CMO TripActions, Meagen Eisenberg: The Joy of Living in Awkward

Meagen Eisenberg: marketing doesn't just have to align with sales. They certainly do. But we also need to align with product. We have to be aligned on the strategy, go to market launches. It doesn't mean we always get along. But we do duke it out every once in a while because inevitably, there's limited resources, people funds and we have to align on priorities. But fundamentally we are in it together. We're focused on it, and we're working through the tough decisions that have to be made.

Joubin: Hi, I'm Joubin, go to market partner at Kleiner Perkins and this is G TMG show that interviews world class revenue and go to market leaders to explore how they operate, think and deploy grit every day in order to build incredible companies. Speaking of world class companies, there are more incredible startups in the Kleiner portfolio than I've ever seen. When I was operating, I would've begged to be in some of these companies if you're listening and we don't do sponsorships on this show, so I figured I'd use this opportunity if you're listening and you are inspired by the stories of my guests and you want to find the next incredible ride for you. Reach out to me. Let's find an amazing job in the Kleiner portfolio. Now, let's get to the episode. Mm. Megan, welcome to the show.

Meagen Eisenberg: Thanks for having me.

Joubin: All right. I kick all of these things off the exact same way you've never heard an episode before. So you don't know that Jew been tends to screw these things up at the very beginning when he inevitably does correct him. We can use that as our platform to get this thing going.

Meagen Eisenberg: Okay?

Joubin: You went to Cal Poly. At some point you went to school in Japan?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yes. Yeah. What? Set up? Alright. What's it called? What's that? A university. It's like the Stanford of Japan.

Joubin: Oh, fancy. Was that your MBA?

Meagen Eisenberg: No, that was just a year abroad. My NBA. Was that? Yeah.

Joubin: Okay. And then you went to Cisco?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yep.

Joubin: Project Manager in I t doing cool stuff for five years. Then you went to Yale two years. Then you went to IBM, which at the time was actually a reasonably cool company. You were in product managing or product marketing. Then you went to post any spent a year there? I guess at some point that got acquired

Meagen Eisenberg: while required by As I was leaving, Google was acquired them.

Joubin: Did you reconsider while you were leaving?

Meagen Eisenberg: No. Okay, so I didn't

Joubin: write, and then I can't even pronounce this tree. Riga

Meagen Eisenberg: Try Riga. Yeah, that's where I switched from product marketing. Over to demand Gen and programs.

Joubin: And while you were there, also acquired.

Meagen Eisenberg: Eventually they got acquired by IBM. I did not stay for that. I left and followed Ark. Site

Joubin: security. Imagine going back to live. You have proof. Okay. And then hopefully there's nobody from the audience. And then you went to our site? Yes. You spent three years there

Meagen Eisenberg: were bought by HP while you were there while I was there? Yeah. And I stayed for a year and a day.

Joubin: You stayed for a year and a day just to rest and vest. Yeah, okay. And then you went to Doc. You sign? Yes. And that's when things started to really cook.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I was higher up in the organization and had some more experience under my belt. It was heavy demand. Gen. At that point,

Joubin: You did VP of demand. Gen and systems for 3 4 years? Yep. And then about a year of VP of marketing and customer acquisition. Something like that.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah. My role expanded. So I had demanded in field marketing Web systems. And then I took on custom marketing as well towards the end of my time at Turkey sign.

Joubin: And it was 150 ISH people when you were there, about 1200 when you left. Yes. Yeah. Okay, then you went to Mongo. You were the CMO of mongo db for you know, like, is it bad when I say mongo

Meagen Eisenberg: A CMO? I just say the whole name mongo db. Well, so I was

Joubin: at Powell to networks. Nobody. Nobody calls it that. But marketing was very keen on making sure that we said the whole makes sense that the home since you guys made it up. Okay, so mongo db CMO for four years with our previous guest, Carlos dilatory And then trip actions for two plus years. Now

Meagen Eisenberg: it'll be three years and in January,

Joubin: So a couple of things. First of all, this is the first time we've ever had a marketer on the show. So very exciting. Second, purely CMO It's the first time we've ever had a guest of a returning company. So this is special,

Meagen Eisenberg: All right? I'm excited to be on your special

Joubin: special. A little birdie told me that you lived in Japan. And you don't

Meagen Eisenberg: eat that little bird named Carlos. Is that true? I eat fish. I'm just a picky eater. I eat lots of things, but there are lots of reasons I don't eat.

Joubin: He's a very big sushi buff.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yes, I tend to stick more to avocado rolls, but I have tried lots of sushi.

Joubin: Okay, So you do eat sushi?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah. I eat it if that's all there is to eat.

Joubin: Okay. So you don't really like it?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah.

Joubin: Okay. Okay, fine. What was your first ever job?

Meagen Eisenberg: Oh, my first ever job

Joubin: where someone paid you. It doesn't have to be like a w to

Meagen Eisenberg: be babysitting. I was a babysitter. I was a pool monitor. I worked at a pharmacy as a clerk. I tutored. I did five jobs at once.

Joubin: Where?

Meagen Eisenberg: I mean, I was in high school,

Joubin: okay. Like where in the world?

Meagen Eisenberg: Oh, I was in San Jose. All Madden grew up in all Madden. Yeah,

Joubin: Why are you doing all this stuff?

Meagen Eisenberg: Because I wanted to make money because I didn't have any money. And I wanted to do stuff. My parents covered me in school, but I wanted to buy clothes and go out with my friends. And they gave me a car. But I need to put gas in it. And I want to go to college. So I had to save money.

Joubin: Were you always the overachiever? Everyone at school just kind of dubbed you the overachiever.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yes. Most likely to succeed if you look at the way

Joubin: I do it. You're kidding.

Meagen Eisenberg: No, I really was. Yeah,

Joubin: well, they were right. I asked Carlos. I said, What questions would you ask? Megan? Him and I were texting last night, and one of them was the sushi thing. The fish thing. And then He said she has three daughters and three dogs. She's like a super human.

Meagen Eisenberg: I have three daughters and three French bulldogs male dogs, though.

Joubin: And so I always been this way. What is it like, a chaos

Meagen Eisenberg: thing?

Meagen Eisenberg: You know, I think it's a foam. Oh, you have fear of missing out. I want to do it all you go through life once, might as well try everything. And yeah, you don't know what you're going to like until you try it. And I think I just grew up trying a lot of different things and doing a lot of different things. And why Miss Out

Joubin: isn't the dark side of overachiever syndrome is that you just get overwhelmed with a bunch of sh it all the time,

Meagen Eisenberg: Maybe, or you just get better at it. I think as you do things, you get better at prioritizing. You have pattern recognition. You just get more efficient so you can take on more. So if I try to do is doing now 10 years ago or 20 years ago. No way. But as I've gotten better at making decisions and seeing things over and over again, you have a gut feeling you can make decisions fast. I would say one thing. Often when I come into a new job, as will, the team will say, Wow, you make decisions really fast. Doesn't mean I make the right decisions all the time, but I can make pretty fast decisions.

Joubin: What was the last decision that you made pretty fast?

Meagen Eisenberg: Oh, That's a good question. We're running ads and you're picking copy. And do you have time to go spin up an agency and do the right research and all that stuff? I mean, that's the right way to do it. Go take a quarter, two quarters, but it's a fast moving market. So let's just throw ad copy out there and design and see what sticks

Joubin: I had Mike, Clive, Owen, Do you know that is the CEO of Stripe now, formerly of AWS and Amazon has this thing where, when someone on his team would make decisions after they made the decision, he would ask them, What's your confidence interval in this decision? And Generally people think that the right answer is a very high degree of confidence. So usually the answer is 90 95% somewhere in the 90s, and his immediate response to that is you took too long. Any time you're in the 90s, you took too long to make that decision.

