EP028 - How to lead marketing teams remotely with Ruta Sudmantaite of Sudmant and Budgets
About the episode
This episode focuses on marketing - more importantly, how to lead teams remotely and create marketing budgets online. To discuss, I invited a fellow marketer whom I have known for years, Ruta Sudmantaite, founder of Sudmant, Budgets, and the co-host of Blame it on Marketing Podcast.
About the guest
Ruta is a B2B marketer who’s worked in SaaS for the last 7 years. She is a strong advocate of inbound and content-forward marketing with a specialization in metrics and statistics. Founder of Budgets and Co-host of Blame it on Marketing Podcast.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
There was an understanding within our team that it's never the wrong time to bring your idea to the table. That's a key component because if people feel they can't speak up, they won't. Then that organic natural ideation, they'll push to the back of their minds and train themselves out of doing it, which is horrific for a marketer.
To get work signed off, get all the stakeholders in at the beginning, at the brainstorming level. So when we were finished with the brainstorming, they knew what we would be up to, and then we could go ahead and work.
Marketers should be able to advocate for themselves through the use of metrics.
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Welcome everyone. Yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we'll talk about marketing. Finally, as someone with a marketing background, I was always passionate about managing remote creative teams providing marketing advice remotely and helping companies to grow anywhere. There are two main issues that we will discuss today. One is about creative team management, and the other is well money, more specifically, creating them and managing the marketing budget without borders. I have Ruta Sudmantaite, co-host of Blame It on marketing podcast marketing consultant, and the founder of Budgets, a marketing budget solution for growing companies. So, hi Ruta, how are you doing?
Hello. Thank you for having me on. I'm good. We're podcasting. We're chatting. I'm very happy to be here.
Appreciate you here. We always start most of these podcasts where I ask the guests how do they end up here working remotely. I know that you personally live in Spain but most of your clients and most of the people that you're working with, and also you have roots in London, in the uk. So pretty much you're working remotely as of today as a marketing consultant and managing marketing teams remotely. How did you end up in Spain? What was? What was the journey for remote work for you?
Yeah, so I very distinctively remember a point in my career where I was like, if I wanna be a marketing manager, I have to be able to be in the office. Like there's no other way of doing that. And that was kind of at the beginning of my career at Clear Review. And that was the norm, as, as it was, right back before Covid hit. And I was like, damn. And my boyfriend had always wanted to travel and work remotely. And I was like, I can't, I just, to be a marketing manager, I have to be in the office. And then Covid happened, right? And all of us all of a sudden we're at home. And you know what? We did really well. We had a team of four marketers and we're all kind of weird, reclusive, introvert extroverts. So we really like to get our head down, make sure we, you know, we get the quiet time we need to do our work. We also really all enjoy not having to take the tube into work every day and pay way too much money for that luxury in air quantitations. So when I think it was when the first sets of, kind of the loosening of the restrictions were coming through, all of us kind of had a call and were. I don't want to go back to what we were doing before and I was like, oh my God, thank God cuz I don't either. So my two other teammates wanted to stay where their families were. So in other areas of the uk, not London. And then I was like, Hmm, maybe this is the time that we can move somewhere. So I kind of came up with a bit of an action plan about how to get my entire team remote and how to get that approved by the CEO. Cuz bear in mind, nobody else at my company was doing this. Like everyone was either in London or happy to be back in the office, you know, those things. So I did a bit of an actual plan and went to my CEO who basically was like, as long as continue doing the work you were doing, which you were already doing through this lockdown and you've given me a schedule and you are here when we need you here in London. I don't mind. It's completely fine. And you don't pay taxes in Spain cuz we're not doing that. So I just came up with a plan. We came up with a schedule of when we would be together. I was planning to come to the UK once a month which was very easy for Malaga. And we created this. Basically structure of how we're gonna work and how we are gonna continue to work. Cuz we were already doing that and then I moved to Spain. Everyone was kind of like shocked when I told them in the company that I'm moving to Spain. They're like, wait, what? How? And then, you know, you tell them the story and they're like, oh my God, that's so crazy. Like, do you have family there? Do you know Spanish? I'm like, Nope, we're just moving. So we did that and then the second round of restrictions for you guys started, so I couldn't fly into the uk. That was I think September of 21. So I couldn't fly into the UK. So all of our kind of meeting schedules got, you know, canceled essentially, cuz no one could go into London anyway. Didn't matter that I was in Spain. So I then worked basically for the next six months remotely. And I ended up leaving clear review after we got acquired and then I started consulting and all of my contacts are in the uk so all of my clients are in the uk. And because we'd already had that expectation set over the last two years of people don't go into the office. You don't, you don't usually, you know, see the people you work with all that much. Nobody cared at all that I wasn't there. And also I was gonna be a consultant, so it matters even less that you're there in person. So that's kind of how I got from thinking I have to be into the office to be a successful marketing manager to get the complete opposite and being a consultant, which is, which is different. I'll give you that, but I could still go and get a marketing job now as a marketing manager and do it completely remotely. I'm sure that's not an issue. So yeah.
