Jaime Punishill (nCino) - It's Always a Journey

Intro: Maybe big data has gotten too big. Whether you're a B2B marketer or a consumer brand, your data needs to be viable, relevant, and accessible so that Stirista can help you retain customers, acquire customers, and make it personal.

Ben: Welcome to The Marketing Stir Podcast by Stirista, probably the most entertaining marketing podcast you're going to put in your ear. I'm Ben, the producer here Stirista. The goal of this podcast is to chat with industry leaders and get their take on the current challenges of the market, and we'll have a little fun along the way. In today's episode, Jaime Punishill, the Chief Market Officer at nCino chats with us about how having a product differentiation in the market makes marketing easier and how as a single platform, the company data model can be usable across every unit of business. Ajay enjoys his favorite lunch restaurant, and Vincent enjoys an extra hour of sleep. Give it a listen.

Vincent Pietrafesa: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of Stirista's The Marketing Stir. I, of course, am your happy host, Vincent Pietrafesa, the Vice President of B2B Products and Partnerships here at Stirista. If you're watching us on YouTube, not many of you do. That's okay. You listen to us though. Boy, are you listening. And you're listening to us, we're in the background when you're starting your day, when you're working out. Thank you for telling me the way you listen to us. That's still a weird thing for me, but I love it. I love that you're telling me all this. I was just at trade shows and people were coming up to us, myself and my co- host, we'll get to our amazing co- host at a minute, but people are always telling us how much you love the podcast. That's a great feeling, and thank you for listening. We appreciate it. Before we start, if you're just listening to us for the first time, we are The Marketing Stir. We're Stirista. Who is Stirista? Let's just talk about us for just a second. There's no other advertising in this podcast we refuse. And boy, do people want to advertise. No, no, no. Ladies and gentlemen, Stirista, we are a marketing technology company. We own our own business to business data, our own business to consumer data. We help companies through our own technology, get access to those records through our email platform, through our DSP called Adstir, Connected TV, OTT, display. Email me, vincent @ stirista. com. That is how confident I am. I just gave you my email address. The other thing I'm confident in, I just got to see him, ladies and gentlemen, and I'm going to see him again. How many people actually want to see their CEOs? Tell the truth out there. I actually like seeing my CEO He is always informative and a fun time. Work and fun. That's what we do here Stirista. Ladies and gentlemen, my co- host, Mr. Ajay Gupta. What's going on, Ajay?

Ajay Gupta: Hey, Vincent, you are particularly happy today. I like it.

Vincent Pietrafesa: I am. I know, even more happy than usual. And yeah, I got to sleep in one extra hour today. My wife and I switch off days because we have little children and they wake up at 5: 08 and 5: 15, so it was my day to sleep in till about seven. Isn't that great?

Ajay Gupta: That is nice. Yeah, that extra hour when you're a parent makes such a big difference.

Vincent Pietrafesa: It really does. Shout out to all the parents out there, working parents doing their thing. Ajay, it's good to see you. You got a smile on your face too. What's going on? How's everything in San Antonio?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, we actually just got back from our favorite lunch restaurant that you wouldn't care for, but it's Dashi. So shout out to Dashi. It is way too spicy for you.

Vincent Pietrafesa: Yep. But all those listeners out-

Ajay Gupta: Brian and Blaine and Steve, this is the spot to be. So that's why I got to smile.

Vincent Pietrafesa: Everyone knows that because, and listeners know this about me, also, they say to me, " You really can't tolerate spicy food?" I'm like, " Look, it's not my fault. I've got GERD." I'm Italian. I don't know, blame my parents for giving me tomato sauce when I was like three months old. I have no idea. But that's what you do for Italians. But yeah, I heard about Dashi. It's good. Good time. Maybe I'm going to come out to the Texas area in June. We'll see. A lot of people keep telling me about a great trade show on the B2B side, the Forrester Trade Show in Austin. I keep hearing great things about that. Maybe our guest knows about that because he's my new go- to for all things B2B and all things B2B conferences. I met him before. We were talking. We haven't met in person. Well, we'll change that because he actually lives close to where I grew up. So very close to New York City. Hope to meet him in person, Ajay. But you know what? We love having him on. And recently, there was another show. We happened to go to the RampUp show in LiveRamp, in San Francisco recently. But the other show I was thinking about going to was the B2B sales exchange in Arizona. And I saw that my guy, Jaime, was there speaking on a panel, rocking it out, all the comments how well he did. So we're happy and it just kind of adds some nice additional flare to our podcast, ladies, gentlemen. You know how I feel about the B2B side, listeners, being that is my role here. So ladies and gentlemen, a nice warm welcome, please, to the chief market officer, chief market, you heard that correctly we'll talk about in the moment, at nCino, Jaime Punishill. What's going on, Jaime?

