This episode features an interview with Matt Rivera, Chief Marketing Officer at Day & Zimmermann and Gary Sevounts, Chief Marketing Officer at Simpplr. Matt has worked for Day & Zimmermann for 34 years, from payroll administrator to the first person in the marketing department. He leads a diverse team of marketers and communications professionals who contribute to a cohesive, professional and high-performing marketing organization. Gary is a veteran CMO with a track record of building high-growth demand and revenue engines, effective marketing teams, differentiated brands, and establishing categories. Previously, he was CMO at Malwarebytes, Socure, and Equifax’s Identity and Fraud Division. In this episode, Miriam, Matt, and Gary explore the connection between customer experience and employee experience, the importance of authenticity and transparency in storytelling, and leveraging AI to enhance communication and measurement.
This episode features an interview with Matt Rivera, Chief Marketing Officer at Day & Zimmermann and Gary Sevounts, Chief Marketing Officer at Simpplr. Matt has worked for Day & Zimmermann for 34 years, from payroll administrator to the first person in the marketing department. He leads a diverse team of marketers and communications professionals who contribute to a cohesive, professional and high-performing marketing organization. Gary is a veteran CMO with a track record of building high-growth demand and revenue engines, effective marketing teams, differentiated brands, and establishing categories. Previously, he was CMO at Malwarebytes, Socure, and Equifax’s Identity and Fraud Division.
In this episode, Miriam, Matt, and Gary explore the connection between customer experience and employee experience, the importance of authenticity and transparency in storytelling, and leveraging AI to enhance communication and measurement.
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“ With the automation that we have today for the employee experience, you can do that and then transfer it right over into the external marketing. You're tweaking the message. But it's the same types of messaging. It's the same campaigns. We're looking at the same analytics. All of those things really start connecting a lot. I think, in a lot of cases, the employee experience and what you're doing there, if you're doing it right, it's authentic, can really drive some of the marketing stuff too.” – Matt Rivera
“ Brand starts internally. It starts with a mission and starts with the employees believing in why. Why did we start the company? Why are we doing what we're doing all day long? Why are we passionate about it? In the companies that I worked with and I dealt with, when there is that connection and it's genuine, employees become ambassadors. In the companies where that connection doesn't exist, people don't believe it and it’s just words, then it can take a negative turn really quickly.” – Gary Sevounts
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:51): Matt and Gary’s career journeys
*(07:01): Getting to know Matt and Gary
*(08:41): Exploring the connection between CX and EX
*(12:56): The art of great storytelling
*(24:15): Marketing strategies for Internal Communications
*(35:36): Leveraging technology for employee engagement
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Links:
Learn more about Day & Zimmermann
Connect with Miriam on LinkedIn
Miriam Connaughton: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Simpplr's Cohesion podcast. My name is Miriam Connaughton, the Chief People Officer at Simpplr.
Miriam Connaughton: And today I'm delighted to say I have two guests. Uh, we're mixing it up a little bit. We have two folks who come from the marketing world, Matt Rivera from a wonderful company called Day & Zimmermann, who we'll learn a little bit more about in a moment. And Matt also has, uh, marketing as well as internal comms. And someone who I have come to know and love who is our CMO here at Simpplr.
Miriam Connaughton: We're very lucky to have Gary Sevounts who has been at Simpplr since last year. So welcome Matt and Gary.
Gary Sevounts: Thank you, Miriam.
Matt Rivera: Yep. Thanks. Great to be here.
Miriam Connaughton: So first of all, we like our listeners just to get to know a little bit. Who are they listening to? Who are they hearing from? So Matt, first of all, maybe tell us a little bit, first of all, about Day & Zimmermann and your role there.
Matt Rivera: Cool. Thanks. Well, it's great to be here. It's a great podcast series. I love this series, by the way, lots of good stuff here. So Day & Zimmermann, I typically shorten it to D and Z is one of the largest privately held third generation family on companies in the U S so really big. We're about 3 billion. And simply put, we put people to work.
Matt Rivera: We have a staffing company. That's one of the oldest technical staffing companies in the country. We say we protect our freedoms because we build embassies and we protect embassies. We have people protecting our embassies and in dangerous places. And, uh, and believe it or not, we make some munitions as well that we do that for the army.
Matt Rivera: And we help our customers power and improve the world. So we've been for a long time, one of the largest providers of nuclear maintenance and modification services, and we build a lot of things. And now we're building again, modern embassies, big munitions, modern munitions plants and solar and renewable energy type projects.
Matt Rivera: So it's really diverse company, really a lot of cool things that we do.
Miriam Connaughton: And the size of the population, just to give our listeners a sense of the scale of the company?
Matt Rivera: We have about 37, 000 employees across the world, but about 2, 500 that we consider full time staff that are not working on projects that we communicate with on a regular basis.
Miriam Connaughton: Very cool. And just a little bit, Matt, about your role, because it combines, interestingly, marketing and internal comms.
Matt Rivera: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Well, I'm kind of a unicorn, so look quick, because I've been at the same company for almost 34 years. Uh, you don't see that a lot nowadays, but we're very fortunate. I worked on the staffing side coming up in the business and then took over about six years as a chief marketing officer and that included internal communications as well as external marketing, branding, all of those things.