Meagen Eisenberg: You took too long to gather the information. Generally Speaking,

Joubin: it's always going to be imperfect, and if it's not imperfect, it's way too late. And so he generally benchmarks around the 70% confidence interval to make a decision.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I bet that threshold difference between men and women

Joubin: was that

Meagen Eisenberg: Well, they always say women won't take something on unless we have a really high, 99% that we can do it. Right. So I wonder if you looked at that. Women Do we take risks fast enough early enough? Is that what holds us back? Because we're risk averse? I don't know. I mean, that's a blanket statement, huh?

Joubin: Was there a decision that you've made that comes to mind too quickly that you regretted? In retrospect?

Meagen Eisenberg: Oh, that's a tough one. I mean, probably having the second or third dog. There's a lot of pickup around that, Um, yeah, but once you have them, you have them.

Joubin: Okay, That's it. I'm

Meagen Eisenberg: thinking one

Joubin: of like you, I don't know, picked the wrong name for a company or something. We're gonna do a rebrand or a relaunch. And you had 50 decisions to make all at the same time. And you miss prioritized which one was actually important, And you probably scuttled too quickly through one that wasn't. Maybe you didn't. Maybe you

Meagen Eisenberg: never know. I mean, I'm sure I've done a ton of that. We have an amazing product called Liquid, and it's a payments expense management product. But there's a lot of products out there called Liquid. So how do you position differentiate and go out when you've picked a name that's out there? A lot of things. So it's yet to be determined. If I picked the wrong name and put it out there,

Joubin: you said something that I want you to just talk about to get this thing going. It was as someone asked you about advice in your career that you've gotten or advice that you would give and you dispensed it through the lens of someone gave you this advice, which was treat your sales team as a customer. Yes, you mean by that?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah. So I think one of things I looked out on is after business school. I joined Trigo and they had just been bought by IBM. That's actually how I entered in through a startup that been bought, and the CMO at the time was Dan Drucker. And he was strong product marketer and said the success or failure of marketing as their alignment with sales and he said. It's really important that you look at sales as a partner and a customer and that you align with them and it was interesting because that time I was trying to learn a lot. So it's going to a lot of marketing conferences and talking to a lot of colleagues. And they were all struggling with butting heads with sales and it was pointing fingers and it was really down at the You're not giving me enough leads not giving me enough content, and they weren't looking at it as okay, we're attacking the market together. Let's figure out what our challenges and let's go solve them. It's much better if you're facing the same direction solving and the competition is outside the company and the challenges outside the company. Now we need to solve it the best way and go to market, and that really stuck with me for a decade of how I was going to approach marketing. That was my first marketing job because my first job out of business school was marketing. Prior to that, it was an I T. And so I just assumed that's how everyone went to market and that was the philosophy, and that's he really partnered closely with the head of sales. And as I heard, more complaints of marketers were that Oh, sales is always pointing fingers that we're not doing this. We're not doing that. I was like, Oh, that's not the relationship I have. I have Okay, What? Our targets? How are we measuring success? What's the pipeline look like? What do you need to get? What's not working for You tell me. I need your feedback and then we'll go iterate on it. And I think Carlos is a tough customer. Tough cr Oh, but the relationship works because he's very direct and he gives me the feedback, and I feel like he's they're solving the problems with me, and I feel like there's no weird hidden agenda. It's like Megan, we got this problem. What are you gonna do about it? And I need your help in this, and that's just a much better way to go through Life is to have a partner with your executive team and to be addressing the external issues that you need to address for go to market.

Joubin: You talked about at the time you were learning a lot do you mean by that?

Meagen Eisenberg: I mean, you're always learning. I think if I went back and looked at my Amazon ordering books the first decade was all these marketing books still doing marketing books? I wanted to be leaders self, self out books. Yeah, leadership books. There was a time period I was doing, how to have a kid book, How to Raise Kids Book. And then I swung back to self help business books. But I think that's key for executives. You have to keep learning reading. If I don't know how to do a technology, I'll dive in and try and figure it out. I think early days in Salesforce, I had to learn how to use Salesforce and create dashboards and report and defend why I was making the decisions I was making. And I think it was people that dive in and try to learn something and self teach and watch. The online classes are the ones who want to hire because our whole job is facing problems, challenges solving, and you have to learn on the job no matter what, because otherwise you're outdated in tech your outdated. If you don't keep learning, you need to hire people who have different skills. You need to learn from them. And so if you just get stuck in your ways, you're not gonna have a job in two years.

Joubin: Is that Megan's favorite medium with which to learn is a book,

Meagen Eisenberg: And no, I mean I I think it's my team now, as I have a stronger, stronger team, they bring new insight and titles. I think it's my peers. I talked to other CMOs and VPs of marketing, and what are they doing? I do read a lot of books. I'm up on the news. I don't watch TV beyond news,

Joubin: but

Meagen Eisenberg: but market, you have to be on the pulse of it. All right. You've got to also be on the social channels like you can't just stick on Twitter. You have to be up on Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat, and whatever new things out there, you need to understand how that's going to impact and disrupt marketing and need to hire people. Sometimes when I'm interviewing folks, I can tell I'm not going to hire them for whatever reason. They don't fit what I need, but I'm on there and I don't want to waste the time my time or theirs. I'll start to ask them, What do you do in your day to day? What are you reading? What are the apps you love? And I'll just try to extract information from them in that short amount of time. So it's not a total bust. And also I learned about line app three years ago. Wait, so

Joubin: they're bombing an interview and you know that they're not going to get a job there. But you feel somewhat obliged to at least do the allotted slot of time that you're interviewing them for. So you're like, Well, selfishly, I might as well take advantage of this opportunity to learn Yes,

Meagen Eisenberg: because they have something. I mean, an example as I was talking to a woman. This is three or four years ago. Is that mongo db? And it was for, I don't know, a developer advocacy role or something, and it was clear it wasn't gonna be a thing. But she started talking about the line app, and I was like, What are you talking about? And she's like, Oh, and I download the app and I start looking at it and It's a chat communication tool is very popular in Asia, and I just start to learn about. And then there's these stickers and then all of a sudden we're buying logo packs for line. For developers that like to send these are gonna be stickers and something I never would have had any clue because I don't chat over line up, right? I just never heard of it. So I do try to take opportunities based on who I'm talking to, to learn. Like, what are the apps on your homepage of your phone? Why do you like them? I'm targeting people who develop apps or I'm in marketing. What? I want to know how people are digesting information. You

Joubin: want to co host a podcast together. You're a great host. This feels like it's totally your wheelhouse.

Meagen Eisenberg: This is this is

Joubin: this is the easiest way to ever to just scratch your curiosity. Oh, yeah, I'll just throw a podcast up and then I can talk to and get curious about whoever I want. It's the best excuse in the world.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I mean, I think it does help you learn, and I do think there's a lot of podcasts like Carlos is a big podcast guy. He's always saying He's like, Go listen to this is what we need to do And I'm like, Okay, so I'll go listen to the podcast And we had a recent one around, actually with stripe, and it was on expense management. And so I was R expensing and looking at how much of the economy is online for payments. And anyway, I was like, learning about it. I know five or 6% something like, Whoa, yeah, so that made me think Okay, Wow, there's something here and eventually the world is going to move to that. There's a massive market.

Joubin: I hate this question because so many podcasts ask this question, and it's generally a closing question, But I've heard you say you have a closet of books, which I just kind of like imagined in my head. I actually believe you. I think you actually have a closet of books stacked on top of each other. What are the ones that you always gift Your team?

Meagen Eisenberg: The one that just came to mind were thinking about category creation and the book play bigger, and there's actually a whole agency around it, but it's like what they did a decade or two decades ago, maybe with Mercury and creating a category and how you differentiate and take a market. And so we're thinking a lot about that. So I've read that. Now I'm reading it again because it's something we're focused on. So there's tons of different marketing books out there, depending on what you're trying to do. And then there's a new book called Move That just came out from the founder of Terminus and

Joubin: sit on the board of

Meagen Eisenberg: Yes, I do. And I'm reading those kind of books. They're looking at the market. They're looking at case studies. What are marketers doing? And I read it and I think, Okay, how do I apply it at trip actions?

