Sheridan, I’m thrilled to be sitting with you in New York in your offices, offices that you helped design here at CultureIQ… We’ve gotten to know each other the last six months or so. So it’s great to have you on the Brand Lab Series with AE Marketing Group. Thanks for participating today.

SHERIDAN

Well, thank you. I don’t know if you looked out the other window but there’s the Times Square ball is right outside, so.

BRIAN

I did see that, and I actually one New Years Eve in college stood out there to see the ball drop and it was a freezing cold night. But one of my favorite college memories actually.

SHERIDAN

You’re a brave soul.

BRIAN

Yeah, and it’s crazy to see how much Times Square has changed in that. I won’t date myself but that was a long time ago. So it’s exciting to be here in the heart of New York City. But what I’m really excited about is we hear a lot of executives and a lot of our customers grapple with culture because in my mind and in our philosophy culture is really the glue that holds a lot together. I know you have a great marketing role. We’ll talk about that a little bit, but I think to me, it’s really culture that holds together your brand, how you treat and advocate for your employees, the types of customer experiences you have… Talk a little bit about the importance of culture in any organization.

SHERIDAN

Well, culture can either drive you forward or hold you back, it’s How are your people executing on the strategy and how do they feel to be connected with your brand and your firm? And as both employees and customers in the modern world who we associate with says something about who we are and culture is that what is the entity which you’ve decided to affiliate yourself with? I think IO psychologists would say culture is how you show up every day and that’s kind of the most stripped down version of it is are you excited to be there? Are you passionate about the mission? And if you don’t have that right, you can’t expect people to go the extra mile and show up every day with their best selves. And so we really are passionate about culture and not just culture for culture’s sake, but culture to make the lives of employees better, and to make businesses perform better.

BRIAN

Yeah, and I know we’ll talk more about that and I think it’s interesting to me because I would say about a decade ago, which is a lifetime in the marketing and technology space these days, but I think it was about a decade ago, that people started scratching their heads and saying it may not matter so much about your marketing and your advertising, if you don’t deliver a good experience. And I feel like everyone got so focused which they should on delivering great customer experience, but I think what people didn’t realize is that customer experience actually starts with your employees and making sure that they’re equipped or empowered or engaged to do their job. And then that’s why I love the fact that I think it comes full circle to culture.

SHERIDAN

It does.

BRIAN

And one of the things that I admire about CultureIQ is that, you just don’t talk the talk, you actually walk it. And I’ve had the opportunity to see some of that first hand and for some of our audience that may not know your brand. A third of the fortune 500 use you. I think what’s really interesting is you kind of merge psychology with technology, but then you also… Which is rare, I think, in the B2B space, you don’t lose that human connection component as well. So, talk a little bit about how you’re helping organizations today and that kind of blend if you will, of the true psychology element that I think a lot of people are familiar with with the technology side.

SHERIDAN

Well, I think the most important thing is to understand what your culture, what it needs to be, so not all cultures should be the same some should be really focused on process and quality and then you may not want people going rogue and doing things in an innovative way every time. Our approach is about helping firms design the right culture, so we talk about architect, assess, and activate. And so the first part is to help the architect phase, and that requires a human because you need to understand What is the business trying to achieve, what do you need the people to believe and do to make that reality and how do you design that? And what should the values be? How do you wanna treat people? And that really has to start and that needs a human interaction. Now, the next phase is assess. And you want to listen to those employees. How are they feeling about what they have today, what do they aspire to and what do they need to really bring their best selves to work every day? And how can we have some insights from that data that can be quick actions for executives to go,”Oh, I didn’t even realize that was a problem?”

So then certainly the assess can be technology-driven and collecting all of that data and segmenting and parsing and with drawing insights. But then you need a human on the back end to help you figure out how to activate that culture. Okay, the data is telling us something from the employees that we listen to, “Here are some best practices that you can do to move that needle towards that which we designed before in the architect phase?” And really help people understand the next steps to move the needle. That’s where we need that mixture of human and technology.

BRIAN

And I love how it’s book-ended by the human element itself, because I think one of the challenges that a lot of organizations face today is I think everyone has a lot of data, they don’t necessarily know how to interpret the data or they don’t know if they’re looking at the data in the right way, and how to make that actionable. Or in your case, I know you’re helping people use culture to be more strategic, whether that be retaining your workforce, whether that be growing your revenue, like a really successful element on the business performance. And I feel like we’re so quick to look at data, but not interpret it through the human lens.