That's, that's a really great journey and it rhymes with most of the people that tell their journey. That they're either started working remotely, pre pandemic, and that was a completely different experience or they started to working remotely or forced to work remotely kinda because of the lockdowns and because of the pandemic and like literally everyone tells the very same that that they don't want to move back to the office. They don't want to manage their teams personally in the office anymore because everything actually just works online remotely. And I guess you wouldn't go back to any kind of agency or client or whatever in the office to London maybe.
No, I'll, I'm happy to visit people and I'm happy to go in person to do specific things that happen better in person, and we can chat about that when it comes to marketing, you know, what those things are. But I definitely wouldn't want to have the routine of having to go in, not having the choice to go in. It'd be quite nice to go into an office with your teammates once in a while, like, you know, being a consultant is fairly lonely as compared to working for a company. That doesn't sound bad, but you know, I visit people all the time and that's kind of how I get my social working kick. Usually.
Also everyone is every, I mean, I am personally really happy that I was able to ditch the underground and the TFL and all the goodies around London. Yes. And, and by the way, I only, only commuted on not, not really more than half an hour twice.
Yeah.
Back. So that's like, okay, I guess.
That's not bad.
That's not bad. Anyway. So let's talk about how how you manage teams. Either as a consultant, because as a consultant you also need to work with other, not just marketing teams, but you know, product teams, sales teams. But within within a company, within did an actual marketing team. That's also closely connected to you. And I think there are some different approaches when it comes to in-office style management and remote management and the reason why I'm asking, and just to elaborate a little bit more on that when it comes to managing I wouldn't say like practic work like development of a product or, or, or, you know, sales for example, which is like, you know reaching out, talking closing and this and so on. Marketing is, or usually viewed as a creative collaboration process and managing creative collaboration remotely is fundamentally different than getting the project done, shall we say. So I think it has a share of new and maybe greater challenges than compared to other kind of commitments or engagements. So how do you do that? Do you have any best practices?
