Jason (00:41)
Hi Jackie, how are you? I'm doing wonderful. Thank you so much for being part of The Wisory Wise in Five this week.

Jackie Yeaney (00:42)
Hi Jason, I'm great, how are you?

Thank you for asking me.

Jason (00:52)
Of course. Before we dive into the five questions, I'd love for you to share your amazing background. You've had an incredible journey and are still on an incredible journey. But if you mind just giving the viewers and listeners a little bit about you and then we'll dive into the questions.

Jackie Yeaney (01:02)
you

Yeah, absolutely. I do call myself an accidental marketer because I kind of just fell in it and then fell in love with it, if you will. So I was a pretty big geek way back when. So I have an electrical engineering degree, a place called RPI in Troy, New York, which is a very sad, cold place.

I did Air Force ROTC while I was there, mainly to pay for college. My dad was in the military. My husband and I were, we, anyway, we decided to get married as we graduated because it was either try to get stationed together and get married or call it quits and say goodbye. So we got married.

an amazing job in the Air Force. I'm fairly old now, so that was Desert Storm times, but I learned a lot about ⁓ leadership during that time. Never intended to stay in. I went to business school. I thought business school sounded ridiculous. I was going to do a PhD at MIT. My Colonel convinced me that I wasn't going to be in a lab and I wasn't going to be an academic, so maybe I should look at MIT's business school.

So wise advice, Wisory, you have to get that. Throw it in. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Ended up being the perfect place for me. When I graduated there, I went to the Boston Consulting Group. Weren't many moms there. Now I had two kids as this was happening. I have a three year old and a three month old and my husband was still in the Air Force. I did.

Jason (02:13)
Thank you. I think I get a dollar for that.

Jackie Yeaney (02:33)
It did get me away from some of the, I'm not that smart, but you can't outwork me. That was my life philosophy. I'm like, I can't outwork these people. But ended up actually really liking it, which you're not supposed to say at those firms, I suppose. But I loved going into different businesses and helping them. I was in Boston and then was in Switzerland for a bit. And then they moved me to Atlanta. So I was consulting to Delta Airlines when 9-11 happened.

And the CFO asked me and two other people to leave BCG and come help directly. Felt like the right thing to do, even though they were about to make me partner. So you can call me crazy or not, I don't know. But I'd really fallen in love with the airline. And I said yes. And then the CFO asked me to run consumer marketing. And I did not know anything about marketing. I thought it was all fluff. I thought they'd lost their minds.

But I get in there, Jason, and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with obsessing about the Traveler because everybody at Delta at the time was just doing their own little thing and nobody was looking at it all the way across. I was like, why am I spending all this advertising money when the experience sucks? So took all that money and put it into experience and ⁓ saw the power of brand, like attaching people to a revitalized soul of Delta Airlines.

And I do believe they've kind of kept that ever since. And so I've been doing it ever since. So I found my way, as you know, back to, so I did mortgages, I did EarthLink, back to tech, because I'm still a techie at heart. So doing marketing for tech companies, that kind of became my thing in my later years. I stopped relatively early. Long story, but because my husband's going blind,

Jason (04:01)
Mm-hmm.

Jackie Yeaney (04:12)
It was just what are we doing with our lives? So I stopped doing my operating role a couple years ago and now I'm on two public boards a nonprofit board support the foundation fighting blindness and I coach about 15 CMOs, and I have a couple that aren't marketers at all

Jason (04:29)
Wow, what an incredible journey. And when I listen to you tell your path, it just strikes me, not only are you this incredible business person, but just this incredible person. ⁓ that's so cool. mean, it's so evident in terms of the path that you've chosen and continue to choose. So thank you for sharing that. So my first question, and it's probably going to be an easy one, given what you shared is,

Jackie Yeaney (04:41)
Thank you for saying that.

Hahaha.

Jason (04:54)
Where do you find inspiration? I mean, you have all these amazing things that you're part of and have been part of. Where do you find inspiration? Just in daily life.

Jackie Yeaney (04:55)
Yeah.

genuinely, my day to day inspiration is my husband and his patience and grace and resiliency he's shown during this journey of losing his eyesight.

