Balancing Strategy and Execution To Drive Sustainable Marketing Growth With Michael Baer

Intro: 00:00

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig into their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here we dive deep with marketing executives, experts and innovators to uncover how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and marketing methodologies so that you can fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations.

With a proven track record, RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn your programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. My guest today is Michael Baer. Michael is an experienced, growth focused, fractional chief marketing officer and marketing leader with over 30 years of marketing and operational leadership and a track record of driving strategic insight, superior creativity and executional excellence to accelerate growth. Michael leverages his diverse end to end experience to help companies turn their marketing into greater value for their organizations. 

After decades leading teams and marketing organizations large and small, Michael is now a fractional CMO in the revenue growth practice at TechCXO, a leading edge professional services firm that has provided experienced C-suite professionals on demand to deliver strategic and functional consulting services for over 20 years. All right. Thank you for joining us today, Michael.

Michael Baer: 02:00

Thank you Rick.

Rick Rappe: 02:01

A lot of experience to summarize in a few paragraphs. It’s always difficult. It’s always difficult. I know you primarily engage as a fractional CMO with startups and early stage growth companies and PE backed companies. Can you talk a little bit more about what kinds of companies you partner with, and tell us more about where your specialty lies?

Michael Baer: 02:22

Sure, Rick. The ideal customer profile does tend to be in the small to mid-size growth phase company. Often I like to say these are companies that have gotten somewhere, but they recognize that what got them to where they are today is not the same model that’s going. The model and approach that’s going to get them to six x ten x 20 x that. And so they recognize they need some help to professionalize the way they go to the market.

Some of the other C-suite roles. They’re finding their approach to finances and such, and they don’t, but they don’t need that full time. So, for example, I’m a chief marketing officer. So they recognize that they could use some strategic leadership. They could use the help to develop plans and approaches and ways to more systematically and programmatically drive their growth levers. 

But again, they don’t need it full time. And or perhaps in some cases they can’t afford it full time. And so I’ll go in again off into very early stage companies. But also sometimes there are companies that have gotten somewhere or maybe even, you know, decades old, but have found that they could use some help in either recharging or driving, you know, driving new growth. I have been focusing my practice on the health care sector, health tech, digital health, med tech, but have been a B2B CMO and marketing leader for again ten years prior to going into consulting.

Rick Rappe: 04:12

Tell me a little bit more about how you made the transition from the world of advertising to becoming a fractional CMO.

Michael Baer: 04:19

Yeah, I got out of school. And I dove into advertising. It was a great combination to me at the time of both. Business and strategy with kind of right brained creativity and innovation. And I spent over 20 years in advertising. I began for over 20 years in New York, working my way up to big agencies, working on strategic businesses like consumer packaged goods and global businesses.

But what I like to think about my time in advertising is I purposefully curated a horizontal path across all of advertising from big strategic packaged goods through digital focused, independent creativity, through even media work. And the reason was I always felt like I loved the work, but I didn’t love the ads. Like I felt like I loved understanding businesses. I loved digging into the DNA of a business, of a brand, of a customer and developing strategic approaches, big, exciting strategic approaches. And I always tried to drive my clients to build holistic approaches to activating those strategies, but ended up literally just making ads because that’s what we were an advertising agency. 

And so I always felt that my, my drive was to be a more holistic, full, you know, full, you know, perspective marketeer, and I made the pivot from agency initially as a CMO of a of a marketing services company, and then pivoting into other B2B businesses as a CMO.

Rick Rappe: 06:12

You’ve coined the term strategy, and I wanted to ask you a little bit more about what that means and how it applies to modern marketing strategies.

Michael Baer: 06:22

You know, I came up with the term now it’s going on 20 years ago. And I would say the term itself has evolved in my own mind. And I think depending on where you’re your company and your business is and, and the way it approaches business strategy, go to market strategy and marketing and planning and then ultimately implementation. You may even view it with a different lens. But I came into it because I spent a lot of time working on highly what I would call strategy focused packaged goods, consumer packaged goods businesses.