Matt Rivera: So it's been a really cool journey for me and a long journey, but I'm enjoying it, still enjoying it, still having a lot of fun.
Miriam Connaughton: Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. They're kind of becoming a thing of the past, but it's very cool to have such a great career and do it in one place. Excellent. Good for you. And so Gary, I think our listeners are somewhat familiar with Simpplr, this being our podcast.
Miriam Connaughton: So, but maybe give our listeners a little sense of your career journey. You don't have to go back to day one, but your career journey and kind of, you know, where you've been prior to Simpplr.
Gary Sevounts: Absolutely. Thank you, Miriam. So my journey started from my interest in both journalism and computer science, which is a very strange combination of things.
Gary Sevounts: It's sort of like left brain and the right brain. And I discovered that I absolutely love tech and I got a degree in computer science and master's in business. And I tried virtually every role in technology from software engineering to tech support, to quality assurance, to product management, to marketing.
Gary Sevounts: And I realized marketing is really what I love because it includes everything from storytelling to metrics, analytics, building success of the companies, and really. Truly understanding the technology and your target personas. This is my fifth CMO role. Some of my previous CMO roles included being a CMO of Malwarebytes, of a company called Socure, as well as being CMO Equifax's Identity and Fraud Division.
Gary Sevounts: And the reason I joined Simpplr is. The importance I put for culture, I believe that it's true happiness to do the work you love, and I really believe that culture, communications, happiness, and productivity are really important, and what Simpplr does, it really brings that all together from in one place where it can build culture to empower the world.
Gary Sevounts: Frictionless communications and make employees productive and happy.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, there you go in a nutshell. And so we're going to dig more into that whole kind of marketing, internal comms, you know, partnership and lots of goodness. But before we do, we like to kind of do a little bit of quick fire, get to know you a little better.
Miriam Connaughton: There's no wrong answer here. Don't overthink it. Say what first comes to your mind. So I'm going to go to you first of all, Gary. Tea or coffee?
Gary Sevounts: Coffee is happiness to me and I have Nespresso Maker right by my desk.
Miriam Connaughton: I know, I steal it often. I steal it often. Thank you for bringing your Nespresso into the office.
Miriam Connaughton: What about you, Matt?
Matt Rivera: Oh, tea all the way. Green tea and I've been drinking it for years. I've never had a cup of coffee in my life.
Miriam Connaughton: Healthy goodness, there you go. So if it was your dream vacation, would it be chilling by the beach or scaling a snowy top mountain? Go to you first, Matt.
Matt Rivera: Definitely beach, warmth, especially this time of year.
Matt Rivera: Um, all, all about the warmth.
Miriam Connaughton: There you go. What about you, Gary? What's, what would be your poison?
Gary Sevounts: It would be absolutely beach, but it has to include cycling.
Miriam Connaughton: There you go. And let's say you could kind of have your superpower, but only for one day. What would that superpower be? Go to you first Matt, go for it.
Matt Rivera: I think I would be able to help, help a lot of people in short order. So I don't know what that would look like, but you got to fly around and help a lot of people.
Miriam Connaughton: There you go. Make some wishes for everybody. Fabulous. Gary, what about you?
Gary Sevounts: It would be similar to Matt's to have ability to help people to build confidence and accomplish that the dreams they have without setback of self doubt.
Miriam Connaughton: Wow. So two amazingly empathetic, altruistic CMOs. I'm so delighted to be talking with you today.
Matt Rivera: Making wishes come true. That's what we do.
Miriam Connaughton: There you go. There you go. So great leaping off point because one of the things I, you know, I'm interested in exploring, so I'm a Chief People Officer. I come very much from that people agenda as well.
Miriam Connaughton: And I'm fascinated by the connection between CX and EX. You know, we've long talked about it, researched it, a lot published about it. Just interested, first of all, to get your perspectives on. That relationship that you see alive in organizations, kind of, how do you think about it? Especially, you know, you, Matt, because you own aspects of both.
Miriam Connaughton: You own that customer relationship and you also include important aspects of the employee relationship with your comms. How do you think about that dynamic?
Matt Rivera: The brand starts inside. So if you're building a brand, it starts inside and it's with your people, how they treat each other, how they treat their customers.
Matt Rivera: So like, that's the way it, you know, if the employees are living the brand, then the customers will see it and it kind of all, you know, all follows. And there's a lot you can do around that. So I'd say it really does begin inside. So if you're caring for the internal experience, you're likely to have a better shot at the external experience as well.
Miriam Connaughton: Inside out for sure. Gary, anything you'd add to that?
Gary Sevounts: Yeah, I want to echo what Matt said. Absolutely. Brand starts internally. It starts with a mission and starts with the employees believing in why, why did we start the company? Why are we doing what we're doing all day long? Why are we passionate about it?
Gary Sevounts: Right. And in the companies that I worked with and I dealt with. When there is that connection and it's genuine, employees become ambassadors. And in the companies where that connection doesn't exist, people don't believe it and it just works. Then it can take a negative turn really quickly.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah. No, that's so important.