He's found purpose and he's done it all in a way. So one of our children also has the inherited retinal disease that he has and it's a hundred percent. He's showing our son that you can still have an amazing life when something like this happens to you. I've never been a very patient person.

I'm more patient than I used to be on with this journey, if I could only be as patient and calm and as he is. And he started a fitness business called Blind Ambition Fitness. So he's a personal trainer now. So it started out virtually during COVID, but now he has people that come to the house. And I hear the way he interacts with these people. I mean, he's just supporting them,

Jason (05:43)
Wow.

Jackie Yeaney (05:51)
sometimes I'm like, are people working out or are you just chit chatting?

Jason (05:54)
I would guess

it's similar. I mean you both are coaching and mentoring, right? That's the path that you've chosen.

Jackie Yeaney (06:00)
Yeah, yeah,

Jason (06:02)
It truly is inspiring. So thank you for sharing that. Well, I'm to go to the business side now. So as you mentioned, you've been the CMO for a number of large technology companies, Tableau, Ellucian, Red Hat. How did your role change? both as businesses grew,

Jackie Yeaney (06:04)
No, thank you. I do get to charge more than they do, so that's...

Yes, please.

Mm-hmm.

Jason (06:25)
and

new technologies emerging within these technology companies. But how did the role change?

Jackie Yeaney (06:30)
Yeah, I have this dichotomy that goes on in my mind where it's like a lot of it's the same, but yet a lot of it's also different. so I feel like no matter where I was CMO, like I always obsessed about putting the customer first. I always obsessed about making sure the corporate strategy was clear and articulated, for everyone. I always made sure that

marketing was not just driving quarterly numbers, but was also obsessing about the long-term health of the company. So the reason I say I always felt the same is those were such foundational, made very, a lot of the job always feel the same to me. Kind of some of it, yeah, cause I had that, I had it. Yeah. And it wasn't going to change and never changed the entire time I was, I was doing it.

Jason (07:05)
and kind of easy, right? Because you have that framework.

I should say easy maybe

what you say yes to and what you say no to.

Jackie Yeaney (07:16)
Yes, exactly, exactly. That said, yes, they all have their different kind of challenges going on. There are different scale notions and it was always what, you know this better than anybody, but what people consider marketing always is different. So the functions that would be in my purview changed based on the company and how they thought about it and also where we were in our growth cycle.

So like sometimes product marketing would be included and sometimes it wasn't. When it wasn't, I still acted like it was. if you're in a tech company and product marketing is not kind of with you, then you're not gonna get very far. SDRs and BDRs sometimes I would have responsibility for. I loved it when I did, but I didn't feel like I had to. Internal communications, corporate communications. So that kind of always would change.

And then I found that as you scale ⁓ functions like field and partner marketing become much more strategic and important when you're smaller. For example, field marketing can be more sales support, I also found that as we scaled, this is when like customer and life cycle marketing becomes its own thing.

Again, when you're smaller or mid, can all be together. But then, yeah, the journey of the customer and the retention becomes very, very important. And then, of course, the complexity of scaling when your market segments expand, the product lines expand. And then the last part of your question on technology,

AI is moving faster than any of the things that I personally experienced. Now I hear my clients and I'm on some boards, but I'm not CMO as it's happening. I acted like marketing operations was always my heartbeat of making a marketing org function and making sure that it was agile, not depending on one, two or three tools because

They're probably not gonna be what's gonna get you anywhere in a year. Setting up processes where things could kind of pull in and out. But know, like one tool seems like the most amazing thing. And then yeah, a year down the road, they haven't evolved fast enough, and now there's something else, and you have to be able to kind of pull those in and out. But it didn't used to be, right? It used to be, here's the MarTech stack, and here's...

how it's used. No, can't be that way anymore.

Jason (09:30)
Right. No,

I mean, it's all getting disrupted right now and we'll talk a little bit more about AI later. But why don't we go to the next? I have a ton of questions, a follow up, but let's go to the next question because you also referenced that you're doing a lot of executive coaching now and I'm sure you're just unbelievable. So when you're working with these leaders, are there certain challenges or questions that you find your most

Jackie Yeaney (09:35)
Yeah,

Mm-hmm.