And I spent a long time at one point in my career working for a company called no for Unilever, which I mean, obviously, you know, and they’re known as a very strategic marketer. And so we would spend, I mean, a year developing a strategy. We’d do some consumer research, we’d do some focus groups, we develop concepts, we’d do some concept testing, we test those concepts with expressions of the concept, etc. over time and, and and with great rigor. And often we develop amazing strategic ideas and really, you know, exciting expressions of those strategies with creative ideas. But what I found was we’d end up the the we’d end up not being able to the client and the agencies not be able to really activate those, those, you know, creative strategies and, and creative ideas in the market that due to a lack of either creating holistic approaches, thinking 360 driving great omnichannel, as you would call it, execution of these, these campaigns that they would not necessarily have the success.

And we’d look across the aisle. I ended up competing with Procter and Gamble products, working in household products and and personal care products, and we’d see that Procter and Gamble, it would seem to us, would not have the most brilliant strategy and the most exciting creativity, but they would execute the hell out of it, and you’d see it everywhere, and it would be fully fleshed out at every consumer touchpoint. And what I found was, you know, we had great strategy, but not great execution. They would have not great strategy, but really good execution. And, you know, kind of initially my feeling was that strategy that most people, certainly in the world I was living in would look at strategy as this, as this kind of paramount pinnacle of, of the work we do. 

And it would be done by, you know, us, the smartest people. And then we’d hand, you know, as if you’d hand the strategy off to some execution elves, and it would just get done by itself. Execution.

Rick Rappe: 09:36

Like, we all need those execute.

Michael Baer: 09:38

We all need execution. No, but I would almost feel like they thought that you just take strategy and or maybe even I’d call it, like sort of idea, put it at, you know, like as if it’s a snowball and you could take it from the top of a mountain and push it down the hill. And it would just happen by itself. And we know, of course, that doesn’t happen. It’s not at all what happened.

You need to have equal rigor on the execution side. So I became this strategy and execution need to go together. And there are a lot of people who will say similar things. Yeah. Tom. 

Tom. Tom. Philip. Not Tom Phillips. Anyway, you know who talked, you know, really eloquently about how important execution is. 

And so, you know, I, you know, I got to believe how important, you know, you have to be as rigorous in your execution as you do in strategy.

Rick Rappe: 10:27

Yeah.

Michael Baer: 10:28

And especially in a digital world where strategy isn’t making an ad like it used to be and putting it on television where people would see it. And that’s all you need to do practically. It’s, you know, how do you place your head? Who do you get it in front of? How do you retarget that?

How else do you follow it up? There’s so many strategic decisions to make. Yeah, but what’s interesting. So. So that kinda was my lens, strategy is so important of course, but so is execution. 

Yeah. What’s interesting now in the world I work in, especially with young companies, early stage companies, you know, VC backed companies, there’s almost a belief that let’s just get started with execution. And I can’t tell you how many companies I come in contact with or of really any. At, at any point in their trajectory. But we’ll say, you know, yeah, we’ve got a, you know, we’ve got a strategy, but you’ll find that there in many, many cases just executing. 

So you’ve got people doing —

Rick Rappe: 11:37

I was, I was just going to say that I, I recently recorded a podcast episode with somebody that’s absolutely specializes in startup marketing. And, and it was a lot of like, well, we try a bunch of things and figure it out as we go. And that’s the strategy is like rapid, rapid iteration.

Michael Baer: 11:55

Iteration? Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 11:56

Just go to market.

Michael Baer: 11:59

Figure it out. Yeah. It’s amazing. I find companies that do that think that that’s that strategy. And the time spent developing it is like a luxury and they don’t have it, or that it’s wasteful and that your time is better spent doing things.

And I just fundamentally disagree with that. I think that even if you cut the time that you would spend, I do think the preciousness of the Unilever days of nine months of strategy development, we can’t do that. But I think, yeah, the amount of time spending, just getting your strategy on paper, agreeing to it.

Rick Rappe: 12:38

A lot of those companies, a lot of those companies are testing really small and just doing little tiny things. You and I, coming from a background of like much bigger companies, I worked for AT&T for ten years and help them build their direct mail sales channel. And of course, everything we did was very strategic testing in small quantities before we rolled things out, because we were rolling things out on such a gigantic scale that, you know, you had to test it first. So but it’s still everything’s smaller. They, they, they take more risks.

And it’s just way it’s a different mentality that tech companies sort of fail fast mentality. Yeah, definitely crept into the marketing world as well.

