Season 6, Episode 8: David Crozier, CMO at Appian: Simplicity, storytelling, and customer connection

Ali
David, hello and thank you very much for joining us today. 

David
Hi, Ali, it's great to be here. 

Ali
Thank you. Let's start with getting to know who you are as a person and how you came to be the person you are today. So to kick us off, could you tell me a story from your childhood that has shaped who you are today? 

David
Yeah, sure. It's interesting. My mother many years ago gave me a photo album of when I was young and I flipped through it and there were about 100 pictures because that's all we had back then. And they almost were exclusively Christmas and being on vacation in the summer, which is quite weird. 

Ali
Familiar. 

David
And I'm sure there was more to my life than that, but what I do remember of Christmases is getting occasionally a bike, which was really good because the older I got, the more I would ride and the further away from home I could get and see wonderful things. And it really gave me a love of travel. So that's one thing that shaped me. And the other thing I got, which was really awesome for about my 11th birthday or something like that, was a computer. And that was really a pivotal thing because it really got me into the technology and I really started to nerd out on that. And if I hadn't got that, I might not have been conversant enough in the technology to start a career in the tech industry, which is how it got me here. 

Ali
Amazing. Funnily enough, I have a similar memory actually of my dad, and this will age me. I won't ask you to age yourself here, but my dad bringing home a 286, an Intel 286 processor machine. And that was, you know, he was allowed to have it for 2 or 3 days over Christmas, you it held like one in the business and he looked after it. I found that absolutely incredible. 

David
And by the way, 286's AGU was younger than me, so I'm gonna say no more. 

Ali
Fair enough. I actually don't know what came before the 186, so yeah, for another time maybe. So were you quite nerdy then when you were young? Were you a bit of a geek? 

David
Yeah, a little bit, I guess one could say that, yeah. I was quite shy, I was an only child, just generally I think was quite quiet. It's interesting now because in the job I'm in and the kind of jobs I've been in for many years now, you have to be on stage in front of large groups of people. So I had to work hard at building that. So that's kind of a, not something that necessarily comes naturally to me, but something that by doing it a lot, I'm more comfortable with. 

Ali
That's an amazing common thread actually in the CMOs I speak to, learning how to speak in public, that element of performance, sometimes an element of extroversion. But yeah, it's amazing how many very senior, brilliant, publicly known marketing leaders have had to learn how to show up in public or in front of a large group of people. 

David
Yeah. And I think that's true of anybody really. I'd be surprised if it comes naturally to more than a very small segment of the population, but like any skill, you got to build it. 

Ali
Very true. And when you were, when you were young, who was it who was kind of shaping your life? Who are the biggest influences? 

David
My dad for sure. My dad grew up in the 1930s. So, and I was, it was quite late in his life when I was born. So I was born in the '70s. So he grew up in Depression era, you know, pre-World War II Britain. He left school at 14, didn't go to high school, let alone college. Worked as a welder for most of his life for 50-plus years. He would come home with burns and shrapnel in his fingers. From welding, which is a really great model for hard work. So if you see somebody doing that every day for 50 years, sitting behind a desk, talking on the phone, speaking in front of a large group of people is not really that hard. 

Ali
And did he talk much about that sort of thing, that side of things with him? 

David
Not a great deal. I mean, you know, I'm British and Northern English people aren't really expressive emotionally. Like that. But, um, it was— you could, you could see, I could see just by looking at him coming home and how hard he'd worked. And he would routinely, especially as he got older, you know, he'd come home, he'd, uh, he'd fall asleep in the evening because he was so exhausted, you know. So he was an amazing person. I'm sure if he'd had the opportunities to go to school and beyond, he could have done something— I don't want to say better because I don't want to diminish what he did, but he could maybe, maybe had even more opportunities that he would've thrived at. But it, it's a good reminder that what somebody's doing in their life and how hard they're working and, and where they are isn't necessarily a reflection of them as much as the opportunities they've been given. 

Ali
Yeah, absolutely. And actually you had a, had something comparable from Joe Taino earlier in the series as well, talking about his dad and the, and the tough work he had to do in, in and around New York City. And there is something in that, isn't there? I mean, you know, I remember seeing my dad would leave extremely early and come home very late most days. 

David
Yeah. 

Ali
And then he'd work some more. And it's like that subconsciously, it never really hit me that that had been driven into me quite young. And I didn't really realise that until I hit my, you know, more of a working age myself. 

David

Yeah. That kind of background and work ethic, it really makes you understand and appreciate what true hard work is. 

Ali
Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned the north of England as well. 

David
Yeah. 

Ali

What was it like growing up in the north of England, '70s and '80s? 

