Building a Global B2B Marketing Powerhouse With Mike Kichline

Intro: 00:01

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, Rick Rappe here, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here, we’re going to 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 the in the evolving marketing landscape.

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Visit rpmdpm.com to learn more. Today I’m super excited about my guest. Mike Kichline is the former Co-founder CEO of Yesler, a tech focused B2B agency that worked with Microsoft, Google, SAP, Adobe, Amazon, and over 40 major brands. Yesler grew to the largest independent B2B agency in the world with more than 400 people in Seattle, London, Philadelphia, Singapore, Portland, Toronto and dozens of other remote locations around the US. 

Yesler was acquired by Accenture in 2020, after which Mike spent several years overseeing the integration of teams and capabilities and leading the evolution of Accenture’s B2B marketing services for their fortune 500 clients. Mike and I have actually known each other for over ten years as fellow members of EO, which is Entrepreneurs Organization of Seattle. And I’ve watched for Mark. I’ve watched Mike, I’m sorry in for the past ten years kind of in awe of his success. So of course I wanted to corner Mike and ask him some some questions and learn what’s the secret to to Mike’s success? 

So thanks so much for joining me today, Mike.

Mike Kichline: 02:40

Thanks, Rick. I’m excited.

Rick Rappe: 02:42

Yeah. So let’s jump in and I’ll start asking you some of my questions. First of all, can you talk a little bit about your your journey leading up to founding of Yesler and, and what experiences kind of shaped your shaped your approach to marketing and B2B marketing?

Mike Kichline: 03:00

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think, I think with a lot of entrepreneurial stories, there’s, you know, I we talked a little bit about this previously. There’s there’s like your serial entrepreneurs are just always chasing ideas. And then there’s people who just kind of find themselves in a place where, where something seems to make sense. I spent about ten years after I got out of college.

I had a few different degrees, but one was finance and one was marketing. And they didn’t. Nowadays that’s really valuable. Like people look at that and go, this is great because you’ve got this, this left brain, right brain kind of balance. And this I call it like the center brain space. 

 You can actually play a little bit on both sides of the creative. And the logical is kind of nice. But back when I got out of school, it didn’t really make it. It didn’t fit. It was like, what do you want to do? 

 Do you want to do accounting and finance or do you want to be in marketing? And I was so lost on that for a while. I did a bit of both, and I ended up working in technology, which wasn’t really my plan, but started learning about the industry at a software company and having some success there. Started in finance and accounting. Went over to marketing and OEM and back to finance, and then to partner marketing. 

 And it wasn’t until 99 or so I joined Avenue Way. Avenue way became a quantitative and razorfish, and they were a phenomenal agency and success story. In this day, some of the smartest people I’ve just ever known and worked with. I love that team of people, and they were like 40 people when I joined there. And it was it was just amazing. 

 In the.com period. But it was this place where like, everything was, was all these customer engagements really defined by performance and data. And for the first time, we were really tracking and measuring things in the online space. They were the first. They were the first to in kind of invent the concept of, of basically embedding a one by one pixel in all of the online ads, so you could track view based activity after. 

 So it wasn’t just click driven and that was revolutionary. And so there’s so many insights that can come from that. Wow. And yeah, it was it was it was a crazy time. And I don’t know I had a I had a funny experience there because I was, I was like 28 or 29, but I was one of the older people in the, in the teams. And, and so I kind of was given these responsibilities. I kind of got all of the I got all the hard clients. I got all the, the the not the, the challenging ones like the Microsoft team was massive.

They were spending huge amounts of money and doing cutting edge things. And I was I would usually get the ones that were problematic or in danger of leaving because they didn’t understand it or something like that, because I was kind of a good fixer. So I would come in and resolve the problems and realize what was going on and get everybody on the same page. But what that meant was where most people would have like they were strategists for like one or maybe two clients. It got to the point where I had like eight and it was just insane. 

 And I’d look over and there’s like the Microsoft team doing these crazy things, and there’s the Nike team and they’re like going down to Eugene and doing trust Falls with each other on the weekend and climbing rocks and things. And and then I’ve got my, you know, messages from my clients screaming and, you know, telling me I should fire my entire team for something. He screwed up. You know, like that was the world I felt like I inhabited. And when the.com implosion kind of happened and they did some cutbacks, I actually, I actually volunteered to to step out. 

 I was so burnt out. I was like, I’m going to step out of here. I need a break. And and then there really wasn’t much to do after that. Like, the wreckage of the.com ecosystem was crazy. 

 And I ended up doing some consulting for RealNetworks. And they had an opportunity to go out to Microsoft and do some things out there. And the program that I was engaged with out there was. They had a bunch of phrases for them, but in the end, it’s basically a customer engagement program to pre-launch for the enterprise customers. It was like, look, when we launch this technology, we want to have customers that have had great experiences and want to have great stories. 

 The challenge is what you need to do is you need to get these customers to work with a an unproven pre-release, you know, beta to release candidate, build a software in an actual production space and have an experience with it so they have a story to tell. Hey, we we found that we are, you know, 10% more efficient or we’re saving money or whatever the story is. B would be to meet the marketing objectives. So either to run this program for the Windows Server launch in advance. And as we got through it, one of the one of the senior guys in the group was like, you know, we run these programs all the time out here and they usually fail. 

 This one’s not. And it was because the guy was working with who kind of framed the program, had a totally different way of engaging with these customers. It was like, look, if you give them something for free, that’s as exactly as much value as they place on it. So if they have other priorities, they’ll just go with those. Because one of the things we would give them is some consulting time. 

 And so rather than giving it to them, we actually had them pay a heavily discounted rate for them. And then we required them to come out to Redmond to meet with the product team, which they never got to do because they only talked to the sales guys. And so you built this relationship with the customers. And so by the time the product launched, we pulled like 80 to 85% of these customers into successful stories at launch. So they had this massive book of customer videos and stories and things like that that supported the launch, which typically they’d get 20% maybe. 

So. I was leading this thing. I think there’s a good I think I could build a practice around this. Right. Like helping them kind of engage with meet their customers where they are. 