Michael Baer: 13:25

No question, no question. I just don’t. I just don’t think it. I think activating and even testing in any way without setting a strategic foundation is still wasteful. It’s like and I like to just say it’s like getting in a car and not knowing where you’re going and expecting it to arrive there by just turning and turning. It’s. Yeah, it’s just you’re going to burn a lot of gas and waste a lot of time.

Rick Rappe: 13:52

I agree on 100% understanding.

Rick Rappe: 13:53

I mean, at some point you understand at least who you’re trying to reach, right? So who are they? What are their needs? What are their challenges?

Where do they go for those solutions? What are their expectations? And then.

Michael Baer: 14:05

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 14:06

What are we offering them? I mean, if you don’t spend time like at least putting that on paper, I don’t understand what you expect to accomplish our world.

Michael Baer: 14:15

In our world of direct mail marketing, a lot of startup companies will throw out a direct mailer and they’ll just do one idea, one piece of creative, one offer and one list, and they send it out and they hope for the best. And it’s like, if it works, great, if it doesn’t work well, direct mail doesn’t work. But that’s not really a very strategic approach at all. We always focus on let’s test multiple different offers, different messages different. So testing becomes the strategy which and the overall process of testing learning.

Optimizing is so critical to like the success of direct mail. So some digital channels seem to work pretty well with the like. Let’s try one and iterate and iterate or, you know, but other things like direct mail, it’s too expensive. You have to have a strategy or you can’t maximize the effectiveness of it.

Rick Rappe: 15:06

But I’m still even saying above that, like I think iterating. Once you have a strategy, of course, test and control A/B test. Yeah. Understand what’s working and optimize. That’s the rigor.

That’s the strategy of digital marketing that I fully endorse wholeheartedly. I’m saying taking a step back from that. The core of who is your persona, what problem are you solving for them? What’s your positioning? What’s your, you know, your purpose? 

What’s your brand or your company’s kind of purpose? These things, you know, I feel like fundamentally need to be set down in writing. It doesn’t mean there won’t be a let’s iterate to an extent. But without that, in writing I don’t think. And then doing a brief for those things. 

To your point about you can test direct mail, but like I believe that you know, all execution, you know, tactics, call them all tactics that you have should have some sort of brief meaning. Why are we using this? What do we expect to achieve from it? How will it, you know, work? Because you want to be able to look at the results through the lens of, or even before you get results. 

I mean, if you’re using external vendors and they come back with a, with a, here’s our idea for what we should put out there, and you don’t have a brief to like hold up and say, does it deliver on that. You’re just going to be making, you know, a judgment based on do I like it or not? And that’s not necessarily the barometer you should be using.

Michael Baer: 16:45

Yeah. I totally agree with that. We have to work with clients to develop that kind of strategic direction.

Rick Rappe: 16:53

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with, say, like a web design firm to develop a website for an early stage company, and I’ll, I’ll hand them a brief and they’ll be like, oh my God, I don’t really —

Michael Baer: 17:06

We never get this. Like.

Rick Rappe: 17:08

So you’re kind of guessing. I mean, it’s and I agree with you, there’s some deep seated feeling of need amongst these, you know, early stage companies where we need to create activity. And I also think that maybe as a human species, we’ve gotten to where activity is viewed as a win in and of itself. If we just do stuff and it’s it shouldn’t be like there’s so much activity that almost you’re contributing to noise. If you don’t ensure that it’s to the right people with the right message on the right strategy.

Developing your brand? Fitting in with the rest of the things you do. The other thing is that I see all the time is there’s no holistic approach. I know it sounds like a big word, but the truth is, marketing is not or your brand is not. As you know, it’s not a series of one offs. 

It needs to feel like a cohesive brand. So if you do as you say with you guys, you know, direct mail, it should be okay. What else might a customer see, feel, hear, connect with engage with across there? We you know, we all call it the customer journey. But across their journey it should feel like it was almost intended and fits together at some. 

But when you’re doing all these things, one off, they could, you know, they may not even look like the same brand. It may not even ring a bell in your head. You’ve seen something, felt something, done something, engage with something from that same company. The way things are built. So fragmented and one off.

Michael Baer: 18:50

Yeah, we appreciate it when our clients have a strong brand, brand guidelines and brand position and where they’ve worked with the company that and and and built all that infrastructure, we utilize that and then we it gives us sort of something to latch on to a foundation for building the marketing, you know, marketing assets that go out and go to market with a strong call to action. And, and but we’re building it on the right foundation where we’re tying in with everything else that they’re doing. So that makes.