Jaime Punishill: Vincent, so awesome to be here. Thanks for that particularly generous introduction. I'm not sure I said anything so insightful out in Arizona, but it was funny. So you know what that does, people will retain those things.

Vincent Pietrafesa: I love it. I love it. Sometimes I try to be funny. People say I'm funny sometimes. They always say that Ajay's naturally funny and they say I try a little too hard. But hey, funny is funny. But no, that's great, Jaime. I was going to be at that show and I know there's another one coming up in August. It's the B2B Sales& Marketing Exchange. Sales and marketing in the same room. What? Yes, it's possible. Ladies and gentlemen do it. I was there last year in August. So go to that show., There's some free advertising for you ladies and gentlemen. But yeah, Jaime, I heard and I saw all the comments you were... Hey, funny is memorable. You did a great job. Those panels sometimes are just boring, and I was so glad to see that my new friend Jaime was doing his thing there. So Jaime, talk to me about a few things here. So let's get nCino, what are you doing there? Tell my listeners here about the organization, then your role, chief market officer. At first I thought that was a typo and then I was like, wait a minute. Talk to me about what you're doing there.

Jaime Punishill: Yeah, so I'm fairly new to role. I won't be able to say that too much longer. I started August 1st, so we're about seven months in now. nCino is a cloud banking company, so it's bank software. It was actually the original, the pioneer in cloud banking 10 years ago when lots of banks thought that they would never go to the cloud at all. That was an unsafe place. It's a FinTech unicorn, rocket ship, zero to a couple hundred million bucks in 10 years and has really gone from upstart serving small US community banks to now serving global enterprises, Australian, New Zealand, Japan, UK, France, big companies, small companies, three of the top five US banks, three of the top five Canadian banks. I could go right through the list. So it's been a tremendous success story and I was fortunate enough to be asked to come in and lead a marketing transformation to help us go from where we are to a billion dollars, as fast as humanly possible.

Vincent Pietrafesa: I love that. That's the role, the market. I love it. So when they say chief market officer, they're talking about the entire banking market. Is that what you're referring to there, the role?

Jaime Punishill: No. And I can't take credit for chief market officer as a title. I can only take credit for asking for it and getting it. But there's a whole crew of marketers. And I apologize, I'm not going to remember the original person. But it came out of the Empowered CMOs group, which is a group of awesome female CMOs really working together to support each other and to help elevate more women into leadership positions. And from a discussion they had there, somebody put out, I don't know, position paper or a blog post or something talking about the need to shift, like hey, if marketers want to be taken seriously, we got to stop talking about what we do and focus on the impact. Marketing should own the market. We should own the view of the market, the voice of the customer. We should represent that for the company. We should bring that back and we should have a strategic place at the table, which we all want. Many people complain about, they can't seem to get, but it's because we focus too much on the activities of marketing and not the impact and the outcomes of marketing. And so it's a fairly subtle thing to drop the ING. You think about it, then none of the other C- level titles are a gerund. But as with so many things in life, that little nuance just changes the discussion for what the marketing function can do and the impact it can have on the business and the role that you can play at the strategic leadership table.

Vincent Pietrafesa: That definitely makes sense. Jaime, talk to us about how you got into marketing? It's one of our few staple questions that we ask. And especially you, you've always kind of been involved or adjacent to the FinTech world, if you will, banking, FinTech. So just tell us your story.