 And there were a couple of people that I had met out there, David and Nick. Dave was running a similar program for early tablet products, and they were in the same space, like hitting some of the same failures the typical Microsoft programs did. But he saw what we were doing and he was like, yeah, I can kind of see this too. Annika was really involved in. She was telling a lot of the stories. 

 She ran a lot of the writing and production of content. And so I got asked by another team at Microsoft to come repeat everything we did. So I started a company called Project Line to basically be the space we build out these programs. So that’s what I did. And and after about a year, I got David and Nicky to come and join me. 

 And I’d started kind of building out other things because I could see that there’s a lot of stuff happening out here in this space, and there’s a lot of needs. And so I was looking at the core things that I thought we could build competencies around, and then also being opportunistic about the types of things we were being asked to do. Right. So what we evolved to over the next few years was really a, you know, a consulting and quasi staffing organization for a while. We were just adding people and meeting customer needs, but really trying to centralize around core tenets of things. 

 We did really well. We built out a lot of these engagement programs. We started building up teams to really produce a lot of this content. These case studies and customer stories. And then we kind of pulled in a lot of other things. 

 And one of the biggest turning points was a few years in. I had a former colleague reach out and say, hey, we’ve got this problem where I think you maybe you could help me out. We’ve we’ve invested like millions of dollars into these tools and platforms that we’ve built. And we want to try to do is get attribution on our marketing. Like we spent tons of money all over the place, all these POS. 

 But we we don’t know where it’s all going, like specifically. So we built out these tools. So all of our marketers can basically tag all of the their spend to the various campaigns that are being activated in market. And here’s what we’ve learned. We’ve learned marketers are really, really bad at using tools. 

 That’s pretty much what we’ve learned. It’s all it’s all inconsistent. None of it’s uniform. We can’t really use much of the data to figure things out. So we’re thinking maybe you could get a few people to help us just be the front end for this. 

 And so I thought about that, and I came back and said, look, I think first of all, yeah, we can do this. Second of all, I think the way you want to do it makes sense. You, you. Because what you guys always want is a just add water solution. You don’t want to do anything. 

 You just want to, like, throw somebody in there and make it happen. This is not the most exciting set of responsibilities. Like you’re just arms deep in spreadsheets and tools and platforms, and you need really smart people, but it’s not really exciting job. So what you need is it’s a great entry level opportunity to build younger teams, to kind of build experience and marketing capabilities and move them up. So it was one of the first managed service programs at Microsoft. 

 We got them to basically, you know, hire a group of people that were fairly junior to kind of start aligning with the regions across the US and Microsoft or the various industry segments and be their, you know, specialist to set up all their campaigns in these tools and platforms and deliver the reporting to them. And in a few years that went from, you know, our first pilot of like 4 or 5 people. And after a few years, I think we had about 60 people running these engagements. Like, we kind of owned this service across Microsoft. And at the same time, we continued to like, build the content pieces and grow the organization.

Rick Rappe: 12:57

Is this when you sort of started out of is this what inspired the beginning of Yesler?

Mike Kichline: 13:03

Not quite, but it is. It’s instrumental in that because a few years later we got a call. You know, we were really Microsoft specific, and we had a few clients here and there that we were doing some things with, but they’re just, you know, they’re they’re just like the sun man. It’s just this center of mass that, you know, it’s it was good and bad. Like we just yeah, grow out there, which was great.

It wasn’t easy. There’s a ton of competition, but part of what we differentiated with was do things you do very well. There were tons of people out there that kind of just did whatever, but they never really invested in creating systemic knowledge, right? That they could replicate. So we really leaned into that. 

 So most of our employees were full time employees, even if they were on contracts, how Microsoft would choose to employ them, they were our employees and we trained them and we develop them into these competencies. So we were building out a lot of these writings and editorial services and doing tons of case studies and more and more stories. And so those are huge pieces of the business. And we got a lead came in from from someone at SAP, and they were asking a couple of questions that were really, really, really specific. And I was like, nobody knows we’re doing this unless they knew from Microsoft turned out to be somebody who had left Microsoft to go there and knew our work and was like, got into SAP and was like, they have the exact same problem. 

 Like, they aren’t they aren’t tracking any of their spend accordingly. And so we went and pitched out there to build. We called it Campaign desk. We built a campaign desk for them. And then once you have that, you can now sell in all your other services. 

 It’s like, hey, you know, we can tell our stories. Hey, we can run these engagements for you. We can start reaching out to all of your partner communities, and we can do all your marketing in this space. So now we have these two big enterprise organizations that were really growing. And we’re Yesler came in was around 2012. 

 We started seeing. Marketing automation and martech was emerging in force. But our clients were using their own stuff or they weren’t really or SAP was just kind of a broken yet. So they weren’t really ready to jump in. But. 

 We knew that was where things were going to go. Dave was really instrumental in our organization of of, you know, I was heads down in a lot of client stuff and building up pieces, and he was looking at going, I think, like we need to think about these martech platforms and what we could do there because that’s what they’re going to want it. They just don’t yet. So we decided to follow, you know, there’s the MVP model, the minimum viable product model. And we said, well, what if we, you know, actually launch an actual agency and didn’t do it inside of our current clients at all? 

 We’ll just go to market. We’ll build a small team internally. What do we need? Well, we need to probably get really good with an implementation of let’s choose what we feel a good player is for the space. So we pick Marketo. 

 And Salesforce. Surprisingly, even though Microsoft you know was, you know in play with you know their own platforms. We were like let’s go outside of those. Let’s use Salesforce and Marketo and let’s write 4 or 5 really good pieces of content about the evolution of B2B marketing and how martech influences it. And that’s our that’s our go to market plan. 

 Thinking that, yeah, I don’t think that we I think it was really going to work. I mean, you’re like, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.

Rick Rappe: 16:31

Well, it was an experiment, which is great in business. That’s what we have to do, right? We have to launch some experiments. And sometimes you fail. But you’re always learn.

And it sounds like you guys were willing to do that.