Jason (09:54)
helping them work through.

Jackie Yeaney (09:55)
I would say for sure the number one and cause humans are humans turns out no matter what level we are, what function we do, but the dynamics with the CEO I'd say is number one. And then dynamics with peers with their CFO, with the CRO, the CPO and not just

⁓ connections with those people, but how am I getting my strategic seat at the table? What am I standing up for and what should I just let go? I'm the only one that's dealt with this kind of CEO before. No, I'm sorry you're not. I mean, almost every story I hear and they think it's unique. I'm like, no. Yes, I think so. Yes, yes.

Jason (10:29)
What is that comforting them that they know that they're not alone?

Jackie Yeaney (10:33)
I feel like a lot of that is a safe place to have that conversation. Who are you going to have that conversation with? The only place might be your significant other, but they don't want to do it. And they don't have the context. But it really, when you're an executive at almost any size company, yeah, you don't have a safe place to be like, how do I handle this situation

The second one, which I guess I'm a little surprised about, but I've been helping a lot with board presentations and with board dynamics. And now I've had several years experience on the other side as well being a board member. So I feel like I can help them pretty efficiently with some of that.

Jason (11:15)
Is

same role that would you be working with on what you had mentioned before? Would that be someone different? I guess my question is, is it more of a CEO that's looking for help with the board or is it more support?

Jackie Yeaney (11:26)
⁓ It's

usually well just because of my clients it's the CMOs

Jason (11:30)
CMO

Jackie Yeaney (11:31)
and what do they, what and how do they share with the board? What kind of relationships are appropriate or not? That kind of, it's really hard to understand. And I can also, I can insert things like the things that make me crazy as a board member is when an executive team shows up and each executive's doing their own presentation and it's not one story at all. I'm like, please don't do that.

Jason (11:38)
Mm-hmm. And if you're new to it, that's really hard to understand.

Right.

Right.

Jackie Yeaney (11:57)
Connect with your CFO, connect with your CEO, connect with the CRO, do not walk in as an individual to the board. No matter if it's a public company, PE owned company, it doesn't matter. And then I think the third most common is org structures, team dynamics, talent, helping them with how to...

Jason (12:05)
Yep, absolutely.

Jackie Yeaney (12:20)
performance manage someone or and or they've got someone they really believe in how to better lift them up. what opportunities to give them.

Jason (12:28)
so you work with leaders, you are a leader, you've been a leader at these organizations. What leadership qualities do you view as the most important to help businesses adjust and scale as they grow?

most of the folks we work with are more mid-sized businesses. what kind of leadership qualities do you think are needed?

Jackie Yeaney (12:46)
So in a sense I have two answers only because I did spend quite a bit of my part of it is I kept doing what I was doing was I wanted people to see a leader that was succeeding without playing the games without compromising their values because if they don't see that happen then they just think they have to behave this other way which

I would have thought that my 30 year career would have been diminishing and it doesn't appear to be. So that's part of it for me is not just making this a big political game of your career and not ever compromising on what really matters to you. And then on the, my second answer is more like just the qualities that you're probably thinking I might say.

of being intensely curious, being agile, resilience. It's a rough world out there right now. Resilience in the sense of being able to deal with constant change and competing priorities. And I can't remember where I heard it, so this is not something I came up with, but it really resonated. This notion of projecting calm.

Jason (13:45)
Mm-hmm.

Jackie Yeaney (13:56)
while still projecting urgency.

Jason (13:58)
Mm, I love that.

Jackie Yeaney (13:59)
Right? Because like there's still lots that needs to be done and, if you're spinning, then the whole organization around you is going to be spinning, but yet you still want people, you need to be moving pretty quickly. Yes. Yeah. So that, that has, ⁓ really stuck with me. Cause I, I don't believe that the chaos is not going to get better. was just trying to convince a client the other day because she was like,

Jason (14:11)
You can't be too complacent because then people will follow your lead on that. That's really smart.

Jackie Yeaney (14:24)
obsessing about trying to make it calmer, you know, and more routine. I'm like, no, no, I think we have to figure out the mechanisms of dealing with the chaos better, not of getting rid of it because I could tell in her company's context, wasn't gonna stop. So stop beating yourself up over things you can't control.