Joubin: You said self help for a while. Then you oscillated to leadership type books. What are the in the stack of leadership? Any favorites? I'm totally putting on the hot seat here.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, Ben Horowitz is on our board. The hard thing about hard thing about hard things. I read as I was entering into trip actions, and I felt a lot of great learnings there. When you think about leadership. I thought about it a lot as we entered a pandemic at a business travel company. How? Making these tough decisions. Hiring? What are you looking for? So that's an example. We've got Shaka Sangoro on our team as well running D I, and he's got a couple of books out there. There's a lot to run and lead a company. And to think about what you're thinking about the people on your team, you're thinking about the market that you're going after your thinking about your function and how you can better run your own function and marketing. There's just a ton of channels you've got to understand and where people are going for information.

Joubin: Can I recommend to Very obvious, actually, three three books that are my favorites, that I'm sure you've read. I just want to sound smart in front of you. One is Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger, Disney CEO. Amazing. The second is shoe dog Phil Knight, and then the third is Andre Agassi. Do you know that is the tennis player, His autobiography?

Meagen Eisenberg: All right,

Joubin: those are the three that I would recommend well, and if I was to give 1/4 it would be Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk. I just think it's amazing, but nonetheless I think

Meagen Eisenberg: we love him.

Joubin: Yeah, the idea around category creation. There's a lot of very practical books, but a lot of the time, and it's just juvenile simple brain working this way. I think about this, too. We're sitting in Kleiner's office. People just come in here, and that's all they think and talk about. I like to read about the people that have created these amazing categories and entrepreneurs. Cros people on my team always asked, What book should I read? Yeah, and usually the first one that I recommend is Shoe Dog, because it's a very, very honest reflection of how hard it is to build a business. It's just so hard. And I think it builds a lot of empathy, reading about how difficult a brand like Nike, how hard it was for them to do what they've done.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I think you're right. When I was reading the hard thing about hard things, I was like a CEO's job is hard. I had a lot more empathy for my CEO.

Joubin: So Ben Horowitz, on your board, yes, Have you ever bombed the board meeting? It doesn't have to be a trip. Actions just in general.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I'm sure I have.

Joubin: Yeah, none come to mind. What would bombing a board meeting even look like? Or maybe I'll ask you a different variation of this. Have you ever seen any of your peers bomb a board meeting?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yes, of course. I've been intense board meetings. I don't think I'm going to go into any of those examples here where you've just come in and you're presenting on one thing. And a question comes in. You're not expecting and it derails the conversation, and all of a sudden you're running down a different route. Yeah. I think if you're orchestrating the board meeting correctly, you've set expectations upfront. The persons presenting They've socialized a lot of these ideas and decks ahead of time, and you've got some alignment going into it. But you're also seeking some feedback. So I think if you're managing it right, you shouldn't bomb a board meeting. But I've certainly being on board and attending board meetings. Things that may go one way or the other

Joubin: sit on G two's board said on Terminus is bored. You're an advisor to Honestly, if I had the whole list written down here, it would be pages. You've done an incredible amount of really cool startups and advisory work with them, two of which are currently on Loom and product board K P companies. How cool is loom

Meagen Eisenberg: like we use it a trip actions.

Joubin: Okay, so I have a question for you. What I do with Loom is I treat the partnership as a kind of my board, and I do a Q b R because I'm gonna come from sales, uh, which is very foreign adventure, by the way. Nobody just gets like it very seriously. Or like I came in with a blazer that like to take the place of crazy anyway, So I will record the deck that I'm going to present in loom. I send it to the board to watch in advance. Then they comment inland. Then I send it to the entire firm so that all of the cross functional people that need to know know about it. And then when we sit in this room, what are the outcomes that we want to accomplish?

Meagen Eisenberg: Smart. It's a really good use of time of everyone's time. You've got everyone on board. You've gotten them to read it, digest it. It gets you past slide two or three. I think sometimes when people haven't digested the information, you get stuck early on. You don't actually get to the agenda that you want. Terminus. They did a similar thing where the head of product head of sales, sent the recording to end. The CFO sent the recordings ahead of time, and it was It was a great way to, like, digest it. Now let's get in and talk and discuss about what we want to talk about versus just having to go through the data. We all have the capacity to read and get the data and now come in with better questions so you can really tap into the board and what advice we can bring.

Joubin: Does anybody prospect into you using loom?

Meagen Eisenberg: I want to say no surprise, but I've started to ignore the videos that come in through emails from people I don't know,

Joubin: but you ignore them all.

Meagen Eisenberg: I mean, I'll glance at subject lines, but the cuts, the ones I ignore, huh? The ones I pay attention to our Hey, I know so and so And they recommended. We talk and they're using the weight of the relationship with so and so to get me to talk and then I'll take it. But otherwise, it's too much inbound. It's the warm relationship, and I feel, and somehow indebted to the person they know that I'm like, okay, I'll give you 30 minutes to hear your pitch.

Joubin: What is PG Tuesday?

Meagen Eisenberg: Uh, Plavix. Carlos. You know he's smart. One of the reasons great to work with is his sales reps are hungry and they know how to sell and PG Tuesday. They have prepped all the way up into that, and they pipeline generate into account. So they're self sourcing deals, and there's nothing like marketing bringing in pipeline and deals creating awareness. But you also sourcing and getting in there. So what's my

Joubin: role in it? Do you

Meagen Eisenberg: have a role? And I totally have a role in it for sure. First of all, from a marketing standpoint, if they PG into someone they've never heard of trip actions or our liquid product, that's my fault, right? I haven't done enough in the market to be in the selection set, so I need to make sure they get someone to pick up the phone. Second of all, as their PG and they need assets, they need a reason to reach out. I need to create those reasons I need to create the content. Upcoming events Webinars Top of news, understand the persona. They're reaching out to what's going to get them to respond to customer case studies. So they have proof points. I need to validate them and give them the content they need to reach out with. And so every Friday they get a PG passport, which is six or seven pages, all table of contents of what are the top three assets you have to P g to finance to the CFO to procurement to HR. Okay, what are the upcoming events? You can invite someone to to meet for a meeting? What's the current press that's out there? What are some case studies or the new things that are happening in the product to talk it to an existing customer to expand? Do they know we have these features, and so every Friday we're arming them with information they need, and they were creating outreach sequences for them so they can easily outreach. Yeah, there's a lot that goes into making sure they're productive and efficient. If your marketing team is doing their job, if you have 70 reps all having to create their stuff to reach out, that's not efficient. So are you arming them with stuff so they can just be on the phone targeting their accounts?

Joubin: And this happens every Tuesday,

Meagen Eisenberg: every Tuesday and they all day long.

Joubin: Come on,

Meagen Eisenberg: all day long. He's PTC

Joubin: guys, they're all the same way.

Meagen Eisenberg: I know. But if you Carlos teaches you how to sell and when he's taking us up market, we have large enterprise deals. He gets command of the message. You come out of there as a very strong rep, you can go sell anything, Which is why I love working with him. He knows how to sell.

Joubin: Yeah, I have had many guests that have actually gone in their career laterally into either PTC itself or someone who has worked at PTC in order to learn that discipline and skill set.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, they make great cros. You want to be a cr oh, Then go train under one of these sales reps. Yeah,

Joubin: dog. He trained a guy named Sean who is now the CR Oh, fig MMA. You see it all over the place. It's everywhere.

Meagen Eisenberg: It's true.