Jaime Punishill: Yeah. So if you look backwards at my resume, it almost looks as if there was a perfectly designed, logical path that assembled a series of capabilities and skills and experiences that led me to exactly this job, exactly here today. I assure you it was not so planful. I started my career actually in sales, which I believe is, and something we talked about a lot last week, the more former salespeople you can have in your marketing organization, the better off you are in really getting that sales perspective and that marketing sales alignment. But at any rate, I ended up in the mid'90s, because I'm old, my children would like to remind me that I'm OAF. I'll let you suss that out if you don't know what that means. And the internet came along and I was a young guy who saw this internet, this technology thing had big potential to change things. And so I was fortunate enough to be tapped to lead a team to build the first online brokerage for Bank of America back in the mid'90s. Before E- Trade is still on the phone. Schwab hasn't even launched e- Schwab yet. It was quite a while ago. That was my first, what I'll call a digital transformation job, even though I didn't know it was digital transformation. I didn't even know what transformation was back then. It was just cool stuff that I thought was going to be impactful. And so I've kind of moved, through my career, really surfing on the wave of digital transformation. And that's taken me in lots of places from product positions to business line positions to P& L positions. And then ultimately, over time we see marketing taking on more and more responsibility for digital, digital transformation inside of organizations. And so I got tapped a decade ago, not quite a decade ago, to join TIAA as they were getting ready for their first national advertising campaign and the rebrand. And so they wanted it to be a very digital led strategy. So I was leading a digital transformation and then my team came up with such a good plan for what we would do digitally that the CMO asked if I would take over the whole campaign. And so that's where I cut my teeth on more traditional marketing things like TV and radio and print and really getting into B2B demand gen campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. And so for the last eight years I've been applying my trade on the marketing side of the house and here I am.

Ajay Gupta: Great background, Jaime. I'd love to know what you are doing today for marketing, what are some of the channels that are working for you?

Jaime Punishill: So I inherited a really interesting situation. nCino was such a rocket ship and had early on come to the conclusion if they built great product and if we sell to banks, bankers very much look at what other bankers are doing. It's a slower, more conservative risk averse industry. If they built a great reputation and really amplified that reputation, they would be successful. And they were absolutely that. An incredible PR and comms function, an incredible sort of event strategy and market presence, but no demand gen function. Not in the traditional definition of demand gen. And then we bought another company that had a smaller, it was a little bit smaller and had a more traditional marketing org, but really didn't have a lot of resources. So really, what we've been focusing on is bringing those teams together, defining what we think the new marketing motion should be for the organization and building that. And so we've had sort of an interesting seven months where we are designing, flying and building the plane all at the same time. Obviously, all the existing campaigns had to keep running. The pipeline had to keep being filled while we were designing our future state and really taking a data first technology and automation first approach to creating scale. Because we're now a big company. We're operating in 10, 11 markets. We've got almost 1, 700 employees and we need to operate with that kind of global scale. And I inherited almost no tech stack. There was just Pardot and Salesforce on both sides of the house. So we've been in a massive plan and build mode and we've just reorged. So we are now rolling out an ABM platform soon and we've started to really up our game in our digital advertising channels. And the nice part is I don't have to change what existed, I get to build the most modern stack with the best process and the latest and greatest toys, et cetera, et cetera. So we're going to likely be an ABM first approach where we have a very definable universe. You got to be a bank, I know who you are. I can get lots of information about you because there's a lot of public data. Though it makes logical sense for us to really hone in on a really tight definition of our target account list and then do a full stack approach. But I think we're going to, as I've done in other places, and you could see the way the buyers are shifting, we'll shift to a little less offline, a lot more digital and really hone in on first party data. There's so much good data and signals out there that marketers honestly, surprising to me, are not taking advantage of.

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, I completely agree. As a data company, we definitely see first party data as the future for our industry. You mentioned demand gen, which is probably one of the toughest things for most marketers and something we grapple with as well. And one of the things we always try to figure out is how do we distinguish ourselves from our competition? So is that part of the strategy? And if so, we'd love to learn about how do you differentiate yourself from the competition?

Jaime Punishill: I have the incredible fortune of having just awesome product market fit. We built a product 10 years ago that literally, there was nothing else in the marketplace to support commercial banking transformation. And the founding team had the foresight and the vision to know that we weren't really solving just for commercial banking that what we're really solving for is a gap in the marketplace, which is a single platform that can empower the entire bank. If you flip it around, customers, we all have banking relationships. Banks spend a lot of time talking about being customer- centric. It's in all the annual reports, they measure MPS, et cetera. But if you look at their tech stack and the way they're organized, they're really organized by business unit, by regulatory construct. And you, as a consumer, it's difficult to go from business unit to business unit. The credit card team and the small business lending team are not the same, even though they take all the same information. So we've been built as the only single platform. So we've got one data model, and we can make that data active and usable across every business unit. So we actually have a substantial product differentiation in the market. That makes obviously, the marketing a lot easier because I've got clear product and capability differentiation. But more tactically, one of the things I could tell fairly early on is as the company had matured and added lots of other solutions and added much more complexity, our story had gotten a little mushy. We're really good at telling that original story and a little less well at telling our more complex, more fulsome story. So we actually just completed a big brand positioning exercise to re- anchor the whole company and the marketplace in what we think is a very differentiated position. So stay tuned in the coming weeks and months as we start to roll this out. But we think we've got a unique way of talking to the market. And the market's changed even in the last couple years too, right? I mean, digital transformation isn't exactly, in the same sentence, with a blank check coming from all organizations. So I think how you interact and talk to the market right now is going to be quite different.

