Kurt Uhlir: 0:00

Traditional leadership gets you compliance. Serving leadership gets me commit.

Joeri Billast: 0:07

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories Podcast. My name is Joeri Billast, I'm your podcast host. And today I'm honored to be joined by Kurt. Hi Kurt, how are you? Hi, thank you for having me. Guys, if you don't know Kurt Uhlir, he's known as the King of Scaling Companies. Kurt is a CMO and a growth operator who has helped lead more than 60 acquisitions and exits, supported by a $880 million IBO and scaled companies from early growth to over $1.4 billion in revenue. You've scaled companies across very different markets and technologies when you zoom out. What actually causes growth to compound versus quietly stall as organizations get bigger?

Kurt Uhlir: 1:04

Oh yeah. I think for me, so many companies have the ability to grow or scale, but it is what stalls them out. At the beginning, it's a misallocation of time horizons. Like too many teams overinvest in two to 12 months and they underinvest in systems that create momentum at a 12 to 36 month time frame and then a 36 plus month timeframe. I mean, they growth also will stall when the execs, even if they've done that, do not intentionally segment their conversations to those three timeframes. And therefore they'll bounce between them and be reactive in discussions. And when they do that, it doesn't allow them to stay in track, stay with tracking the leading indicators versus lagging indicators, because especially in the short term, I want to track those lagging indicators. I want revenue. I want sign-ups. But if they bounce between those time frames, even in their discussions, then they're not properly going to be able to test hypotheses or give strategies the time to evolve over time. And so I find the other thing that you can so look look at as something that holds it back. But on the other side, what helps it grow is there's this big dichotomy I see on technology right now, where leaders will either overtrust technology, AI is going to solve everything. We should replace 90% of our team, or they almost ignore it because they do not personally have the technical literacy. And so what I find helps that is they should be hiring, instead of hiring role fillers, they should be hiring tech forward people to fill those roles that they will trust to figure it out. And then instead of being the leader that's making the decisions, they're instead gonna say, I don't know this. They're gonna be innately curious, and then they ask questions and they will try to actually not make the final decision. They're gonna bring those forward technology thinkers and let them come up with structured tests that they can do to improve things. And when they do that properly, growth just happens naturally.

Joeri Billast: 3:02

I love that you touched on so many things. I'm always also describing in my book, actually. I'm talking about CMO should be a marketing technology. So technology is really important. And I see this a lot. People expect for marketing directly sales, and they expect directly to use the latest tools and technologies and AI. My question for you would be you see too, many teams rush into AI for efficiency. But you focus on trust, you focus on narrative. Where do you see AI most often breaking trust instead of strengthening it?

Kurt Uhlir: 3:40

Yeah, trust is so critical right now, especially on the B2B side and growth over time. Increasingly, I'm having problems with AI. It's getting more powerful, but it's also hallucinating more and causing problems, which leads to trust issues. And so I find that AI companies are breaking trust when they're using AI to publish content at value at volume without human oversight. They have an agency or a team person that comes in and basically says, hey, we need 1500 articles on a monthly basis or weekly basis. And the problem is AI is increasingly hallucinating facts, even strict guidelines that you give it, or the text feels robotic. Not all the time. Maybe it's really great, but then you get to a paragraph or sections where it sounds chaotic. And even if you're using personalization tricks, it almost feels manipulative at times the way some of the AI is doing it. And so I think that's how it's breaking trust, as opposed to using AI to push content that it doesn't necessarily look always slick, but you can use it to find gaps in mistakes that you're having. I use it to enhance quality. So it's not just the speed, but I'm using it for deep edits. Repurposing content is huge for be building that trust. Because like somebody might find my B2B brand on TikTok, and then they're going to hear the same message on the YouTube in a longer form. And they're going to find snippets of it in different articles, and then they may find it repurposing it into a newsletter. And so that's ways I'm able to use AI to build trust while also at the same time identify gaps that it's like I'm hiring now the best editors I possibly can because I want that top 1% or that top 0.1% editor because when I combine them with AI, I can truly outperform competitors versus I see a lot of companies using AI right now, or they're just relying on traditional ways to write content and produce stuff. And it's almost like lighting cash on fire. Hey, you just gave me an extra million dollars for revenue or for marketing. I want to do something with that. And most companies they don't realize it, but they might as well just light it on fire if they're kind of just going as fast as they possibly could with AI as opposed to using it to build trust.