SHERIDAN

It’s funny, we were just doing some segmentation and so the first wave of the segmentation was spreadsheets and so much data, and it was really insightful, but I had to peel it back, and I was like… Where is the human in this? Tell me about the human that this describes. And so when we were doing personas, it was funny because our personas in the first wave looked like job descriptions. They were role-based and then the data was some insights into why people were buying and what other things they were considering and I was like, “I need to understand how these two things fit together,” and that you can only get by meeting a human with those real problems. And I am absolutely a data geek but I also want to get out into the market and listen to our customers, listen to those who didn’t choose us, listen to those who may not have ever considered us, but what are they thinking and what does the day in their life look like?

BRIAN

Yeah, and I love that last part about the feedback loop is probably not the right term, but you’re really trying to understand maybe why sometimes people chose to buy, which is an obvious one, but I think you can learn from why people either didn’t or why there wasn’t a consideration there, and ultimately maybe they’re not a right fit for your business. We talk about that a lot in our own business on the AE Marketing Group side. But there’s also the possibility to maybe see something that you otherwise wouldn’t have seen, by doing that.

SHERIDAN

Yeah.

BRIAN

Well one of the things that I think is really unique, although I wish I had a couple of your impressive schools on my resume but like me, you were a political science major. I had every intention of going into law, and somehow I’m running a marketing company. But talk about your journey and how you went from… Again, it’s some great schools down South. And you came up through sales, and now you find yourself in marketing.

SHERIDAN

Well, I will say I also was gonna go into the law, I was very influenced by LA Law. I was like, “Oh this is gonna be awesome. I’m gonna drive around California and a convertible Mercedes. That’s what being a lawyer is like… ” And then I decided that probably wasn’t for me, after I got into contract law, I was like, “Oh this is horrible.” So I am a creative person, but drew me to political science, even just as its own discipline, is it’s about trends and influence and how are people influenced in… One of my favorite pieces that I ever read was a piece on pendulum politics and how things are gonna swing back and forth and in the era of information they swing more rapidly and more violently. And so I was like, “Oh this is you know I use that a lot.” when I’m thinking about marketing, learning how to parse data and spot those trends is certainly something interesting in Political Science. And how do people leverage influence to positive? And so I feel like I brought that with me into marketing.

I do have a double major in English Lit, which my parents told me I would never get a job. Like how are you gonna get a job with an English Lit major? But actually that probably has been the most influential thing in my life because I read a lot, and stories are at the heart of marketing and you get to read people who tell very interesting stories in an English Lit major. So I went to graduate school in English Lit. More employability, so I actually became even more unemployable but it was those stories that always stuck with me and I tend to being from the south, I have a great penchant for Southern literature, and the short story has done incredibly well in Southern Literature. And if you can take this really big epic story, and tell it very concisely and make people feel emotions, that’s really the heart of marketing.

BRIAN

And I was almost about to say that verbatim, because as you’re talking there and I’m sitting there thinking these experiences have not only, well prepared you, but it’s marketing 101. It’s just you didn’t go that particular path. And one of the things that I always talk about, I know we started chatting a little bit earlier about culture, is how certain employers wanna check the box to say like, “Okay this degree, this school, this agency,” whatever it is, it’s the box-checking. And I think what’s interesting is I’m always one that wants to look at what are people’s transferable skills, what’s between the lines. And I think it’s really interesting because I do think, and it has nothing to do with our current political culture but I do think a lot of what I studied in Political Science is highly relevant. And then when you were joking about which I didn’t know the English Lit, it’s like I wish more people actually were studying English Literature today, or the short story because as we know, as marketers, it’s all about… We’re almost moving through the information economy to an attention economy. So now, it’s like how do you get someone’s attention, and how do you hold it? And storytelling is an important aspect.

It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s a bullet in the arsenal of a marketer and you need to think about doing that in a way that’s compelling. What’s interesting is I think that the job of a marketer today though is a challenging job and especially if you’re in a challenger brand, like yours or mine. As we were kinda joking before we started taping. It forces you to be very disciplined, you have to really be effective in what you do and strategic about it. Talk about some of the kind of challenges that you see, or opportunities in marketing today.

SHERIDAN

I think I like to be data-driven and prove everything that I believe but what’s gotten lost in the data-driven world is the hypothesis. What did I believe before? And can I use the data to test that, as opposed to data for data’s sake? So I feel like a lot of marketers have erred on that side now and they’ve lost the human connection and the story. I do think if you go back into my early career, it was before dot bomb and we had bats of money and we spent that on brand experiences and we didn’t prove that they had any value, but they were a lot of fun. And so it’s… How do you take… I believe something to be true. Let me get the data to prove or disprove it, and then to measure, to take action and then continually measure it. If you don’t have an iterative approach to what action data action correction data you lose so much of what it’s like to market to humans.