Vincent Pietrafesa: And keep a lookout for that, listeners, some of the new things being rolled out. It's nCino. N, the letter n- C- I- N- O. Jaime, I'm curious because again, I heard a lot of people commenting on it, what panel were you on at the B2B exchange in Arizona? What did you talk about? What were some of your takeaways from not only the panel but the show in general that you could share with our listeners?

Jaime Punishill: So I was on a panel with Quarry and FIS talking about just ABM in a down market and how each of the organizations was thinking about ABM and applying it. Demand gen's hard, ABM's hard. Let's face it, you ask five people for the definition of ABM, you'll get seven answers, right? We see this. We're doing a lot of education even internally. So it was a lot about how the relationship happens with sales. How do we set the ABM strategies? Are we doing more or less? And so obviously, there was a lot of funny discussion about creating that sales and marketing alignment, which is the ever elusive goal. At a more macro level, I thought there was great energy frankly at the event in a way that I was happy to see because not quite sure with all the tech layoffs and everything else what would be there. But there's a lot of energy. I am always struck, to your earlier question, Ajay, in many ways how non- adaptive so many organizations are of this new stuff. I like to call it digital kabuki theater, which I think we all saw at the beginning of the pandemic. The pandemic was awesome. I thought it was awesome, as a marketer. It was the world's greatest AB test. We took away all other tactics. All we had was our digital marketing. And what I saw was how many teams said they were doing digital, but you realize that was not a prime directive or they weren't really doing a sophisticated way. And so I was really still struck Vincent at how early in the journey so many companies are in really rethinking and resetting their approach to the market as being digital first or certainly very heavily digital. You're still running as if we have analog buyers. They don't have great data, they don't have the right analytics on their website, they don't have awesome first party intent signals. They don't know how to action them, their teams are still operating in old ways. And so that's why, when I go to these things, I try to take a pulse of where we are relative to what's working out there and what's not working. And I continue to be struck at how slow the transition is into what I think a lot of us have been talking about for... Heck, people were talking about this before I became a marketer. But we're still sort of in the first few innings of the journey here.

Vincent Pietrafesa: Yeah. It's funny you mentioned that because I was kind of thinking the same thing when we were just at that RampUp and the trade show, we're always kind of just seeing how we fare and how we stack up against other companies. And I remember someone talking to me about, " Well was the whole conference about the deprecation of cookies still and what's happened?" I was like, " You know what? It wasn't." I feel like people just haven't talked about that anymore. And it was just amazing to see what, just a year ago, for the last three years was a topic and it's still very relevant, but it wasn't even there. And also, retail media, retail marketing. All of that was a huge topic of this particular show. So yeah, it's interesting to see just again, how we fare, what are the trends, what are people talking about and why are people not talking about things that are still relevant. But yeah, it always boggles my mind. But like you said, it's people were out and about and it's good to see that people were out these trade shows. I think 2023 is the year that I think it's going to back to almost normal. With that, Jaime, I wanted to get back to something you said earlier and then maybe, you said that you were really proud of that TIAA campaign that you worked on there. But have there been other projects or campaigns that you're particularly proud of that you worked on, or is it at nCino rebuilding a lot of this, the technologies that you have or programs? Talk to us about it.