Joubin: What else, Carlos said is, one thing I appreciate about her is that we're in it together. There's never any finger pointing. We both want the company to win, so we view each other's problems as our own. And as I was soaking that statement in, how much easier does that make the alignment of your respective organizations all the way down,

Meagen Eisenberg: for sure, I mean, I think that when

Joubin: they see you to demonstrating, yeah,

Meagen Eisenberg: you can't have because what happens if you guys are aligned and your team starts to point? Fingers are bigger, it's going to get escalated eventually, and we're going to stop it, and we're gonna line them, and we're going to make sure they realize they need to work together or does work much more efficiently if the executives are lined. That is something I definitely learned from Dave at Mongo. DB is that your first peer group as a C level executive is the C level executives. Your first team is the C. R. O the CFO, the head of product. It's not your actual team that reports into you. That's your second team. And when you align as leaders and you have the same goals and you're lining around the vision, the problems, you work through them. They're tough problems, but you're aligned. Your team's work better together. Marketing doesn't just have to align with sales. They certainly do. But we also need to align with product. We have to be aligned on the strategy. Go to market launches like these teams all have to come together for go to market, to understand the story. We're telling the vision, How do we enable the field to go after it? How do we take feedback from the field from our customers Making sure product is also taking that the engineers are building that out and we have to make tough decisions. It doesn't mean we always get along. But we do duke it out every once in a while because inevitably there's limited resources, people funds and we have to align on priorities. But fundamentally we are in it together. We're focused on it and we're working through the tough decisions that have to be made.

Joubin: There's so many sales leaders listening this right now, calling their marketing peers being like we got it, we got to work on this. You were at Doc. You sign at 1.50. The category wasn't created yet, But boy, did that become a pretty cool thing. Are there any lessons that you learned creating that category? Because you've bounced around all different industries? And the only common theme is that you're creating a category and extraordinarily fast growth. Are there any lessons that you pulled from that experience? I'll kind of leave it open ended, but things that you felt or learned there that have been pretty consistent across then Mongo trip actions. Question makes sense. I know it's super Open ended.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I do remember that 1 50 Keith Krach, CEO getting on the stage, say, And with our CFO Mike, we are going to be the clinics of E Signature and the one who claims a majority of the category people are going to Doc. You sign things not electronically signed something. They're going to dock, you sign it and they were really painting the vision of that. And one of the things we do is we align the company around one goal, which was volume of documents. We wanted to get the millionth documents signed, and it was a way to align. If you're in customer success, you're making sure you're enabling the companies to have more use cases signing electronic. You might start with sales use case signing contracts, but now you're doing facilities and procurement and onboarding and hiring. And so I think at the beginning you start with one use case, but then figure out how to go out into all the other use cases. So even in marketing, okay, my first persona with sales and contracts, and we targeted the sales persona and we went all in on that. But once you got sales now, it was like, Okay, let's go after procurement. Let's go after HR and you're taking over all places, anyone basically over the age of 18 that signed something is a target. But if you went after everyone, you're not going to get that far. So focus on a use case. Focus on industry, focus on a problem, solve it, get product market fit and expand. If I think about it, most companies start out solving a problem and your problem market fit, then your next thing is to get product market fit once you have product market fit. Now you move to platform with multiple products, and it's kind of a great way to pick a company. If you can find some with product market fit that's going to grow. You take a large addressable market like electronic signature, like travel business travel. Like the database. These are all very large markets with incumbents, that of legacy incumbents that have been there a long time. And how do you disrupt it? Will you come up with a product that's so different? It's gonna be 10 X better than any other product that's out there, and it's got to have customers that love it. Mongo db High NPS Score. Developers loved it easy. Use 10 x better than Oracle Scalable, I swear. Products built after the iPhone disrupting legacy. Large markets that have good product market fit. You should go work there. You think about it. You've got a massive market, a product everyone loves. It's only a matter of time you're going to take the market if you execute. So, Doc, you sign. The incumbent was really just fax machines in the old way of doing business, and now we've got a better way of doing it. You've got the iPhone coming out. People are used to interacting consumer experience on their app, and you're doing everything in real time database. Oracle Legacy Been around forever Mongo came in a very different way to do it. You could build apps quickly. They scaled. Now do database as a service. Now released Atlas. Same thing. Trip actions. It's a industry full of point solutions you've got booking with concur. You've got to go work with Amex and the travel agencies. Then you've got to tie it back to expense management. Either expense. If I or concur all these disparate solutions or you could just have one platform trip, actions comes in. You've got booking TMC expense management all in one. Why do the point solutions? So you come in. Everyone loves the travel product. You figure out expense management. They love that. Now you're disrupting a massive market. You've got travels 1.5 trillion. Just business travel. You've got expense management. Another couple trillion, right? You bring all that together. One platform on a modern stack you don't want to go by these point solutions that nobody likes.

Joubin: You might give Carlos a run for his money for the c r. O of this company, one of our portfolio companies rippling. It's basically workday for SMB s, and it does everything every single HR thing. They're rolling up like 10 different products into one just raised at $7 billion on trip actions trajectory.

Meagen Eisenberg: And it's

Joubin: insanity. I've never seen anything like it on the problem product

Meagen Eisenberg: platform,

Joubin: maturation cycle. Having done them all, which do you think is the hardest to pull off?

Meagen Eisenberg: I I think it's hard to get the product market fit, so everyone's trying to solve a problem, and to do it, you go to fixate on the user. And so Doc, sign fixated on the user, is going to be fixated on the developer trip actions fixated on the traveler and created a product the traveler loves and got a love for it, which drove adoption. And now you get product market fit. You need the team to go execute because you've got a product people love. Now you need to make sure people are aware of it, and then scale that up. So I came in. We had product market fit on the travel side. We're really going into more of the platform side of it. And that's multi product. So we're traveling expense management. Now we're playing against expense. If I Brexit ramp divvy, that's the whole point solution set of products. And we're in there with travel expense management and payments and corporate cards. It's different when you go platform because you're now going after a bunch of point solutions. You have to create that new category, which I don't think is easy. So I don't know. They're all hard, right? Pick a problem people are going to pay money for. That's hard. Okay, you got that. Now get product market fit. You built something people love. Now you got to get it out to the masses. Okay? You get it out to the masses Now you got to keep scaling and growing. You're doing the platform and you have multiple solutions on that. And so I would say any of them are easier, right? I think that's you going from 0 to 10,000,000 10,200 million. One billion and they all have different challenges.

Joubin: I agree. I live in the problem and product market fit size of companies. And it's not for the faint of heart. It's gnarly, and often the problem that I've started to see, at least in this current environment is there so much money that companies are getting one or two customers and then throwing 10 million of venture dollars at Facebook, Google LinkedIn ads and really inefficiently trying to manufacture product market fit. That's not what it is. Product market fit feels like you're being pulled like you're being extracted out of market. You don't know what to do with the leads there. It feels like what's happening at loom. Yeah, it feels like what's happening. A product board feels like what's happening in trip actions.

Meagen Eisenberg: We grew 700% the first year I came in

Joubin: a trip action 500%

Meagen Eisenberg: the second year. Yeah, I mean, that's product market fit when you're growing in that 70%, we're talking 500% because you have a solution that people love and it solves a pain.

Joubin: Yeah, I couldn't agree more on the 1 50 to 1200 ride at Doc, you sign what was the worst part about that. What was your lowest point?

Meagen Eisenberg: The lowest point? And can I preface

Joubin: this? Your resume along with every other. One of my guests reads like this up into the right incredible success story. And it's pretty much the least relatable thing that I could possibly tell a story about, because that's just not how it is. That's not how it feels. Even product market fit has dark days.

Meagen Eisenberg: I was there 3.5 years. I loved it and my role kept expanding and I took on more and more and we really went up market there. So we were heavy into corporate mid market and we went up enterprise. So there are different challenges as you go up market. It's a different go to market and we didn't want to lose S and B. So you have to keep the engine going on S and B while going and building out mid market going into enterprise longer sales cycle, different selling packaging. And so I think the biggest challenge of these companies that can hit all these markets that have massive addressable markets is to go to market is different in each of those segments. And so you need to be able to organize the team and the flash point, Your website. If I'm A s a P and I come to your website and it says all this enterprise speak, it doesn't feel like it's for me if I go there and I'm Enterprise and you've got a bunch of little people I've never heard of. I think you're not relevant. And so I think, the biggest challenge as we grew as being able to be something very specific to everyone. And you have to be smart. You gotta use your technology. You've got to use personalization. You're figuring out who's coming to your site. You're adapting.