Joeri Billast: 5:52

Yeah, as fast as they could, but maybe in the wrong direction, if you know if you go you go fast. What I find interesting about AI, I mentioned already the book, is the capability of finding patterns. So, you know, I have all these different people like you that call my podcast that share their wisdom. Now, AI is really strong in putting that together and find certain patterns of that. Um, now another point is you may already mentioned that is uh decision making. From your experience as an operator, what is the real difference between adopting AI tools actually changing how decisions get made inside a company?

Kurt Uhlir: 6:33

I love that question because what I see at most companies, especially in that mid-market stage right now, where they're later stage venture or private equity backed, when they say adopting AI, what they actually mean and they don't realize it, is they mean buying tools or just testing a new workflow or automating a few tasks. They're not thinking about transformation and decision making. And so the real shift happens when they, especially at the executive level, where it's most helpful, I find, to start thinking about AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement for themselves or their team. So, like in my marketing teams, we're using AI to pressure test strategies before we launch. So we'll simulate different personas. We'll use AI to force us to confront blind spots that we may not necessarily see because we're also trying to go really fast. Um, they you'll use AI then for decision making to shorten that iteration loop, not just the testing, but we're using AI to go from hypothesis to a version 10 in minutes or an hour as opposed to weeks or months. And so that can radically influence the tempo change. And then I will also use it to surface objections and customer language in real time to your point about patterns, often before our competitors are doing it or even realizing that those patterns exist. So it's like I intentionally have workflows where I'm having the AI play devil's advocate, become the persona, look for where that persona is talking about things on Reddit and Quora and forums and bring in our thing, record the conversation, and help it to identify blind spots that we do not see yet, and then accelerate our draft to feedback cycle. When I can do that, I can completely reframe how decisions get made. So it's no longer necessarily top-down, which so many leaders think like I have to be the decision maker. Instead, everyone on the team can explore what-if scenarios without having a committee, and then leaders can stop relying on just their gut instinct, and we can interrogate their gut instinct or logic with AI pressure testing instead.

Joeri Billast: 8:33

I love that you showed that you have a system and you work with companies with the I, but most companies I see they are using a chat GPT or using AI where they don't have a strategy. Um, when leaders come to you and they say, Oh, it doesn't work, or AI adoption fails because of the culture. What is actually the deeper issue that maybe they are not willing to confront?

Kurt Uhlir: 8:57

Yeah, I mean, we it's not like you or I are old, but we're old enough to bend around through several things like AI from technology waves that have come through. It's almost never the technology's fault itself. In that case, for me, it almost always is the culture is the issue. And so that technology gets scapegoated. And so it's it's a culture, but it's it's really the leadership perspective. And so what ends up saying is the leaders cannot fully articulate what a successful AI-enabled team would look like. They just say, let's go implement it, and then they're like, hey, it failed. Well, you didn't set up what the team should look like afterwards. There's a fear of visibility. Like people are tend to be concerned. I'm seeing if I look back historically at what's failed for them, because AI would expose um that they've been flying blind. And frequently I find a lot of companies have been, and they were concerned about that when instead of like, I want the AI to tell me where my gaps are up front. People also don't, you know, the leadership themselves, they have not enabled their teams to feel safe failing in public, like transparently in the front of the whole team. And so most AI adoptions, it's not going to work right the first time, it's not gonna work right the 12th time. A lot of times, you have to iterate through this, and so you have to enable your teams to fail, tell you why they failed, allow you to coach them through the end results and outcomes that you want. And if they don't feel comfortable, that's not on like on the team's fault. That's your fault as a leader. They don't feel comfortable coming to you. And so, underlying that, it's like it's always this concept to me of they may be a nice person, but they're really an authoritative leader where their team views them as if I get this wrong, if I don't do what you said at the time frame that you said, if I'm not implementing AI in the exact way that you said, you're gonna fire me. And so people go very protective of their jobs. And and so for me, that's really like that at the end of the day, if the behaviors, if the behaviors are gonna follow whatever your incentives are in the systems that are set up, and so that's why most of the AI fails.