I'm gonna try to recall as much as I can from Clear Review, cuz that was my kind of managing a marketing team remotely. Biggest experience. And then it's different with clients cause all clients work differently. So I'll talk a little bit about what I do with clients, which is some of the same stuff, some different stuff. When we were working together we already had some pretty good structure day-to-day in the office. And also we used to work remotely two days a week as a standard. So we did three days in the office, two days remotely. Even before the pandemic. So in terms of the structure that we had When we were all together in the office, we used to do standup every morning. So everyone would just talk through what they're up to and if anyone needs any help from anything. And then we also had kind of regular scheduled meetings. So from what I can remember, the only real regular scheduled meeting is once a week. We just have a marketing management meeting. Meaning we go over our numbers, check in, make sure everything's okay, everyone's knows what they're doing, the numbers are what they should be, et cetera. So that's the kind of structure we had before going into the pandemic. And I think that worked because you see each other a lot. So you kind of just shout over the desk or whatever, you know, like it's easier to communicate in that way. So we carried that structure over to remote working. So we still did a standup every morning together. Same format, discuss what's up, what we're doing, what's working, what's not working. We still did our management meeting, which is again, standard. I think most teams have those two things anyway. And then the things that were really interesting to implement where things like brainstorming and trying new things and trying to figure things out. So previous, We'd either sit, you know, we all sat around the same kind of desk area. We'd just chat and talk about stuff. Like, you know, like, I've got an idea about this guys do you think that's crazy? We'd talk it out. Or we'd, we'd get out one of the meeting rooms and we'd go in and book it out for three hours, bring lots of sugar and caffeine, and just go for it which obviously is much harder to, to do in remote. So what we ended up doing is, Basically in our standups, allowing that to be time for any random creativeness. So if you had an idea over the weekend, or if, you know, you were working yesterday and you came up with something the standup was also the place to bring up any kind of quick things that you might wanna do, quick ideas, things you want people to kind of backboard with you. So that worked really, really well. And actually some of the Most fun and effective things that we did during Covid, because also we were selling HR tech. And HR managers were extremely overwhelmed during covid in general, especially in the beginning. We had to like flip the entire marketing strategy basically what we had planned right before Covid hit. So standup was a time for those like backboard moments of like, Hey, I'm thinking about this. Should we do it? And we're like, yeah, fuck it. Let's do it. And then we also would then put for ourselves. So this wasn't a meeting, this was just a time to be creative and go try new stuff. So we would we would have basically different times in our diaries whenever something suited the best for the person in the team. It wasn't like a set slot for everyone at the same time, but that was your time to basically allow yourself to learn something new. Be creative. Try something you haven't tried before. Research something you haven't looked at before because we weren't spending so much time together and exchanging information and being like, oh, hey, have you seen this or like, look at this weird thing someone's doing. You needed a time to basically have that developmental stuff going on so everyone would set aside time to do that. And then in terms of those big brainstorming sessions we would obviously conduct those online. We'd often send out like snacks to each other or little like gift packs or like new notebooks, whatever it was that we needed to kind of emulate that environment. And then we'd also invite on our stakeholders. So In order to help with getting work signed off, which I know can be an issue for marketers. Yeah. We would get the stakeholders in right at the beginning, at the brainstorming level. So when we're finished with the brainstorming, they knew what we were gonna be up to and then we could just go ahead and work. We didn't have to worry about constantly having to check in with them. And that's a good practice whether you're remote or not. But it works really well remote because again, they can't hear what you're doing, they're not seeing you regularly. So getting them in at the beginning is really, really useful. So yeah, those are the kind of team things that we did. And also team socials and non-work hangouts. We also put into the diary quite often because we still wanted to foster energy of an actual team and also we were all actual friends on that team and still are to this day. So it was important for us to be able to just, you know, emulate that Friday night at the pub however we chose to do that.
Nice, nice, nice, nice. And I love the stakeholder example that you gave. And I saw that that example with other companies as well because usually one of the big problems with marketing that it's heavily idea based, of course, and creativity based and sometimes people just simply don't know what marketers are doing with their time. And it's really great to move the stakeholder you know, decision maker, whoever it is at the very beginning of the planning session. Mm-hmm. What I'm really curious about, I'm also marketer, so, and also worked in office. It was super easy to grab people quickly just for a quick checkup. You know, most of our work is heavily idea based and sometimes you need that feedback or just bouncing around with these ideas together even with one colleague or a team of colleagues doesn't matter, but someone to give some feedback on the idea and push the idea through to actual execution or so. And in the office it's really, really easy, right? So you walk to the desk or, or have a meeting or whatever in, and it happens almost unintentionally or super organically. In remote, most of the, and it's not just for marketing, but for any kind of collaboration everything has to be intentional of course, because you don't have the physical space where you can do, just go organic and that's it. How did you solve that? Of course you had the daily standup. Yes, of course you had dedicated brainstorming sessions or ideation sessions, whatever you call it. How do you solve that unintentional, organic ideation process?