Meagen Eisenberg: I wanted to be the CMO of Dock Houston, and I didn't get the job. I went for it. At the end of my three years, our CMO was leaving and that I knew I wanted to be a CMO, and so I went to the CEO. And so I said, I want to be your CMO and I went for it for 12 weeks. I fought for I had just had my third child. The CMO resigned the day I delivered and within four days I was like, I want to be your CMO And I fought for it during my maternity leave to go be it. And ultimately I didn't get it. I learned a lot in the process. I learned what I need to do. I built confidence, and eventually I ended up leaving to go be a CMO. But that didn't turn out the way I wanted. I loved working at Doc. You sign and they did amazing. And they should. I think they made the right decision at that time, I think, Yeah, it would have been hard for me to transition with my peer group to lead it, I think, And to be seen in that position, I had never been a CMO. They brought in Brad Brooks who came from Juniper. He'd been a CMO. He saw the transition that was coming. I was kind of a up and comer. And so, you know, I think ultimately they made the right decision. But it was for me, like I went for it and didn't get it. So, you know, I don't get everything I go for, but I do try for a lot of things,

Joubin: this perspective that you have now of. I call it content, indifference towards the decision or agreeing with it. Did you feel that way? Then

Meagen Eisenberg: I came to terms with it and I was like, I'm gonna learn from this guy. Brad is going to come in and I worked for him for about three months. I was like, He knows something I don't know. He knows about Brand. I'd never run brand or corporate calms. He brought me in to listen from some of the agencies he like took conflict head on a different way, like he's like I love conflict. It's how I get to know my peers and work with them And I was like, Oh, that's a really interesting way of looking at different points of view and building relationships and at the same time, Mongo DB was trying to get me to come be there CMO and I kind of had your thought. Well, I've never done the developer marketing there in New York. I'm in the Bay Area, but over the six months back and forth with them and say No, I'm not going to come to your CMO. I somehow built confidence and I thought, okay, if this CEO thinks I can do it and has confidence in me. Then maybe I need to go do it. Dave thinks I can do it. He sees something that my current company doesn't see. And he said to me, You know, you got to prove to them they made the wrong choice, and it was right. I had to go and go. No, I can't do this and go build this team and go after it. So, I mean, I'm kind of a person who tries for a lot of things, and I don't get them all. But I have so many things I'm trying for. I'm okay with it. Like, Okay, I didn't get that. But I got these three things. I'm a glass half full, so I'm always seeing the silver lining. The learning. It's just how I get through failure. I just go. Okay. Well, that was supposed to happen. When I went to business school, I applied to Harvard and Yale. I didn't get into Harvard, and at the time I was like, Oh, I didn't get into Harvard, but I was like, Okay, well, I got to yell for reason. Yeah, I met my husband I got a great job coming out of that. I made a network from there. I am in the camp of things happen for a reason. You take the learnings from them and you make whatever happened, the best thing that could've happened, I don't know. It's like self fulfilling.

Joubin: But is that perspective retrofitted? What I mean by that is like now you're in a happy relationship with your husband. Now you have these great kids. Now you're really happy with the way that you're. But in the moment, do you also feel that way?

Meagen Eisenberg: Does that make sense? I went for it for 12, like it still feels like a loss

Joubin: at that point.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I mean, I went for it, but I fail fast. You know, you didn't get it, get on board and move forward. Changes happening. I don't know. I think that's part of my success is if something doesn't go the right way, I figure out the situation. I'm in and I deal with it and then I make the best of that or I prove something wrong or I go fix it. I think it's that determination and what do you want and go figure it out. I don't know. I think attitude has a lot to do with not giving up.

Joubin: Was it awkward when Brad obviously knew that you were running at that job? And then he became like, There's a little bit of

Meagen Eisenberg: for sure? I interviewed him and I sat down to interview, and I didn't know they had told him that I was also going for the CMO job

Joubin: during the interview and

Meagen Eisenberg: he knew. And so I was interviewing, interviewing, and then towards the end, he goes, So they told me you're also interviewing for this job. We asked me, like, kind of a very pointed question, and I was like, Oh, this is awkward, but I'll deal with it. I deal. I live in awkward. So I was like, Okay, well, yes, I am. And this is a long term career thing for me and what I want to do, And he was a very mature leader, and when he was given the job, he quickly set up time with me. We went to breakfast and I told, Hey, this is what I want to learn from you. Yes, this is what I want to do but I can obviously learn a lot. I've never done brand calms. And he did. He pulled me into the agency, brought an agency, had worked with that juniper. He let me go to those meetings. I really felt like he did everything he should have done when you have someone that's there on the team that you want to retain. But they didn't get the position they're going for and I think he handled it really well.

Joubin: What do you mean? You live in awkward?

Meagen Eisenberg: I just I mean, I don't know. I think I'm used to dealing with tense situations.

Meagen Eisenberg: I always say marketing is a bunch of plates spinning in the air because you're doing brand. You're doing product marketing. You're going global, you're going up enterprise, you're building sales decks, you're enabling the field. You're enabling customer success. You're dealing with a fire drill. You've got press. You've got to get your CEO thought leadership. You're running events. You've got all these mediums online and at any one time, one little mistake. It's very visual. It's not like you're an engineer coding something, and everyone watches your code in marketing. Everything's visual. Everyone's a great marketer, Everyone has an opinion. You're supposed to be growing learning. You've got a competitive landscape that's constantly changing, and you've got to balance all that and you're managing a team that is not all the same. You're not hiring 50 reps in the West and the East. You've got Enterprise Mid Market. No, you've got very different personalities. You got your product marketers who are analytical, M B. A s looking at the industry, crafting messaging, understanding the persona. You've got your creatives, your designers who are definitely a different type of group, that our understanding, how people react to colors and design. And they're doing booths and direct mail and different things. You've got your marketing operations, they're running results. They're setting up dashboards there, and we have 46 technologies and marketing. You can integrate all those technologies. You've got a website that has 20 technologies on it, and it needs to look good. It needs to serve a bunch of different users that are coming in. So you're managing Web developers? I've got front end developers, backend developers. Full stack. You've got a European team there, localizing. And to get anything out the door to launch a product. You have to get all these different types of personalities to work together because nothing can go out the door if it's not relevant to the persona like you've got to have the backbone, which is your product marketing. Understand the persona and messaging. But those folks usually aren't great at taking it to market. So now you've got demand. Gen folks, you've got to get it out on email. Social media, press, Web It's gotta look good. Nothing goes out the door. Unless the designers are looking at it, your sales reps need to know what's going out. You've got to enable them with all their content, their decks. Now you've got a CSM team, your customer success. You gotta make sure your customers know about the new features. It's a ton of teams are bringing together, and at any one time you make a bad decision. You've got to go clean that up, and then the market landscape is changing nonstop and you are beholden to a lot of people. You need to serve your sales team. You need to serve your customers. You need a partner with product because you need to know what's coming and the launches. So it's a lot of different things going on. And you need to serve your people team because your employment brand marketing needs to help with that. Your LinkedIn brand. You're social you're trying to hire. We've got to hire a lot of people. You gotta hire 100 200 sales reps. You gotta hire a bunch of engineers. Your brand is part of marketing, so make sure you're out there getting the right messaging out in the market. You're enabling your executives to be out there speaking. There's a lot that goes on in marketing, and I think that to manage the different personalities, the different functions and to get them to work all together in one orc is a lot. So you live in, I would say awkward. You live in just knowing there's a lot that you need to do. So you prioritize.

Joubin: Drop the mic. You just laid out a marketing manifesto.