Mike Kichline: 16:42

Yeah. And and we got some traction and we got a couple of clients that were pretty gung ho. We got an early this company that a tech company that had kind of leaned into a startup, but they had good funding and leaned into it. And, and we and at the time what we do is just turn the screen around. It was great.

It’s like, here’s how you showed up. Here’s here’s our content that you downloaded, and here’s what, here’s where, who you forwarded it to. Like, we could show them the journey of their own space as a customer to say, you could do this with your customers, you can manage this customer journey and you can know, like, once you did this, we reached out to you this way.

Rick Rappe: 17:17

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 17:18

Once you did this, then we sent you this. Once you did this, we called you or we? Yeah. You know, we could show them the path in a simple form.

Rick Rappe: 17:26

I’m working with a B2B company right now that they literally showed me that I want to work with them based on how they interacted and and acquired me as a customer. It was so it was so impressive. I was like, wow, I need to do that for my company as well.

Mike Kichline: 17:42

It’s a powerful space and.

Rick Rappe: 17:44

Oh yeah, well, when somebody does it differently and noticeably differently and better, it stands out, right? Like because we all get a lot of, you know, junk email and things that don’t work. And we we recognize those also. But you know.

Mike Kichline: 18:02

In those early days, you know, the worst part about marketing automation was the name. Because people didn’t know what that meant. And what, you know, we would always tell them, look, if your marketing is crap, all you’re going to do is automate crap to scale. Congratulations. It doesn’t doesn’t help you.

Yeah. And most people got it wrong because they didn’t really know how to how to use it. And so what we realized after once we got momentum and we were like, you know, we’re getting to this tipping point with our core customers where they’re they’re starting to be curious about this as well. I think what we should do is take all of these teams that are essentially doing this, just not on these platforms. And we need to rebrand them from product line into the agency. 

 And basically, let’s just take the what are what are the agency related services that align. So we just did a reorganization, which wasn’t really reorg. It was just more of a rebrand of like, we have this other brand. Let’s pull everybody over and create the space within the actual agency for the stuff that we’re doing. And it was funny because, you know, I always say that, like with Microsoft, it’s like some of our clients knew we were doing this. 

 They were really intrigued by it. We had some stalwarts that were like, really, you know, thought it was fantastic. But most of our clients, when we went to like, we didn’t even tell them right away. We just did it. And then after, you know, a few months, we’re like, we have a naming issue. 

 Like, you know, who they think they work for and who the clients representing and stuff. So we we said we need to have comms with their customers and talk to them about this. And we said, look, here’s what we’re doing. We have this brand which is going to continue in the consulting and kind of bespoke services you need. And then we have Yesler and they do these specific things in B2B marketing. 

 And our teams are like maybe oh that’s great. Cool. And then they kind of go, wait, wait, is this going to cost me more money? I’d be like, no, no. So nothing’s changing. 

 Or Do I have to work with different people? Like, no, it’s all it’s all the same. We’re doing this and like 85% and 90% are like, oh well cool. Good. Well good luck with that thing, you know.

Rick Rappe: 20:22

Right.

Mike Kichline: 20:23

Congratulations. Right. But there were about like 10 to 15% of customers that were they would listen really intently and they’d go home and be like, that’s really smart because nobody here is doing this yet. And I want to use you to do this more. Had an amazing, like lift, not for everybody, but for the people that were starting to think about that.

It was a real accelerator for. Yeah, yeah. Because we the world out at the enterprise organizations was one where you did what they asked you to do typically, and to show up and say, we’re we’re not only ahead of you, but we’re investing in doing things ahead of when you need them was not typical, and it was a real help to our acceleration of growth within those areas. So wow, that was great. Then we started leaning into the platforms and building out those capabilities. 

 And then we got a project with Google which was based around content. Somebody there read a piece of our content, which was about honestly, it was about like, how do you track? We’re the first people to kind of play around with Marketo and figure out how you could actually track. They had a blind spot with how their platform tracked activity, and it was on mobile. They weren’t, you know, hadn’t quite figured it out, but it was in their one of our guys figured out how you could actually set up your campaigns to still track on mobile. 

 So we published some content about it. And someone at Google was like, hey, can you come out here and do like a, do like a project with us to kind of educate our teams? And we did a gig out there to kind of like roll up the sleeves and show them how to do it. And, you know, clearly.

Rick Rappe: 22:03

Clearly, there must have been some buzz in that in that world at the enterprise level. People were talking about you and sharing information about what was going on.

Mike Kichline: 22:14

So yeah. Later we went from, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to, you know, at the time, you know, 5 or 6 years, I think we were we were, you know, well over 10 million in engagement revenue with them. So it was like this. Right?

Rick Rappe: 22:35

Yeah. Right. Well, I was going to ask you because you scaled the business so quickly from 2012 to 2019 or so, when you. When you sold to Accenture. Yeah.

You know, you scaled it to be the one of the, the largest B2B marketing agency in the, in the world, like, which is an absolutely amazing accomplishment. You know, I wanted to ask you, what were some of the other key strategies that you used to to accomplish that scale so quickly.

Mike Kichline: 23:06

Yeah. I mean, we had a few things we really believed in. First of all, it was you just go back to the very beginning. It was. It was around culture and and people.

In the very early days, we hired people that we kind of knew and liked and respected and, you know, like attracts like, and you create a personality and you build a culture around the things that are meaningful. We had a huge investment in time with each other. We had huge investment in supporting our community. We we tended to attract people that shared our expectations and values. Yeah, we leaned into that a lot. 

 That was that was huge. And it’s not a matter of, you know.

Rick Rappe: 23:52

Hey, players hire a players don’t they.

Mike Kichline: 23:54

Yeah they do. And, and and I this was one of those lessons from the way we used to joke about back then was, you know you’re hiring philosophy. And we talked about it at Project Lion yesterday. It was like smart and nice. It sounds.

I mean, the resume still needs to hold up, but like, I’ve met a lot of smart people, met a lot of nice people. You know, I’ve met some smart people that could come in and and totally kick ass. And they’re going to five people on the way, and it’s just not worth it. Right. I’ve met some wonderfully nice people that are probably not. I’ll go to dinner, but they’re probably not going to be the ones that can really own and drive whatever solutions and initiatives you’re trying to build around, but if you have both, generally you minimize conflict and drama. People collaborate well together. They problem solve, they find solutions. And we just really believed in that.