Yeah. I'm not sure if I solved it. Like that's, you know, that sounds great if I had that answer. But one thing with that we kind of had a rule about, and it became very apparent when we did go remote, I think we always had this rule, but it just, we never spoke about it. We were always open to ideas. So it doesn't matter if we've got our tables full and we've got a full stack of a campaign to build, if someone comes with a good idea. We're gonna do it. So there was very much an understanding within the team that it's never a bad time to bring your idea to the table, and you're not gonna be, you know, shunned for bringing your idea because it's not the right time or whatever. That was, I think that's a really key component because if people feel like they can't speak up, then they won't, and then that organic natural ideation, they'll just push to the back of their minds and basically train themselves out of doing it, which is horrific for a marketer. So don't ever do that of so, so that was one thing. So it's not a physical thing that happened, it was just an understanding within the team. And obviously we took action on people's ideas, which is how we proved that it was Okay. So it's not just about, Yeah, bring your ideas. Everyone's welcome. You actually have to do something with them and not just be like, oh yeah, that's great. We'll, we'll think about that later. So that's one thing. The other thing is, is we were quite heavy on comms in our Slack channels. So that was a, a place where you could put something in, but we, you didn't necessarily have to discuss it immediately, but it's somewhere that people could feedback on what you're doing. So whether that was an actual idea and there were, and the person was like, am I being crazy? Like, does this sound good? Or it was a piece of work that they're already doing, and they're like, Hey, I'm taking it in this angle. Can someone give me some feedback? There was always that continual loop chatter and feedback. And we did that a lot. Slack, an asynchronous methods basically. So I think that really helped with making it feel still fairly organic. So that was all in the marketing team itself. Now, outside of the marketing team, that's where it gets really, really hard because you are not walking to people's desk. You're not seeing what your product manager's working on because you're completely separated from them. So what we ended up doing was having. A regular schedule of check-ins with everyone, essentially. So the entire team, we kind of were like, okay, have you spoken to this and this and this person this month? No. Okay. Go book calls with them, catch up with 'em, see what they're doing. So that's how we try to solve the I guess department division whilst remote. And I will say that's way, way harder than within your team. Providing you have a fairly healthy team, you can make it work, but with other departments it can be a lot tougher.
And yes well we don't have that much of a time, but I can rant for hours. How companies and teams can mess this up even with the best intention from the marketing leaders because people are just naturally open to discuss the, you know what marketers are doing. Usually what ends up happening is that the marketing team constantly nags the, the other department departments that, Hey, I haven't looked at this. Have you looked at this? Can you, can you, can you help me doing that? And whatever. One of the hardest issue obviously is the product team because you know you are a marketer, so you have to market something and you need information on the product. And, you know, it's really hard to get any kind of information out from a product team that's not marketing focused, at least a little user.
Oh, they'll come to you and it's like, oh yeah we're rebuilding the app and it's out in two weeks, and you're like, what the fuck? Like, I, one, I can't get anything prepared. That's good. In the next two weeks and two, we have like a whole schedule of stuff already, you know? Yes. Like I'm sure you knew way before this that this was happening, so Yeah. That's that's a fun one.
Yes, yes. Totally, totally happened to me as well. Also, it's really, one of the, the biggest examples that I always had if it's really heavily developer focused the product itself, then it's the harder to actually maintain that conversation within the team. So anyway so I feel the pain. Let's talk a little bit about about budgets. Because that's also important I think Well, I wouldn't say that part of marketing's job is to spend the marketing budget itself, but it's, you know,
It is...
It's kinda like part of the fit a little bit. Spend it creatively. And it's really interesting, especially for growing companies they raise funding or get hit a certain revenue and, you know, they want to scale and now they have a budget for marketing. We are not just testing things out here and there and, you know, asking for I dunno, fi, 5k budget for ads or something. But yes, you have a fixed budget now that you can work with and and you can grow and capitalize on that. And that's when usually things happen when most marketers or you know, handles of the budget marketing directors they usually never spend time in, in actual enterprise related companies. So they never actually created any kind of fixed or growth related marketing budget. And I know that you have a solution, so let's talk a little bit about the budgets itself.
