My guest today is Matthew Quale, president of Bask Bank (the only bank to offer American Airlines Loyalty Points in lieu of interest). This is Part 1 of the interview where we dive into Matt’s career and path to CMO. Tomorrow we will explore how he grew the Bask business.
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Transcript:
Edward: My guest today is Matt Quale. Today we cover Matt's career and path to CMO. Princeton, General Mills, McKinsey, American Express, MetLife, and Brighthouse. Matt is now the president of Bask Bank and we're lucky to have him here today.
Matt, many of my guests had a roundabout path to CMO but yours is more traditional than most. You started your career as a marketing assistant at General Mills. You took on progressive responsibility, but let's talk a little bit about the last two steps. First, you moved from a sales enablement role at American Express to running all the marketing functions at MetLife, how did you do that?
Matt: What's interesting is you really do need to think about your career progression and plot out what are the pieces that you need. To your point at a very traditional marketing career, I've done a lot of stuff, print advertising, TV advertising, et cetera. As I was talking to my mentors, one of the things they talk about is you really haven't done enough technology.
An opportunity came up with American Express to run sales enablement for the merchant business that included managing the Salesforce instance and gave me access to a tech team. When I think about what really drives the market today, I think about a three-legged stool. I think about data and analytics, I think about core creative, but then, I think about delivery through technology.
For me, I felt good about my data and analytics from my time in consulting, I had the core creative. What I didn't have was technology and so much of marketing, particularly during the time on financial services, is that interaction between marketing and sales. For myself, one thing I always talk about is that marketing is a multiplier on sales activities. Having access to the CRM and having access to that tech team was really important for me in terms of actually building that tech muscle because digital is just going to be bigger and bigger going forward.
Edward: Did you have the marketing skills to run all of the marketing prior to AmEx? I'm getting to the fact of why did MetLife take a person who is doing sales enablement and put him in charge of everything?
Matt: Yeah, and also somebody who is in a different industry, who was an insurance person. Much of this also gets back to relationships and making sure that you are building a legacy, performance, and credibility.
I had a boss at American Express who left for MetLife. He called me up and said hey, there's this great opportunity here at Met. He was really the one who introduced me to the opportunity and vouched for not only my market credentials but more of the fact that I was a strategic thinker and a transformation agent.
As I went and interviewed with MetLife, who was really coming across was, they weren't looking for a traditional marketer. They’ve done that. They saw plenty of candidates who are in the industry. They're looking for somebody to really transform the marketing organization, in a lot of ways making more digital. For myself, the heavy technology and the heavy sales enablement played a really big role for them and something that they're very excited about.
Edward: How did you develop those other skills? Because you're in charge of more than just moving them digitally and doing sales enablement. Things like branding and performance marketing and all the other things you weren't doing before, how did you pick up those skills?
Matt: I guess when you actually take a look at a lot of my career, a lot of branding in places like General Mills. When you're working on brands like Cheerios and Kix, I've done a lot of repositioning work. Obviously, when I was with McKinsey, part of the marketing practice, doing a lot of marketing projects across a wide swath, but at the same time, oftentimes you are doing new things.
I’d say no matter who you are, getting that next job, oftentimes your skills you don't have. That’s really around building a team. I'll be the first person to say that I don't know every single piece of marketing, I don’t have every single skill set, but what I can do is assemble a good team. That team really includes both your agencies as well as your internal folks.
Oftentimes, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to hire people who are better at things than I am. For example, even some of the core creative, I ended up hiring some great folks out of P&G and really my other brand came from P&G. I said, look I want to be my creative eyes. I think you're better at this than I am. One of the things I always try and do is trying to figure out where my weaknesses are and how do I build from there.
Edward: For MetLife, you became the CMO of Brighthouse. At MetLife, you still reported to a CMO who controlled Snoopy and the blimps, but in Brighthouse, you ran the whole show.
Matt: Yeah, I was dot and line at the world of CMO organization for Met. At Brighthouse, we were spin-offs. We talk about one of the largest spin-offs in history. We had $240 billion of assets under management. You're right. I mean, I'm sure there are definitely some moments where the president who became the CEO of Brighthouse said, “Do you need to go out and hire a CMO from someplace else, or do I have the talent internally?”
Much about this—I think for your listeners of the podcast—is that a lot of this is about performance over time and making sure you're somebody who's seen as a good team player, somebody who’s reliable, and somebody who’s delivered. When you do that, people are willing to give you the opportunity for the next step up.
Edward: Okay, I want to go back a little bit on your path to getting there. As regular listeners know, I have a theory that things that happen to people when they're 12–14 affect them their entire lives. What were you passionate about at that age?