Jaime Punishill: Yeah. The TIAA program, that was great because obviously that was my first one. But it was also my first sort of experience with how really thinking through the tactics and the audiences and the new digital capabilities could give our firm a strategic advantage. You're talking about now 2016, 2017. We were very early in on using Facebook and B2B marketing. We were talking about 15, 20x improvements in click- through rates in engagement, in account opens, et cetera, et cetera. Partly because we were almost the only ones fighting that fight. At Lionbridge there were two things that, which was my last company, we did a lot of... I mean it was the same kind of, it was a marketing transformation. We took the tech stack down, we rebuilt it, we rebranded the company, or at least refreshed the brand. But we did two things I was particularly proud of there. We saw how little frankly, SEO was being done in the space. Just wasn't a key priority. And so we made it a big priority and got a call from an agency, one of the industry analysts one day who had partnered with an agency to do a look at how the industry was marketing itself. And he's like, " How are you doing this? You're like 10, 15x better than everybody else." I'm like, " I think we have a good team, but honestly, I think we're the only ones running the race." And I have a similar- ish view here where I look at how our competitors are marketing and look, if everybody's doing TV, I can do TV, but now I'm just crowded with everybody marketing inside of TV. So I'd rather figure out where there are creative white spaces that we can reach people that we don't have to fight so much for attention. And so at Lionbridge, we did our 25th anniversary campaign, which was sort of an even newer refresh in the branding journey that we had taken and we kind of really reset the company into this new space of language AI. And that was probably one of the better campaigns, things I was more proud of. Just really created a sustained motion. That was our first simultaneous multi- language campaign. So we launched a campaign on day one in 10 languages with a fairly small team around this new messaging with a truly integrated sort of campaign strategy that was really super successful. So I guess I'm always just trying to figure out where are the edges we can find, because I'm looking at, I think CTV is underutilized right now, particularly in B2B. Great. So why am I going to go fight for email attention? Because I don't know about you, but I get eight million emails. And not that we won't use email, but we can uniquely be in front of our buyers in a quiet zone by focusing there. And after this and in a year, everybody will be there and I'll start looking for something else. But I think that's actually part of the challenge and part of the success of the really good modern marketers right now is you really have to pivot and adapt and look for new edges. They're not going to be the same and they're not going to last for very long.

Ajay Gupta: Jaime, CTV for B2B, you're literally giving us our marketing pitch. Great.

Jaime Punishill: There you go. There you go. You're welcome. I didn't even know, but there you go.

Ajay Gupta: Love it. I think managing marketing teams is usually a tough challenge because you have creatives and then you have the analytical people and sometimes media buyers. So what's been effective for you in managing and leading teams in various organizations?

Jaime Punishill: Look, every team is different and it's hard. I'm seven months in, I'm still learning this company and what I can bring to it and how I have to adapt so that my vision and my experience, et cetera can come through in a way that connects with this team. And in my case, I've got two teams, from two different companies, that are coming together to form this new culture. It's always a journey and I think you have to look at it as such. The other thing, I pride myself on taking a very learning first approach. I actually think in today's day and age, if you're not taking a learning first, leading with curiosity every day and dedicating time to it, I don't know how you stay on top of your game and stay successful. And so connected that then to your question, I want to learn each of those functions and each of those disciplines and each of those approaches because they are unique, how creatives look at the world versus how traditional demand gen people look at the world, versus how the marketing ops people look at the world. And I think because of that, I've learned each of those worlds. Now, nobody wants me driving the SEO strategy. But I know enough about SEO to have a really good conversation with my SEO expert and appreciate the nuance and be able to push their questions and then take that and connect it to what's going on the rest of the team, which I think is my key responsibilities as a leader is to help the team understand how their little piece of the factory and their contribution connects in with the whole. Because let's face it, as a customer, you're seeing an integrated story. I'm listening on the radio, I'm reading the print, I'm clicking on the ads, et cetera. And you can tell when the company isn't operating in integrated fashion. The coupons you get from a store that is different than the coupon you get from their online site, which still happens to this day, where you clearly have different parts of your organization not creating a single buying experience. And so that to me, and really helping my team grow and learn inside of this ever- changing universe. CTV literally wouldn't have been talked about 36 months ago. And my team, I said CTV and they, " Okay, let me explain to you what CTV is." And there's so much of that. I don't know if this helps. One of the metaphors I use a lot to reflect how I look at the world and how we drive marketing plan is you got to think about like GPS. Your point of departure, your point of arrival. And for a few years I was driving up to Boston every week. My address from where I started was the same and my arrival was the same, every week. But the path was different every week, weather, traffic, time of day, construction, whatever. And so if you're really anchored on your strategy and your vision and you really know where you've started, it allows you to be flexible and adapt as the conditions are changing. But you got to know those two things and have them anchored. And I think this is the best thing we can do for our teams right now is help them understand what you know today is super valuable today and will almost be irrelevant in 24 months. There's a new version that you need to know 24 months from now, right? There's a different SEO world than it was 24 months ago. Heck, now we got generative AI and generative chat. What's that going to do to the SEO experts? So that, I think, I spent a lot of time really working with my team on managing your career and growing so that you can really ride the wave of how fast things are changing.