Yeah. Yeah. So the solution kind of came out of two things. So one, I work with a lot of freshly funded companies that are for the first time having a marketing budget or having to make one. And then the other thing is just I'm hyper logical and very maths interested, and that's kind of like a weird thing to be as a marketer. So I'd say I'm like 30, 40% creative and the rest is like analytical mathematical. So there's a very specific way that I build budgets and I've always done it that way. And luckily enough when I was in, at Clear review, we did really well. Like marketing was where the revenue came from, all of it. And that's b2b, SaaS so that's fairly rare. So the conversation that I used to have about budgeting is like, okay, how much are we growing this year? What revenue does that equate to? And I'm gonna go away and tell you how much money I need. It wasn't how much money can I have and then prove how much I can do with it. So it was very much a top down approach, essentially. And that's how I view all marketing B2B SaaS marketing budgets, because it, it gets complicated in other you can't generalize to many different industries, basically. So let's talk about B2B SaaS. I'm very methodical. I am very fact driven, very logical about how we do budgets. So it's all mega, super duper simple. You look at how much revenue you need to make, you look at your things like conversion costs and cost per acquisition, and then you calculate how much money you would need based on that revenue that you need. And that is, that is how much money you're going to need. There's lots of chat When you then show that number to typically founders or finance advi finance advisors or CFOs. And they're like, oh, that, that's a lot. Usually that's usually the topic. And it's like, yes, but you know, these are the steps we went through and this is why that number is as it is. And they're like, oh yeah, but we can cut that down right? And I'm like, Not if you want to actually reach your revenue targets, like we might be able to reach the revenue targets with a smaller budget, but it's unlikely because thus far all of our information is leading to these points. So it's all very hypothe logical, and I prefer it that way because once you start just pulling numbers out of thin air, I mean, you are all, it's all guesswork and then you get into the horrible marketing is an art form and it's not really, you know, you can't really predict it. And it's all black magic. And I don't like to play in that field because most people are very uncomfortable and they're even less likely to give you money. So doing your budget, if you are creating a budget in that kind of hypothe logical way, at least let's you put the expectations down of, okay, I need, I need half a million pounds to make my revenue target this year. If you give me half of that, I will probably make half the money you need me to make. So if that's all the money we have and that's what you're willing to give me, just know I probably won't hit Target. So you're always on the front foot that way and I'm a huge, like my biggest issue is not my biggest issue. The thing that I'm really passionate about with marketers is them being able to advocate for themselves through the use of metrics. And that's one of the biggest ways you can protect yourself and your team is by understanding what you can actually make out of the money that they give you, not just what they want you to make, and then feel infinitely shit for not hitting that number, even though that number was never gonna be realistic in the first place. So don't put yourself in that trap. And that's basically why the way I do budgets exist, and that's why budgets exists in the first place.
And how do we address the indirect responsibilities of different departments? So for example, let's say you sign up for generating 100 leads per month, whatever. These are marketing qualified. Which we can act upon in whatever way we talked about B2B SaaS. So probably it's a user signups or something like that. Now depending on the product, of course if they have a freemium converting to starter, middle and, and high tiers of users subscription or paying or paid clients paid users, sorry. Or we b2B SaaS for enterprise, and that's the salespeople come in, SDRs, you know, long sales cycle, yada, yada, yada. So a lot of things especially the results the revenue results are relying not just on the marketers, on the content that you're creating and you know, all the stuff that you do, but also on the sales, on the product sometimes communication is is not part of marketing, by the way. So again, yeah. That's also also an issue, obviously not for growing companies, but, you know bigger ones. Everything is interconnected and obviously marketing plays a a bridge between these departments a little bit anyway. But it is, at the end of the day, it is you who are holding the marketing budget and not the sales and not the product.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. It's interesting because we're only like usually at the beginning of the life cycle, right of the customer, but mm-hmm. , we hold all the money to get them and then obviously when shit doesn't go right, you the one who gets blamed cuz you spent the money. So yeah.
Blame it on marketing.