Like, let’s, let’s build a culture where everybody here is, you know, it’s not like, oh man, that guy’s really smart. Yeah, we’re all really smart. He’s got some great plans and solutions. She’s really good at this, but it’s not like the expectation is everybody is really good at collaborating and communicating and we all like them, you know. Yeah. 

 That that was that was a huge part of how we built built the organization. The other was we had a lot of transparency.

Rick Rappe: 25:26

That’s sort of really interesting and and refreshing, I guess to hear that you that the, the looking for nice people as opposed to just smart people, I mean, you don’t hear that every day. That’s really that’s really noteworthy.

Mike Kichline: 25:40

Everybody’s always looking for like who’s the best candidate. And would you still do you just add a couple more qualifiers to it? Yeah. Like and you don’t always know for sure. And it’s not a universal constant.

But you, you know, you lean in, you just basically say for the most part, what we’re trying to do is find people that we genuinely, you know, enjoy. And one of my favorite things.

Rick Rappe: 26:03

Well, people don’t always reveal that they’re not nice right off the bat. Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 26:08

That’s true.

Rick Rappe: 26:10

Did you have to be tough with people sometimes when they came on and you found out that they weren’t nice and you had to make, you know, decisions to undo them, undo some things.

Mike Kichline: 26:22

Yeah. We had a we had a couple hard ones over the years that. I mean, everybody does, you know, on, on the, on the timeline, it’s always going to happen where you have some like man that didn’t. But I also you know.

Rick Rappe: 26:37

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 26:37

Would reflect on it and say at least for me. Any time you, you know anytime I went against my gut on something I it never, never ended well. Like there’s something about like if you really.

Rick Rappe: 26:58

If you trusted your intuition.

Mike Kichline: 27:00

Yeah. If you feel like you reach a point where your intuition has served you well, then then you you kind of have to. It’s healthy for you to trust that there were a few times where made some really hard decisions, just because something didn’t feel 100%. I never regretted not making those decisions. I did.

Rick Rappe: 27:26

Write.

Mike Kichline: 27:27

The ones where I overrode that intuition, right? And for the most part, I think getting talent and getting people that’s that’s a big a big part of it. Now, it can also work the other way for sure. People feel like, oh, I really like this person. Like why?

Like do you? I mean, it’s a classic interview challenge, like, oh, I like this person. Well, I like them too, but are they. What’s their capability? Like what? 

 You know, that’s one of those challenges in the interview process that people don’t really know how to do it well and understand what they’re looking for. But but sometimes they do the opposite, right? They look totally at their skill and capability and they don’t actually think about the person. We we in the very early days of Dave and Nick and I and Nick was a huge proponent of this, which was fantastic. It was about, you know, the classic what’s your mission statement? 

 What do you you know. I’m not dismissing that out of hand. It’s like it is valuable, but you have to mean it. It has to be genuine. And for us, we built one that. 

 We we really we did cement the culture of the organization and our plan around it. And it was in its simplest form. It was like, you know, the commitment to have a positive impact on the people we work for, the people we work with and the global community. And we had a long form of that. But that was the short. 

 And we measured we measured that every year. Like, how are we doing? How, how are how are we supporting our clients? Are we are we meeting their expectations? Are we getting them promoted? 

 Are we making them happy?

Rick Rappe: 29:08

Like, yeah.

Mike Kichline: 29:10

Before. Like that’s driving business. Are we positively impacting the people we work with each other? Are we are we are we elevating people? You know, are people happier?

They’re being heard. And then the global community, we had like four pillars of community engagement that we focused around, which was children, homelessness, food insecurity and pets. Because we had so many animal lovers. And like those, were we every year we donated money and time to causes that were aligned with those things. Yeah, that was how that was. 

 How we measured ourselves was like, how are we supporting our clients and how are we supporting each other, and how are we supporting the world around us?

Rick Rappe: 29:48

Yeah, I feel like the first two are fairly common in in that, you know, in how people, agencies approach their work and the world. The last one, I think is a little bit less common and, you know, more unique. did it make? Do you think that particular pillar of your mission statement made a big difference?

Mike Kichline: 30:11

Yeah. Yeah. Because because from from the very beginning, we, we, you know, we put purpose and time and investment into that monthly, quarterly, yearly. And and it was meaningful. It kept people with the company for a very long time because they, they, they liked being part of an organization that that was very genuine about supporting community around them.

It wasn’t just the, hey, you’re doing a fundraiser for a thing. And, you know, well, I guess it.

Rick Rappe: 30:45

It makes it feel like you’re motivated by not just financial success, not just money and revenue and growth and the business, the business growth that benefits the owner. But it’s also like you’re embracing a bigger picture, a larger need.

Mike Kichline: 31:02

Yeah. And that’s where you start and there’s where we finish. I mean, it’s, you know, that’s we did this for about 17 years until we joined Accenture. And in the early days we had, you know, ten or 20 or 30 people. It’s very different when when you have like 200 or 300 or 400.

Right. So the shift from small and, and you know, familial to like large corporate is is tricky to navigate. Well, I think because you can lose that identity because you do go in those early days where it’s like you’re trying to just be in a space where is everybody enjoying themselves, or are we doing things that are fulfilling personally, like it isn’t about the money, and then you reach a point where you’re, like large enough where it has to be because you’ve got an ecosystem that like, well, we have to hit these goals because I have commitments to people and to payroll and to, you know, investments we’re making in our in our development and growth. And it was, I think, some of the most challenging times we had. I don’t think they were challenging for the business, but I think for my mental space, for your mental health is like how, you know, in some of those growth phases where you’re like, how can we. 

 Aim for these large objectives and how do we continue to fulfill these things where you are feeling like you’re obviously more corporate, but still have these close personal relationships in this community of people? Yeah. When you were 15, 20 people, and it’s a tough balance, but I think we did that really well. I know I’m we’re probably all biased about it. I try to be really honest about some of the blind spots we had, but yeah, I think we did it well.

