CMO Chats with Brett Chester, Chief Marketing Officer at Objective Corp

We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all around the world. Today, we’re thrilled to have Brett with us. Hello, Brett. could you just first introduce yourself, your job title, your company, and a little bit about what your company does?

With pleasure. Thanks, Neil. I’m Brett Chester. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Objective. We are a software for the public sector and heavily regulated industries. We’re solving all sorts of problems, from taming content sprawl to ensuring that regulators around Australia can deliver better outcomes for the communities they’re servicing. It’s a pretty exciting role, and as everybody knows, there’s always a new regulation coming out that we need to ensure folks can comply with, and there’s always a request that we make of government that needs answering, and we help those types of organisations out there resolve those challenges and keep operating as they should be.

 

From a personal level, can you tell us a bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in marketing?

Oh, wow. I’m thinking back into the annals of time here. It’s been a while since the start of my journey. I actually started out in law school. I knew nothing about marketing, realised that I hated the law after a short stint, and ended up stumbling into marketing through a chain of online casinos. So, I really cut my teeth not on the academic side of marketing but more on the experiential side, like, ‘Hey, here’s something. Get it done.’ I’ll never forget learning the dark arts of SEO back in the day. I’m talking about the early 2000s from, literally, people that sat in dark corners with torn black jeans and mascara, like the emos of the day, if we’re allowed to say that.

I learned by doing, and as a result, I’ve been fortunate enough to spend my time experiencing all the different aspects of marketing, which has made me a stronger marketer now, because I can piece together things far better—ego aside—far better than most others, because I’ve experienced all the different facets of marketing over time, everything from demand generation, positioning, messaging, product marketing-type function as well. So it’s pretty exciting.

 

As the CMO of your company, what’s your current main marketing focus?

I’d be lying if there was a main focus. At any one point in time, of course, I’m driven to generate revenue as efficiently as possible. That’s my direction, my North Star. That could be revenue generated from existing customers, new prospects that are converting to customers, or cutting costs to make us more efficient or more profitable. But to deliver on that, I need to be thinking about all sorts of different things, from process to practice, from potential to reality.

My job is to be a good steward of marketing, an advocate of our craft, not only internally at our business and being able to articulate the value to internal stakeholders, but also, externally, to folks like yourself and our listeners, to be able to help share what we do. Priority-wise, it’s a whole bunch of things, advocating for new and exciting things out there as well as generating revenue profitably.

 

Bringing it back down into the use cases, could you expand on something that’s been really successful in terms of a marketing campaign or an initiative that you’ve recently executed?

Sure. The thing that I think most enterprise businesses are going through is having to do more with less. We’ve come from many years of, ‘Here’s a problem. Throw some cash at it. Oh, wait, you need more? Sure.’ We’re living in the world, where I grew up, which was do less with more. You’ve got to figure out how to fix problems without throwing money at it. 

Traditionally, account-based marketing has been somewhere in between those two. Can you throw lots of money at it? Yes. Should you throw lots of money at it? Maybe. But the way we think about account-based marketing here is something that I’m most proud of, and we don’t call it account-based marketing. The reason I don’t call it that is because it’s not just about marketing, right? I don’t call it account-based sales because it’s not just about sales. I call it account-based engagement—and we’re very proud of our ABE programs.

Essentially, we’ve launched successfully internally across multiple different business units here an account-based engagement program that couples marketing and sales side by side to effectively drive the pipeline. So it’s a pretty exciting program that we’ve launched. From a metrics perspective, we’re not spending a lot of money, but we’re generating a lot of pipe. We’re creating a lot of interest in the accounts that we want to engage. And so, if there’s an inevitable follow-up question, what recommendation would you give people starting on an account-based journey? It’d have to be: understand your ICPs, understand your bias, and build for them—not for what you think is awesome.

 

As well in that model, and it seems like you’ve got it with that rewording of what we’re looking at is getting the buy-in from multiple stakeholders within your company. And I think that the account-based model works well because it ties sales closer to marketing. Are you finding that, and how are you pushing that to be as successful as possible?

I think everyone wants us, as B2B marketers, to maximise the amount of ARR that we get from our customers. If we’re waiting for someone to come knock on our door, then the likelihood of that ARR being higher or being from a target account is much lower, right? Plus, we’re not taking sales cycles or our marketing cycles into our own hands. We’re really waiting for business to appear on our laps.