Yeah. Blame it on marketing. There you go. That totally happens. Of course it happens. One of the ways I like to mitigate the risk of that happening is by building assumptions that are based on how your current company is performing. So for example, one of the assumptions that goes into you building a budget is the conversion rate. So whether it's conversion rate from free user to premium user, or from a demo to a closed sale because it's salespeople. Those numbers are dependent on either sales or product usually. Mm-hmm. and I will bake those in at the beginning and we all agree on that number. So if that number. Goes up or down. Obviously I will check that my leads are still of the same quality, but if I can't account for that number in my leads, I then know, okay, sales or product, something wrong is happening. We're not converting anymore. It is now your job to go and convert them. So kind of knowledge is power in that sense. Track your numbers, make sure you always know what your conversion rates are, and also bake them in and get them signed off as part of the budgeting process. So it's super like clear and transparent. And then I guess the other thing with complex sales cycles, Being realistic about things like the sales cycle itself. So that's again, another thing that I bake in. So if your sales cycle is 12 months and you want to start spending money today, I will end your marketing targets. Make sure that the revenues 12 months later, like I don't expect you to be making any money for the next 12 months, and I expect you to only be spending money and seeing those kind of beginning indicators that the right things are happening. So, being super transparent and putting that into basically a spreadsheet and making sure it's signed off at the beginning. Mega important. None of these things will prevent people from blaming you, but when they do blame you, you can remind them that they signed up for this. Yeah, you signed up for this. You agree to this. I'm doing what? You want me to do? If you want that to change, that's okay, but we're gonna have to basically come up with a whole new strategy of how we're gonna do this. And then it's kind of not on you as a person, it's on the leadership team or the company who want to change the parameters, and you then have that conversation. So, Yeah, there's nothing you can do to prevent that from happening. And hopefully you work for a nice company that gets marketing and that's kind of the most important bit, but get them to sign off on these things and be really transparent. And that usually goes a long way when, when the kind of the finger comes back to you at some point.
Perfect. Perfect. Oh, what, just one quick clarification because I cannot hold myself here on the sales part because if you have a long sales cycle and marketing is planning with the conversion just to make sure that it's not like a you have a hard no at month number one and the hard yes at month number se six or seven, you, you have the cycle. So it's a, it's an army following of small yeses. And you probably predict at month four how much money you will bring in, how much closed yeses you can give get in in front of the door. Or if you can, that's, that's a problem with salespeople, right? So yeah. They also have to track everything. Yeah. Yeah. That's a quick condition. Let's try to this all together with the consulting part because consulting can happen remotely. You don't need an office for that. I guess, personal relationships are really great and personal referrals are really great, but still you can connect with people online. So that can work. How can you create and help, for example, with marketing budgets totally remotely, not just remotely, but also as a consultant externally. So you are pretty much not part of the internal marketing team. You are a service provider, shall we say. And you obviously have a external view, but also you are kind of like, In a way external that you don't have skin in the game in that sense that, you know, if the company fails you go on the next one and that's it. So how can you actually do like, meaningful budget planning externally? While you never meet any of the founders and the leadership personally in the office?
Yeah. I think sadly a lot of that comes from reputation. So I have a fairly good reputation within the people that know me and they trust me to do these things which is very fortunate if you don't have that, you can build your reputation. So that's always an option. Obviously I built my reputation just not necessarily as a consultant. I built it within companies and then those companies recommend me out. So I think that a lot of it comes down to that. And then the other way of I think being really valuable and making sure that it's thoughtful and it's not just, you guys must do this and goodbye now I'm, I'm gonna leave and never see you again, is by one, educating on what that should look like. So what the process of budgeting should look like. Because most founders want to be the best and aim for best practice and want to be exceptional. So they usually like that side of things. And two is just by asking the right questions. So, a lot of the time. Although I have a very set way of doing a budget, I like to qualify whether that will make sense for that company. So I have extensive calls about basically their finances which they kind of find weird sometimes, where I'm just like, I need to know these numbers and I need to know what's going on. So I know how realistic it is that you might hit those targets. So, you know, asking them about their runway and how much cash. Can spend on how much cash flow they need, what their payback time is, what their investors are expecting of them. You know what, for example, what the relationship between sales and marketing is like. You know, all of those things will affect how you help them achieve a budget and then create targets based off of that. So I do a lot of that pre