Rick Rappe: 32:51

Well, it sounds like it. You it sounds like you were extremely successful at growing the business and building a huge, successful team. So I think you can give yourself a big pat on the back. I wanted to dig in a little bit more, though, just out of curiosity. I mean, I let my curiosity guide me.

And I think that idea that you said, you know, Yesler went from a small familial, familial agency of ten people, up to 200, with offices all over the world. It leads me to the question of, you know, what other significant challenges did you face as you were growing? And you know what comes to mind as, as and how did you overcome those things?

Mike Kichline: 33:35

I mean, I know that. 2008, 2009 was a tricky one. We grew, but but we shifted our mindset a lot like that and said, well, I mean, some of it was the space we were in. We were fortunate because when you’re in the services space, When things are going well for your clients and they have budget, there’s plenty of things to do. And when things are tight and they don’t have a lot of money, it’s obviously difficult.

But we thought about was, well, let’s just think about this differently. If they don’t have much as much to spend, if they’ve got to make harder decisions, just be the best choice. Just be the best at what you do. If they’re we want to be the last thing they remove from the budget if they’ve. And when I referenced earlier that investment in creating your own processes and your own institutional knowledge that you could share, like we took a lot of pride in the fact that, you know, in the Microsoft ecosystem, for example, like just because you work at Microsoft doesn’t mean you have a clue what anybody else is doing. 

 It’s a giant organization. And we would find, you know, I remember being in a meeting with. Dated like it was. It was an office 12 and Vista and like they are both running programs for both of them. And somebody and I was in a meeting and somebody was like, man, you know, we should probably figure out how we can align our customer set because there’s a great, better together story and we don’t know how to do, like, does anybody know anybody who’s running that? 

 And we’re like, why are you going to wrap the meeting? Like, you guys should talk. We’re already doing that. Like we’ve already built a list of like which customers you should probably collaborate on because you guys don’t talk to each other because there’s no incentive or like, no incentive to do that within the organization. So heads down. 

 So by by looking at it and saying, how can we make our customers smarter? How can we create connections that we see that you don’t? Because we’re actually we cross over organizational boundaries that you don’t. Right? So by doing that, you gave us an opportunity to add value and stay really connected. 

 So we would have clients that would have. Less budget. But we might actually get more of it because we were able to look and say, well, we’re not going to hire people. You know, that’s the other thing. Yeah, tight. 

 They’re actually tightening up their own internal stuff. So we found paths. How do we take these negative.

Rick Rappe: 36:09

Situations and.

Mike Kichline: 36:10

You know, and where do we find momentum in these and positives. And and we did that pretty well through through those years.

Rick Rappe: 36:21

It sounds like you guys were really great at just imagining what’s coming next and understanding the, the environment and sort of future, you know, seeing the future a little bit and then positioning yourself for where things were going, which is, you know, that’s an amazing skill.

Mike Kichline: 36:39

And yeah, we tried and we weren’t always right. I mean, one of the bigger failures we had was during man, maybe, maybe it was 2009 ten through like 2012 or 13. A lot of the work that we’re doing in these platforms and tools was adjacent to kind of an emergent push in business intelligence, right? That was the phrase at the time. It was, oh, we want BI solutions.

We want we have all this data. We’d like to build huge repositories and have actionable reporting and insights being pulled out of these databases that can tell, like and so BI was where everybody was investing a lot of their funds and you needed like dev teams to build out these comprehensive database solutions. And it was really adjacent to what we were doing. And we were we were working with a lot of customers that needed that. And so we wanted to we thought that was a good extension of our work. 

 It wasn’t. And we invested in that. We built teams around it and there were a couple of failures to that. One was we like myself and Dave, and that’s not in our personal wheelhouse. Like we’re not developers. 

 We weren’t, we weren’t. We understood the value of data and analytics and reporting, but it wasn’t like our specific sweet spot. So we hired somebody to kind of build and run that. And while they were brilliant in the technical aspect, they weren’t good with the PNL, you know? They weren’t good at aligning like skill sets to products. 

 We’d have a project that would need ten different skill sets, and we only had four. So then it would be like, well, I need to get these other people hired on board. And it was like, but they’re not. It’s just for little bits and pieces, right? That we can’t. 

 It just didn’t fit. And we chased that for a couple of years before going, this is not our space. And what’s funny is down the road as as marketing automation became more prevalent in the later half, a lot of that got kind of built into the solutions. You still needed even deeper levels of analytics and reporting, but you didn’t need to do you didn’t need dev teams. And the work that we did do on the development side was more like, you know, HTML and and templating and things like that. 

 That just helped kind of turn on a lot of the capabilities within the system. Those are much easier kind of space to be technical in, so to speak. But yeah, that didn’t work at all. But it seemed like good, right? And but one of the things that we did that also helped us a lot. 

 We always put a five year plan together, and the five year plan was not like a constant five. Like like we were to do it right now, it would be the 2030 plan. It was five years from now and we talked about we want to be this size. We want to have this revenue. We want to have ten more enterprise clients. 

 Whatever the goals were, we wanted we you know, there were we want to have 50 employees and like there were big picture things. And we want to emphasize these capabilities. And every year we would track to that. And, you know, two years in, you’d be like, hey, out of these five core Goals were on track for. These two were ahead of pace on this one. 

 We haven’t even started this one. We and by when it was in that mix, it was like one that we were like we’re underperforming, underperforming. And then when we turned it off, like we kept it on the card. So here we are, our annual meeting and like our quarterly reviews and our leadership team like we just spent time on it. But it was always like, yeah, that one got crossed off the list because it’s a good reminder, right, that this is part of the vision. 

 This was removed for the right reasons. These are the things we’re now doubling into and emphasizing and that and so it gave you a more complete picture. And then when we get to year four we would start thinking about what’s our next. So we went through like three of those in our in our evolution. Right. 

 Wow. Funny is we realized we’ve I talked to Dave and Annika about this. We always kind of have more often than not we got there like.

