that my my structuring of executive board decks has gotten better. It’s

MIcki Howl:
I mean, that comes with that comes with practice. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
So for

MIcki Howl:
me but that’s that’s where I thrive is in that outcome driven approach. Yeah. Where where I also enjoy, like, a high level of satisfaction and and feel like I’m I’m in a good spot is when I see my team members coming along and developing that next set of skills. I’m at a point now where I could get hit by a bus, and I’ve got 2 folks that I would be perfectly fine with saying, and it’s theirs. And so that’s that’s also been something a a big checkbox for me in terms of of growth.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. The the hit by a bus test is always an important one. Yeah. Well, Mickey, we’re out of time. Thank you so much. I don’t usually say this to folks because I don’t usually mean it, but I’d love to have you back. This flew by, and we didn’t even talk about sales. We didn’t even talk about CS.

Josh Schachter:
We didn’t even talk about it. We just we just stuck on on on your Rocketship career. But I think that that folks are gonna really gain a lot from that, and it was truly fascinating. So thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for taking the time today. And, will you come back?

MIcki Howl:
I will. I would love that. Yeah. I’d love to talk about all the things sales and CS.

Josh Schachter:
Wonderful. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Take care. You.