Paul: 0:29

Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers. This week, I'm joined by the fantastic Jeff Roberts. Hi Jeff, how are you?

Jeff: 0:38

Am thanks for the invitation to be

Paul: 0:40

on your show Good to have you along. Good to have you along. Jeff is a founder and CEO of Innovation Vista, which is an IT consulting firm that gives strategic leadership for mid size organizations. And with over 25 years of experience as a CIO, including 5 10 years leading digital transformation, and I have a little background in digital transformation, I'm surprised you've still got hair. Jeff has become non fraternity IT department's profit center. And driving business growth through text back. Jeff's leadership, Innovation Vista, has, and this is interesting, right? Originally when we wrote this bio, they'd advised over 650, Jeff tells me that's now over 700. Congratulations on the milestone. 700 C suites and delivered over 2. 4 billion dollars in client results. Which is amazing, I can't imagine that. Jeff, thank you very much for agreeing to be a guest on the show. I'd like to just jump straight into things with you, if that's alright. Obviously, guests on our show fall into one of two buckets. One is marketers who have a lot of experience across lots of different industries and the other is entrepreneurs and founders. And I'm sure a few people who's turned up for marketing advice today are wondering what sort of advice am I going to get from a CIO? I'm actually really excited by this cause I know a little bit more behind the scenes. But let's start back at the beginning. You had an impressive career as a CIO and then founding Innovation Vista. Why did you decide to go it alone and start your own business? What was the turning point for you?

Jeff: 2:09

Yeah. I guess in a couple of the 10 years as the CIO, I had some touch points on some short term projects and turnaround an interim role. I saw some things that are a little more, normal in the contracting and consulting engagement space. And I find myself Really enjoying those and I enjoyed those maybe a little more than the farmer kinds of roles that a CIO permanent position often ends up being, right? There, there's an existing platform, it needs improvements, but a lot of the role is understanding what's there, understanding the team, understanding the vendors, and, operating the machine while you improve it. I found myself really enjoying more. The broken platforms or the we really need to change the way this whole organization works, maybe in an M& A event or something like that, where there are a lot of strategic decisions needed in a short period of time. And we really are, we've got leadership support for major change. So all of that was in my mind. The last role that I was a CIO for a commercial real estate firm they were acquired by, A huge multinational in 2019. And so rather than thinking about finding CIO chair number six, I said, I'm going to do this. It's been on my mind and I'm going to start a firm. My original idea was fractional CIO and I wanted to do some work myself and I knew some other colleagues that I thought maybe I could subcontract them. in different markets That was late 2019, right before COVID. We, that could be its own show. COVID and the aftermath of COVID. There are a lot of horrible things, of course, but part of the silver lining of COVID for me was discomfort level everyone began to have with video conferencing and remote work in general, and particularly for consulting, getting your advice from someone who is not in your same city. And that really opened. A whole new model for us my fledgling business, right? Four or five months old. I began to realize I don't need to worry about specific city and market where people are. I need, time zone has to work, right? To some extent, but this really can be. A global business and I can make it about really just finding the very best fit for what a client is looking to do. Find the best fit among all of the consultants that I can find. So I began to really build that network. We're up over 400. Consultants in our network now. I still try to take care of a client or two myself so I keep my skills sharp, but a lot of what I spend time on is business development and finding opportunities. For these freelance CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, et cetera, that I have met through the years.

Paul: 5:18

That's amazing. I, it's funny because my business started well after COVID and in fact, I only moved out of the B2C space at the very beginning of COVID. So I'd never experienced online or hybrid work until COVID And hands on heart, it was a combination of serendipity. Good fortune, hard work, networking, and the way that the world ended up, that I got out of that, that B2C space, I was so desperate to leave. And I've always, it's weird for me when I hear people talk about, do you have a lot of clients in the local area? Because I've never even thought about trying to get clients in my local area. Cause it feels like really hard work to do that. Why would I try and get clients in my local area? When I could just go broad and go across LinkedIn and find people wherever they are, regardless of their geography. It's always interesting to speak with folks like yourself who've been on the other side of that and trying to find, through local network, through local businesses and things. I'd be keen to understand your viewpoint on market and sales with your CIO hat on. Because I know. Certainly in the current landscape that the amount of software, the amount of information, the amount of data, it's a technical headache for most IT teams, right?