David
It was very interesting. It was a time of the miners' strike. I come from a town called Sunderland, which is in the northeast, which was a big shipbuilding town in the 1800s and 1900s. In the 1970s and '80s, that industry fell apart, as did many other industries. So we were in a transition period in Thatcher-era Britain, which was really quite uncomfortable. And there was a big dichotomy between the economic revival that you saw happening in London in the 1980s, much as we probably would've seen in New York City, between that and what you were seeing with the industrial centres being hollowed out in the north of England. So it was an interesting time, obviously as a 9, 10, 12-year-old, I was somewhat oblivious to some of that. But you could see it going on around you nonetheless. And I feel like I was lucky to be able to break with that. 

Ali
Yeah, as a 10-year-old, you're not writing kind of long cultural dissertations on socioeconomic change. It's like, oh, that's weird, that shop's shut. Exactly. Or they've had to move out. 

David
It's really interesting to reflect on it later with the benefit of hindsight. 

Ali
And what were your ambitions then back then? What was the kind of life that you wanted for yourself? 

David
You know, I don't think I had much of an idea. I did know that I did not want to work in heavy industry like my dad. Yeah. But beyond that, I honestly didn't have much of a clue because I wasn't exposed to much. No one in my family has been to college or anything like that. So the choices, if you didn't work in a heavy industry job, was, you know, you might be a teacher or a doctor or you'd work in a bank, but not a banker, somebody who worked in the local bank, that kind of thing. You know, it, there was never the notion that you could work in marketing for a big company or be an investment banker or any of those kind of things, right? That was just not even a thing. And I don't think my parents were equipped, nor the careers guidance people in our school system were equipped really to give me that visibility. So I was probably much influenced by what was on TV, which is not necessarily helpful. So if you watch Moonlighting, you want to be a private detective, and if you watch Airwolf, you want to be a pilot. 

David
Neither which I ended up being. So, yeah, it took me a while to figure it out, and I don't know that it was intentional. It was more kind of opportunities coming up along the way and then trying eventually to be aware of opportunities and jumping on them. 

Ali
Yeah, fair enough. I mean, I watched The A-Team, so I should currently be running around as a God knows what. Yeah. I wouldn't get away with it. So what else were you doing then? What were you doing for fun back then? What was your daily life like? 

David
Outside of school, I told you I got into biking, right? But it's interesting, I read the Lance Armstrong autobiography many years ago and he had a similar experience. I think he grew up in Plano, Texas, and obviously he was a bit better at biking than me, but for him the bike was the same kind of outlet. right? If you live somewhere where it feels a little bit restricting and you want to get away, you know, one day you can bike 5 miles, but if you can bike 5, maybe 10, and if you can bike 10, what about 20? So as I got older into my teens, I'd be going out biking 50, 60, 80, 100 miles out in the north of England, which is beautiful up there. There's hills and moors and it's really amazing. But you can quickly escape from whatever is in your mind and get out there. And that was one thing that really, I think, captured my imagination for travel, which I started doing more, and then moving away and finding other places to be and other pools to swim in. 

Ali
Where did you travel to first? Did you kind of head down south of England? 

David
Well, for university, I went to Scotland. I went to the University of Stirling. Which is far enough away, about 3 or 4 hours from where I grew up, to be distant but close enough that you get home relatively easily. After that, and even before I went to college, actually, I did a fair bit of travelling with my friends. We did the classic kind of, you know, Interrailing around Europe as far as we could go. Yeah, after that, I travelled as far as I could, starting with Europe, but then further afield. At one point, this is later on, once I'd been working for a little while, but I took a sabbatical with my wife and we did a full circumnavigation of the world over several months, taking in all the continents along the way, which is a terrific experience.

 
Ali
That's phenomenal. What would be your top tips for anybody considering doing that today? 

David
Go in the counterclockwise direction is one. Okay. 

Ali
Is that just to shorten flights or is that what's going on there? 

David
Time zones and flights make more sense. That way. 

Ali
Okay. 

David
Yeah. But also, I'd say have a thing, have a way to integrate with the countries and the regions you go to. So one thing me and my wife decided to do along the way was we took cooking classes wherever we went. So Mexico, South America, Thailand, et cetera. It's a really great way to understand somebody's culture because it's locals delivering the classes. You learn about the food, you learn why they're using the foods they do because of the local environment, et cetera, et cetera. So that was a really great experience. 

Ali
Brilliant idea. Do you still have a pretty wide culinary repertoire today then as a result? 

David
Yeah, very much so. I'm not so much good at making it myself. My wife's superb at it. Me less so, but I love eating it. 

Ali
Fair enough. What about music as well? 'Cause you said obviously growing up in North of England, you know, I might get my dates wrong here, but there's kind of the Northern Soul era. There's, you know, The Smiths, there's all sorts of like amazing music coming out of the North Wing at that time. And then obviously travelling the world. So one of the ways that I tend to experience the world is of course through food, like you said, an amazing way to experience, but also through music and kind of what's happening locally. Was music part of what you were about growing up? 