Matt: I think what’s interesting is for me, it probably goes back even further. My mother owned an advertising agency and my father was a financial adviser. The odds I'd be doing marketing for financial service firms are probably pretty high. But I think about the things I think about at 12 or 14. This is what came to me in my mind was both doing a lot of strategy games—Risk, Axis and Allies, Roman Conquest—but also a lot of fantasy baseball. These are back in the days where my friends and I would get the box score and every week somebody had to hand calculate everybody’s scores. We rotated around who had to calculate across the box scores and give the scores.
It was really just this idea of looking at baseball in a different way and thinking about performance in a different way. Often, you had these traditional stats that probably didn't really measure the impact of the players. For myself, I think as I've continued to move into marketing, I've certainly been the kind of person who said, how can we actually make sure this is having an impact? How can we make sure this is having a measurable impact on revenue? I think that's really been something.
And then obviously the strategy. All these strategy games are very much about how do you allocate your resources in the most efficient way possible, where do you want to enter or exit that's going to be effective. Much of what you're doing in marketing is really making choices. You're making choices all the time and you need to be able to measure the impact of those choices.
Edward: You went to the University of Princeton. How did you come out different than the way you went in?
Matt: Well, I met my wife. Certainly, if I hadn't gone to Princeton, I wouldn’t have met her. I think what’s interesting about Princeton is you're surrounded by a really bright set of students who work incredibly hard. I think for myself, I really had to dig in. Going from high school to college (I think) was quite a shock in terms of both the workload and intensity. For myself, I really had to figure out a way to elevate and raise my game, and I felt good about that. I felt good about the fact that I was able to achieve and do well there. I think in a lot of ways, it taught me a little bit more about how to work even harder.
Edward: What would happen if you hadn't gone to Princeton? Say you’d gone to a local regional school instead. How do you think your life and career would have been different?
Matt: It is really, really so hard to know how it would have been different. I think I probably would have gone to some of the same places. But obviously, I talked about my wife, and I saw some of my best friends from university times. I think in a lot of ways it's about the relationships. I think I probably still would have pursued the same career in marketing, but certainly having companies like General Mills come to Princeton and recruit gives you a really good opportunity and knock that first job.
Edward: Your first job was at General Mills in marketing. Were you looking for any sort of corporate job, or was marketing something you were looking for when you started your job search?
Matt: That's funny because I did investment banking in the summer before senior year. The thing I felt about investing in banking was the kind of thing that anybody who sat in that seat was going to come up with the same set of answers. What I really liked about marketing was the choices you made. The choices you made for that brand were very distinct and unique. I think my path, in a long-range, has always been moving to that leadership position, moving to that P&L ownership position. Really, the question was what's the best way for me to go get there? You always want to play to your strengths and figure out where you're differentiated.
For myself, even though CFO is probably the more traditional path to getting to CEO, my financial skills are mediocre at best. It was interesting being at business school, where I was pretty average in terms of finance, but things like marketing and strategy were really where I excelled and was able to differentiate myself. I always knew marketing was quite a better place for me to play because you want to play with your strengths.
Edward: You left line roles after business school to join McKinsey. McKinsey is known for, among other things, doing a lot of PowerPoint presentations. How did that experience affect your later marketing career?
Matt: I think what's interesting is, I really enjoyed wanting these different brands, but at the same time, it oftentimes is very micro. I wanted to take a position where you're taking a look at the company holistically and thinking about resource allocation, cross-functionally, not just within the confines of a single brand, and you're making a different set of strategic decisions. I think what was great about the McKinsey experience was it really teaches you how to think strategically, teaches you how to problem solve, and a lot of ways teaches you how to communicate.
We talk about PowerPoint. PowerPoint is just a vehicle. When I work with my team, I'm a big fan of written documents. I don't care if it's Word. I don't care if it's PowerPoint. I don't care about email, but what I've always found is that anything written down ends up getting shared more broadly and also really makes people think. They have to think about what they're going to write down and you end up getting a better response. I've spent time at companies where the written word wasn't as big. It was more just about talking and people walked out of a meeting with a completely different view of what was accomplished versus everybody's lined up around a piece of paper, saying I agree with these words. You've got a lot more alignments.
Edward: Amazon argues that you should do that on a Word document rather than a PowerPoint document. Do you have a strong opinion on that?
Matt: I definitely use both. I think it depends on the kind of presentation you're doing. I had started moving probably more to a Word document for a pre-read than on the PowerPoint. What I find with PowerPoint is if you're making a bigger presentation, where you're projecting, I think PowerPoint is a lot more effective. The thing that I honestly also really like with PowerPoint is, I was always a big exec sum guy, and you can almost do the entire presentation off of the executive summary. But really, the executive summary is almost just a Word document.