Jeff: 6:33

Yeah I didn't have a lot of experience with marketing. I had supported a few website projects led a mobile app development project for direct customer contact. I'd helped some sales teams, a lot of work around sales empowerment, sales analytics. Even some AI and prediction of what customers are maybe gonna be interested in. Mainly B2B in my client experience as a CIO. So I knew those things, but really when I began to think about founding the firm I did a lot of reading because I needed to come up to speed on marketing. And frankly, there are too many ideas out there. I spent a lot of money that I probably. Should have just left in my bank account on marketing strategists, marketing partners, marketing outsource services, fractional sales managers and nothing against any of those groups. But the problem was not them. The problem was I still hadn't fully formulated what I wanted to do with this business. I did that very early on, 2019. Pre revenue, I'm out there. Hey, I want to engage you. I need to find out, how do I do branding? How do I do marketing messaging on a business that we're about providing C level IT support? And I knew the thousand foot view of what I wanted. But it's gotta be more than that. And so I learned the hard way, not the easy way, unfortunately. Read all those books, trying to learn the easy way and really. Made a lot of mistakes. Like I said, spent a lot of money early on that was not real effective because my vision was not really there yet. And I don't know that I could say it's fully there yet now. I certainly have learned a lot of lessons. I've learned what is working. There's still a lot of things that work and to me, they, I find that they work this much. So I don't have that one thing that just is going to send me

Paul: 8:39

It's a mix, right?

Jeff: 8:40

exponential growth. But, my wife tells me that's probably a good thing, Jeff. Because if it was exponential growth, you'd lose your mind even more than you already are. And so steady growth, you're growing about 40 percent a year, something like that. That steady growth is nice. And it lets you systematize a sane kind of cadence. As things get to scale, then you can put a process around them and standardize. So I, my journey with marketing has been this, learn the hard way, finally figure out some things, have the light of realization hit me after I've tried three or four other things that really were not as effective.

Paul: 9:20

I wonder when you're working with your clients, do you find that the sales and the marketing teams work hard to keep their software systems away from the C suite and away from the CIO in fear that, that kind of they'll become too restricted? Is that something that you see in the marketplace?

Jeff: 9:39

I do. Sure. Actually, increasingly so because software is a service has really opened the door to, you could subscribe to something. It's hosted in the cloud. You don't need IT. It's not going into your data center. You don't need a system administrator to install it. A lot of the things you used to need. So that is certainly escalated shadow IT, what CIOs often call that. I call it, business people trying to get things done. And I try to get CIOs to understand this is not, it's not evil. They're not just, purposefully trying to exclude you from these conversations. What they're really trying to do is do what they can with what they're empowered to do themselves. And that's human nature. To some extent, it's okay. There are a few things that It's of course the IT people worry about with respect to marketing systems. Confidentiality, can spam and laws like that we want to make sure we're compliant. We're the ones that will be audited on those things. Out the marketing group. And so there, there's a little bit of a mindset of, we're being paid to think about things in a different way, whether we're a consultant or a full time CIO, but that, that really just turns into a need to partner and collaborate and find a way with marketing to put something in place that works for them, where they do have control. Particularly with content and the flow in social media marketing, content marketing the pace of generation and publication, that stuff has just gone up and up. And it's an arms race in some sense for a lot of these businesses that keep up with their competitors. They can't wait on IT tickets. to say we need to add a new menu item. We're creating a new topic for a series of blogs. We want to put out. They've got to be able to do that stuff themselves and and be nimble and have a staff meeting and change direction. Yeah, I've learned a lot about what marketing people really need

Paul: 11:42

And yet it's, It still surprises me how many businesses still use their main email domain to send cold emails still, and it's almost become a kit.