Rick Rappe: 19:20

I like the way you use the foundation. I mean, I think there’s certain analogies that I think we should ensure that people understand because they ring true. I mean, it’s like building a house in a lot of ways. You know, you build a foundation first. You don’t start by putting in doors and windows or things that look pretty.

You know, you got to build that foundation or it won’t stand up.

Michael Baer: 19:48

So let me ask you another quick question about you’ve worked extensively with healthcare companies. We were talking about startup companies. But now I’ll shift gears and to ask you a question about healthcare companies. So what unique challenges and opportunities have you encountered, you know, in working in that sector?

Rick Rappe: 20:07

I mean, there are a lot of uniquenesses to it. And at the same time, I think the fundamentals of marketing hold true. And I, you know, I like to joke around and say it’s marketing is really its marketing and sales are really dumb. Simple. It’s like understand your customer and their needs as well as you can, and find out how to serve them and address them in your marketing and you will succeed.

Like, I mean, I think that to a degree is is the same in a lot of places with, you know, some of the differences in healthcare are obviously there’s lots of regulation and And compliance things that make it a little different and challenging, both in how you talk about it and how you make promises and how you share information. And then also, you have a complex ecosystem of users and end users and customers. So, you know, especially like for example, I do a bunch of work in medical devices that get sold into hospitals or just like let’s say on the provider side. And so you’ve got potentially buyers and sometimes committees of buyers. You also have the user, which is generally a physician or a technologist, and then you’ve got an end user ultimately a patient. 

And so that gets, you know, can get complicated. And a lot of times I’ll work with companies and they’ll I won’t say they lose sight, but there won’t be unanimity or clarity around who are we really building a benefit or a story or a value proposition for because there are benefits across that ecosystem. I mean, there’s an end user for like there’s a user meaning a doctor, and there could be or a provider and there could be real value in this devices. How it helps them, be it do their job better. Have a faster, you know, do something faster so that they can reduce some sort of administrative or burden aspect of their job, or give them some sort of job satisfaction. 

It may just be better to use, but then there’s also could be financial aspects or or enterprise level aspects that are benefits. Or is it an outcome for a patient. You know, so there’s that can become complicated, not complicated just just clarifying and understanding that. And I think there’s a lot of, you know, isms that have traditionally been thrown around that, that made, that made maybe the hunt for those benefits. Less important. 

And I think now there’s just so much noise and clutter and that breaking through is more challenging, that I think the need to really find insight in what benefit, what value are you offering a buyer and or user that’s and that’s not different than the rest of Non-health-care. I think that’s always critical. But I think, you know, the, the, the major changes that have gone across healthcare, a lot of it accelerated by Covid and kind of remote, you know, the remote aspect of, of medicine, when salespeople couldn’t go into doctor’s offices anymore for a little while. And so I think that accelerated. A lot of digitization of the go to market, and that’s led to a tremendous amount of noise and clutter. 

So it’s just making it harder. It’s interesting. It’s kind of went this, you know, big bell curve where all of a sudden everybody could leverage, you know. The digitization of marketing and the go to market was a bit slow in healthcare. I think you probably have heard that. 

And it was a fast, you know, a fast track to, to speeding that up. And initially it was great companies could reach, you know, their, their buyers, their users, those they wanted to prescribe their drugs, for example, digitally. But there was so much and meetings and events went on demand and went to webinars and things like that. And that was a great way to do business. But all of a sudden there was so much that now it’s becoming harder and harder. 

I mean, you talk to some doctors say they get, you know, 500, 1,000 emails a day. There’s all kinds of, you know, noise out there. So it’s harder and harder now to break through in these ways. So that’s one of the challenges in this space.

Michael Baer: 24:50

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 24:50

But not unlike every other. You know, which we talked about in the intro, Rick, about how in a weird way, your world tangible, you know, real mail. Physical mail.

Michael Baer: 25:06

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 25:07

Which was kind of old and digital email went, you know what? You know, now it’s becoming a way to break through.

Michael Baer: 25:15

I think, you know, based on what? Based on everything I’m hearing about, you know, the number of digital messages that we all get hit with every day. People’s rising skepticism. And there’s real trust issues with email. You know, there’s so much there’s so much.