Of course, many people could argue with that, but at the highest level, if we were to agree that that’s the case, what ABE does is it allows us to rally behind higher ARR opportunities by targeting on who we need to engage in a combined and crossed-over fashion between Marketing and Sales and even Customer Success post-sale by having unified messages, by having consistent processes—well, consistent processes that have easy reporting. I was at a session this morning at a B2B forum, and people are still talking about attribution. Well, if we change the paradigm in how we operate, attribution doesn’t need to be the concern of marketers. It needs to be the backbone of a reinvestment thesis.

It’s all about having an operating thesis for your business, being able to advocate for what the direction is that you’re heading in, being able to recruit people to advocate on your behalf, and then knowing the reporting framework in advance, so that you know what’s going to happen and work backwards from that outcome, and then pretty much the rest of it sells itself.

 

Yeah, I definitely agree. It’s amazing how often those steps aren’t all in place and there are missing links, and a campaign is just not as effective, or, like you say, we’re not streamlining budgets or messaging, which is obviously so important nowadays, and I don’t think anyone’s got more budget. Someone mentioned that recently, Gartner did a study, and budgets were down 15% on where they were, but expectations from marketing, obviously, never go down.

Yeah, exactly right. In the days of more is more, I think the savvy operators, who I was fortunate enough to work with, were not just saying more for more; it was more with, Prove to me why we should scale.’ The venture partners that I got to work with in the States were pretty amazing, but they’d always ask, ‘If I gave you a million dollars, how would you scalably spend that now?’ And then, ‘If I gave you another 10 on top of that, to reinvest? Would it continue to scale?’ And I think that’s the mindset that we need to apply because if we can find repeatable mechanisms for cost-effective scale, I don’t know many CEOs that wouldn’t go out there and beg, borrow, and steal to reinvest, right? The more with more life will always go on if you’ve got the right investment thesis and the right backer in your CEO or leadership team.

 

In terms of challenges, what are you seeing as your biggest challenges at the moment?

Well, like everybody else, it’s saturation. What is it that B2B buyers are looking for? Everyone wants to put out their best piece of content. Yay. We’ve created another piece of content. But, trust in content is down. So I think that the challenge that we’re going to face is twofold. The first is authenticity fatigue. That’s the best way to describe it. I see you nodding there, like I think you agree.

 

I find it so hard at the moment. Everyone’s a LinkedIn expert and posts five times a day, but how much of that view is coming from you, and how much are you just banging into ChatGPT? Where are the actual leaders?

Correct. It feels as though I could be playing into that a little bit by not sharing metrics earlier. We’re a publicly listed company; it’s hard for me to share metrics, so I didn’t. But I’m sitting here saying to you that I’m a leader, and the first thing I’m saying to you is that authenticity is hard, and I believe that, not because of ego, not for any other reason. I don’t know everything, but what I do know is that when I get myself out there and I have a go, I’m proud of my outcomes, and I can prove definitively that I can do them again and again, and that I’ve thought them through repeatedly, and I’m happy to be also told that I’m wrong. I don’t know how many folks are really out there being truly authentic or being their Instagram double, and I think that’s going to be a problem for a lot of people: authenticity fatigue. And couple that with, couple that with AI in its current form, we’re really getting to a point where marketers in B2B are at an inflection point as a result of AI. There are a lot of naysayers out there saying, ‘Guess what? Marketers are going to be gone in two to three years,’ and maybe, but the reality is that there are more fundamental issues that we need to grapple with, which is just because ChatGPT has given you an answer to a question doesn’t mean that you’ve asked the right question, or you have the ability to execute on the answer in a way that will yield a positive result. So, although I love my ChatGPT, AI that I’ve named, and she likes it being called ‘it’, according to her—we’ve got a great relationship. She’s the best marketing partner I’ve had in a long time. And my team hate me saying that, but the reality is that if it weren’t for the team, it’s just a chat, right? So we need marketers to be able to execute, and we need smart marketers who understand the paradigm in which they operate. As long as we need those things, marketers will continue to exist.