digging essentially, and then go away and create this budget that makes sense for them. So I think that's my answer. And. Oh, going back to the point you made about I have no skin in the game. I don't minus my reputation which is a good amount of skin in the game. So that's important to me, of course. But I think there's a way there's a benefit to being an external person, and it's because you're not so close to the business that you are either very optimistic or very negative. You can just kind of see things for what they are. And because you're working with other companies, you can, you kind of have benchmarks and normalities that you can expect. So for example, if somebody in B2B SaaS comes to me and they're like, we want five r ROI, 500% ROI in every year of marketing, and I'm just like no, that's not gonna happen. We can budget for that, but like, it's not going to happen. Like I'm, I'm that person. I'm the no in the team. And you know what, clients find that useful? Usually, as much as they don't like it at first, they, they do find it useful in the end. So just being that outsider that can actually see clearly, and like I, I'm really into like finance and economics. So like I bring in market issues and like venture capital things and like, you know, really give them as much context as I can, which other marketers and the team might not even have to make sure that we're building something that's actually realistic. and then looking at what resources they have of course, if you've got a million pound marketing budget and you've got two marketing people and you're not willing to hire any more people or hire agencies, you've already failed, it's not gonna happen. So making sure that then when we budget the resources are backing up and being able to spend that budget well is also kind of a way to get skin in the game because you are the one recommending these things and it's important they go well. So yeah, the, I think there's, there's a good amount of responsibility there.
And do you enjoy it?
I don't enjoy it as much as being an employee I'll tell you that much. It's, it's quite lonely being a consultant.
How do you manage that? Although you're also working remote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alone from yeah, exactly.
Exactly. So I managed that by talking to my marketing friends a lot. So for example one of the reasons the podcast exists is because we just, me and Emma wanna chat to people about marketing cuz we're both consultants. So we do, I do that and then I also like to kind of immerse myself in the teams that I work in terms of clients as much as I can. So, like, Even with my language, which is not anything in lp, don't worry, but like when I start working with a client is we're going to be doing this. We need to work on this, we should be thinking about this. And really just embedding yourself, making sure you are, you know, if you're on their slack, comment on other people's shit. Like have a little conversation with someone. You know, those kind of things just to make it feel like you're part of the team. Even though you're a consultant tends to help.
Yeah what I've found, by the way, is some sort of the same mingling with others, but I also love to join sort of like a communities because part of our job, I think is again, bouncing ideas here and there and and it's so it gets so lonely especially when you're selling the service or, or productized service to others. You know, you need the feedback. Am I, am I doing, am I doing it right? Do do my messages are right for the people. Do I have a right target group you know, stuff like that.
Yeah.
And it's really great to have the, the similar people around us and you know, without any commitment, just share the ideas around and that's really helpful.
Yeah. Have you found any communities that you really enjoy being part of?
Yes. Usually slacks. Slack groups that, that works really well. And again, part of the podcast of mine is also, also also part of that conversation. Sometimes and I do have a lot of a lot meetings like, you know, discussions with others without any commitment at all so I'm not selling anything, not nothing. We are probably, or usually are in the same business or industry or same service. And we just, you know, did that work for you? How did you do that? Okay. And what was the message? Okay. Oh, so the newsletter, I know that. So, you know, things like that. And it's really, it's amazing to do that. And plus also my wife is a designer, so also like, you know related a little bit to marketing. So I also bounce some ideas back and forth with her, so that also helps. Anyway, but yeah, I agree. It's a little bit lonely part of the game, especially you're doing it remotely, but also what I prefer, and I by the way, you said that you prefer being an employee. I personally always preferred to act as a consultant. So even, even though I had mostly full-time roles for most of the engagements that I had remotely, I personally, I always treated myself and the way I was working as, as well. I'm not an external, but you know, I'm an objective bird's eye view person. And I am always fully honest and...
I think when I say I prefer being an employee, I think I love the emotional side of being an employee, like, feeling like you're part of something bigger. You know, feeling like you can rely on the people around you. And obviously that can only happen if you work for a good company that you can do that with. So I think I prefer doing that emotion on the, from the emotional side, but also probably wouldn't go back to being an employee unless I found an incredible company or for some reason needed to be an employee again. Because obviously there's other perks of being a consultant, like managing your own time and those kind of things, which are very different when you're an employee. So yeah, I see what you mean in that sense. I think I like that flexibility yeah of being a consultant for sure.