David
Yeah, 100%. And my friends and I, it was very much a unifying thing for us to, you know, before we could do cool stuff when we're 14, 15, go to the record store, look through the through the records and figure out what we had and didn't have, and then eventually going to concerts and whatnot. But that was really about the time for me, late 1980s, we're talking, yeah, you mentioned The Smiths, but the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, the Spiral Carpets. Yeah, I'm kind of dating myself here. So pre-Oasis even? 

Ali
Even. God, we're not that old, are we? Pre-Oasis doesn't need an even yet, does it? 

David
I'm afraid we are a little bit old. But even hearing some of those songs right now, I was driving home the other day and a Buzzcocks song was in my playlist. And immediately transported me back to being 17 years old, right? It's just, it's amazing that music can do that. 

Ali
It is. It's also made me think there's a question I should ask people, which is what's in your Spotify kind of most played songs playlist or liked songs playlist. So tell me a little bit then about how you moved from the childhood you've described to going to university. And I don't know what you studied there, but then moving towards marketing, how did that journey come along? 

David
Yeah, I actually didn't sign up to do marketing at university. I honestly, I'm kind of ashamed to say this because— 

Ali
It wasn't accountancy, was it? No, no. 

David
I wish I had a better story, but I started out with psychology. It just sounded interesting, right? 

Ali
Well, I also studied psychology and I don't know if I should be ashamed to say that as well. 

David
Well, I'm not ashamed of that as much as ashamed that I didn't have a more directed view of what I should be doing. Right. If I could get back with 17-year-old me, I'd tell him to get a grip and realise that time is precious and you need to kind of have more of an idea, right? But I was 17, so hey. But yeah, I started out doing psychology. I needed to fill up a minor slot in my schedule, so I took a marketing class. And the hours were really friendly. And the lecturer at the time was super good. I mean, the marketing department really marketed their class. Realised that the way to get people to sign up for this class was to not have any classes starting before 11:00 AM. And they had a really charismatic lecturer who painted a really great picture of what they call Big M marketing, right? Not just the promotional side, but the end-to-end product price, the whole thing, the whole experience, right? We all know. 

Ali
Yeah, fantastic. 

David
Semester of that and I was hooked. I just thought, wow, I really wanna do this. And if going back to what I said earlier about not having much of a clue about what kind of jobs were available, And then you have somebody talking about bringing in Tom Peters and talking about a passion for excellence and looking at really great companies at the time. And at the time we're talking about pioneering companies in customer experience like Marriott or something like that still sticks in my memory. And you look at that and think, oh wow, this is— I just felt, felt it was super inspiring that you could touch people's lives in that way with the topic. And marketing was a topic for me. 

Ali
It's such a head start that actually having a lecture or, you know, series like that, that is so grounded in, you know, what I think of as marketing and the classic principles of marketing and the levers you have available to pull. And also a really lovely example of market orientation from the course itself. Like you said, you know, oh, we're trying to get 18-year-olds in middle of university in Scotland to come along to our course. Let's not have anything before 11 AM. It's just a perfect example of that, isn't it? 

David
It's genius, right? It's absolute genius and it worked. And here I am. There we go. 

Ali
And here you are indeed. So obviously now you are CMO at Appian, which is a phenomenal business. You've had an incredible career to lead to this position as well in this role. Can you tell me a little bit about that, the amazing companies you've worked at, and also then obviously tell me a little bit about Appian itself? 

David
Yeah, I started out after I left university, I actually started out in technical jobs because I just honestly, I needed the money at the time and the technical jobs paid more than marketing job. So I started out doing consulting in a number of computer-related domains, programming, system administration, and that, that's how I wound up with IBM. And after a couple years of that, which is frankly exhausting, you know, 100% travel and not in the domain area I was really passionate about, I realised I had to get back into marketing. And because I was in IBM, I was very fortunate, wonderful company. I had access to all the different jobs they had available and they had a marketing role open, which required marketing expertise and expertise at that time in the energy and utilities industry. And I had just been for the last year in a project with an energy company as part of my technical role. So I knew the industry dynamics pretty well, and that was really the launching point for me. And I did a, pretty much a two-decade career at IBM in all different kinds of roles, starting with low-level marketing roles to progressively more management responsibility, managing people, leading teams, et cetera, and different levels of responsibility in IBM's marketing function across all the different disciplines of marketing. 

David
In hindsight, I might have done what many people did and switched jobs earlier into a different company. But a company like IBM is such a great testing ground and it's such a big company. It was 400,000 people when I was there that every couple of years you could switch roles and go to a different business unit or a different geographic group and find new challenges and problems to solve. And that was great until I feel like I'd seen all there was to see, which took me about 20 years. And at that point I made a shift to another big company, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is also a fantastic company to be involved with. They'd kind of taken a bit of a right turn from their peak, which was really about the early 2000s and been through a difficult time. But there were a couple of areas of the business that had some great opportunities and I joined that and spent a great 7 years there. Totally different culture. IBM is kind of an East Coast, New York culture. HPE is very much a Silicon Valley culture and it was, Very interesting to see both, but those things together kind of set me up for where I am, which I really feel I needed all that to be able to come into a company like Appian and offer what they needed to lead all of marketing in a smaller environment. 