Jason (14:42)
Right? There's a concept,

I actually teach it when I do my class at Indiana, which is you move from this idea of perseverance to resiliency to anti-fragility. know if you've heard about, resilience is kind of working your way through it. Anti-fragility.

Jackie Yeaney (14:56)
Hmm. I that last one I had not heard yet.

Mm-hmm

Jason (15:04)
pardon my French is you take this change and you make it your bitch and you just go after it. You own it and you really go after it. And so all of a sudden you take your power back, right? And maybe that gets into

Jackie Yeaney (15:09)
Mmm, own it, you own it. Interesting, I like that a lot.

Yeah. No, you're

right. Resilience is like ability to handle rather than owning it and making it your own. I love that. Okay. I'm going to, can I steal that? Okay. Yeah, absolutely. And I'd be remiss if I don't say, cause I always heard is obsessing about your team. You're the talent on your team. I never had all the answers, but that's getting impossible now.

Jason (15:26)
Absolutely. Yeah, we share, right? We're not stealing. This is just, sharing with each other.

Jackie Yeaney (15:42)
There's, it's all happening too fast. So you need to hire people smarter than you with expertise you don't have. has nothing to do with the current current AI. But for me, because I was that engineer first, I was not the creative. So I always tried to surround myself with amazing creatives. And then over time, I feel like I became really gifted at knowing a great idea when I saw it.

but I wasn't gonna turn myself into one of those creative director types. I just can't, just, yeah, I'm like, I remember at BCG actually, way before I was a marketer, I even got some feedback then because I always believed the data was gonna take me to the answer. And they would be like, I wasn't out of the box enough. I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. Once I be, yeah, yeah, so once I was a marketer, I'm like, ⁓ that's what they meant.

Jason (16:09)
Right. That's virtually impossible as an engineer.

Think inside the box.

I gotta take a cup of wisdom.

Jackie Yeaney (16:33)
Yes, please. I've got my ice latte and my soda water. Those are my two things.

Jason (16:38)
It's too late by me to drink the iced latte, I just have plain espresso. ⁓ Question four, actually this is question five, so this is our last question, Jackie, believe it or not. you have this amazing network of people, right? You had them throughout your career. You also built the CMO collaborative where you got a lot of the... ⁓

Jackie Yeaney (16:41)
it's true, I'm three hours, yeah, three hours behind here.

Okay, that was fast.

Jason (17:03)
leading CMOs were a part of that. ⁓ You mentioned AI. I think that's how you pronounce it, AI. ⁓

Jackie Yeaney (17:05)
Mm-hmm.

Not a one or whatever.

Jason (17:12)
How do you see it affecting marketing and the go-to-market approaches, especially when we're focused on midsize businesses? I think it's actually better to be small right now with AI. I think some of the bigger guys working through the layers that they have to work with and some of the things that have already been codified are going to have a harder time shifting as fast exactly.

Jackie Yeaney (17:24)
Yes.

undoing. Yes, I could,

because you will being big isn't, isn't going to give you an advantage, certainly. And you can scale much more efficiently your team and your impact in marketing with AI now. I completely agree with that. Yeah. Some of my clients that are at the bigger companies, they're, they're trying, they're trying to do a blank slate, you know, and look at it then try to figure out how they're going to shift. But yeah, it's hard.

Instead, they have to set up tiger teams and pilots and they have to go beg legal. There's a lot of begging legal going on. I've heard that a lot. I do, I don't know if you feel this way, but and granted I talk to marketers more than others, but I feel like marketing is ahead inside organizations as far as using AI for efficiency and scaling. Yeah, definitely for efficiency.

Jason (18:04)
Right.

Definitely for efficiency.

I think there's a growth challenge right now.

Jackie Yeaney (18:27)
I agree with that.

Yeah. So I think they're a little stuck on that still. I have not seen the out of the box completely change how we go to market. I have not seen that happen. I have more from on my board side. I do find there's the AI efficiency activity. And then there is the, we fundamentally going to change the business and the market, not stemming from marketing, probably stemming from product. Yeah. Which is just good.