Rick Rappe: 25:35

Yeah. Fraud.

Michael Baer: 25:36

Fraud in email and direct mail hasn’t always been this way. But now direct mail is a much more trusted and it’s harder to create and harder to send. So when you do get something physical, it is more trustworthy because there’s not as much junk there. There’s not as much stuff there, so.

Rick Rappe: 25:54

Well, it is ironic, right. And and and our, our mailboxes are so less full than they used to be that it has bigger, you know. What do you call it. You know, mailbox value when it hits. Yeah.

Michael Baer: 26:09

It can, it can if we do it right. That’s true. We can get noticed and get people to engage with it. And I was talking to someone recently too and just saying like it’s different when we can put an offer and make it a tangible thing, like a, like a certificate or a voucher or a coupon or things like that, where it feels like, yeah, this is worth something. If I throw it away, do I really want to throw it away?

You know, it’s a little bit different sort of thought process. They’ve studied the neuroscience of direct mail versus digital. And they found that direct marketing, direct mail actually lights up a whole different area in your brain. So it’s a completely different experience. So we’ve done some interesting things for in the healthcare space for direct marketing, including sending gift baskets, believe it or not, out to doctors in an in an entire area. 

And that was for, you know, like a spinal center, you know, announcing to the doctors that would be referring patients to a new facility.

Rick Rappe: 27:14

So during Covid, we did — I was working on a program where we had a webinar that had been an in-person prior to Covid, had had been an in-person event. And so we sent everybody a meal. We sent them. I can’t remember if it was an actual meal we sent, or did we send them a certificate that they could order their own? But the idea was, hey, we’re all watching this together.

Michael Baer: 27:45

A boxed lunch or something like that.

Rick Rappe: 27:46

Have a, have a, have a have a lunch. Yeah, exactly.

Michael Baer: 27:49

Yeah. What’s one marketing tool or resource that you can’t live without? Is there anything that comes to mind?

Rick Rappe: 27:56

Yeah, I think the two the two things that I, 2 or 3 things that I say are part of that foundation are one is develop a persona based on as much as much actual either research or time spent with your customer that you can possibly do. Now, in some cases, it’s literally. Googling and online time. If you can’t actually get to your customer or you don’t have time because in the fractional world, sometimes it’s yeah, what can you do quickly? But I think putting pen to paper on again.

I keep talking about the customer and understanding their needs and their challenges and their expectations and how you can help. I think that’s like a tool that is worth its weight in gold, as is then trying to map out this customer journey. Pain points, friction points across there. You know, going from I don’t I’m unaware to I’m considering all the way to and that that helps you when you’re developing a go to market plan or, or a marketing plan or even just a series of tactics if you want to just dumb it down. And then I really think you fundamentally have to have what is your positioning? 

And we can call it value prop. You could call it your main message, your and it’s astonishing to me how many companies don’t really have that. They’ll say we know it. We’ve been doing this long enough. We get it or have something that reads like a product message. 

And so I think that’s critical. Those are like. So you asked, what are my, you know, marketing? I don’t know if you were talking about marketing tactics or something, but I think those are the foundations that then you can go off and create anything, you know. And so and frankly, that’s what I do a lot is I’ll go into companies that, you know, have revenue, have, you know, have begun to, you know, get somewhere, like I said. 

But I think they feel like they’re spinning or, or, you know, juggling spinning plates and, you know, it just doesn’t feel like there’s a rhythm that there’s a, that things are growing momentum, that they’re growing on each other. Yeah.

Michael Baer: 30:23

I think the answer to the answer that you gave was perfect. And I get it. It’s like you’re working on the foundational elements. And those become then the core. Like we said, in building a house where you build everything else on top of those things because that fits the overall plan and it makes perfect sense to me.

I think it it’s it’s an area where, yeah, we see companies struggle with that because it seems like a lot of companies or some companies that we work with have products that do a lot of things, and they have a hard time, like kind of boiling it down to the key message and a way to convey the value, like quickly and easily, you know, if there’s too many features, it’s hard to talk about the features and the benefits, but or it’s hard to focus on the benefits and not talk about the features. I guess you’d say so.

Rick Rappe: 31:16

No, exactly. I think that’s a real challenge. Is that early-stage companies in particular. But all companies are. So I mean, either they’re so enamored with or they’re so focused on selling their product or service that they lose sight of the customer.