Joubin: My who would have thought a small question about living in awkward list? Just wow, a couple of things that you just said, actually, many things, but just random thoughts that I have. These are like really basic stupid thoughts, so just indulge me, will you? I live in Carlos World, not your world. So let me just preface that. Okay? So I would think that attribution to skill in a marketer is very difficult compared to a salesperson. What I mean by that is that it's very black and white. How good you are. Generally speaking, Yeah,

Meagen Eisenberg: either make the number. You don't

Joubin: make the number you don't and then you can be very specific. There is not that much collaboration like don't get me wrong. There is. It's not the same as marketing to get a product out the door as an example, like you close a deal, you can pretty specifically go into the details of that deal or the way you hit your number or the way you approach building a territory or what PG looks like for you. There's a lot of ways to be very specific about it. I imagine it's not as cut and dry and marketing. Maybe I'm wrong. So that's question one. Is that true? Question two. If it is true, does that also mean that in a marketing orig there's more political jockeying because you need to make sure that you have attribution for the things that you do again. I'm just throwing things out there something wrong?

Meagen Eisenberg: I mean, it's true. Marketing, art and science, Right? There's a lot of things we can measure. There's 15 plus metrics, depending. If you're looking at social media, there's metrics. If you're looking at your website, there's metrics. If you're looking at measure product marketing by sales productivity, if your reps are productive, product market is doing their job and PR is doing their job because they go in there. They've heard of you and then you have all the hurdles that the customer is gonna throw at you and you're ready for them. And so you look at brand everything in marketing as a metric as well as the whole funnel. Are you giving the right leads? Are they converting with the SDR? Are they qualified? Do they then go on to the reptiles? The rep creating opportunities. Do they close the opportunity? So, yes, in marketing each of the functions on my team measure those 15,000 to see if their inner function is doing the right thing. But at my level, I've got to tie it all the way. Did we hit the revenue number or not? What are the company goals? And so no matter what function you're in, you're tied to revenue. We do not succeed. If sales does not hit the revenue target, how much

Joubin: of your compensation is tied to revenue, or do you have a variable compensation

Meagen Eisenberg: tied to

Joubin: the number of

Meagen Eisenberg: Yes, yes. But even if you don't, you're not going to be the CMO anymore. If sales doesn't hit the revenue target, right, your job is to make sure you hit your company targets and it's the quarterly revenue targets, and it's the overall brand. I mean, there's a lot of things you're thinking about the future of the company and where it's going and the short term hitting those goals. So as far as ATTRIBUTION aligned marketing to the revenue target, yes. Eventually, the leaders of those functions trickle it down to the individual level at the end of the day, at the beginning of every all hands I look at our dashboard, which is the funnel For that month, and everyone the 50 people in marketing now are looking at where are we on our revenue targets? Where are we on opportunities. Where are we on qualified through the SDR, or how many leads that are qualified? The volume and I make sure everyone looks at sort of the North Star of that. And if you want to change behavior, then change what they're measured on. But you're right. It is different than sales. You can tell right away if a rep is going to make it or not. It's pretty clear. Either made the business target or you didn't in marketing. It's not completely clear, except that if they're not making their revenue targets, you're messing up something in marketing, right? If nobody's heard of you, go look at your PR, your content and your event strategy. If you're not getting enough leads, go look at demand. And what are you doing to capture the people? Once they've heard about you, right, and you're bringing all that together.

Joubin: I will play Devil's advocate to myself a little bit, which is that in sales, especially in this market, especially in the valley, there are mediocre reps at trip actions today that look like heroes because the business is growing 700%. There was those reps at Mongo. There's those reps at Doc. You send those reps at every one of these insanely fast growing companies. At some point when you're seven, Xing the business there is more demand than there is people to meet that demand. That's the way that these high growth businesses go. And so everyone's hitting presidents club everyone over achieved under quota. I'm not picking on the company that you work from just giving examples.

Meagen Eisenberg: If I go, is that high enough?

Joubin: Well, so So what you end up doing is you have to distill it down to qualities and characteristics of those people. So the line of questioning that you ask is a similar one that I ask. I want to understand how you learn. I understand your curiosity. And so I unpack. Where do you learn from? I wanna understand resourcefulness. And so I uncover resourcefulness. I want to figure out, Are you competitive? I want to figure out how you're resilient. I want to figure out,

Meagen Eisenberg: go through a global pandemic. As a travel company, we'll talk about resiliency, go from zero revenue to back to revenue.

Joubin: Tell me about that Carlos and I recorded, and probably June of last Year

Meagen Eisenberg: 2020 and

Joubin: and I kind of have a rule of thumb that I generally try to not talk about covid on the show because the idea is that hopefully, in 10 years someone can still listen to these episodes and extract value independent of the current events. However, Carlos, when we talk because we had to talk

Meagen Eisenberg: like this travel management

Joubin: company and he said it's not very good right now, like things are not very good. And he said, The one opportunity that we have is we grew up so quickly that none of the systems and processes that we had in place were built for the scale that we needed to go ahead. Our base was just not wide enough. And so he said, This is kind of our opportunity right now to rebuild a lot of those systems to enable us to get to the other side of this whenever that is.

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I think he's short selling, you know, it was really interesting. Carlos joined, and then Covid hit a month later, right? No. But what I'm saying is I think he's one of the reasons we came out so strongly out of this is he took us up market to enterprise and landed really large deals and really validate. I mean, that was our goal to go to market and enterprise, and his rigor and ability to come in and hire the right talent and focus on enterprise and enterprise is still traveling. He also diversified us. We went into a lot of other industries because who was traveling? Healthcare is traveling. You had manufacturing traveling. You had retail had to go to their stores. So there were other industries traveling. So he took us into other industries and he took us up Market and enterprise, and these logos that he brought on just really validated us up market. Um, so definitely. He was the right hire at the right time, and he came from the PTC grit. I loved having him as a partner. The other thing we did that years we launched liquid, so we had to go into another market. Outside of business travel was was expensive management payments,

Joubin: and I didn't realize it's going to be a Carlos appreciation show. But in Ben Horowitz's book, he talks about peacetime and wartime CEOs. Carlos is a freaking wartime cr oh, he's a wartime CR Oh, so just to paint a picture for the audience listening Because everyone at least in our general world, that's in tech. While there was a lot of hurt in the world tech experience, the incredible General Tailwind because everyone went online, everyone

Meagen Eisenberg: digital

Joubin: accelerated digital adoption to an incredible it brought the world five years closer. Yes, that is not what happened to trip actions, because imagine and tell me if this is wrong. But I want to paint this picture appropriately. Imagine if demand overnight was reduced by 90-plus%. Your em que els?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, we're people who are not looking for trouble. So

Joubin: they went from let's call it 1000 a month. I'm just making up numbers to sub 100. Is that fair?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, we were all p gene. It was Everyone was in sales and marketing. I mean, if I think about how marketing changed, we had to go find business and we had to create a sense of urgency and why Now is the time to switch out your platform. You're not traveling, so let's go switch it out and have you come out on a modern solution and our engineers were busy building product that people needed post covid duty of care, health certificates, vaccines, integrations with Sherpa. So you understand the environment where you're at where you're going when you're traveling. So the engineering team built a lot of product and then we double down on liquid and payments. Every company was still had to set up office equipment at home. Had to buy marketing

Joubin: dollars like the expense. If I

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, going into that market that accelerated

Joubin: it's almost like back to your evolution of companies that for you accelerated the urgency to become a platform multiple products. Did you ever think the business wasn't gonna make it? Remember Airbnb, which is in a similar boat to you, had existential moments of They raised a boatload of money, quite a discount, that deal that silver lake did for Airbnb it, whatever it was, $12 billion dollars might be the greatest investment ever.