BRIAN

Absolutely agree with that. And I think something also that is interesting about you is between your time in political science and English literature and everything else. Before you got into the marketing office you were in sales as well. I think one of the things that we see as a big misstep by a lot of organizations, especially in the B2B space is not doing a good job of aligning sales with marketing and kind of keeping them a little bit siloed. Talk about where you see some good opportunities for some best practices or what… Maybe you’re doing to try to make sure that there’s some good alignment there.

SHERIDAN

Well, the one thing I learned really quickly in sales is your messaging, you get to see the message at work. So you say something and you get people’s face going, “That’s not true, it doesn’t resonate with me.” So, as a marketer, I think it’s really important to know what your message is be like on the front line, because that’s a quick way to make sales distrust you is you write something you think is really punchy, and it would be great in a magazine ad, but the sales person on the front line has to say that to a prospect space, and then prove that message. And so I think that’s a really important opportunity for marketers is get out from behind the computer and writing the copy, and get out there and watch your sales team deliver it. And I think that’s the first place of collaboration is does the message work in the market and does it work on a one-on-one basis? The second thing that happens to marketing and sales is a lot of times sales will say, “I need more leads, give me more leads, serve up more leads.”

And they forget, they don’t have brand cover and sales is really quick to say, “No, I don’t really care about the brand.” They certainly want the one-pager to look great, but that’s where they think the brand stops until they don’t have it. And who feels lack of brand cover the most acutely in our world is our business development reps, or our outbound sales reps. Because if you have to have a pitch in 30 seconds to somebody who didn’t wanna answer your phone call to start with, if you have to start with, “I’m with CultureIQ. And we help make culture a strategic advantage.” Well, your sales rep is already wrong-footed, they’re not able to talk about that clients pain, they’re too busy trying to explain who we are, and so, it’s really important for sales to understand that brand cover is not just, “Hey we’re making pretty pictures and we’re sharing them on social. But hopefully it helps when you enter a conversation, you don’t have to start with who we are, you can say, “Let’s talk about you and how CultureIQ can help you. So I think that’s a really important intersection. And marketers need to get out in the field and sales reps need to read what marketing is writing.

BRIAN

I really like that thought about getting marketers out in the field or even listening in on the phone. It’s really interesting. And when you talk about outbound, and we have certain customers that also have inbound as well. And it’s interesting to me because I think marketers need to hear the conversations that are being had because that can help him or her maybe refine their strategy or their messaging or… I think the other thing it can really do coming almost back to culture is, it can maybe create some empathy with the end buyer or maybe even with the salesperson, that is on the front lines, either in the field or on the phone as well.

One thing though, that I also think is pretty interesting in terms of getting to know you over the last few months is while the job is challenging and we’re all juggling a lot of balls as marketers, one of the things that I think is unique about your personal brand culture, is you like to keep marketing fun and I think that as we’ve talked a little bit about when it comes to the day jobs and the grind, you wanna be an environment that’s fun and exciting and engaging and gives you some sense of being meaningful. Talk a little bit about your secret sauce for how you like to make marketing fun.

SHERIDAN

Well, first of all, I’m a goofy person by nature, so sometimes you have to pull me back. But again, it goes back to that human experience. We all wanna have fun and it certainly doesn’t wanna feel forced, but if you love what you do in the story that you’re telling, and you really believe that you can bring value to the clients that you serve, showing that with personality and enthusiasm is the way that we’ve decided to market and it’s part of our brand is that we are passionate about culture and how we can help people improve that.

And I guess the biggest thing is you don’t want to look like and be like everyone else, you have to be who you are and that’s who we are… One of our values actually is celebrate and enjoy the journey and we only have four values: One is: We respect data, but we make human decisions, we celebrate and enjoy the journey, we treat each other with respect, and all of those should come through in our marketing, and our brand and hopefully we’re celebrating when our customers win and when we do something new. We just launched the Culture Advantage model, and that was a ton of research to go into a small model but… And we did celebrate it, and we want people to feel excited about it, internally and externally.

BRIAN

Well, I want to give you a chance to talk a little bit about that Culture Advantage, and as you said, it’s something that’s recently been launched although it been in the works obviously any strategic initiative. Talk a little bit about how you’re seeing an impact of culture obviously truly being an advantage for businesses. I know we touched on it real briefly, but I wanna make sure we kind of revisit that, ’cause I think that that’s an area that businesses struggle with.

SHERIDAN

Yeah, especially in an age of transparency when brands and companies get culture wrong, it can be front page news, or it can certainly surface itself into Glass Door. So when we think about Culture Advantage it has to start with aligning the purpose of the business with the purpose and mission of the people inside of it. I think Wayfair is an excellent example. A lot of those employees signed up to be in a firm that was about beautification, and making homes nice and next thing they know that’s about how we’re treating the immigrant population. And that really wasn’t what those employees signed up for, and and they walked out to show their displeasure.