Joeri Billast: 10:57

Yeah, but in general, with every change, you know, people want to protect their job if something is new, every automation that is there. Um now you build go-to-market systems that survived massive scale. What signals tell you early on that a GTM strategy will collapse later under pressure?

Kurt Uhlir: 11:21

Yeah, I'll go through them quickly and then I may talk just about each one, but there's five signs for me that really struck that go-to-market strategy is gonna fail. Attribution, people are concerned about attribution over contribution. Um, people rely too much on pay-per-click. And so, second thing is that the product and marketing they drift apart. You'll see that in things when product starts to get a product marketing, product marketer separate from the marketing organization, the your GTM strategy is gonna fall apart. The third thing would be the marketing system was built to serve the boardroom, not the buyer. Like kind of that attribution versus contribution. They often, I see a lot of times too, they're focused on a single playbook. I kind of alluded to it, but so often VC back companies and private equity-backed companies, the latest funder comes in with the playbooks that worked 15 years ago and 10 years ago, and they force it in as the only option from the playbook. And that's why I see such turnover in successful names of the top PE firms right now, because the ones that are successful realize they need multiple playbooks. And then that fifth thing I mentioned in the very beginning, is they do not have a time horizon diversification. They are only looking at a marketing go-to-market plan. And usually that's going to be almost entirely weighted just at that two to 12 month viewpoint, and they haven't come back and looked at those three time frames that I looked at. But that first one is really kind of the key for me in everything. I go into it, and this is it's the bane of why so many private equity companies and later stage venture capital companies fail. At some point, they keep growing in value, and then there's some acquirer who's come in with a major check or completely bought off the company, and they're left with a company that ends up like at a third of the value. Well, what happens when I'd come in and to try to help fix that ship afterwards very often is I go back and look, everybody was so focused on their KPIs or OKRs, and they didn't like we got a new customer. They brought in $10 million a year. Does it really matter if it came from my marketing campaign or from sales or from product? At the end of the day, maybe the you know CFO actually went to high school with the person, and that's the root what started the relationship. I got credit for it from a pay-per-click and sales closed it. But 90% of the contribution was the fact they were friends from you know from early school. That's a contribution approach about how successful teams really look at things. And too often, as companies get to try to be concerned with scaling, they're so focused on who gets credit for both what went well and who does not get credit for the failures. Like I see I've stepped in $100 million plus companies and like, okay, we lost a major account, a $50 million account. Whose fault was it? Well, maybe it wasn't product's fault. Maybe sales did not actually oversell. Maybe it was set up because marketing had a bad perception that we put in place with the press release and social media. Like, until you actually care about diagnosing who all has actually contributed to losing the customer or winning the customers, you can't actually uncover what's real, which if you don't know what's real, none of the rest of it really matters.

Joeri Billast: 14:31

And this brings me to a point I also see that people of companies are changing, like these vanity metrics. You know, they want feasibility, they want to see, oh, we are, you know, we are present everywhere, or you see these influencers showing up and so on. And that's also one of the points I speak a lot about you, also about trust. So it's not only about visibility, but the trust is important. And also on writing the book came back to the idea that feasibility without trust is backfiring eventually. Now, from your perspective, Kurt, where the modern CMOs most optimize for visibility at the expense of long-term trust.