Miriam Connaughton: And just kind of let's drill into that a little bit. So starting with the why, the purpose, the mission, what are some of the effective strategies you've seen or used, you know, whether it's more current or in your past that really help bring that purpose and mission alive, both for customers and for employees?
Miriam Connaughton: Because to your point, Matt, it starts from the inside out, but you also want your customers to believe in your brand. as well. So what are some of the strategies that you've seen effective at getting that purpose and mission across, whether it's to customers or employees?
Matt Rivera: You know, one of the best strategies is to be transparent, is to make sure that again, what, what Gary said is it's, you're living what you say you're living.
Matt Rivera: And so, you know, if you're doing that and you're able to do that where people can really feel that it's authentic, that's a strategy. That's one of those things where you can't make that up. You can, to a certain extent, get some window dressing around it and kind of make it feel like maybe a little better than it is, but at some point it has to be transparent and authentic.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, well said. Gary, what would you add to that?
Gary Sevounts: Yeah, I would focus on three things. One, stories. Everything starts with stories in marketing, right? And I can give you several examples, like when I was at a company called Count, we helped customers, and one of the stories was we helped stop the fraud ring that turned out to be doing human trafficking.
Gary Sevounts: And because of our software, the New York Police Department was able to bust that and free people and arrest two criminals who were driving that. And when you tell an impactful story like that, employees believe, right? It's not just words, right? So that's number one. Number two is a consistency of communications.
Gary Sevounts: And number three is the importance of communications, right? Because, I mean, you tell one story, people move on to the next thing, but unless you have a system of communicating consistently and genuinely and through the right channels, the voice kind of get muffled and people get into their silos, right?
Gary Sevounts: So those are my thoughts.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, no, I mean, that that's well said. I mean, storytelling is a great connective tissue, isn't it? Between that kind of customer marketing, storytelling and employee storytelling. And I love your example, Gary, of taking that real life example and bringing it to life, both for employees and for customers.
Miriam Connaughton: What are some of the characteristics of great storytelling, whether it's your stunning, telling that story to a customer to inspire them to reinforce the brand or doing that internally. What are some of the things in your collective, many decades of experience between you? Have you come to know to be true about great storytelling?
Miriam Connaughton: Now, what are some of the things that come to mind for you? Maybe Matt, if you want to go first?
Matt Rivera: Yeah, I think that when you're telling a story, so a couple of things, one would be It's always better to have the people tell the story right so we can craft a good story. We can package it. We can do some things that really help the story or help the narrative of it.
Matt Rivera: And there's things we need to do to do that. So in our jobs we do we help package it. We have some ideas to, you know, to help that. But there's nothing more authentic than having the person tell the story. So, so that's kind of the first thing. And, you know, a good example of what we do right now is we have parts of our business where the work is kind of different than what that's not sitting at a desk.
Matt Rivera: It's not those types of things. And, you know, if we had a corporate head, somebody just talking about it, even having somebody tell the story wouldn't be as impactful as having the person who's doing the job. Tell the story and in part what it's like to work there and just get a flavor for the type of person that is doing, you know, the job you're thinking about doing.
Matt Rivera: So I think that's the first thing. It's making sure that's authentic. I think the second thing when you're telling a story is, you know, just to follow. A little bit of the rules. You don't have to be, you know, really regimented. You know, you don't have to say, you know, we have a beginning, a middle and an end, but you want to tell that story.
Matt Rivera: You want to give them some context and then you want to give them enough details that they connect with that story. And then you want to kind of wrap it up and say, here's why it's important to you. So you got to follow a little bit of storytelling through there and it makes for a better story and it makes for more impact with those stories.
Matt Rivera: And then if you have a few different stories and you connect those, then people kind of go, Oh, I get that's, you know, that's what they're about. And that's what they try to tell me or or even sell me or this is what their company's about.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, my consistency point that Gary mentioned a second ago, Gary, what are some of your additional thoughts on great storytelling?
Gary Sevounts: Absolutely. So journalism being one of my hobbies, the stories are one of the reasons I'm in marketing. And I would say starting with audience and making sure that the story is very relevant to the people that we're trying to speak with. Right. That's number one. Number two, there's going to be an all effect in it, right?
Gary Sevounts: Where people are like, wow, that's interesting. I didn't really think that way. Right. And the third one, which is, I is very important is to be genuine. I think as marketers, we get so many tasks oftentimes that we revert to fluffery. And the genuine story should be devoid of fluffery, truly genuine story accounts and it carries and the receiver can detect that genuine component.
Gary Sevounts: So those are my three thoughts.
Miriam Connaughton: Fluffery is my new word of the day, Gary. I'm not sure it is a word in the dictionary, but it evokes a great image. So fluffery. I love it. I love it.
Gary Sevounts: I even have a blog on that. Yeah.
Miriam Connaughton: And yeah, you both kind of, you know, what resonates very strongly through both of your comments is that authenticity, that genuine people can sniff it out.
Miriam Connaughton: If it's faking, it's going to be real. That, that really resonates, I think, just in, in the, in our own real life human experience, the kind of stories we kind of hook onto, there's got to be a real resonance to them, hasn't there? Of authenticity. And I'm curious as well, because one of the things that resonates with me in storytelling a lot is humor.