Rick Rappe: 40:40

Yeah, those things are super powerful. I’m a huge believer in that true North vision, sort of creating that future. Writing down what the future state is going to be, or that you want it to be, and then having that and referring back to it regularly. Yeah. Keeps keeps everyone focused on, you know what what we’re doing and where we’re going.

And miraculously, sometimes things just fall into place. It must be law of attraction things. You know, I’m not a big believer in all of that, but it seems to be it seems to be how things work. You know, I guess at least in.

Mike Kichline: 41:16

That North Star is valuable. Like, and you don’t always have to be staring at it. I remember the planning meeting in early Yesler, where we were creating our identity, and we had like.

Rick Rappe: 41:25

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 41:26

People in the room. And it raised like, you know.

Rick Rappe: 41:28

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 41:29

We’re trying to figure out, like, what do we truly want to make our identity about and all this stuff. And finally, I think I just I said, here’s the here’s what we want to be the best B2B agency in the world. That’s it.

Rick Rappe: 41:46

That’s a big that’s a big one. But a big goal.

Mike Kichline: 41:49

But it’s not that you get there. It’s where you’re always trying to go.

Rick Rappe: 41:54

You’re striving for that. Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 41:55

That’s true. It’s simple. It’s like is what we’re doing in to serve the mission of trying to be the best B2B agency in the world? And if it’s not, then then does it does it stack up to what you know?

Rick Rappe: 42:09

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 42:09

Always the goal. It’s never achieved. It’s like the North Star. You’re always going that direction. You’re never going to get there.

But it guides you to to why am I walking in this direction? Why am I moving in this? Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 42:22

Yeah. That’s that’s great. And thinking about progress, not perfection. And and the fact that these goals take a long time, you know, it’s amazing what you a week seems to go by really quickly. A month goes seems to go by really quickly.

But years and five years that’s you can accomplish an amazing amount of things.

Mike Kichline: 42:42

That was one of the best. Bill gates quotes of all time. I have referenced him over and over. And she said, you know, people, it was something along the lines of. People overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten.

Rick Rappe: 42:56

Right. Oh, wow.

Mike Kichline: 42:58

And and it doesn’t even have to be ten, three, five, but a year. I mean, we know I mean, we’re old enough now that like, a year is not that long. Man. And when you set these arbitrary goals that define whether you are successful as a person, whether you’re successful as an organization based on how the year went, I, you you invariably, unless you kind of game the system and you hit the year with a lot of momentum and you know it’s going to be good, which is measuring anything other than did I maintain the momentum. But if you’re truly trying to create growth and change over time, I don’t know, a year is good, but where is that going to take you?

Because that gives you some grace to kind of have some things happen that you don’t expect and navigate them and recover from them or maintain them.

Rick Rappe: 43:48

Yeah. Yeah. Having quarterly goals is great. And sometimes you hit them and sometimes you miss them. But, you know, as long as you’re still got that distant goal in mind and you’re moving in the right direction, I think that makes this a massive, massive difference.

You know, even if you miss this quarter’s goals, you can reevaluate. You can pivot, adjust and and keep after it. You know, I think those are that’s that’s very, very wise.

Mike Kichline: 44:16

The corners are valuable. The years are valuable. But they’re they have to be in service of something larger. And you can’t if you miss that’s fine. It’s no different than you know, the reason why is, is is what you need to understand.

The why is very valuable. And it’s no different than when I would have, you know, our services, business, everything we do is based on people, and having good people is really necessary. And people are going to leave.

Rick Rappe: 44:45

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 44:46

You know, I was always really pragmatic about that. I was like, I don’t if someone works for us for six months or six years and they go to something else, and I had people that would go, you know, I got to have this amazing opportunity. They’re going to pay me a bunch of money or do something I really want to do, or it’s just a next step for me that I really want. And if I don’t have that for them, like, yeah, if I do, awesome. But if, if I don’t, I don’t own all the opportunities.

But I looked at it as like, if your time here, you know, if you learned things here that took you to the next level as, as in your career as a person that you can now go make more money, own responsibilities that are exciting to you, and meaningful work in another industry that you really want to go do like I did my job. Like I was excited for you. Now somebody. So the reason they left was really important. Now, if they didn’t feel heard or they didn’t feel respected, or they felt like something was not going well, or yeah, that was a concern that I didn’t like. 

 I needed to understand that and it was accurate. You can’t just take someone’s not everybody has a good experience all the time. But but you got to go. And if you listen to the people that are often in the middle of it, you know, each side has its bias, right?

Rick Rappe: 46:12

Sure.

Mike Kichline: 46:12

And you can’t just take it on face value but recognize something was there that didn’t work. Well.

Rick Rappe: 46:17

A lot of times people don’t quit their job. They quit their boss. Right? We yeah, that’s that’s a true statement and very true. It certainly resonates with me.

I mean, well.

Mike Kichline: 46:29

You know that. Give you little warning. You go. Okay. Do we do have a do we have a gap in the leadership here is one of our managers kind of struggling to really understand people.

Yeah, that was something to be paying attention to.

Rick Rappe: 46:41

Yeah. Wow. It’s everything you’re talking about is super fascinating. And I want to keep talking about those things. But I also don’t want this to be a four hour podcast episode.

So I’m going to keep asking you a couple more questions. I mean, this is solid gold though. Mike, I really appreciate your sharing your your wisdom with us. Let me see. I guess I want to ask you because you seem to be a visionary, I want to I want to talk a little bit about B2B marketing.

Mike Kichline: 47:11

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 47:11

And say, you know, obviously you saw it evolve dramatically over the past decade. Where do you see things going from here? What trends do you think are happening? What are the things that are coming that are going to shape B2B marketing in the next 5 to 10 years? Does anything come to mind?

Mike Kichline: 47:31

Yeah, I mean, I mean, obviously the easy answer is I and obviously will, but I think what’s more relevant than that is. Figuring out how to how to not let AI take. The human element out of marketing. AI is really good at taking things that have already been created and repurposing them into something.