Jeff: 11:53

I know. No, it's you're absolutely right. And it's one of the things we talked about, the blacklist. The the compliance laws around opt outs and things like that, you don't probably want to do that, create a separate domain, create a subdomain where, that, that risk of being categorized as spam or people opting out of your messaging. Doesn't take you away from really being able to communicate with actual customers that you have a business reason to connect with.

Paul: 12:23

I find that marketers now are, technology has become so simple to use that. That market has, it's become democratized, right? So a lot of the stuff that would have traditionally sat with IT, you called it out, it sits in the cloud, it's very easy. It's one click stuff, a lot of it. But then I find that there's a lot of people out there who will sign up to something cause it looks a really good idea, but they haven't really fully investigated it. And then when they get into it, they've spent a bit of money to get access to it. And then they realize, huh, I need this, and this, but if I do that, I can't do it myself, really, but IT are going to want to ask questions about it and that's going to get back to my boss. He's going to ask why I bought this money, bought this product that we probably don't really need, but I just want to play with it. And so you find people are trying to do all these, like setting up domains. Like I've come across loads of marketers who try and set up domains themselves. And there's so many I'm not an expert by any means. But I know the basics. I know enough to be safe with setting domains up. And I still come across and so this applies whether you're a small business, whether you're a medium business I've even seen larger businesses, larger domain businesses still using their primary domain to pump out And it's usually just an over eager salesperson somewhere who's realized something's not locked down and i'm gonna i'm gonna use it I'm gonna volume spam people I can't stress it enough. It's so it's a danger that's never existed before the last few years, really, because of the acceleration of, and this is where I was going when this is, the acceleration of AI and platforms that claim to be AI, but let's be honest, aren't quite AI. What's your position on AI? Is it helpful? Is it not?

Jeff: 14:02

Incredibly helpful if you find the right use cases and separate the hype from the reality. There's that's a answer with a lot of baggage embedded in the, but I will say so much agree with what you said about the the. The individual efforts, and there's some technical things that IT people do around DMARC and DKIM and SPF, things in the setup of the email domain, which can control, okay, we will tell you which tools and which other domains are enabled to send on our behalf. That help with that. The other touch point we find is when marketing people want to make some connections with us, especially B2B, want to make some connections with CRM. Who's opening my emails? Are they actual customers? What other things have they done? That tends to not be something that's out of the box, right? So now you need IT to get involved and integrate. Or maybe seeing the traffic on the website, depending on your tools. You can tell if they open an email. You can't necessarily tell where they went on the, You can't integrate on the website after they are there, unless you also integrate with through some IT efforts. So we find that's when a lot of CIOs hear about these initiatives, is when they're already running, and now someone says, Yeah, we've got this thing, and it's great, and, but we're trying to get data from the other side of the equation, so we can run a report to see what are people actually doing with us in terms of transactions. So That's all great. I will say AI is a topic in the last 12 months that we like most consultants in this space AI burst on the scenes with chatGPT 3 in particular, there are a lot of others now, there's the Claude and the Gemini and the Grok, a proliferation of these tools. And that will end up consolidating and we'll have a, there'll be some winners and some losers like in most things, but it's a, it's an arms race there too right now. And the idea that something is now possible with an affordable cost that delivers real results. That has some value and predictive accuracy. That's, that is definitely gaining traction. And we see, you mentioned our 2. 4 billion, 1. 3 billion of our impact. Which we take a lot of pride in thinking more and aiming more for revenue and market share for our clients than really any of our competitors that I know of. A lot of IT groups talk about efficiencies and automation, and those things are great, but I really find, I tell people if you really want to get the CEO excited, not just the CFO. Talk about growth, talk about market share and revenue, and if you can deliver those things, that's when you get the board of directors, that's when you get the CEO paying attention and supporting what you're trying to do because you can't save your way to growth, as they say. It's got to be, this top line. AI can deliver some top line in ways that automation cannot do. I mentioned it in my background, empowering sales teams. And some of that was and is predictive AI. Especially again in the B2B world. There's so much, there's so much more, the partnerships and the patterns are richer and repeat business is often just way more common with B2B than it is with B2C. They buy your product once they have it, they're done, and so much of the time in B2C, but B2B, they're going to come back and they're going to do other things. And that thing they bought from you, they may sell to someone else. And, there's a lot of There's a lot of middleman sort of businesses that just the power of AI to connect those dots to see what entities are doing in the market. There's a tremendous value in the data that these companies have about their customer base and those activities. There's also tremendous value in outside data, in routine data, we call it, where you go and get a An industry wide report some industries have it, some industries are very mature in this, and some are not. Financial services, things like that, are very mature on this space, where it's not just what they've done with you, you can see what kind of business are they doing with your competitors. And that's where visibility leads to some very powerful predictions, in ways you can understand almost in AI. The mind of the customer, what are they trying to achieve? What sorts of things are they buying? What sorts of things are they selling? What things happen in the economy that drive them to those activities? Similar things in the economy. The next time you can predict what that group is going to do. That's all. it's amazingly powerful, I think, and almost everywhere, groups that have that, brokerages, things like that investment advisors those kinds of businesses that have the AI power may be in a position to completely disrupt their space, where that will become the difference maker, where firms that have it, will just take over. They can do things better, cheaper, faster, automatically, as opposed to having an army of analysts that have to crawl through spreadsheets and understand this data. And some of this is millions and billions of rows of data. You just can't hire enough people to do that kind of analysis. Where now you can spend, 11 on cloud costs. To run an analysis that goes through that entire data set and creates amazing predictions that you know who to reach out to, you know what to say when you reach out, you can automate and personalize the outreach. I could keep going forever. It is an exciting time to be involved in IT and really specifically AI advisory. Because just things are moving so fast and things are possible now that really move the