Ali
An incredible business to work at IBM. I spoke to Erin Gabrielson earlier in the series and I loved to chat with her about what IBM's, the transformation that's undergone as well over the last few years is incredible. It reminds me a little bit, there was an urban myth when I was young, I have no idea to what extent this is true, but there was a very small percentage of the US population had passports. And when I was very young on my tiny island called Britain, I was like, well, that's crazy. Why aren't people getting out and seeing the world? And then I went to America and I was like, oh my God, there is so much to see here. There are so many places to go, so many different experiences to be had. And it made a bit more sense to me. And it feels like that is a similar pattern to what you're describing at IBM. It's such a large organisation. There is 20 years worth of interesting things to go out and explore at least. So I think it does make sense a little bit. How does it feel being at those companies now moving to Appian? 

Ali
How is Appian different? 

David
It feels empowering is the first thing because being in control of everything rather than in control of one part of the thing is very much an empowering feeling. It feels like there's more degrees of freedom, right? So in a company like IBM, the marketing team is thousands, right? The company is hundreds of thousands. The marketing team is thousands. At Appian, the total employee population is just over 2,000, right? So it, it's far more nimble. You can surface ideas more quickly. You can try out new things. Uh, you can just get stuff done faster. And when you try things out, you can see it immediately or very quickly how it's working, how you can tune it. Fewer people in the room to worry about with decision-making, which is true, which was true of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, right? Just big companies, there's more, there's more structure around things as you need. So one of the challenges for me with Appian is one of the reasons I'm at Appian and very excited about it is we are growing significantly and it's how do you keep your brand values on your message consistency and your execution discipline in marketing while the company grows significantly? 

David
And that's where I hope to bring my big company experience to Appian. 

Ali
That echoes something that Kirsten Koch said, who's at ServiceNow, a couple of seasons ago, talking about how she was brought in, part of the game really is to introduce enough structure in order to enable further growth, you know, at a place which was experiencing extraordinary hypergrowth at the time. So for anybody who doesn't know Appian, tell me about Appian. What does Appian do? 

David
It's a super interesting company. So it was founded in 1999 by 4 friends in their apartment in McLean, Virginia. The headquarters is still within about half a mile of the apartment they founded the company, and the 4 founders are still there. So one of them, my boss Matt, is the CEO, and the other 3 founders are still there in operational roles. So it feels really nimble and not just feels nimble, it is a nimble, agile company and it's really amazing and I think somewhat unusual to have the founders all still there. So Appian is a software company. The software platform we have serves very large organisations, governments who want to use AI to automate things. So they want to do things faster, improve productivity, but they're concerned about the risks that AI brings because AI has many risks. It's inherently a, what we would call a probabilistic technology, right? You don't, you might get a different answer when you ask the same question twice. And that is not something that is good if you are operating a big bank or an insurance company or a government agency. So our technology helps organisations like that operate AI inside their business processes with some controls around it. 

David
And the, one of the most exciting things for me coming in, and it was really a critical part of my decision process joining, is the product is amazing. Which as a marketer is so important. The product gets great reviews by analysts, users, customers really are very excited to come to our events and speak on our behalf and act as testimonials. It's fantastic. And for me as a marketer, that's half the battle. One of my sort of pet peeves as a marketer throughout my career is when somebody will turn to you and say, yeah, we just need a little bit of kind of marketing magic. On this implication. Can you put the lipstick on the pig, please? We don't need to put any lipstick on anything because our product is a diamond. 

Ali
That's amazing. And such a brilliant time to join a business like this as well, right? Because I feel like for the first couple of years of, let's call it the post-ChatGPT era, the conversation, people are so obsessed with the new and the explosion of possibilities. The conversation generally was pretty immature around this, right? It was just, oh, you just generi everything, press the big red button that says AGI and you don't need anything else. In fact, give everyone a big red button saying AGI, just let them run wild. And the conversation now is maturing as reality has hit that plan pretty firmly in the face. And so as a result, you can see then that Appian's in a brilliant position for the moment that we are in right now. What's the role of marketing at Appian right now, given all the noise, all the conversations, and all the opportunities around the space? 

David
Yeah, and you're right. It's a perfect time to be in this space. It's very exciting. So the role is breaking through with our message, which is different and unique while being a small company, right? So it's just such a competitive message space. Every possible dimension of AI is front and centre. In the media every single day. It's what all anyone wants to talk about. And that's from everything from the technology itself, the large language models, the financials around AI, the ethics of it, you name it, right? So as I was saying, our message is really how if you want to get value from it in an enterprise, because we are a B2B company serving large organisations, how you need to use the technology in the right way with the right structure, give it the right data so that it can be effective for you. So the role of marketing is really defining that message and telling that story in the simplest, most compelling way consistently over a period of time so it breaks through. 