Meagen Eisenberg: I mean, I voted with my feet. I stay at the company because I thought there was a world where we were going to travel again, and I believe deeply in the executive team and our CEO RL specifically and his ability to pivot build product We had very strong board representation. I knew we would come out of it. We had to streamline. We had to go through layoffs and we had to downsize. But I fundamentally believed this was a massive market. And the incumbents, if anything, we're getting weakened by it. I mean, we had strong product, we had strong investment. We weren't so large that if you think about the big players, they all had massive real estate infrastructure, outdated legacy. They worked. Yeah, they had bloat. They had 12,000 agents. If anything, it weakened them. It accelerated our growth because it weakened the big players and then the little players that weren't smart investing in the product and saving cash like we got our cash burn down really quickly. They went out of business or sold or consolidated. There's been a lot of consolidation, so we've been fortunate. Our leadership team managed cash direction, product build, focus on the user. So when now, as we're coming out, our booking numbers and travel numbers are larger than January 2020, so we are coming out of it and our customers are still only at 50% travel levels. It's just we have enterprise. We have a lot more customers and enterprise clients. And so think of this 3, 46 months from now what travel is going to look like when everyone ramps back up full speed.

Joubin: Okay, so going back to your earlier comment on everything happens for a reason. Like retrospectively you are coming out of this. You did recently raise at 7.25 billion. Congratulations. So this is the real deal. But it couldn't have felt as rosy as you're painting it now. In the Moment.

Meagen Eisenberg: No, not at all. I mean, laying off 20 some people in one day in 15 minute increments so you could talk to everyone that was crying at the end of the day and a stiff drink. That's probably the lowest point in my career.

Joubin: And 25 people you mentioned earlier, about 50 people in New York. So you laid Off.

Meagen Eisenberg: I lived off half my Oregon. I've rehired 20 some people in the last three months.

Joubin: Before the word started to spread, you wanted to make sure the message came from you

Meagen Eisenberg: On the day we got two groups. The team that wasn't impacted in marketing, specifically the team that was. You want to let them know right away? Because if you start to call people slacking, texting, so you need to let people know. And then immediately you're putting times on their calendar and you're it's a 30 minute meeting. But To get to 20 some people and 89 hours and have to go through everything like you want to talk to everyone and you want to talk to him that day and we're in the middle of Covid so you can't see them in person. You can't. It's all zoom. So it's It's the worst way to have to do this and you're getting on and you're going from one emotional conversation to the next and you're talking to them. You're explaining it, and then your people partner is taking the next 15 minutes while you go and talk to the next person. To understand the details, answer more questions, and then you set up more time later and you go back and talk to them. But you want to get to everyone. And I did not have any of my leads on my team do the terminations. No matter if they reported me or not if they were in my order. I talk to every single person. I just felt like one. I couldn't put my leads through that. Most of these have never even terminated anyone, let alone make them go through that. And so I figured I was going to have every single conversation with every single person. And I owed it to everyone on my team Because these are very strong, talented people. We were growing 700%, like zero. So you you owe it to your team.

Joubin: Worst day of your career.

Meagen Eisenberg: Worst day and the night before. No sleeping the three days before. Definitely no sleeping.

Joubin: Just thinking about how they were going to go.

Meagen Eisenberg: Just Yeah, how do I not do this? What other things I can do and how do I cut budget? I mean, I was like trying to hide people left and right, Right. So I figure out, how do I keep everyone on? And I was pivoting people's roles to take on other things and a time where we need to work harder than ever because then after we did that, we had a lot of work to do because we had to pivot all of our message and we went from the best experience in business travel. Or no one was having a great time traveling because of covid to hey, cost control, visibility, safety of employees. We had to rewrite everything. Rewrite website sales, enablement decks. It became very serious tone. And so that meant everything we written. You name it Social Web content. Blogs, enablement. Everything in marketing got redone within, like, two or three weeks.

Joubin: So this stuff always comes up and there's a reason the show has the word written it and grit is forged when you put the iron in the fire those three nights before, yeah, and those subsequent weeks like that's when you build that coat of armor. Yes, if you were to do it again, knowing what you know now, not even the layoffs but the feeling. Are there any things from a personal perspective that you did besides the extremely stiff drink? Maybe it went from a double Triple vodka, but are there any things that you felt like kept you grounded in the moments, giving you perspective where it wasn't just sadness and I don't know, working out or going into going into your closet and reading books like I don't know what it was, but I'm just curious what people are doing as the irons in the fire.

Meagen Eisenberg: We were in a crisis and we were focused. So, yes. Did I try and ride a bike for 30 minutes in the morning to try and relieve stress? Yeah, but at the end of the day, I remember we were sitting there and I saw this Latin proverb and it was like if there's no wind row, so while having to downsize everyone, we needed to row because there was no inbound at this moment. So how are we gonna get out of this situation? Row and wartime? What are things we need to do right now and get everyone focused? Because not only did you lay off people, the people that didn't get laid off have guilt around their colleagues that have left. So how do you tend to their need and they're dealing with the pandemic? Let's not forget about that, but how do you attend to them? But get them focused on what you need to do to get the business moving forward in a different environment. And so I think for two weeks we were just so focused out of focus, you couldn't think about anything else. There's just no time you're going from one thing to the next because you need to lead through. And I did keep thinking, okay. Am I being a good leader right now? What am I doing to lead through this? I can't sit there and shock and pity. Right? Okay. What would a good leader do right now? Well, they're going to focus their going to prioritize. I had stand up meetings every day, the war room every day in the morning. What are the three things we need to do today? And I had the team check in, so I did like a core team of 10 every morning and every night I checked in with the team and then we did. You know, you start layering in the happy hours over zoom the zoom walks, get everyone out of the house because I thought, Oh, my gosh. Everyone's in their apartments. Can they walk in the backyard? Can they walk around the block? What am I doing to get people out of the house safely? What am I doing to get them focused on their job? What do we need to keep doing? And what are we hearing? So it was really a very focused time. If I sat there and just got Wow, this sucks. I would have been dead. I wouldn't have been at the job anymore, So it was a very like, Okay, what do we need to do? Let's focus. Are always doing the same thing. Focused leadership, focus, engineering. Start building product. What does the customer need Focus on your customer

Joubin: and in the boardroom. What did it feel like?

Meagen Eisenberg: We had very supportive board. They were looking at the environment. They brought in what other portfolio companies are looking to do. They got it. They were supportive. They watched us through execution. They put their talent, their energy. I felt very supported by our board.

Joubin: Random question for you. What is the hardest job that you have to hire for every time

Meagen Eisenberg: I feel like it changes Product marketing, I would think in general is a good one. Overall, hiring product marketers is hard because you need solid analytical message like they have to be good at their craft. But They also need to be good at their domain. There's no supplement for someone who's got domain expertise. And so how do you marry someone who knows the domain with someone who knows the academics of product marketing and can translate that into sales enablement. So I find that to be a tough one to hire for.

Joubin: Okay, I've heard you say that in your first six weeks of trip actions you hired 20 plus people. How was part of your evaluation criteria of trip actions as an opportunity, seeing if those that you knew were great would come with you and so kind of like lining them up to be like, Hey, here's what I'm thinking. What would you do? Something that you're interested in? And then you've already kind of warm them up to the idea before stepping into the job.