Paul: 20:27

But then on the other side of things, there's some pretty scary things that are happening. I say scary anything new in the technology world tends to be scary at first until we get more used to the idea. And I read an article, it's funny cause this episode probably won't go out until sort of January, March. January, February time, right? So it'd be all news by then, I'm sure. But some Harvard students managed to plug some facial recognition into the Ray Bans AI glasses. That scares the bejesus out of me because The potential for nefarious use there is huge. But then also at the same time, we've got an announcement from Claude this morning that they can now, in certain environments, control your PC for you with the AI. That's both a dream and again, scary as hell, because we remember what happened when Microsoft brought in macros for Excel, right?

Jeff: 21:15

Absolutely. Yeah and the the bad guys out there, any time you take your personal control away and you're given the keys to your environment to a system the opportunity for criminal activity on that is, that's where they're going to pay a lot of attention. Because what more fantastic thing is there than taking remote control of someone's PC? They've got their finances. They've got everything there. So yeah, whether things are a risk now, I agree with you that they will be in ways that we can't even predict a lot of this. And that's embarrassing for a consultant to admit. But we tell people, we have, it's like headlights on a car. We can predict to some extent, we know what people are working on. We know, things are going to get faster and things that are not feasible now, because the models take two days to run, that's going to be two hours within six months. So that sort of thing, we have that sort of forward look, but to predict what's going to be happening in 2030. Or what's possible? What are people worried about? What kind of controls and protections are we gonna need? Becau, like the glasses example that just came out, as you mentioned, that is very innocuous. Public data, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles, things of that nature where people have a picture of their face and then they have some information about themselves. Professional, personal, but it, people feel okay about it because it's an isolation. And if you're on LinkedIn, you want people to see your face and know where you work and what you do. But if you combine that with. All of these other things. And now you see that someone is a sergeant in the police force, for example, and here they are at some kind of a political rally event undercover potentially, right? That's not supposed to happen because that data is never supposed to come together. And AI can bring it together. Yeah it's a brave new world and I have a feeling there's going to be exciting things and then there's going to be some hitting in the forehead and, oh my gosh, we need to lock this down to in some cases, ask people to turn things off for a while until we can put some protections in place. Will they play ball with that? Will they not? It's going to be a rough ride, but an exciting ride as we go through this society, really worldwide.