Kurt Uhlir: 15:14

I love that question. I love your approach to trust on it as well. And I mean, you even mentioned influencers there. It's like agencies ruin so many parts of marketing. And it's like if I go to most marketers now and I talked to I mentioned about influencers, in their mind is paid influencers, which to me is no different than paid media. You can buy a, you know, buy a sponsorship for for TV or with streaming service, or paying somebody to talk about your product, that's not influencer marketing. That's just paid media and sponsorship. And so that's part of it. But I'd say fundamentally, what CMOs don't realize and they're scared to tell their board this, because in most industries, you are not the number one, number two, or number three brand. And so if you're not, what the board needs to hear right away is that this is backed by research, not just that I've seen it at hundreds of companies, but Forrester, Gartner, McKinsey have all done independent research that says at the end of the day, especially in the B2B market, the decision makers will between 50 and 75% of all decisions always go with the top three most visible brands, the largest companies. And it's not because those products are the best. They're so concerned right now about making a bad decision. They don't want to be left buying a bad egg and being the person that says, I bought the bad this, that they will almost always choose a lesser quality product so they can go, but we chose one of the biggest companies. And so they're gonna then opt from a chief marketing officer perspective, they're gonna opt for those vanity metrics because the CMOs know or they should know, like that 50 to 75 percent. Imagine if you walked into the boardroom ahead of time and said, Look, if we do not invest in trust, and this is what I'm gonna walk about through that what that looks like to you, Mr. Mr. and Ms. People on the board. If we do not invest in trust, if we do not invest in things that aren't gonna just change the revenue in the next two to three months, we lose seven out of ten deals of people that sign up on our website, seven out of ten people that come to our events that show up to webinars, seven out of 10 of them will not choose us. That's what it actually means. And like then you can shift the conversation. Otherwise, but since most people don't want to have that healthy conflict, they never have that conversation. And so the CMOs typically know, well, if I don't have that healthy conflict and that conversation up front, I'm gonna be out of work in the next 18 months on average. And so they just optimize for maybe staying 18 months, maybe 24 at the tops, and they never have that better thing. And so they're gonna opt for the vanity metrics of visibility, right?

Joeri Billast: 17:59

And then it will be average and it will be, you know, they will not stand out with the company. I had a business intelligence company before, and then what people used to say is IT directors, you know, you cannot be fired or get filed by hiring SAP or buying SAP because you know everyone is using SAP. But maybe it's not the best solution for everyone. It was just like, you know, in terms of not taking any risk. And then, you know, a friend of mine, Mark Schaefer, he's uh has a book which is called Audacious. He talks about you need to do audacious marketing, you know, do stuff that no one else is doing. Now, another thing you mentioned, the word blind spots, I love that. I also ask into the you know AI, what are my blind spots? Because AI is often agreeing with you. Um so I said you often talk about blind spots, leaders defend as being correct. So, what is actually one blind spot that you see repeatedly in senior marketing and executive teams today?