Miriam Connaughton: I'd be interested to get your professional perspectives on what place does humor have, both in talking to our customers and also, you know, Matt, you know, in your case, you all bringing it inside as well and bringing it to life in your internal comms. How do you kind of. Do you use humor? And if so, kind of, what are some of your perspectives on how to use humor well in the workplace?
Matt Rivera: I love that question because this is one of my, that's one of my favorite things other than music, you know, and as a way to get messages across. But humor, I think, has a great place in kind of bringing things down to like That human love, right? It's tricky. I will say it's tricky.
Matt Rivera: Any marketer will tell you it's tricky because some things don't land. I mean, just look at the Super Bowl commercials, right? So you go to Super Bowl commercials and not everyone, you know, was a touchdown, let's say. So the idea is you want to connect with people. And, you know, so even when you're using humor, you have to learn when it kind of disarms and when it helps you get that narrative across.
Matt Rivera: So there's some things that are very serious and you don't want to use humor, but there's some things that. Using humor. I like here's the way I like to think of it. And I like to tell my folks as they're going through their day is surprise people. And sometimes you can surprise them with you. So you know, whatever the content is, whatever you're trying to get off.
Matt Rivera: If you put it across in a different way, and I'll give you a very concrete example of that. It was very fun. So we had a leadership meeting. So the first part of the year is always Leadership kickoff meetings, right? You go to kickoff meetings, you listen, you're in the audience, you know, you're listening for hours on end to stuff and some of it's great and relevant and you're into it.
Matt Rivera: Some of it you might not be. Okay, I'm tired. You know, it's day three. We do an awards type night and I put together some music and I've, I've done this for a lot of years, but I'll put together a song and it'll be a song parody, but it'll have a message, proud to put our name on it. Or we had a lot of salespeople who had a rough year.
Matt Rivera: So we'll do something like losing my commission to the tune of losing my religion. So it's things like that that get across that people remember. And so, you know, there's ways to use it. And I think it's a huge tool to use. But again, I think it's part of the surprising people giving them something a little unexpected, and sometimes that's humor.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah. And it sticks more, doesn't it? It resonates more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gary, what's your perspective on humor in the workplace and in marketing and comms?
Gary Sevounts: Yeah, I absolutely love humor. I think it grounds people and show them that we're human. And connects them right in my experience, humor is a tool where you have to be thinking about the audience and circumstance, like certain personas are more welcoming humor than the other ones, right?
Gary Sevounts: So when you're marketing to IT versus lawyers, versus internal communication folks or HR, you know, you may have different type of tolerance or a completely different type of humor, right? So again, like any good storytelling, right? We have to tune the humor to degree to the audience, right? And then the second part is the circumstance.
Gary Sevounts: You know, in some circumstances, a humor can come across like super well placed and in certain circumstances, as we all know, as we've all seen in our lives, could be totally out of place and come across cruel, right? So, uh, I would say it's a great tool when used right, but also we got to be careful how to use it and when to use it.
Miriam Connaughton: Hey, I'm HR as well. Sometimes the note can be off in, in, in humor, can't it? I know I looked at as a police of, you know, is it appropriate or not? Yeah. It has to be appropriate to your point, to audience, to context and kind. Yeah. Yeah. No, that, that's well said. And so, you know, a lot of what you know, we do as practitioners or help our leaders do in our organizations is tell stories.
Miriam Connaughton: And especially, you know, Matt, given your role, your leaders are ambassadors for the brand. externally, but also especially internally. How do you kind of work in equipping your leaders, especially to be those great storytellers to really represent, bring the customer experience into the workplace and inspire employees?
Matt Rivera: It's a challenge. You know, leaders have a tough job and trying to get them engaged in storytelling or in how they get their messages across that are different than what they're used to. So what we've done, you know, what we tried to do and what we try to do is to demonstrate to them. So the best way is to show them that it works is that people are connecting with their messages.
Matt Rivera: And we try to do a variety of types of content to let them tell the story. Uh, we try to facilitate it, right? To help them, because hey, kind of constructive. Here's what we might talk about. Or yeah, probably isn't good. If you have 45 PowerPoint slides, you know, you might want to cut it down to like four.
Matt Rivera: And, you know, have a point, you know, that kind of thing. So it's working with them to make sure that they understand how people are consuming, you know, the information and then walking them through that process. But I will say that, you know, one of the things, you know, with brand ambassadors and folks you have inside your company who could speak about it is that again, you've got to find the people that are enthusiastic about it and enthusiastic about what they are doing, because they can talk.
Matt Rivera: Much more freely and much better about it. So it's finding also the things that make that person light up. So, especially with leaders, sometimes, you know, they don't focus on necessarily the things that, you know, maybe will resonate with the audience, but if you can find those things that just make them light up, that connects with an audience and people get that.
Matt Rivera: And, and so I think that's really important just to make sure that they're talking about things that they're comfortable with and enthusiastic about and that will come through. If they're not, and you just try to just give them something that's really not their thing, it's not going to work.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah. It's that well known because I think it resonates saying that, that Maya Angelou about it's people don't remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel and that very much comes across, doesn't it?