Ali
And in terms of your audience, who is it? You mentioned obviously there are kind of highly governed, highly regulated industries that you tend to look at. Is that across the entire world or is there specific regions you tend to focus on? 

David
Yeah, we operate all around the world. We have thousands of customers. The customers we have, 80% of them are in heavily regulated industries, healthcare, pharmaceutical, life sciences, financial services, insurance, and in government agencies, both at the state or provincial, local, and at the national level. But that's our sweet spot. We've got a product that really excels in high complexity. Environments. And customers who have those high complexity environments really appreciate that. 

Ali
And in getting your message out there, as you said, cutting through some of that noise, couple of questions on that. One, what is it that you can do to punch above your weight? As you said, the noise is very crowded, some massive players already in the space. And then the second part of that is, the second question rather, how much of what you do is education around bringing people to your point of view versus simply you're finding you're meeting them where they're at and actually they are ready and primed to hear exactly what it is you want to tell them? 

David
Yeah, I mean, on breaking through, I think it's being consistent, but also having that unique point of view. So I think the point of view we're on, we can tell that with a level of credibility that others can't because we're living it every day with our customers. So we have customers we're working with who actually colour in the picture that we draw out for us, which makes it compelling. So it gives us a bit of an accelerator from that point of view. So telling that story with customers, it gets us more pickup in the media. Obviously we can control that a little bit with social media. One thing we've been focused on is not always relying on higher authorities right, for the information, right? We've got really good subject matter expertise. We do our own research studies. We have data to back up what we're saying. So rather than us quoting somebody else as the higher authority, we aspire to be that higher authority. On the question of how do we bring someone to our point of view, I will tell you that with our target market, most of them implicitly understand, I would say, that the point of view we're on is correct, and maybe they just haven't had the time or the facility to explore it enough. 

David
But what I routinely find, just a couple of days ago, we had one of our regional events called Appian Around the World. It was in London, and we had a couple of hundred customers at the event, and I noticed afterwards several of them on there social feeds, just recounting their experience at the event. And generally what you see is this, I went to the event, the message really resonated with me because what we were really trying to do is we've got this powerful technology and the question is how do you harness that power in the right way to get value in the enterprise? Well, the way enterprises do work is with business processes, right? Process is just a way to do work consistently. And repeatedly over time. Before you had any information technology, you had process in heavy industry, and it's just a sequence of steps to get work done in a really complex environment. Well, now you fast forward to the IT age, the information age, and now the AI age, and you still have processes, and AI is now a potential worker or collection of workers that need to work in processes just like humans do. 

David
So I think that the point is innately understood and we just kind of turn the light switch on a little bit and people really had that thought in their mind anyway, which is why I'm confident in our message and our strategy. 

Ali
Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely, definitely, like I say, I think the market is realising as well the reality of this. And I, you know, I spend a lot of time working with businesses both on their positioning around how they go to market to tell their story relating to AI, but also how their own marketing teams make use of it. And absolutely, you know, a couple of years ago, it was very much just, let's give everyone the tools, you know, well, let's measure it, measure access, you know, does everybody have access to a tool? That's a job done, tick. We've done our AI thing, which has obviously now matured massively to, okay, well, how do we structure this stuff? How do we create some kind of persistent context? How do we start building loops that start to improve the system? You know, how do we govern it? Where are the guardrails? Where's the observability? All of that stuff, which is just so absolutely critical to making it work. 

David
Yeah, that's, that's a common theme. I mean, I think if you think about it applied to marketing, the, the sort of easy use case for AI applied to marketing is in content generation. And sure, we can all pull up ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever and have AI write a blog or create some image, great. But who's deciding what blog to write and is it the right thing to write? And once you've published it, are you getting any feedback loops and where is it being used and so on? So it, and that's the point about process, right? It's one thing to view AI as a personal productivity tool for any profession, including marketing. It's another thing entirely to weave it into the fabric of how your process should work. So a marketing process where you've got your automation and your job roles and functions should also consider AI as being applicable at certain steps in the process and not just something that people independently use once in a while, because that's not how you're going to get scalable value out of it. 

Ali
Yeah, absolutely. I heard a lovely phrase the other day, which is kind of tools don't scale, systems do, which I think there's a lot of validity in that. And the sense that actually, if you leave it down to individualism, you've got kind of two things. You're calcifying fragmentation, right? All the silos that existed before are now going to built into tech and kind of made more permanent as a result. The second thing is that you're kind of shifting bottlenecks around, you know, the generate, the writing of the blog was probably never really the thing that took the most time and prevented you actually getting something into market. It was the 15 people whose approval you needed that probably, probably end up delaying things. 

David
Well, that's exactly right. Yeah. And then you might start to overestimate the productivity again, because so much of marketing depends on having message clarity and intent clarity. Up front. And if you don't have message or intent clarity, writing something as at face value simple as a blog of 500 or 600 words will be excruciatingly complicated whether or not you have AI because use AI will just get something that didn't have the, wasn't faithful to the message or the intent in the first place. 