Kurt Uhlir: 19:02

It's not always just a single, the same thing that they're wrong about, but and from a category perspective, the blind spot is that, and this applies to every leadership role, is that they think that they are right about things that they're really wrong about. And it takes them in to get your mind around that. So, for the listeners, if you think back about the last even just like 12 months of your career, not that something is shifted in the market. And so by all means, we start seeing trends and we start putting things in place and the market changes. That's not something that you're wrong about. But there's decisions that when you look back, new data came up, and it you had a moment where you realized that something that you you thought you were entirely correct on, the new data comes out and you realize I could have gone back in time and realized that I was making the wrong decision at that time. And so, for examples that I think about, I was at a company early on in social media management where there were two big enterprise plays. We were one of them called Vitcher, that's Apple and Samsung Mobile and everybody used to manage all of their social media profiles. And so we thought that we needed, and we were told by our customers, that we had to create local offices in Chicago and Paris and everywhere to be right where our customers are, the way a lot of agencies have done. So we started doing that. And we get about seven months into that and we're rolling out. We have like 30 or 40 people now at the teens. We've got leases starting to come up. And not only is it not helping our sales and our customer relationships, it's actually making them worse because our customers think that we're available all the time because we're in the same city. And so we we we went and we checked, we only took us like four or five days to pressure test that. We realized it was the wrong decision. And we should have known it was the wrong decision when we made it. And so at that moment, we did have to figure out what do you do with those people you've hired. But like that's one of those cases where it was a unanimous board decision. It was a unanimous executive decision. Hey, we could have chosen something different. We were wrong. And so I think the biggest blind spot is not realizing that there are at least three major things that you think you're right about right now in your business unit, in your company, that you're actually wrong about. And so, like I literally every morning when I'm brushing my teeth, I don't, you know, it's it I don't live in a world of negative, but I take about 30 seconds just to be open to what could I be wrong about right now? And then I actually make a point in my one-on-ones to close my one-on-ones. It's on my agenda that says, hey, Yuri, what could I be wrong about that I'm not seeing? Do you have a different gut feel? You don't even have to have it fully formed, but what should I be thinking about differently than the way I am today? And the only response you can have after asking that in one on ones is a curious question, never to justify, because otherwise it doesn't work right for kind of gathering new information. And if you can overcome that, you will uncover blind spots, sometimes two years before you otherwise. Would and so imagine if instead of waiting for two years you could pull back those mistakes six months to 24 months early and how many more iterations you could go through.

Joeri Billast: 22:09

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, but I think a lot of leaders, you know, they are at a certain level and they don't ask those questions or maybe don't take the risk, or maybe key they like you say, you don't know what you don't know, and they think that that is the truth. Now let's talk about servant leadership. Sounds soft to some executives. How does it actually increase the speed, accountability, and execution in high-growth environments, you think?

Kurt Uhlir: 22:38

Yeah, I wrote this really long article, probably end up being a book. It's part of my keynote, it's called The Business Case to Servant Leadership, because it servant leadership, it's not soft, it's actually tactical. It removes friction, it builds alignment faster, it uncovers gaps in strategy costs and opportunities, all while making the whole team and company much more resilient. The way that I think about it is I mentioned like authoritative leadership. Well, authoritative leadership, and everybody overcomplicates things, but authoritative leadership is that concept that at the end of the day, I'm going to fire you if you don't do what I said in the way that I said it. The servant leadership approach is just very different that says, look, I didn't hire you to do a job. I hired you to reach a business outcome. The moment that that happens, from a servant leadership perspective, I have to make sure it's on me that you understand the outcomes that I want. And then I need to make sure I can remove all of the hindrances and give you the resources to get those outcomes that I want. Well, that when you do that, accountability takes care of itself because everybody's extremely clear the results we want out of the company. Where some people think it's soft, traditional leadership gets you compliance, survey leadership gets me commitment. So I want you on board to actually go towards the conflict, find the problems, get those outcomes, not just do what I told you to do.

Joeri Billast: 24:03

I see that people having difficulties to implement the AI, there is a lot of resistance, of course, depending on the leadership. Where do you see this internal resistance usually coming from first? And how can strong leaders address this without forcing compliance?