Miriam Connaughton: For you as a speaker, if you, if you've got passion or energy or you're, you connected well with something. Yeah. it naturally will flow out of you than if I'm reading a script because Matt told me I had to say this.
Matt Rivera: That's right. Yes. And sometimes they say that that's the worst part is they said, you know, I have to say this.
Miriam Connaughton: I get that too, Matt. I get that too.
Miriam Connaughton: It's like, okay, now I'm turning off. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's one thing. I'd like kind of maybe shift to exploring with you guys because very selfishly, I want to learn from this as well is, you know, strikes me that as, as we think about marketing campaigns, connecting with customers, you know, there's that parallel that I started off this discussion with between, you know, connecting with customers and connecting with employees.
Miriam Connaughton: What are some of the things maybe approaches or ideas or lessons. Can we draw from how you develop a marketing strategy, how you build a great customer campaign? What are some of those ideas that we can learn from and maybe import into our employee experience and communication world? It must be a myriad of things that we can steal.
Miriam Connaughton: I'm all for stealing good ideas.
Gary Sevounts: Yeah, I'll start with the story. Uh, so two or three companies ago, our CEO walked to me one day and said, Hey, Gary, I want you to run internal communications. I'm like, huh? Internal communications. Like, why would I run internal communications? Well, he's like, right now, HR cannot do that.
Gary Sevounts: And marketing is the closest. So you have it. So that was my first experience with internal comms. So I engaged in recruiting an internal comms leader and working on. Building the programs. And that was an eye opener for me because that's where I truly understood the importance of internal comms of consistent comms and the possibilities that it brings.
Gary Sevounts: So we worked together to develop campaigns and. How to listen. So from that perspective, a few similarities there to me where yes, absolutely want to develop campaigns and you want to have some themes and that works both in external marketing, as well as internal marketing, like internal accounts, right?
Gary Sevounts: Then the other part was interesting is listening the same way that you listen to your customers, so you know what messages to give, you know, you want to listen to your employees and not pretend that you listen, but we actually hear them and have their stories. And then I'll finish with segmentation and bring in story's life, right?
Gary Sevounts: If you think about each persona has their story. Like if we're marketing to internal accounts, folks, we want to have one story here, right? When we talk to our IT partners, we have a different story, and HR partners, different story. But if you think about it, you have the same departments in your company.
Gary Sevounts: Uh, and, uh, you're marketing to the same departments. And if you can really connect to, for example, to IT, and understand what their challenges are, uh, and what are their deepest, uh, desires, or fears, or happiness is, you can really develop. Like a nurturing campaign almost, where you can tell a story after story.
Gary Sevounts: And if you have a really good platform, like employee experience platform that you can communicate from, you can automate that, right? And I'll finish with this thought, something that I totally underestimated was because it was my first job with IC was importance over the platform. So when my IC person came, said, Hey, we want to have a platform.
Gary Sevounts: Like, so how much does it cost? And he told me, I'm like, yeah, I don't think we're going to do it. Right. And then after struggling for two, three months, I'm like, okay, now I understand why do you need it. And by automating and actually making easier and enabling people within departments, after you train them to tell their stories in a visual way, video way, and other ways made the world of a difference similar to the way you do it.
Gary Sevounts: Externally.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, yeah. Not that delivery piece is so important. Gosh, there's so much to unpack in there. I mean, the notion of thinking about segmentation, personas is something we've used for a while now in internal comms, but just the kind of richness of just some of the adjectives you use, Gary, about how you unpack a persona and think about it differently.
Miriam Connaughton: Anything you would add to that, Matt, as you think about those lessons and ideas we can learn? import from marketing strategies internally.
Matt Rivera: Yeah. I, I think that on that subject of like, uh, campaigns and doing it, he's thinking about it as a campaign. I, I think if you're doing internal comms and this is something we probably didn't think about, we would think, Oh, we just send the email out.
Matt Rivera: Okay. If he goes out, they all got it. Right. Which we all know it doesn't work and we all know the email's not great, but. If you do a campaign, you have a, you know, you have a start, a middle and an end. So you let people know what's coming, what's coming, get them excited about it. Then you tell them and you, you have the event or the thing that you're getting to them.
Matt Rivera: And then at the end, you tell them how it went. And you do that as a campaign, just like we do any marketing campaign. And I think he was a good example of that. So we wanted to get innovation going throughout the company. And, you know, so somebody, you know, on and probably on an innovation committee, a council side that said, we need to talk about innovation more.
Matt Rivera: And that's, you know, okay, let's just talk about innovation. And so we wrapped it up in a campaign called the summer of innovation. So we had the summer of innovation where we said, Hey, everybody, this is coming and get excited about it. We're going to give away, you know, a few things. So we led up to it and we had this big campaign and we talked about it and then we told them after who, you know, had some of the great ideas and it just turned into this very long.
Matt Rivera: So it was like, you know, even if we had done a short campaign or talked about it a couple of times, this turned into a month's long. Campaign where everybody was hearing about it, and we got some very good results from that, that we wouldn't have gotten if we just said, uh, you know, hey, everybody just get your ideas or if we sent out an email or a couple of emails.