 

Those are great points. From a company perspective, how does your company stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing?

Yeah, it’s a good question. I really don’t think about competitors in the sense that, sure, there are other people out there that have similar products to us, but I think about us as a truly innovative company that is on the edge of everything that we do. ‘Edge’ is a term that I use with my team. And I’m grateful to an ex-CEO for bringing me to this concept of edge. But the edge for me is that we need to be able to understand all the technologies around us. We need to be well-versed in what’s there. We need to understand the channels that exist. We need to understand the interoperability of those channels and technologies. So we really need to be the masters of our domain. How do we beat our competitors? Well, we run our own race, not naively. We know what they’re doing. We know how they operate. We’re aware of them, but I don’t think of them as competitors. They’re just other people that sell other software. We are unique in our offering. We can differentiate ourselves uniquely through our perfected messaging. We can differentiate ourselves through the channels that we operate in. We can differentiate ourselves through how we show up, from our merch to our presence at a show, right? So I don’t really care too much from a competition perspective, but what I do believe we need to have as a business is an innovative edge, an innovative approach to marketing, an innovative approach to sales, and we always need to be on the forefront of what we’re doing in whatever discipline we have in the business.

 

In terms of opportunities, what do you believe are the biggest opportunities for CMOs today that might not have been available in the past?

Yeah, I’ll go back to authenticity and talk about your brand integrity in the world of AI. How do we maintain our brand in a world where everyone has their own little AI that’s guiding them through the world? How does that brand manifest in the voice of my ChatGPT? How do we start to think about building trust into the LLMs as marketers so that when somebody asks a question of it that is very, very, very nuanced, the answers are not only authentic but can that be trusted? Ultimately, relationships between individuals and their AIs are being forged through the context of search that folks are doing with their AIs. So I think there’s going to be a big journey and a massive opportunity for marketers to understand how to build brand integrity and resolve to answer questions for consumption of the LLMs, to be able to remain top of mind in this unique bot that I’m engaging with that’s different to your unique bot that you’re engaging with, because our contexts are so different, not only from a geography perspective, but from a day-to-day engagement perspective. Only 3% to 4% of people say thank you to their AI. I think I’d probably get a better answer from the people that don’t, maybe. Who knows? But I say thank you, because I was raised nicely. Maybe my results would be different because of it. Who the hell knows? But there’s a brave new world out there that we need to understand. I think there’s a huge opportunity for AI to be an advocate for marketers. Forget about the mechanism for helping us do better faster; as an advocate for us to sell our product, there’s a huge opportunity, and I’ve yet to meet many people who are thinking like that.

 

My next question was about what the future of marketing looks like. But you pieced a little bit of it together there, and I think that’s really good. Yeah, like a building block, it’s actually how you work together with it and get that advocate. Do you want to add on to that?

What’s the future of marketing? Fundamentally, we have to go back to the question: Why do we exist? Not to get too philosophical, but why does marketing exist? It’s sales before sales, right? Our function is to educate and illuminate folks to the challenges that we solve, regardless if you’re marketing a car or marketing a B2B software. In the car instance, you’re doing exactly the same thing. So as long as there are folks out there that need to be educated, that need to be illuminated, that need to be affiliated with a brand, we’ll always have a function. The question becomes, who is leading the function and who is executing the function, and what mechanisms are available to expedite, accelerate, or make more efficient the outcomes? I think a couple of years back, senior marketers were okay. When it comes to the AI world, it’s like, well, sure, but how do you just manifest senior marketers? They need to come through marketing to become a senior marketer, right? They need experiences. So, is it the end of marketing? Probably not. Will the landscape shift dramatically? Yes. And so I think, coming back to an earlier comment I made, I think we’re going to start to see a divide between the authentic marketers that know what they’re doing and the marketers that are creating authenticity through, let’s say, leveraged expertise. They’re going to come across some problems because they won’t necessarily be able to execute their way out of a situation they’ve created. They don’t know what questions to ask. Anyway, I think we still have a bright future as marketers. It’s going to be very different, but everything’s going to be different. SaaS is going to be different. Cars are going to be different. Yeah, everything’s going to be different, and that’s okay.

 

Those human-to-human engagements are going to expose a lot of people but are real key pieces of the puzzle of anything going forward. It’s almost as if we’re coming back over to key relationships.