Jason (18:50)
Right, exactly. That's something,

and we referenced Dave Edelman before we jumped on this podcast. And he's very much into personalization and he's similar to you, works with a lot of C-level people around AI.

Jackie Yeaney (18:56)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason (19:06)
He said a lot of what he's seeing now is it definitely is around efficiency, but he gave some examples of growth where it was pulling in all these disparate pieces of data. And it was with smaller companies where they were able to do that.

Jackie Yeaney (19:20)
Yeah, yes, know those, I know the

stories you're referencing and yeah, I think those are, yeah, they're happening, but not everywhere yet. And I do, personalization with marketing, as you know, has always been the dream. Yes, but we never had the tools or the money or the people to do it. And now we have the tool.

Jason (19:31)
Segment one, right?

Right. And what you had said before, one of the challenges with segment one was always about efficiency, right? Because you couldn't get scale in terms of how things were being developed, both the tools, the capital that was there and the people, right? And now exactly. That's exactly right. Great. Well, we did our five questions. So thank you for that.

Jackie Yeaney (19:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. Which is how ABM kind of got going. Cause they're like, well, at least if we can think of some accounts. Yeah.

Awesome.

No, thank you. Okay, okay, good. Okay.

Jason (20:04)
You passed. If there was ever going to be a question, you passed. But I have a bonus question.

And it relates to The Wisory. So as folks want to engage with you on The Wisory, and I know they're going to especially after this, what questions or challenges do you feel you're best suited to help them take on?

Jackie Yeaney (20:14)
Mm.

No, you're actually kind to ask that. I feel like some of that's come out as we've been chatting in my head anyway. how you engage with your CEO and your peers, how you engage with your board.

Jason (20:27)
Mm-hmm.

Jackie Yeaney (20:34)
I'd say strategic positioning or repositioning, especially if a mid-size company. don't know. I feel like it's more of a natural gift or maybe I got it at BCG, but I seem to be able to understand market context really quickly. So I don't exactly know how I do it.

Jason (20:53)
Probably just pattern recognition

Jackie Yeaney (20:54)
I guess, yeah, yeah.

Jason (20:54)
from all the things we've worked on.

Jackie Yeaney (20:56)
I just, I can tell by how I interact with some people of what seems obvious to me and in the boardroom this happens to me sometimes too is not obvious to others yet. We didn't talk about this one yet, but it comes up a lot and it came up a lot in my jobs, just rebranding. Should we?

Shouldn't we? Is it worth it? What would we do it for? If you believe yes, how do you convince the people around you? What kind of brand architecture are you using to best position yourself going forward? So those sorts of things I'm really good at. On the marketing strategy front, it's like, do I have it right? Does this make sense? Should I be altering it? I can do that pretty quickly.

Jason (21:36)
So it's kind

of like one side of executive leadership and how you fit in the organization and what the organization should be doing and structuring. The other side is using your marketing chops, right? know, from a marketing strategy, branding standpoint, well, that's wonderful.

Jackie Yeaney (21:48)
Yeah, if you're a marketing leader, yeah, exactly. And then

maybe the one I would say that's more broad that I seem to be able to do, like if you're just stuck on something, whatever it is, and it doesn't, because I do this with people, all walks of life, all ages, all industries, friends of friends of friends, I can probably help you talk through that. And if we can't solve it in a half hour hour,

I bet I can tell people what to do next.

And I don't, I've also, maybe everyone else that knows me knows, but I always have an opinion.

Jason (22:21)
If you're a marketer who doesn't have an opinion, you're not a marketer.

Jackie Yeaney (22:25)
That's true, that's a good point.

Jason (22:26)
Well, Jackie,

this has been absolutely wonderful. I am so honored and thrilled that you're part of The Wisory. can't wait. Thank you. I can't wait for people to engage with you. So thank you for making the time and being one of our amazing advisors and we'll talk soon. All right. Thank you. Bye.

Jackie Yeaney (22:32)
No, thank you, Jason. Yeah, I'm thrilled to be a part of it. Yeah.

All right, we'll talk soon. Bye.