Matt Rivera: So huge impact using the same principles you'd use for any marketing campaign and tracking it and doing all those things as well.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, the measurement piece that Gary was alluding to. It's a good reminder because I think I sense often in the rush of, you know, so many things going on that we're just all heads down working so hard, you know, we forget that repetition.
Miriam Connaughton: And I think it's a good reminder because I've often said, as I've worked with many different types of leadership teams over my career, I've heard especially CEOs often say, Yeah, I've already told them the strategy, you know, we did it at the town hall and we did it, you know, I've repeated myself six times already.
Miriam Connaughton: It's like, well, you, when you're getting bored with it, that's probably means you've just got to keep on going because you still haven't said it enough, you know, especially with an organization which is dispersed, bigger population. You know, it doesn't matter how big you are. Communication needs repetition.
Matt Rivera: Yeah. And, and us, you know, marketers and advertisers, they know that number, by the way, there is an upper got to hear it like seven times and, you know, all kinds of data along, along those lines. And you, yeah, you'd have to remind people, you know, yeah, they're not going to get it the first time. They're not going to get the second time.
Miriam Connaughton: You know, that's really interesting. Let's kind of, I'd like to, to kind of play off of that because, you know, you both alluded to the metrics. You mentioned Gary, the importance of listening and you said, you know, we as marketers know there's a number that seventh time is the charm or whatever. And we know how to track them.
Miriam Connaughton: I'm not sure that we're maybe as finely tuned as that. when we're thinking about internal comms. Although, you know, there's, you know, we have tools at our disposal for listening, for measuring. How do you look at that when you're looking at that? How many times do I need to communicate internally, Matt, to get the message across?
Miriam Connaughton: What kind of things and approaches do you use for that listening measurement piece?
Matt Rivera: Yeah, well, I think, uh, Gary also hit on this, which is knowing your audience, which is knowing who the message is going to and how it's going to impact them. So there are some messages where if it has a very Real impact to them.
Matt Rivera: You probably don't have as much, you know, you can tell them and they'll get it pretty quickly why we're communicating. It's like, Hey, this is, you know, if you said it's going to impact your paycheck, I'm instantly interested. I'm watching and I'm asking and I'm looking at every line of that message and you're going to, Yeah, ask you about each one of the bullets in this message.
Matt Rivera: So you've got some of those, but I think the key is, and we all struggle with this, is there's other messages and there's other things that go along kind of on the transom that are maybe not as important as like your paycheck or those types of things. So you have to fight a little bit for attention and sometimes it's timing.
Matt Rivera: So sometimes it's just knowing what the right timing is. Sometimes it's repetition. And no repetition. And then the last thing I'll add is, and one thing that I'm very passionate about, is cascading messages. It's just making sure that it comes through in multi channel, in multi channel, so that, you know, they're getting the same message, it's consistent, but your boss mentioned something about it, the, you know, you saw the article about it, you watched the video about it, and then, you know, and the CEO's all hands.
Matt Rivera: He talked about. Well, I guess that's pretty important. I should probably pay attention to this. So there's all different ways, but we all struggle to, like, find the right channel, the right timing, the right way to get it. And you cannot. And we do have folks in our staff units that just want to pound the message into people's heads.
Matt Rivera: Can we send another email? Like, we get that all the time. Can we send you send another email? Can we just send another email? And we're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to do that. They're not going to get it. So you're right. It's, we all, you know, when we think about communicating, you need to think about those things and kind of everything that everybody has going on.
Matt Rivera: And you know, what is the right time? What is the right message? How many is enough? You know, it's a game, but, and that's one of the things that's fun for us, right? I think it's trying to figure out what that is and very rewarding when you hit the right tone and you hit the right. message and you get it across.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah. Yeah. That's seventh time. Just knowing you've hit that seventh time, a charm or whatever that number is.
Matt Rivera: The bell goes off and you're like,
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Gary, anything else that you would add to that list?
Gary Sevounts: Yeah, I want to absolutely agree with Matt's points about multi channel and the time, like you think about like when we do email in external marketing.
Gary Sevounts: Or messaging. We look at the timing, right, time of the day, time of the week when it's most effective for certain type of messages. So, and multichannel, absolutely agree. I wanna add two elements to that. One is, it's gonna sound funny, multimedia, but not multimedia of nineties. Where with a cd, wrong, right?
Gary Sevounts: I'm dating myself, but meaning that certain types of messages resonate with certain people on certain generations. To Matt's point, let's not shove like emails into people's throats. Why not have a short video clip that is 30 seconds or 15 seconds like TikTok, right? Uh, that delivers that message. Or, uh, maybe have in a warm of an audio form.
Gary Sevounts: Of an audio, right? Or a popup on the mobile. If you have like a employee experience that is mobile first, right?
Matt Rivera: To add to that is that the way that people consume, you know, is different. From person to person and job to job. And we have people that are not at a desk. So sometimes you got to get them by mobile.
Matt Rivera: Sometimes they are by a desk. So they consume it in different ways. They consume it at different times. They like it in different formats. So it's all of those things, right? It's trying to get them where they are. And you know, it's that old saying, you know, meet them where they are.