And so aligning mission and purpose are really important at the foundation of our Culture Advantage model, if you don’t have that, that’s really table stakes into treat employees with dignity and so that’s something that we believe and then you have to really calibrate the rest of that Culture Advantage based on your strategy. So the next piece is about collaboration and how do we get work done together and so how do we execute together? And then do we create an environment that curiosity thrives, where people find new ways to do things, and so that’s part of the model and then there’s the old fashioned execution is do people understand what their role is, how to get their work done.

And then lastly, every business that we work with is being disrupted in some way, whether it’s utilities, trying to figure out how do we take advantage of the green approach or retail is constantly being disrupted is how do you create an organization that’s agile, and we think about agility is not… Can you pivot to the changes that affect you, but can you really change the market yourself, and can you change before it’s necessary and you feel the pressure to do so? And so that at the top of our pyramid is about disruption and can you not only withstand being disrupted, but can you actually become the disruptor? And so, disruption is really the advantage.

Can you be the first mover? And the ability to predict change is super important as things move really quickly. So that’s the foundation of our Culture Advantage. Our IO psychologists will say I have oversimplified it and I absolutely have. And that’s what their role is, is to show clients the data behind it and how we’ve done the research on what thriving cultures look like especially in every industry, with different strategic objectives. We talked Brian several times about a firm that’s thinking about merger and acquisition is really gonna need to architect a completely different culture than maybe somebody who’s thinking about innovation and how do you craft that culture, how do you create a system of rewards and how do you get your people to go along with you for the ride?

BRIAN

And if I can turn that just a little bit through the lens of, now CultureIQ or anyone who’s in marketing strategy, you just did a really nice job of articulating a lot of your values, and that sometimes the clash between brand and culture, if you will, but what I think is interesting is, at the very end, you just kind of alluded to a couple of different industries or different roles or? Different seasons, if you will, in a company’s life and that might have an influence on culture. As we start to wind down, one of the things I’m interested to kinda learn about is, when you think about it now through putting your marketing hat on those are different personas, those are different buyers, those are different industries. What are you doing that’s effective? And what advice would you have for especially “B2B marketers who are looking to try to position their company through a competitive advantage, but doing it in a way where they have all these different audiences and personas.

SHERIDAN

Well, I think the first thing is always to figure out who you are and what do you believe and if you can be true to that and then figure out how that matters to different personas is I think the best way, because if you start with What do the personas want and then can you accommodate that but you’re not true to your own mission and values, it feels like a very transactional relationship. What you want is people who value who you are, and you value who they are. And I think that’s really important for marketers and that’s what good segmentation does is this is who we are, and this is who we serve well and we understand that at our core and we can really create that joint value proposition, if you just wanna measure your culture, we’re probably not the right firm for you. And we’re glad that anybody is working on culture, and listening to their employees, but if you really want to figure out how to design the right culture, and you are serious about doing something then we are the right partner and that’s okay for us to say you’re not quite ready for us or we’re not a good fit, but marketers need to know who they are, understand who values them, and that’s the important thing, to us.

BRIAN

I like that thinking, because as you just answered the prior question you were kind of talking about how it’s not enough to try to pivot when the trends pivot, and what I heard you just saying, is you don’t wanna retro-fit your organization, based upon what you think the market might want where you really need to focus on your core values, your core strengths, your core culture, and then let that be the forward march into the marketplace. And I think what’s interesting about that, and I’ve said a 1000 times, I think what’s been so interesting about brand in the last decade is it’s so much bigger than the marketing and advertising component now.

And it’s not something that you can always control. And you had a good example with Wayfair, but what you can do is you should be able to set and live a culture and I think if you’re true to that, it makes that game a little easier. And I think that that’s really interesting insight which you’ve shared a lot of in our time together as I knew you would. Sheridan Orr as the Vice President of Marketing at CultureIQ. How can people learn more about you and CultureIQ?

SHERIDAN

We’d love for you to visit us at cultureiq.com, and follow us and on LinkedIn, we typically share a lot of information on how executives can think about culture and make it an advantage and we’re passionate about that. And so, thank you so much, Brian, for the time. Yeah, I’m sorry for all the sirens.

BRIAN

Oh that’s okay, that’s vintage New York City. And as we joked earlier, about you putting the fun in marketing, I see first-hand some of the fun that you share on your own LinkedIn profile as well. You’re a good LinkedIn follow there as well. Sheridan, thank you for sitting down with us today and sharing all your wisdom, and expertise and experience along your journey through marketing, through culture and throwing in a little political science and English Lit as well. So thanks for joining us on the Brand Lab Series.