Ali
And for me, that really is, it gets to the heart of what will help marketers succeed over the next few years, which is this ability to build coherent systems. That make the most use of AI as part of that system. But absolutely as part of a coherent system, not as we'll just use the technology to do everything. Um, but can I just go back to a couple of things you said as well that really interested me? One was that lovely point you made about co-creation. I think the way you phrased it was customers colour in some of this stuff for us, which is a really lovely way of putting it. Um, and obviously, you know, I've experienced and run a lot of ABM programmes. And one of the joys of that is getting customers into the room and really getting to know what they need. And, you know, I've been involved in programmes where I've literally been developing entirely new solution sets with businesses because that is what their customers need. And just through that relationship, you co-create something, which I think is super important. Is there anything you do in the marketing team to foster that, to encourage it? 

David
Well, as a routine part of what we do, customer feedback and interaction is just critical just because of the nature of the business we're in. So typically we have a, a long enterprise selling cycle. The product we're selling is not something that you're gonna swipe your credit card and get started on, right? So there's a longer discovery process with customers. So we have a, a large part of our mix in events of all kinds of formats from very large user conferences or participating third-party shows, but a heavy emphasis on satellite events that we own that might have scores of people, hundreds of people, but right down to 5 and 10 people. We bring people to our headquarters in other locations. We go and do customer days with them. So there's a heavy emphasis on customer interaction. So it's not like we focus on, oh yeah, we've got a customer feedback council or something. Yeah, of course you do stuff like that, but it's more into the fibre of what we do. It's just customer interactivity is part of our marketing plan. It has to be. And Some of our best messaging just comes from customers, right? 

David
You bring them in, you do a briefing, you listen to what they're telling you about their problems. I sit in on as many of those as I can personally, because it is the most valuable grounding and market research you can get in this space. 

Ali
Yeah, very good. There's something interesting about the value of events as well. If looked at through a purely kind of media comms lens, you're missing out on half the value, which is being exposed and having conversations with customers, which is incredibly valuable. The other part that might be interesting is in terms of marketing at Appian, you mentioned you were very lucky to have a lecturer in the beginning of your interest in marketing who emphasised the importance of the 4 Ps. To what extent does marketing at Appian influence or have control over the 4 Ps? 

David
Yeah, so we are a seat at the table, which I think is very important. You know, aside from the product quality coming in, I was really on the lookout for how the company views marketing. And you can see that in different ways. I've seen that in— even though I've, I've really done two big employers in my career, I've probably had 5 or 6 different marketing models depending on where I've been in, in those companies. And it was really important for me, for marketing, to have a seat at the table so that when, when it comes to providing input to our product team on product direction, because we we do have a lot of interactivity with customers and also analysts, that side of things, and also having a strong partnership with the sales organisation to make sure that our go-to-markets are aligned. We, we're in a good position because I, we don't have full control over that because we have a go-to-market team and a product team, but we have a very solid partnership across them. So, uh, we're all aligned and I think that's super important. 

Ali
And is there anything I referenced fragmentation earlier? Do you see that as a potential issue for marketing teams? And if you do, is there anything you've done to help create a more coherent marketing or revenue function? 

David
Yeah, fragmentation is always a problem. I think we're relatively small, so the risk is lower, but I think the principles of keeping a solid message architecture and executing consistently apply regardless of size because every company wants to scale. So if you don't start with that basis, scaling is going to be very, very difficult. Like you said, system scale, right? So there are core things that we are implementing at Appian that you would see in any big company, right? Where the concept would be write once and reuse kind of thing, right? So you have a message architecture, you have the notion of campaigns defined as messages and appeals you take out to a targeted group with core needs together with a content plan so that we have the ability to build packages of content in partnership with our product and sales teams and then push them out into the field in a consistent way. So if we're operating in one country, we could do it. If we're operating in 10 or 50 countries, we would do it just the same way, just a bigger scale. 

Ali
Yeah, very good. And that also speaks a little bit to that, how do you make a global scale and that balance between global and local work? 

David
Yeah, and some of it's basics, right? It's message maps and campaign planning documents and having the tools behind it to make it work and having all the teams aligned on how we're going to make this work. So we have some people who've worked in very big companies and know this stuff just because they've lived it and some people who haven't, as you would expect, and the the job is simply, although it isn't also so simple, but it's simply getting everyone to the right level of understanding and having everyone execute consistently, which generally just means having a discipline over a long period of time. 

Ali
Is there one big marketing challenge that you'd love to change or overcome? 