Miriam Connaughton: No, I think that's very well said by both of you.
Miriam Connaughton: I was just going to draw that parallel that, you know, we know there's that CX-EX relation alignment and it plays out in the technology, doesn't it, that we're having to use to both reach customers differently and to reach employees differently because we all consume now, you know, it's too long, didn't read, it's everybody's down to kind of the length of a tweet or whatever your channel of preference is, it's evolved massively.
Miriam Connaughton: And so that internal tech As to how we reach employees has by necessity had to evolve and almost keep up with what the needs of the demands are. Well, it's kind of goes back to where we started at the top of this conversation, Matt, when I, you know, I asked you the question about kind of that CX-EX connection, you said, you know, starts from the inside.
Miriam Connaughton: And in order to equip employees, build that brand, have people believe, feel excited about it, you've got to have the means to reach people. And I think we invest instinctively, I think often first in our marketing platforms, you know, and for good reason, because that's reaching our customers and they are our lifeblood, but equally important is.
Miriam Connaughton: How are we also reaching all of our employees? And as you see that world evolving, do you look at your marketing tech and think, you know, I see innovations happening there. You know, I'd love to have this on the inside. Where do you see that? marketing tech, employee tech kind of relationship evolving.
Matt Rivera: Yeah, I think that's a great point.
Matt Rivera: Um, and you know, when Gary was talking about, you know, when all of the changes in technology have really helped us understand what's possible and how we leverage that. And I think that. You know, we're closer than ever to saying the things that we're doing to try to reach our customers, their people. So we're trying to reach people in roles that are very similar to the people we have in our company that are in similar roles.
Matt Rivera: They're in the same types of people doing the same types of work, and they're interested in the things that we can talk about can be just as relevant to them. But. We need to do it in the same kind of the same type of rigor that we're doing on the marketing side, which is not taking for granted that they're going to read the email.
Matt Rivera: So they're not taking for granted to there. They want to hear what you're trying to tell them or hear what you want to say or consume it in the way you want to deliver it. So all of those lessons we've been learning from the marketing automation side. I think have really helped us. And I would say in certain ways, right, it's a back and forth.
Matt Rivera: It's not like you don't get ideas from your internal system and the things that you're doing internally. Some of those things just naturally you think, Oh my gosh, that would work externally. Or, oh my gosh, we should be doing this in our marketing. And there's some companies that are really good at it and some companies who are already kind of thinking that way.
Matt Rivera: And there's some companies who do the marketing and it's really about the employees and about the culture and those types of things. And they didn't probably didn't even realize it or didn't even think about it. And it may not even occurred to them or it may not even be happening internally in the company.
Matt Rivera: But I think with the automation that we have today for the employee experience, right, you can do that. And then transfer it right over into the external marketing. You're tweaking the message. You're saying, okay, just a little bit different audience, or maybe the way we're delivering it is going to be different, but it's the same types of messaging, it's the same campaigns.
Matt Rivera: It's the same, you know, we're looking at the same analytics. So all of those things really kind of start connecting a lot. And I think in a lot of cases. The, you know, the employee experience and what you're doing there, if you're doing it right, it's authentic. All the things we've talked about can really drive some of the marketing stuff too, not all of it, because you do have to sell, you know, things we're selling, but the company and the employee experience and those types of things are very relevant to most of our customers.
Matt Rivera: If you're B2C, maybe. Maybe not as much, but it's relevant today, but it's B2B. Absolutely. And customers will find those types of things interesting, just like your employees find them interesting.
Gary Sevounts: Matt, you brought an interesting point. I just wanted to highlight this point. I never really thought it that way in terms of what can we.
Gary Sevounts: Do from like internal comps tech towards marketing tech. I thought the other way, but as you were speaking, I was thinking, wow, how cool it would have been if similar to employee experience platforms that have additional things like surveys, you know, listening and newsletters and. AI capabilities. How cool would that be for our marketing?
Gary Sevounts: Automation platforms would have similar things like natively built in, like an employee experience platforms, right? So it's not just the bolt on, but it's natively part of the sort of thing where you can easily just. Design and send a survey to your customers and segment them and see their engagement in that way, or create a newsletter that is also within just a couple of like mouse clicks, right?
Gary Sevounts: Like in employee experience platforms, right? Like that would be super cool if our automation platforms could follow the example of the X platforms.
Miriam Connaughton: There's just so many possibilities out there and you've kind of both touch, you know, you're touching on all the automation that's possible, what AI can bring us.
Miriam Connaughton: When you think about in marketing tools and employee experience tools, obviously AI is just built in or should be, if it isn't, you need to change out. You know, as you look forward, what are some of your hopes or wish lists to say, gosh, you know, we've made all the advancements we've made. Things have changed very rapidly, especially in the last few years.
Miriam Connaughton: What would you hope for next that would both maybe help you reach customers, but also help you reach employees or vice versa? You know, what would be that wishlist without naming any particular technologies, but just what would be your wishlist of what comes next?
Matt Rivera: Ooh, that's a tough one, but there's a lot, there's a lot out there.