Ajay Gupta: Jaime, the next one is a fun one. It's one of our staple questions on The Marketing Stir. I'm sure you get a lot of messages on LinkedIn with your job title and experience. So would love to know what's one that actually gets a response from you, and more interestingly, what's one that really annoys you?

Jaime Punishill: Yeah. Boy, the last one is much easier question to answer. And we watch in themes and then a bunch of us CMOs, we joke about it. For a while this summer, it was everybody was getting invited to start a franchise. All of a sudden, all the franchise guys came out of the woodwork and they seemed to have quieted a down a little bit. But I don't know why for three months everything was about that. I guess I'll answer it this way because it's a hard question, and our BDRs and sellers ask me this all the time. If you happen to hit me with a message that is pertinent to something I'm thinking about and you find a way to do it with some value add that I'm going to respond and listen. And the truth is I try to respond to everything and you talk about irritating. I will respond, " Hey, this doesn't fit," or" Hey, I just can't think about this. Call me back in four months." And I'm just never ceased to be amazed about how many people try to convince me that whatever I've just told them isn't correct and I really should have urgency to talk to them today. You should just be happy I responded to your cold email. I even told you to call me back in August. Your timeline and my timeline's not the same. And I think if I'm giving counsel to sellers on that front, I must get 300 emails a day. You're not getting a lot of time. If I've taken the time to respond. Or even if I haven't responded, sort of that super clever, you're dead, you're under a rock, you need help, let me know if I should call you back kind of A, B, C, D thing. It was cute the first time, it's not cute anymore. But I really think it comes to there's got to be a value exchange. There's too much noise and if you've got a value exchange and you engage in a good conversation and you have some persistence, it can pay off. Our web design agency, I literally have been talking to these guys for eight years across three companies and it just wasn't right, it wasn't right, it wasn't right. But they kept at it and they kept adding value and I knew at some point it would be right. And sure enough it was right and now they have a big project. Whether it's LinkedIn or email, yeah, I might need that, but it might be number 99 on my priority list. So stick around because at some point it's going to move up on the priority list. And I think there's too much of the I need to create pipeline this quarter, therefore, you need to have urgency now to meet my needs as opposed to kind of understanding where we are taking that feedback and then having the discipline to nurture that because the time will be right.

Vincent Pietrafesa: I love that explanation, Jaime, because it's something we haven't talked about, specifically for that question that we ask because you're actually responding to them. And then they're like, " Hey, no, it's still not good enough." And I respond to people too, and I get that every once in a while. I'll respond and I'll say, " Look, it's a no." And I know that in sales you appreciate the no as opposed to the maybe. You know what I also find something you said there. Follow up with me in four months. They never do. Sometimes they never do. They forget and it doesn't come back. We have a lot of BDRs and SDRs and sales managers who come up to us, Ajay and myself now, who are saying, " Thank you for asking that question." The LinkedIn question's people's favorite question because it's like we've retrained our BDRs to how to reach out to people. Because no C level executive that we've had on the podcast has been like, " Oh no, email me 43 times and I'm going to then sign a$ 100,000 deal with you." No one has ever even remotely came close to that. It's one of those lessons there. And be respectful of people's time. Also, it comes down, sales management, if you are listening to this, it's like you're right. I think a lot of the times, from the top down, you're creating that unnecessary urgency. I get it, pipeline needs to be built top of the funnel. It needs to be built. But you need to respect. We're all human beings here. We need to respect each other's... That one inaudible. Yeah.

Jaime Punishill: A little patience and perspective. And again, I can tell when somebody has investigated my background, reads my LinkedIn posts. And I'm not super active, but I'm active enough. And you can tell when there's a thoughtful connection set. I can also tell when the marketing team has written the three urgent bullet points to try to share. And there are people with needs. Even if I do have that need, it doesn't mean I have that need at this moment. Right? Because again, we got lots of projects, lots of things we've got to do. Just because we fit an ICP doesn't mean we fit right now. I'm a big fan of the FIRE, whatever rubric you use, but FIRE works for me, fit, intent, recency and engagement. Have some sense and then use that to judge how you want to interact with somebody.