Kurt Uhlir: 24:24

The first resistance I see tends to be with mid-level managers that are either afraid of how they lead teams being exposed, or they're concerned with the redundancy in their roles and they think like they push back on it, whether they fully comprehended this or not, but they think AI is going to replace me. So it's usually that mid-level manager. Smart leaders, on the other hand, they realize that they should be using AI to amplify, uh, it's going to amplify what they do. It's going to help clarify things. It's not going to replace them. It, if you're a mid-level manager, maybe you're going to be managing 50 people or 100 people as opposed to eight. But but otherwise, it might actually end up replacing you. I think the smart people are realizing that they're they're trying to approach it as how do I create opt-in pilots? And then, like, how do you take those mid-level managers and you reward them for experimenting things and being transparent and then allowing team-led discoveries to reduce fear? I think the resistance happens when companies just come and they start to push it down to the mid-level managers as opposed to being very transparent across the entire team and creating almost that level for them to share what's working, what's not, where they have questions. That concept of, yeah, like there are no dumb questions, especially in the terms of AI now. So many things are changing. I had like 50 calls in 30 days from AI visibility tools trying to sell me as the chief marketing officer. So I literally just called several venture capitalists that I knew, and like two of them are like in the top 10 names in the world that have written checks. And I called quite a few people that were building some of these companies, and all of them told me the same thing. AI visibility tools are all just vaporware. Like we've now seen that with surfer SEOs coming out with the thing and HRS has saying, like, hey, when you prompt the AI versus actual human prompts, you get very different responses. But here were two companies, major VCs that have written $10 million plus checks, one like a $75 million check, and they're like, Yeah, it's vaporware. What? Well, like that's a transparency then that you take back to your teams and they're like, should we be using one? Well, yes, we are using one, but it changes the influence that we're going to give to it, it changes how we use it. It says, Hey, look, you can't experiment with these things.

Joeri Billast: 26:39

It's a lot of conversations I have these days. Of course, I'm also in AI visibility marketing is indeed about that. It's about tools also on my podcast and guests. It's about geo showing up in the AI answers. Um, curious to hear your opinion about that. Where are we going? Where should we focus on if now people are listening to that? SEO, geo, all these different terms. What would you tell to those people where to focus on?

Kurt Uhlir: 27:09

Yeah, I don't completely agree with that. It's all vaporware, but I think about with where we're at with it, it's much where SEO was 20 years ago. And so the tools are really good for like the canary and a coal mine to see where you're at. I'm building a company right now that we have a portfolio of companies, but we're we have built one of the largest real estate platforms in the United States, comparable to Zillow from a size perspective. I simply could not run enough AI prompts to truly tell you when people search for homes for sale in Roswell, Georgia, condos for sale in Roswell, Georgia, houses with pools. I could not possibly run enough tests to know what my AI visibility was across the country. But that doesn't mean that I cannot get value from them doing local tests and extrapolating them. I think that it may also be different next week. And so I use it much more for trend analysis. Do we show up at all, especially when I see where competitors are continually showing up? So I think where people should really think about it in terms of AEO or GEO, to your point, or SEO, it is search everywhere optimization. I work at B2B companies. You may not realize it, but if you're selling technology solutions that are $10 million a pop, there's still people that are searching for your terms on TikTok and YouTube, Apple Podcasts. And so you need to have marketers that are capable of thinking about that everywhere, thinking about terms of search everywhere optimization. That's where the future is going.

Joeri Billast: 28:38

Well, thank you for your enthusiasm and your passion and all the tips that you shared with us, Kurt. We are coming towards the end of this episode. I think people will be excited if they listen to these episodes. Um, where can I send those people that they want to learn more about you, the work that you're doing? Where would you like me to send them?

Kurt Uhlir: 29:01

My personal website at Kurt Euler.com is that I write a lot about this myself. And for those that are in the United States, I'm on the board for and run a group called CEO Netweavers for paid forward servant leaders that are all C-suite executives. By all means, search for CEO Netweavers. We would love to have more paid forward people that want to kind of open up cross-functionally and have a lot of these conversations that you have behind the scenes, and we get together to do that.

Joeri Billast: 29:25

As my listeners know, Kurt, there are always show notes. There is a blog article. Everything you mentioned will be found in there. Um so yeah, if you're not listening in the car, go check it out. Kurt, it was really a pleasure. Really interesting to have you on the show. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. If this conversation resonated, feel free to share it with other marketers or founders who might benefit from it. You will find the full article and show notes on the blog. With the video version coming soon. Quick thanks to Rio, whose wallet is now available on Android in addition to iOS, and to Metricol for supporting the podcast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.