Yeah. Let's talk about, it's, it's February now, but still kind of like early in the year. And I also, it wasn't on my topic of discussions for today, but I, again, can't hold myself with, with artificial intelligence.
Oh.
Yes. Sorry.
No, no. It's okay.
Killing or marketing jobs and stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
And how do you see the short term future for marketing in general? And let me give you a little bit of context and also my perspective because that might be useful for you. So I came from advertising like the classic one, like creative campaigns and stuff like that. So advertising agencies and. When I started, well Jesus, that was like mid, mid two thousands and we were always super huge and big on big ideas and creativity and I viewed the whole process from the, okay, it's all about the big idea and the creativity to a hundred percent technology. And the big ideas just pretty much killed during the process. And we always foc started focused only on the technology side because everything became growth. Everything became growth hacking, everything became marketing technologies. And I always missed the creative and the human element part. And I always felt that technology didn't touch the design, for example, the creative design. Everyone around marketing or working in marketing viewed designers and the people who actually drew stuff as the creatives. However, most of the job from marketing is actually a creative process and not technology. I still hold that that statement even though that you know, everyone is against that now. Now that we introduce AI to the picture, Just introduced. It'll take over a lot of stuff. I think in short term, how can we stay within marketing? That's my main question. Where is me as the marketing director in that whole scenario? And again, where is the, the, the creativity, the human element in campaign strategies. So how do you see the future for us?
Yeah, I'm, I'm fairly quite like a skeptical, cynical person. So in terms of like AI taking over marketing jobs, I'm really not that worried. I think I saw this panicked, by the way, within the HR world. About HR being very panicked about AI taking over their jobs, which is, I actually think just unlikely. There are obviously HR jobs, which are automated tasks, which can be done by technology, same as marketing, but like you can't take away the people, bit of HR with tech, like it's never gonna happen. So I kind of feel the same about marketing, I think. There's definitely certain tasks and jobs that AI is gonna either replace or make really, really easy for us. And I think that's great because if anything, we're actually reverting back to being the creatives and the strategists in that sense. If we're taking away these tasks that take us hours to do and we've got more time to do the fun stuff, basically one area where it's a little bit kind of hard right now is with writers. So obviously I've used chat g p t blows my mind every time. I'm not a writer, so when I get lazy and I'm like, Hey, can you write me a description about this thing and this thing? Like, I'll take that as a first draft and edit it into what I want it to be, and it's so useful. Saves me so much time. So I think in creative writing, I am a little bit scared, but it still can't come up with the brief. So you still need to tell it exactly what you want it to do, and then you probably have to edit it in the voice of your client and make sure that it makes sense. So there's a place for it, I think and I dunno if that place is gonna expand as it gets better, but I can't see, kind of like a chat G B T or Open ai, you know, or the one that Google's releasing very soon now because they've been, they're scared about the competition. Replacing the thought process and the thinking about what is relevant to my audience? What is my audience? What pain points do they have? What pain points are the most important? How do we solve them as a company? What do we want to say about them? And what are specific stances? I don't think it can replace too much of that anytime. So even within the writing sphere where it's actually really scary or can look scary, I think all of that, which is actually what makes a campaign or a bit of marketing a success or not, it's that thinking. It can't really be replaced, but you can get it to do, you know, stuff you don't wanna do or stuff you can't think of and, you know, be a starting point for something. And I think that's actually really useful. Like, view it as a tool, it's probably not your competition.
Yeah. Yeah, totally, totally agree, this was a really great chat, where can people find you?
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Ruta Sudmantaite. If you search for a Ruta, you probably don't know any other Rutas, so that will be me. You can also find me at sudmant dot com s ud m a n t.com or blame it on marketing on any of your Spotifys or Google or Apple Podcast. We do a fun episode there every week as well. So yeah, you'll probably find me, if not, it's OK.
Thank you for coming here. That was really great.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate for coming here. Thank you.