Vincent Pietrafesa: Exactly. Exactly right. I love the comparison there. Jaime, two things before we wrap here. One, we'll get to know you on the personal side here. But this is a question I'm very passionate about, it's the B2B marketing. How does one stay innovative in B2B marketing, stay ahead of the curve? You talked about the connected TV piece. A lot of people aren't doing that to the B2B marketer. But those business professionals, they're at home. But talk to us a little bit about that, how to stay there.

Jaime Punishill: By the way, they're not just at home. They're on the road in their hotel where you now can pull up your Netflix account or your Disney + account or whatever, or I've downloaded it on my phone, I got the episode. So many new ways that you can consume the media. It's a hard question to answer because some of these things are like, " Oh, I don't know how I do it, I just do it." But I will say this, I spend, I'm going to guess five to 10% of my week. So that's not an insignificant amount of time reading, talking to vendors that I may or may not even know I need right now. But I do it because I don't know how you can stay on the edge without doing that. And so it's a little like the way people say, hey, you can write, you just got to say every week I'm going to spend an hour, I'm going to write that blog post. Or you want to do a podcast? Okay, you got to commit and you got to do it and decide that this is really important and let it sustain and build itself over time. And I feel the same way about the learning. You have to decide that you're going to do it and you have to commit to it and sustain it. It's not like, " Oh, I'm going to spend a week learning this month, this quarter," or" March is going to be learning month." I don't think that's how it worked. And so it's not easy. I never want to go to a conference actually and learn something radically new. I love to hear new ideas and new ways people are doing things. But I almost view it as a failure on my part if I go there and like, " Wow, I had no idea this was a trend." But I can only do that because I spend quite a bit of time consuming lots of content and talking to lots of smart people to just keep the information flowing into my head. And back to your other question, Ajay, I do it across all disciplines. I'm just as interested in understanding what's happening in the tech stack as I am as what Google's doing in the algorithm, as I am understanding new strategies around creative. And in my industry and outside of my industry, you never know where those inspirations are going to come from. And that I think is the key is because you've got to get lots of inspiration and lots of inputs and then you'll come up with your own alchemy for that.

Vincent Pietrafesa: It didn't makes complete sense. Thanks for sharing all that information, Jaime. We appreciate it. Get to know you personally, right? You're in New York, adjacent area, Connecticut there. Were you always on the East Coast here? Did you go up around here? Tell us what you like to do for fun?

Jaime Punishill: Yeah. So I was born in New York City, but my parents decided to raise me in the country, so to speak. So we moved to Western Massachusetts. I grew up there, went out to the Bay Area for college, decided that was kind of an awesome place. So I stayed there for a decade. Then got a job in Boston, was there for about a decade, and then had been the tri- state area since about the mid inaudible. So I've lived in some pretty awesome places. My new company is headquartered in Wilmington, North Carolina, so started to learn about North Carolina a lot. I'm down there a lot, even though I'm staying remote. As to the hobbies question, I just sent my youngest child off to college in late August, so I'm an empty nester. And one of the first things I realized was, wow, I have no hobbies left. I spent so much time at softball tournaments and swim meets and all those things, that I'd led a lot of my personal hobbies fall by the wayside. I'm like, " What am I going to do with my time?" So went out and got myself a bike and so I started road cycling again. And this year I'm determined to get back on the golf course for that lifelong never ending pursuit of failure, that is learning how to golf. And my wife and I have just started to travel a lot more. So we love to go to concerts, anywhere not local. So we did Rage Against the Machine in Toronto last summer and we're going to go see Muse in Vegas in a month and just get back out there into the world. And we love ourselves some live music so I'm enjoying the next phase of my life, I guess is the way to put it.

Vincent Pietrafesa: That's amazing. You're a empty nester atta- boy. But also don't discount the amazing Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. Right there, my hometown. It's a great little venue for those who live in the New York Tri- State area. Check that out every once in a while. Jaime, this has been awesome catching up with you. Keep up the great work at nCino. This has been a great episode. Ladies and gentlemen, check out nCino, n- C- I- N- O. Check out Jaime, he's the Chief Market Officer at nCino, Jaime Punishill. I'm Vincent Pietrafesa, that's Ajay Gupta. This has been another episode of The Marketing Stir. Thank you so much my friends for listening and we'll talk to you soon.

Ben: Thanks for listening to The Marketing Stir podcast, by Stirista. Please like, rate and subscribe. If you're interested in being a guest on the podcast, please email us at TheMarketingStir@ Stirista. com. And thanks for listening.