Meagen Eisenberg: So I have a few people I've worked with that multiple companies over and over again. So certainly that's part of it. But in the transition from basically, I was coming back from New York to the West Coast, and it was actually quite hard, you know, when I joined Monte were dual headquartered, but within a Year two, we consolidated headquarters in New York and pretty much off sites happen in New York. Board meetings happen in New York. All the new execs were getting hired in New York, and so I found it harder to hire for a tech company in New York when most of my network had been in the Bay Area. And so there was some really good, talented people that didn't want to do the cross country thing at the time. And so I actually found it a lot easier to come back to the West Coast and higher. And I had 10 people on my team when I joined Terp actions and I had 24 open headcount. And in some ways there's fires everywhere. There's a bunch of things we need to be doing, and we weren't doing enough to support the sales team. We had Amazing brand. They've done a lot of great work on the brand. We had an amazing product, but we needed to build out all the functions we need to build out product marketing and content we need to hire in Europe. We needed a design team. We needed a Web team. Everything was really outsourced to a lot of agencies. And so bringing that in house message alignment, there was a lot that needed to happen, and I knew I needed to hire leaders and I needed to hire their teams. So when I looked at the 20 I brought in half the leaders. I had already worked with that prior companies so that I hired people that had been at Doc. You sign with me. Maybe they weren't at Dock Houston anymore, but I had worked with them at Dock Houston. I'd worked with them an Ark site. I have 12 people I'd probably worked with over the last decade, and so as soon as I knew I was going to trip actions, I did start to reach out to different leaders, saying, Hey, I have a new opportunity about to go work on where you are, You happy? What are you doing? But if I had waited for them to join and then spend a month or two months to hire, I never could hire that fast. So I was hiring the leaders and the people on their team, and then I was introducing them to each other before they both started because I just knew Hey, I needed people to do this function within it as well as the leader. And I prioritize hiring over anything else because I couldn't dig out. Marketing is fire drills all day long, Especially if you're behind and you're scaling the company's scaling. So value growing 700% that year. You are already leapfrogging what you need to do in marketing in like a month. And we bought 46 technologies, right? We had to implement those. We rewrote the entire website In two years. We're at 46 now, but we probably about 20. That first year, we rewrote the entire website by code. We used to have 13 pages. We have 1300 pages on our website. We built blogs. We did a bunch of things. We had to put the right people process and technology in place to scale. We had to get a budget. I had to set up QB ours for marketing. And so, yeah, I hired leaders and people on their team. So then they could start doing the excellence in their functions so we could scale the company. But there was no way I was gonna do it by myself with 10 folks that didn't have those functions.

Joubin: I can't help but ask you like I listen to you talk and I feel like you're in your first ever job. The way that you care so much shocks me because you've accomplished so much. What are you still trying to prove? I can't help but listen to you caring so much, so deeply passionate about this thing. Why? Where is that coming from?

Meagen Eisenberg: I mean, I mean, that's why I love marketing. I mean, it's hard. You could be a CMO and you never master it. And it's because of all the moving parts. It's the people. It's the new technology that's out there. It's your competitive landscape. It's going from product market, fit to platform fit. There's always something you're dealing with. New salespeople, new functions going upmarket, and I don't know I love it. I think I would be bored if I wasn't Dude, I like the challenge of it. I like working, and there's a lot of satisfaction from that. And so, yeah, I've always been someone who likes to take this stuff on.

Joubin: It's amazing just to be clear, it's it's It's inspiring. You've said in the past that success comes from your ability to look at a problem and solve it. When you're interviewing people for your team, how do you qualify problem solving skills?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I mean, unless I'm hiring a specific leader. Usually they've been vetted by the team from more of a domain standpoint, and I'm looking at their background. I'm looking at the feedback, and now I'm trying to figure out Are they the right fit culturally for us in the company? And are they how I want to orient the team? And what I mean by that is I try to get rid of the victims. I want the problem solvers. I want the ones who I can get very big hairy problems to, and they go find out how to solve it. They figure out how to get people on other teams to do what they need, even though they don't work for them. And so I'm interviewing. I'm asking things like, What do you love about your current job? And I'm hearing that. What do they love about it? Because usually you're interviewing someone who's not looking to leave. If you're trying to poach someone or go in there and then I asked them what they hate about it and what they hate about it is very telling if they come back and say What I hate about my job is I told him we should do this and we're not doing that. You know, I don't have enough budget or I don't have enough headcount. Nobody's listening to me, and I think, Wow, they're going to come here and nobody's gonna listen to them right, Because nobody listens to. If you don't sell the value aligned people on goals, you have to earn the respect of your colleagues peers to get the money, to get the budget, to get the company to go in that direction. So I'm looking for people who can figure out What do we need to do? How do I sell the value to the team? How do I make the right decisions you execute, make right decisions, You learn all those things. So I want someone who's going to come and solve problems, not come to me at my desk and say all the reasons why they couldn't do what we needed to do. I'm hiring them to come to me and go. Okay, let's try this. I think we should do this. And if you can go solve these big problems, you're gonna also get promoted. I'm gonna give you more big hairy problems, right? Your role is going to expand. You're gonna move up in it because people who move up, they can take on more problems, solve them, orient people and all of that. So I'm trying to find people who can come and solve problems, and we deal with a lot of change. I need someone who can deal with change. I don't want someone to just come in and just do the day to day startups are all about figuring out running hard, beating the competition, doing something, maybe differently. Marketing. You have to be creative. You can't just do the same thing over and over again, right? As soon as you found a way to to win, share on a social platform of changes or that gets old, you have to keep re inventing, inventing yourself. So people who can innovate and do that and solve it versus coming to me going. You know, I need you to solve this problem or this person won't do what I want. Okay, great. Let me go. Help you figure out this person like people who are political, stopping what we need to get done because they can't figure out the relationship. That's not a great way to use your time. You want to be facing the competition, attacking the market, solving the problem. Not that you know, you have to deal with the internal people stuff. But if you can bring people on who know how to collaborate, work and do that, your team moves much faster and it's a better place to work. Who wants to work in a place where people aren't collaborating, taking on tough problems and conflict is there, but work through it.

Joubin: I'm smiling because trip actions obviously has more than one wartime executive on the staff with you. What do you hate the most about your job?

Meagen Eisenberg: Sometimes it's trying to find those right hires, right? You know, I see a whole I know I need to go get this very specific candidate and I'm kissing a lot of frogs and I haven't found the right candidate. It takes a lot of time. It's an important part of your job and everyone needs to be good at hiring, but sometimes, like it's not going out there and trying to get people and reach out. You know, I'm basically selling into LinkedIn, and it used to be you'd meet these people out in the wild. You meet them at events, you get them. Right now, we're all online. I think we just have to get out there just to meet people and build networks. If you went to a bunch of events, you saw people and talented people and met them. That's a much better way than to go find people on LinkedIn and try to reach into them, try to convince them to talk to you, then have a conversation. It's better networking being out there. I think the job was easier to hire when we weren't all at home.

Joubin: Speaking of hiring, are you hiring? What are you hiring for? And are there any key roles that you want to shout out for the audience in case they're listening as the first CMO guest and the marketing audience hasn't gotten any love until now that you want to shout out?

Meagen Eisenberg: Yeah, I mean, so we're hiring like crazy. We're hiring, certainly always an engineering sales recruiting. We'll hire probably another 1000 people this year. Marketing specifically always looking for strong product marketers are liquid product expense payments. Corporate cards. I want fintech people. I want domain expertise. So anyone that's in that space that loves tackling that market come talk to me. I'm also the GM of lemonade, which is personal travel. So if you use this for business travel, you can use us to book your personal trips. I'm hiring a leader for that team. Basically, you're running a whole function, thinking about the product direction, marketing, working with engineering. And it's fun because it's more the consumer side. Yeah, consumer marketing, for that is a lot of fun, and we have 4000 customers you can market into, and we're adding more customers every month. So, yeah, I'm hiring an a lemonade world as well.

Joubin: I asked this question to every guest. What does the word grit mean to you?

Meagen Eisenberg: Not giving up, I think, And taking what's thrown at you and find a solution, right? Figure a way to get through it. It's the glass half full figuring out these are the cards are dealt either play a new game or figure out how to make it work, and I think that's a big part of it.

Meagen Eisenberg: Don't give up,

Joubin: Megan. Thank you. Thank you. That's it. Thanks for listening. If you're just discovering the podcast, we have a lot more episodes with Cros from organizations like snowflake twilio slack, LinkedIn box, etcetera. If you want to keep up or support the show, the best way to do so is by following us on Spotify subscribing on Apple and leaving a review. Thanks. Talk soon.