Rick Rappe: 47:57

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 47:59

When it’s not good at yet, and I think it’s much further away than people believe. That’s my own personal opinion based on conversations I’ve had, but stuff I’ve read is not good at creating out of nothing, right?

Rick Rappe: 48:14

Yeah. Truly innovative thinking.

Mike Kichline: 48:16

Yeah, that’s where humor comes in. That’s where emotional response comes in. It’s it’s the crazy idea. And all of our ideas are inherently based in something, you know, that we experienced or some amalgamation of those. But humans are different from I.

It’s not, as you know, you know, a big pile of data that I’m pulling up, prescribed. Right. Instead of a prompt. It’s, it’s you know, that’s the thing that, that I think people do. Well. 

 And if you look across the landscape of, especially in B2B marketing, I mean, you can find a million articles about how it’s just all there’s just so much crap out there. Everybody’s realized you need content, which is great because back when we started, nobody quite got that yet. Well, congratulations, we won that battle and the war is still going on because now there’s just too much of it and none of it is compelling. Yeah, like you can read content that, you know, effectively tells you the information that you want to, you know, you know, transmit to, to the public. That’s not interesting. 

 Like, it doesn’t. And very often it’s, that it’s it solves it or solves it. It runs into the same problem that I think most product companies struggle with. And we saw this in tech all the time that they’re built fundamentally, most tech companies are built by engineers. They love their product and they will tell you everything about it. 

 And you’re like, I don’t care. Like you’re assuming I know how your product will solve my pain point. If you want to talk to me about like if you if you can approach me and say, I understand you have this pain point and you need to solve these, these things, and it’s not going to help unless this is resolved for you. And what we’ve done is like, if you shift the narrative, like to really think first and foremost about what is your customer experiencing and how does whatever you’re doing address that, then you have something to say, but you still need to do that in a genuine and meaningful way. That’s conversational. 

 That’s, you know, it’s not too long. It’s not too short. It like, that’s hard. It genuinely is. It’s hard for humans to do. 

 And the the the world right now is really generating a lot of AI content. And it’s not all bad, but there’s a lot of it that’s just not particularly memorable either. Yeah. Stuff.

Rick Rappe: 50:55

Well, I think it’s from from my perspective as a B2B company selling to businesses. I mean, it’s so tricky to break through the digital clutter and get people’s attention, obviously. First off, first of all, and so you want to be short and to the point and get right to the right to the message. But then you also have to have credibility and build credibility and explain who you work for and why you should be listening to me or why? Why you should engage.

And there’s some, there’s so much, so many touches that have to happen in B2B marketing. You have to reach people over and over and over and over again before you actually break through. I think that’s that’s super fascinating.

Mike Kichline: 51:41

Advocacy is the back half of that. Like that’s where you get a lot of the genuine piece, customer advocacy, even employee advocacy. And it blew my mind over the years and Microsoft was as good as anybody. But you get into a lot of these, you know, with F5 or Google or anybody, right? They want these customer stories.

Man, it was always one of the first things that they pulled budget from. It was it was like for 20 years, it was always one of these areas that they knew they needed. But it’s always a little more expensive because it is high touch. You need, you need and you need to create a program around it. You can’t just call somebody, say, hey, man, you want to tell a story. 

 Like it’s just not how it works. You need you need to actually invest in an infrastructure that creates processes for advocacy across the organization. So you have a framework that this is how we run these programs. This is how we nurture our customers to prepare them to be available for these types of stories. And it’s mutually beneficial to both of us. 

 It’s not just me asking for stuff and asking investment, and they would inherently always try to. That was the one that was always there, cutting the corners on and drive you crazy. Because then when push came to shove, the stories were what they really wanted.

Rick Rappe: 53:00

Yeah. And those things are hugely valuable in the sales process.

Mike Kichline: 53:04

Yes.

Rick Rappe: 53:05

But it’s it’s not directly tied to ROI, so it’s pretty difficult to track it. That’s where it gets really tricky. Right. We have to in direct marketing we’re tracking everything and looking for the ROI. And it’s hard to do.

In B2B marketing it’s not as easy. All right, well, let me ask you another quick question and hopefully moving towards the end of our interview, but I just wanted to ask you, with this amazing career you’ve had with Yesler, what advice would you give to like a young entrepreneur or a young marketing person who’s trying to build and scale their business in this competitive landscape? I guess you’ve touched on a lot of things already that were that would be great advice. But and I and I know you don’t love giving advice, but I’m gonna.

Mike Kichline: 53:59

Tell you that.

Rick Rappe: 54:00

You told me yesterday and I’m here. I am asking you a question. Give me advice.

Mike Kichline: 54:04

It’s funny. Like I said.

Rick Rappe: 54:05

This is for a young person, though, so it’s. It’s a worthy cause, Mike, where I think you have a lot of value to add to offer a young person. So you know what? Think about someone in their 20s.

Mike Kichline: 54:16

Yeah, I think it’s I mean, I don’t know, the first thing that thing comes to mind is you probably know more than you think, but you probably know. You probably also know less than you think too. Finding the difference between those two is kind of challenging. Yeah. I think that.

Sometimes the hardest part of growing a business is. Is just sticking to it. And, you know, you’re you’re going to hit plateaus and phases. And if I reflect back on one of the hardest ones for me to overcome, and it took me a while, was the classic get out of your own way, you don’t you’re not the smart. You know you don’t. 

 You’re not the smartest guy. You don’t know how to do everything. So at a certain point, you got to figure out how to create redundancy. It’s better for you to not do everything. It’s I used to call it the the Atlas complex. 

 Right? You carry the whole world around. I can carry this whole world and a certain level, like there’s. I mean, there’s statues of Alice, and it’s impressive. Then you realize it’s not. 

 Yeah. If you were to put it like you’re stuck with it, you’re carrying the whole world on your shoulders. And the reality is, it looks impressive. But it’s not because you’re miserable.

Rick Rappe: 55:38

And it creates a nobody else.

Mike Kichline: 55:39

Around. And there’s nowhere to sit down without wrecking stuff. So.