And, you know, you’re positioning your story, your narrative, your the value you offer. Your customer is not your product. It’s the solution they need. It’s the value they get. It’s the benefit they are looking for. 

Yeah. And yeah. So often it’s like you said well we know we do this and we do that and we do this. It’s like stop saying we. What does it do for them? 

And boiling it into something powerful that. Yeah, the features, the attributes those product benefits aren’t unimportant. They’re just not the lead story generally. And they’re also not what the customer buys. They buy, you know, the classic marketing story. 

Nobody needs a half inch drill bit. What they need is a half inch. What they need is a half inch hole. And so, yeah.

Michael Baer: 32:28

I was about to say that exact same thing. Isn’t that funny? Our great minds are thinking alike. This could be a can of worms, but I’m going to ask this question, and hopefully we can keep it short because I’m. I think we should wrap up here pretty quick.

We’ve covered a lot of ground. Where do you see the field of marketing heading in the next five years? It’s a big question.

Rick Rappe: 32:50

It is a big question. And I know everybody is talking about AI, and I think AI is a game changer. I’m somewhat of a counter conventionalist or a contrarian in some ways about lots of stuff. That doesn’t mean I’m not a forward thinking progressive, which I am, but I’m also I like to not just jump on bandwagons. One of my favorite quotes of all time is a Mark Twain quote that says, “when you find yourself in the majority, it’s time to pause and think.”

So I kind of find that to be the case, and I think there are a lot of people who are jumping on the bandwagon and using it. Not so great, because I think there’s a lot of question in my mind about some of the utility. Having said that, there’s tremendous obviously opportunity. And of course I use I 25 times. So having said that, I use it 25 times a day. 

But what I think it’s doing best right now is speeding up tasks that used to take a long time. And so I view it from how can it like I do a lot of customer interviews. I talk to clinicians a lot as part of projects, and I’ll record that stuff, and I can use it to find quotes quickly. I can use it to help me summarize things. I can use it to help me ideate on things quickly. 

I find it not great at writing yet. And I think that what it’s doing, unfortunately, to marketing, is lowering the bar to, to the creation of crappy content. And so I see a lot of crappy content right now. So. So I’m hoping that we all don’t start just creating advertising and marketing everywhere, because I don’t think yet it’s doing what it’s doing the service to, you know, what’s needed. 

Meaning how do we understand, get insight and create things that actually do engage people, especially in this world of clutter? Like I feel like one of the one of the worries I have is that there will be only infinitely more clutter because we made it so much easier to make stuff. And so.

Michael Baer: 35:12

That’s true.

Rick Rappe: 35:13

So that’s one worry I have for the future, is that it’s just going to be just if we think there’s noise now, particularly online, there’s going to be an exit. And so how do you then break it. Break through.

Michael Baer: 35:26

Yeah. It’s easy to produce long form content. And then you can feed it into ChatGPT and say summarize this for me and boil it down, you know, so I think AI is super interesting, but it still needs human intervention. It still needs human correct human help to optimize and make it really create the kinds of things that are really worthy of, of putting out into the world. But it certainly is accelerating everything that we do, isn’t it?

Rick Rappe: 35:56

Yeah. Every day and every day there’s, you know, a new improvement, new breakthrough. So yeah, we will see. We will see. Obviously I’m bullish on it but I think it needs to be used the right way.

I agree with you. It’s a human. Using it can be more effective. It’s less about taking, you know taking people doing the work of people.

Michael Baer: 36:19

Well thank you so much, Michael. This has been really interesting and I appreciate your time. For our listeners that are interested in learning more or connecting with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out and get in touch with you?

Rick Rappe: 36:31

Yeah, just send me an email. It’s michael.baer@techcxo.com. I love talking and networking with people.

Happy to set up a time to chat. And whether you’ve got a challenge or a problem you’d like to chat about, or just want to network and expand your network, I’m happy to. Happy to connect.

Michael Baer: 37:02

Awesome. Well thanks again. I really appreciate it and I will be in touch and talk to you soon.

Rick Rappe: 37:08

Thanks, Rick. Good talking to you.

Outro: 37:10

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

Just drop us a message at responsedrivers@rpmdm.com. Until next time, keep driving response and making your marketing work smarter.