100%. What’s old is new.

 

Exactly. Nothing dies. It just goes out of fashion and comes back.

Correct. It manifests itself slightly differently at a later point.

 

What is the role of a CMO in one word, and maybe you can expand it?

Easy. We’re conductors, not train conductors, more like orchestral conductors. At any one point in time, a CMO is looking to their skilled musical players. I’ve got a team of folks that are very skilled, right? They have strengths, and they have weaknesses. My job is not only to set the tempo and the rhythm, but it’s also to get them to play their pieces fantastically in unison with others. And those others might be other marketers. Those others might be salespeople, customer success people, operations people, customers or prospects. But really, what I’m doing as a marketer, as a chief marketing officer, rather, is leading a complex orchestra. I think that’s the best way to describe it. And I wouldn’t do it any other way. It’s a lot of fun.

 

That’s a great way to describe it. Marketing does have both from end user to internal, like the multi-touch points, which is almost the function with the most touch points, and, yeah, it’s got to all play the right way.

Look, as marketers, if we can seek to strive for harmony like musicians, do we all know when we’ve heard that beautiful harmony and we go, “Oh, that sounds amazing.” If we can achieve the same thing as marketers, then our outcomes will probably be very strong.

 

What is a piece of traditional leadership advice that you don’t believe applies to modern CMOs or marketing leaders?

Everyone says, ‘Stick to best practices. You’ll be right if you stick to best practices, stick to best practices, and stick to best practices.’ Most people who have worked with me know that I appreciate best practices. They’re that for a reason. But if you just stick to best practices, what are you doing? You’re executing someone else’s playbook, and it’s probably the same playbook that your competitors are playing with, too. So don’t stick to best practices. Challenge the status quo. Think differently, examine and explore what others are doing. Understand it, don’t just see it, understand it, and optimise it. Then, create your own best practices, accept that they’re best practices, and move on and build some more. You know that there’s an operating paradigm that we need to exist in. Check. Got it? But for everything else, let’s just continue to challenge the status quo, not because it’s the status quo, but because if we keep doing the same thing over and over again, we should expect the same outcomes.

As I said right at the start when introducing myself, I’m here at companies to bring change and foster better outcomes. I think that sticking to best practices will yield the same outcomes. So don’t stick to best practices. Admire them, look at them, know what they are, and then challenge them and operate outside of them.

 

Fantastic. In terms of career advice, is there anything that you share or would like to share with people looking to work their way up the marketing leadership ladder?

Look, I think a couple of things. Firstly, from a discipline perspective, folks should really understand the various roles of marketing, their interoperability, and their different mechanics. Being able to write a good press release is just as important as being able to create an amazing paid search campaign. All of these things take unique skill sets, and having an appreciation of them and understanding them is pretty important, and that doesn’t have to be through doing. It can be through conversation. Always ask why, and don’t, again, accept that status quo comment like, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it. That’s the way you should do it.’ If you can build a business case in your head as to why something should be different, take it to that subject matter expert who wrote that last press release and say, “Why aren’t there bullet points in your sub headline? Why aren’t there best practices? They shouldn’t be there.” People consume information differently now, so maybe we should. Ask a lot of whys, speak to a lot of people, understand the craft, and learn the role that you play in that craft.

Understand science as well as art, and don’t be shy about finding mentors out there and guides that can help you. But just don’t come with, ‘Tell me something.’ Come with a specific ask; come with a problem. I think there are a lot of people out there who want to help others, so don’t be shy. Reach out to folks. Ask questions. Some of the best answers I’ve had are from cold outreach to people that I don’t know because I’ve seen them do something well, and I’ve wanted to understand if it worked or didn’t work, coming back to that authenticity, right? Did it work? You wrote a big case study saying it did. But what were the pitfalls? Tell me more. Be inquisitive.

 

Amazing. I was telling someone as well, and with the whole mentor thing, there’s nothing more people appreciate than people actually digging deeper into what they’ve done. That shows a sort of level of respect for what you’ve done. I think people enjoy that a lot on both ends, which is great. You shared some fantastic bits of wisdom during that. Thank you, Brett, for taking part in our series.

Awesome, thank you for having me.