David
Oh boy. I think for me, and I'll qualify this by saying, you know, I've been in large enterprise, you know, B2B marketing my whole career. So I don't even know how much this would apply in the consumer domain, but certainly for B2B, it would be the notion of multi-touch attribution. And that's not unique to Appian, that's just something throughout my career, right? We all, we all know the data. Customers are doing more of their research online, less with sellers. Their buying groups are becoming bigger and more complex in the enterprise space. So you have more people involved in the decision making. Maybe more than one person with final sign-off authority. So as you get higher up in enterprise selling with longer deals, the, uh, the buying decision-making process and the marketing buyer's journey becomes more complex. And then it becomes almost impossible to answer the question, well, did this tactic have an impact? We spent X dollars on this thing. Was it the right thing to spend money on based on the return it generated? And so that's where I think that the idea of campaigns comes in in general, because you can uplevel your marketing into big chunks of things. 

David
But of course, it's kind of like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, right? The higher you elevate, the less precisely you can measure. And if you want to measure really precisely down to the tactic, you actually lose precision because it's impossible to say that one tactic was the silver bullet that actually did something for you. So that's something that I've seen challenge teams across all of the companies I've worked with. And at some point you have to look at a high level and say, we're investing money. Are we comfortable? We're doing it in the right way. And over a long period of time, is it generating the results? 

Ali
Yeah, absolutely. Find the right frame to put on that conversation. I think it's absolutely critical, isn't it? It's a bit that people often miss, you know, whether you are trying to triangulate through Last touch attribution, multi-touch attribution, media mix modelling. These are all kind of different frames and things, you know, ways of looking at the challenge and choosing the right one makes all the difference. I think you're right. You mentioned earlier your lecturer who's instantly a hero of mine, just judging on the syllabus that he taught you. But do you have any other marketing heroes? People you look to for inspiration or advice? 

David
Yeah, I'll give my lecturer a name actually. He's called Don Bavi and he was at University of Stirling. And if he's listening to this, thank you. I imagine he's retired now. I mentioned Tom Peters. I'll tell you one more, which is my favourite ad campaign of all time is the Stella Artois reassuringly expensive campaign, which ran for many years. I think that was Sir Frank Lowe and Jeffrey Semmel, but that is a, Just for the beautiful idea of reassuringly expensive. That is, uh, they're heroes of mine. 

Ali
Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, stunning campaign. Uh, and also a lovely example of consistency over time as well. 

David
Absolutely. 

Ali
And what do you then have as your guiding principles as a marketer from all these different things you've experienced, different businesses you've experienced, different people you've worked with? What's the kind of, if there was a list of your kind of top things you think about that determine your behaviour, your principles, what would they be? 

David
Yeah, I think for me the number one thing would be simplicity as much as possible. So I'm thinking about marketing more so than kind of how to manage people, et cetera, in this. But simplicity is really key. We're all just humans. You can't overload the audience. And this can be hard in B2B because, and if I think about our our current company, right? The, it's, if you gimme 100 words or 45 seconds, I can explain in pretty compelling fashion what we do. Gimme 5 seconds and 7 words, it's a little bit harder, right? 

Ali
Mm-hmm. 

David
So getting that simplicity is key. So distilling down from the 100-word version to the 30-word version to the 5 word version and getting your message across in a simple and consistent way, I, I think is, is really the, the overarching principle that I would go to. And, and I think that really then takes me to a second principle, which is you need great storytelling. You need people who can capture imagination. And I think in B2B, it, it's very easy to fall into the trap that because we're, we're buying for businesses or marketing to businesses, that the only thing that matters is rational business value. And sure, rational business value is super important. You gotta justify why somebody should enter into a, a deal with you. But at some point you've also gotta appeal their human side and how is this thing gonna make them feel, or is it gonna make them look better or help them with their career? So having that storytelling component that addresses the whole person, and not just the rational economic decision-making part of that person is super important. 

Ali
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And one of the things I find exciting about the world of B2B is the extent to which the emotional granularity of what's possible hasn't really been explored, or maybe hasn't been intentionally explored, perhaps a better way of putting it. To your point, there are all sorts of buttons to push in people, you know, ways to stimulate them. That I think are still radically underused in B2B. 

David
It is interesting just, you know, because I am envious of Stella Artois' reassuringly expensive campaign, or here in the US when I'm watching the Super Bowl and you look at the Bud Light ads, it just looks like a lot of fun. I don't know why I'm like, how often this would be. 

Ali
Anything with a puppy in it. 

David
But yeah, here we are. And, but when I go to our user conferences, I feel joy from customers. Sometimes because of how the product is helping them. I mean, that's a big, you know, why'd you get up in the morning? You go to a user conference like that and somebody is just thrilled with how the product has helped them in their life or helped them in their work or for the people that depend on their implementation of the product. It's made the job easier for 50, 100, 10,000 people is really, and their end users and customers, it's really quite compelling. So harnessing that feeling of joy and articulating that in the B2B environment is also kind of a unique set of circumstances. It's something that I'm always looking for. 

Ali
I agree. I used to work across B2C and B2B. And occasionally I would talk to colleagues of mine or friends who work in the B2C space and they go, oh yeah, B2B, what's it really like? Not so sure it'd be as exciting. But I think one of the things people miss is our customers' and clients' relationships with our brands are far more intense, richer, engaged, more textured than I have as a relationship with my shampoo or the last chocolate bar that I bought. And that is something that just feels like it's massively underpromoted, perhaps should be the way of putting it. You know, B2B, you get the chance to interact with customers on a level which is far more involved than anything you do in B2C. 