Rick Rappe: 55:43

So it creates a flaw in the organization, as if the organization is a system. It creates a bottleneck. And I’m certainly guilty of this. This is my this is something that I need to work on. So it’s a.

Mike Kichline: 55:56

Self importance kind of thing that we that that is valuable to helping you be successful. But at a certain point you have to figure out how do I how do I separate out the stuff that I don’t need to do? Yeah, that’s that’s hard, but it’s necessary.

Rick Rappe: 56:14

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 56:15

And it hits everyone at a different phase of growth. But I think that’s really important. The other thing.

Rick Rappe: 56:25

I heard you, I heard you talking about, I want to just go back to some of the things that you said earlier, briefly, because I heard you, you chased a lot of opportunities and you took a lot of risks in your young, younger career. You saw opportunity and you would go after it and see what would happen. I mean, and I think that’s where entrepreneurship starts is the willingness to take some risks and to try things and maybe fail sometimes. And that’s that’s okay as long as you’re learning and moving forward.

Mike Kichline: 56:53

I’m a fan of the what I call the rule of three. I was talking with somebody about this last night, I think, and we struggle with this. When we joined Accenture and people were struggling with, you know, all your business shifts and where you’re going with it and which pieces are going to continue. And when they said, look, here’s the thing. It’s either strategic, it’s profitable or it’s got growth objectives.

Pick any two because I can’t work. They’re not going to work with one. And when you’re thinking about the things where you want to spend your time in a business, I actually think that that if you can get all three, like that’s a home run, right? But the reality is, if it’s people talk about, oh, it’s so strategic. How strategic is it if you’re struggling to pull enough money out of it and it’s not growing anywhere? 

 I mean, you know, how you know if it’s growth oriented, but you’re not making any money. It’s not super strategic like that. The only one that kind of has little value is if it’s profitable, but it’s not particularly strategic. You’re not growing where it’s a good like good run it, but use what you’re getting out of that to build stuff that are those other things. Right. 

 If you’ve got to have, I personally believe that you’ve got to have at least two of those qualifiers in order to really be aligned. And it’s funny, sometimes people look at that and they like kind of goes on and on. Never really thought about it that way. And what helps you realize, like, what am I chasing? That’s not helpful. 

 You know.

Rick Rappe: 58:28

Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I think and that’s another thing that came through. And what’s something you said earlier is the ability to focus and to stay focused on certain things that are important and, and to to say no to the things that aren’t important. I mean, that’s a very, very critical lesson that entrepreneurs seem to learn the hard way usually.

Mike Kichline: 58:51

And I gravitate to. Yes.

Rick Rappe: 58:52

Like, yeah.

Mike Kichline: 58:54

I really, really I do and it is hard.

Rick Rappe: 59:00

Totally.

Mike Kichline: 59:00

Because I grew up and there were times but but there’s this is it a yes within the sphere of what you feel confident in? There were things that we were asked to do that were like, we haven’t really done that before, and I don’t know if we know how to do it, but I would say.

Rick Rappe: 59:11

Oh, I know when you’re serving a big client like Microsoft, there’s people that ask you for all kinds of things and you know, hey, do you do signage and you want to say, absolutely. And you’re like, no, I don’t do signage. I don’t do that.

Mike Kichline: 59:24

But if it but if it’s in your space and you’re like, I haven’t done it, I know that people are doing it and we haven’t. But you look at it and go, I think somebody else coming in here isn’t going to know how to do it any better. We’re smart people. Yeah, we can figure this out. And it actually is adjacent to what we it fits now for sure.

Way out there. Of course not.

Rick Rappe: 59:45

Yeah.

Mike Kichline: 59:46

Certain point leaning in and saying we’ll figure it out. We’re smart.

Rick Rappe: 59:49

Oh yeah. We that’s how we innovate all the time. You know client has a has a need and there isn’t a solution available. And we have to build it and custom build something you know for a client. And then that becomes a capability that we can roll out and and scale up for other people.

Yeah. So wow Mike, this has been so great. And I have just one more last question for you before we wrap it up. And I want to pretend that we’re at an awards banquet like the Oscars of the Emmys, and you’re awarded a lifetime achievement award. And for everything that you’ve done up to this point, who would you thank in your in your acceptance speech?

Mike Kichline: 1:00:33

Man.

Rick Rappe: 1:00:37

That’s a big question, isn’t it?

Mike Kichline: 1:00:39

Yeah it is. I mean, I think I think we’re all the product of influencers that we don’t even recognize a lot of times. And the easy one for me is I, you know, I had two partners. And it’s really funny because I know plenty of horror stories of people who had partnerships and, and. I also am big fan of having there were three of us and three is interesting.

We were really different people, but we shared the same values like, you know, very much. We cared about the same things, even though our personalities are radically different. And at any point in time, if any one of us, any two of us were not on the same page or frustrated, there were times Dave and I were like, kind of pissed off at each other about certain things. Someone else could be the communicator, someone else could mediate and arbitrate. So like Annika could be, she could talk to Dave and talk to me and get on the same page. 

 I would arbitrate between some thing they were frustrated with each other about.

Rick Rappe: 1:01:34

There was a time there was a tiebreaker. If it was just a partnership of two people, it could have been a deadlocked tie.

Mike Kichline: 1:01:40

Yeah, the two of them were huge. I mean, there I would I don’t think I would have I would not have been able to accomplish this without the two of them. And I think we were all incredibly instrumental in helping each other get to this point. They would be phenomenal influences on me. You know?

That’s an easy one for me.

Rick Rappe: 1:02:03

Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Mike Kichline: 1:02:07

Thanks, Rick.

Rick Rappe: 1:02:07

We. Yeah, we’ve been talking with Mike Kichline, former CEO of Yesler, a rapid growth B2B marketing agency serving over 40 amazing brands and product line services, before Yesler, a consulting and staffing company. He’s an incredible entrepreneur, and if you have the opportunity to work with Mike in the future, I would highly encourage you to take it. So all right, Mike, thank you very much for this time and this opportunity to learn from you. And we’ll talk to you later.

Mike Kichline: 1:02:36

Thanks, Rick. It was a fun time.

Outro: 1:02:38

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.