Matt Rivera: So, you know, so. There's a couple things, right, that you measure whether you're a marketer, whether you're doing internal cons, those types of things, right? It's reach, you know, so what's our reach? And then what's the relevance? So any tools that can help you? And, you know, my wish, this would be, you know, something that really gives us that kind of real time pulse of what's relevant to the audience that we're trying to reach.
Matt Rivera: Is that really hitting? And there are Some tools and some things, some ways to do that. But it's really hard because if like us, if we're talking, I can see your body language, I can get, you know, an idea of whether or not that's really resonating, whether you're excited about it or whether you're, you know, you're looking at your phone, those types of things.
Matt Rivera: You can't really do that. I look at it like, so if I was to, you know, the analogy for like a driving cars right now, so cars that drive themselves and you have something that. monitors your eyes to make sure that you're looking at the road and you're on there, right? So if we had something like that that says, Hey, I can tell when they're looking at our message and when they're really into our message, not just looking at it.
Matt Rivera: We track stuff like that, cookies and all that thing, you know, so you can get an idea. They opened it or they read it or, you know, whatever, but really something would be, you know, Hey, that really resonated with it. There's a spark, there's something going on. The light bulbs starting to go on. It's a little dim.
Matt Rivera: But it's going on, let's hit them with something else and let's really make it shine and let's really be, do that. And so that relevance, that idea of reach, and then, you know, we're reaching people, but we're reaching people that it really matters to like, or that we want to reach, you know, we do inbound marketing, which is, we're really trying to reach the people that are looking for the things we're selling, not just
Matt Rivera: everybody in the world. So, you know, that would be another way that I'd say that would be on my wishlist. Get to those people, see that it's really resonating.
Miriam Connaughton: That's a, that's an interesting parallel. I wrote that down, that reach and relevancy, and how do you kind of keep hitting the mark and learning that much better?
Miriam Connaughton: I mean, some of the analytics we have today help us with that, but there's no doubt the next generation of that coming that will help us do that even better. What would be on your wishlist, Gary, as you think about the next leaps that we're going to be able to make with this.
Gary Sevounts: AI has been revolutionizing marketing and I think it's an understatement and I often share with my colleagues that either you will be dominated by AI and you'll be left in the dust or you will embrace AI and you'll dominate the industry right in marketing and AI is completely transforming the way we create content.
Gary Sevounts: And not that AI is creating content for us and we blindly go with it, but for amplification and scaling, if before we had to have like four or five content people and they could create certain amount of it, now you can have just one or two people and they create like three, four times more content that is better and easier to research, right?
Gary Sevounts: Like in product marketing, the amount of research that you can do with AI and ideas you can generate to start with, again, is a huge game changer, right? And then we're seeing a wish list, it would be for me, for AI to. Be more engaged, ingrained in our analytics that it could go through, uh, integrations of like Marketo, Salesforce, you know, Sixth Sense, you know, demand based, whatever people use and other tools and truly connect the dots.
Gary Sevounts: And come up with meaningful recommendations like, Hey, based on your target customers and ideal customers closed, one closed, lost, and what not here is you should use this kind of touch points or reach out to these audiences. And we have so many touches use videos that are 27 seconds, you know, and whatever else, like putting this together, I think.
Gary Sevounts: That could be an absolute game changer and that's where we're working and going towards because a lot of that process right now is super manual and it relies on armies of people and takes lots of time.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, no, that productivity gain is huge. And I know, you know, speaking as a HR practitioner and somebody who is all about that employee experience that
Miriam Connaughton: kind of ability to aggregate data, create insights for that much more faster, much more real time. That for me would be absolutely game changing. Again, we've made some great leaps. You know, I love having my team dashboard that I can see in front of me on our employee experience platform. But there's so much more like you're saying, Matt, being able to get more of that kind of almost emotional reaction, kind of more real time.
Miriam Connaughton: You again, we've made maybe steps, but. big strides ahead of us. Well, I could keep on talking all day, but literally we need to bring things to a close. It's been fascinating. I've got fluffery is my word of the rest of the day, Gary. So thank you for that. But good reminders about just the lessons in reaching our customers that, you know, resonate with reaching our employees about authenticity, about transparency, about storytelling and bringing real emotion and human connection into it as well.
Miriam Connaughton: And being able to do that at scale. quickly leveraging technology runs through both of those sides of the equation. So delightful to talk to you both today. Uh, we like to let our listeners know if they would like to connect with you in any way and what would be the best kind of platform for them to do that on.
Miriam Connaughton: Matt, how could people reach out to you?
Matt Rivera: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn at Matt Rivera. The company is D A Y, Day & Zimmermann, and we're at dayzim.com. So I'd be happy to connect with anybody.
Miriam Connaughton: Perfect, Matt. And Gary, for you?
Gary Sevounts: Uh, same here. Uh, LinkedIn, Gary Sevounts, and, uh, Simpplr with PPL in the middle.
Miriam Connaughton: People are at the center of everything we do.
Miriam Connaughton: That's for sure. Well, thank you for listening, everyone. And thank you again, Matt and Gary.
Matt Rivera: Thank you.
Gary Sevounts: Thank you, Miriam. Thank you, Matt.