Most people don't want to go through all these pieces. When I was a consultant when I moved in and now I had consultants present to me, I'm like everybody else. Who wants to go through a 50-page PowerPoint presentation? You want to go through just a few key pages that are really critical and you want to have a conversation drive some decisions.
Edward: After McKinsey, you focused on sales enablement at American Express. I often see a tension between marketing and sales organizations. Was that your experience?
Matt: Absolutely. It's been interesting, some of the organizations I've come into where marketing and sales are just completely apart. The word I’d often use is there's contempt between the two organizations. Marketing is off in their silo working on brands, and sales up doing their thing thinking marketing's not helping them at all. I do think as a marketer, you need to take a step back, swallow your ego a little bit, and understand that you need to be customer-backed.
Now, this depends very much on the category. I know we're going to talk about the last thing which is really direct-to-consumer, but when you're an organization that’s more B2B, your salespeople are really your best channel, really your most effective channel. Instead of thinking about sales as a separate organization, think about sales as one more channel that you need to work with. Really getting the sales team running and working closely with marketing, you get a huge multiplier effect across those enterprises.
Edward: How do you do that? How do you get sales and marketing working so well together that they feel like they're on the same team?
Matt: What’s interesting at Brighthouse is the sales guys are really, really started getting along marketing. What’s interesting is when they're recruiting, salespeople say, marketing’s our secret weapon. They would actually talk about marketing to go higher. I think the big thing for marketing is your job is to drive sales productivity. When they understand that all you're trying to do is candidly help them make more money, they are on board. Where we're very successful was launching pilots with sales and then putting it up in front. I always give an example and oftentimes, it’s small tactics that work.
Trigger-based emails. I talked a bit about how important the CRM is but one of the things that we did was build trigger-based email campaigns. I've never met the kind of guy who’s going to say, you have to do this. Instead, I'm going to find a portion of the sales organization that is going to embrace what we're trying to do. We found a group of salespeople who are open. What we found when we did the test and measure was that those people using trigger-based campaigns were selling a lot more than those who didn’t.
Whenever we have the national sales meeting, I would get up and say, here are three different tactics. We actually put the sales organization in quartiles, those who used this the most versus those who used it the least. You can see those using the most made more money than those who didn’t. You find pretty quickly that the sales organization starts embracing what you're doing. You really need to build, test, learn, create that case for a change, and then you go sell it through.
Edward: Matt, what were your biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?
Matt: Much of those moments came oftentimes from external activity, where something happens to you that you're not expecting. When I was at American Express, I was in a strategy role. My leader left. They left the company. When that happened, they decided to shut down our organization. They said you know what? We've built this around the leader. The leader is gone. You guys are all going to be displaced. We got to go find new jobs in American Express.
It's one of the things you're not expecting. I think my wife was pregnant at the time. You feel like you're doing good work. Really, what it made me reflect on was the importance of both your network, but also managing your career. A phrase my father-in-law would use was managing your career is as easy as PIE. PIE stands for performance, image, and exposure.
Your performance can be great but if you don't have broad exposure across the rest of the organization, you leave yourself in a situation where one person leads, or some situation happens where you're not going to be in a good role. The team that AmEx had done good enough work that we had three offers that day going to a new role. Now, as part of the way we ended up in the sales enablement team. Part of the reason I talk about the team is that some people at AmEx are still working with me 10 years later. Really, what you want to do is you want to build a really good team of folk you work with.
Edward: Matt, what are your productivity tricks? What do you do to be productive that most people don't do?
Matt: For me, I spend less time thinking about my own productivity and more time thinking about the team’s productivity. I think as you get more senior in your career, [...] start getting these organizations that are 100 plus, your productivity is pretty small compared to all those people you have working for you. I really think about three things and it's interesting, but it's very much from prioritization, consistency, and culture. What I've used to great success is OKRs. You're probably familiar with OKRs but laying out the OKRs, the objectives, and key results for people, it really helps people understand what you're prioritizing and what they should prioritize, so they're not wasting motion someplace else.
Then, I use the word ‘consistency’ a lot, and that is both strategic consistency and emotional consistency. What's interesting is, you can really whipsaw your team even inadvertently, like coming up with different ideas, and you need to let people finish things through. The worst thing for anybody is when they start-stop-start-stop. I remember a lot of times when I was a junior in my career somebody walking into my cube saying hey, we need to do the analysis on what happened in Florida with the hurricane. Your whole day is burned and shot. It's hard to get to those basic strategic objectives.
The other thing is just emotional consistency. What's interesting is you hear from people, we didn't want to talk to so and so because we're worried they weren’t in a good mood. When people feel safe and secure, and they're not worried about whether or not the boss is in a good mood, it really allows them to go thrive. That last piece then starts playing into culture as well.
Edward: This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. We're going to continue this tomorrow with a dive into your experience at Bask Bank.
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