David
Yeah. 

Ali
Yeah. People don't fly thousands of miles to go to a conference about You know, insert soap brand here. Do you know what I mean? It's just a very, very different thing. And our brands as a result and the touchpoints and the entire relationship becomes much, much more involved. And there's that classic meme really has become of, you know, the amount of space and the amount of time that any customer thinks about your brand. And yes, of course, marketers were always going to perhaps slightly overestimate that. But the amount of time that somebody who is using my product for 7 hours of their day, every day, every week, the amount of time they're spending thinking about my brand is a hell of a lot more than the amount of time that I spent thinking about, you know, the last thing I bought was a pair of trainers or anything else. So I just think that's just under referenced in our conversations about B2B, I think. 

David
Yeah, well, now you're taking me back to my marketing education because I think when I was at university, we were talking about moments of truth, which I think was coined by Jan Ericsson of SAS Airlines. But it's super true. People are using the product every day. So the user interface and the experience of deploying the product if you're in software, and the support and everything that goes before the sale. All of this and more is part of the experience where every single one of those things is a moment of truth that we've got to manage. 

Ali
Absolutely. Yeah. Sometimes you use a framework, more time, more money, more people, and that's in the course of the buying cycle, but also in the course of using the product. It's like more people are using it and they're spending more time with it. And they are hoping to get more value from it as a result. It's, you know, it is fascinating. Do you mind if we finish with just a quickfire round? 

David
Yeah, sure. 

Ali
Just a few questions, as I tend to say, kind of trickier questions that we force into short answers. So the first is complete this sentence. 

David
The qualities I look for in my next exceptional hire are people who bring solutions, not problems. 

Ali
Very good. Slight aside, saw a lovely framework about levels of agency the other day, which I'll try and remember to share with you, but speaks exactly to that. Second, I often say the only problems that worry me are the ones I can't see. So try to be open with my team about challenges that I have on them mistakes that I make to create a space where they're comfortable doing the same. Uh, in the spirit of psychological safety, what's a mistake that you've made in the last couple of weeks? Oh boy. 

David
Uh, yeah, I, I think, uh, I, I asked my team to work up some creative before we were fully ready, and that probably wasted some time. And for that, I apologise. Very good. 

Ali
Thank you. Um, thirdly, what is something most people get wrong about you? 

David
I think Americans probably hear my accent and think I must be related to the Queen or some sort of— That's very good. Socrates or something like that. Or 10 points more IQ than I actually have. But you heard my backstory. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Ali
Well, very, it's very useful, isn't it? An English accent. 

David
Oh yeah. 

Ali
In the US. Yeah, 100%. 

David
I'll take it. 

Ali
What are the 3 technologies you're most excited about over the next 10 years? 

David
10 years is a relatively short timeline. 

Ali
Wow. You are, you are the first person to say short. I, I love that. Well, yeah. 

David
For me, in terms of monumental development, so I think I'd focus on things that are like the maturation of things that are already in motion. So I think accelerating medical discoveries, right? I think new pharmaceuticals, cures for conditions like Parkinson's, et cetera. As I reach that stage of my life in the next 10 to 20 years, I'll be very motivated to see improvements there. I'm really looking forward to seeing us get to critical mass on electric vehicles and hopefully accompanying that with some advances in clean energy for the sake of my kids and grandkids. And finally, quantum. I feel like right now to me, I don't explore it deeply enough. It feels a little bit like a solution looking for a problem. So I'm very interested to see how that plays out in practical applications, which might practically apply to the first two things I mentioned. 

Ali
Lovely. Thank you. I agree. I think quantum is the solution looking for a problem is a lovely way of putting it. Finally, what's one piece of advice or one idea? Also, sorry, I should also say thank you for not saying just AI, which is frankly, you know, it doesn't need to be said. 

David
I couldn't say AI. It's too in the room. 

Ali
Exactly. It's too easy, too obvious. Finally, what's one piece of advice or one idea either about marketing or about life in general that you keep coming back to? 

David
I think be the change you want to see in the world, the famous Gandhi quote, right? And that can apply to anything. I think at work, lead by example. So get stuff done, roll up your sleeves, get the work done. I have a team of people that I couldn't survive without, but I work alongside them and get stuff done is number one. Treat people with respect. Find their strengths because everybody has strengths. You know, you heard my story about my dad, right? He, to the outside world, he was just a welder, but to me he was way more than that. And I think that kind of narrative is true for everybody. Find where people can shine and just be good to people because I think being respectful and kind too often is confused with weakness and it shouldn't be. 

Ali
100%. Well, that is a lovely place to end the conversation. So David, thank you so much for being with us today. 

David
Thank you so much, Ali.