Paul: 23:48

So then putting your marketing business owner hat back on, I guess you've made what is clearly a very successful business and congratulations on getting to the heights that you have. If you're looking back now at where your business came from what marketing strategies or sales strategies were, would you say in your opinion is the most successful and why?

Jeff: 24:09

That is a great question. I think our target market is C level executives of mid size companies. In other words, our target market is the very busiest people in the world. And by the way, the people who are targeted by the most other Marketing and sales organizations in the world. So how do you get their attention? How do you get, how do you make it clear to them that you're doing something that someone else isn't, or that the thing you're doing in a way that no one else is. That is incredibly hard. And I guess I would say I've learned that I've learned to respect the customer. That sounds so obvious to say, but I, what I mean is tailoring what you say, not automating and just blasting and spraying prey and Right. The, this sort of idea where people are out there selling all these marketing automation tools. There's a place for automation. I'm not a Luddite that certainly in my business, I can't. For, there's no place for that, but you have to understand who's receiving that. And the value you bring is where AI can step in and help with automation. You have to bring them value in their industry, in their specific situation, in their competitive landscape. It can't just be this vanilla message that is the same that you send to a hospital administrator. That you send to a manufacturing company that you send to the head of a university. It just, that, that can't happen. That when you, when they get marketing messages, when they see a website page, it has to really resonate with them. And so that idea of, and we market across every major vertical now that we have, Really, once we got to 300, we're over 400 consultants now.

Paul: 26:03

That's amazing.

Jeff: 26:04

That's people who have worked in every possible sector that you can imagine. Frankly, double digit consultants in a lot of sectors that are common and large. But the messaging can't be the same for all of them, right? I had to learn this idea of segmentation micro. Segmentation and personalization of that messaging. And then the value of brand building content marketing, putting out thought leadership pieces, I am spending. 10 times more of my bandwidth than I expected ever to writing articles, doing podcast interviews like this because of the brand visibility, I so appreciate the opportunity. So thank you again, it's important and it's important not just to say contact Innovation Vista, we're great. These kind of interviews and articles and everything I put out, they have to add value. It has to make sense and really be helpful for people who listen and read even if they never contact us. Because that's how you get that sort of respect and you show that you respect the customer. And so I guess all of those lessons learned have helped us get to the point we are today. I always want to stay humble. I'm constantly seeing other people do things that I think, wow, that was actually really smart. I might have to steal that idea or combine that idea with something I've been noodling about. It's constant. It changes. And that's another exciting thing about running your own business, right? It's figuring out what is the most effective way to reach the the customer base. But a lot of what's out there for sale on the shelf, It's not going to work, especially if you're reaching the C suite. They get those messages thousands of times a day and, they've got spam filtering and everything else that they're going to treat you like every other spammer out there, unless you really find a way to add value to each and every

Paul: 28:08

Yep. I wholeheartedly agree with almost everything that you've said, Jeff. I think we could probably talk for a long time on all of those subjects, but you're right. Ultimately, it's about adding value for people and acknowledging that whilst they might not be a client, They might spread the word about you. And that for me is every bit as important as finding the clients. You need both an equal mix. And for reference, I would probably be most CIOs worst nightmare as an ADHD person with technical abilities. I've once trained as a software engineer. I'm, I wouldn't say I'm a coder anymore. I've lost all that behind, but I'm good.

Jeff: 28:47

You can

Paul: 28:47

I'm good enough with technology to get things going and cause problems. And I'm good enough to keep it hidden for long enough that nobody finds out. And that's why I'm probably better off running my own business because now I have to be careful because it's, it comes back on me directly. But it's always interesting, I can see terms and conditions and stuff and I'm like, Oh, no, I'm not reading that. Gone. God, I haven't got the intention span to read it, right? So I'm just going to move on and assume nobody's trying to pull a fast one. And we always are. There's always something in there, right? So I really appreciate the conversation, Jeff. If anybody wants to find out a bit more, how can they contact you? How can they learn more about Innovation Vista?

Jeff: 29:28

Appreciate that. So our website is innovationvista. com as you would expect. And I mentioned social media. I am incredibly active on LinkedIn. So Happy to message. I have a lot of messages on the website and on LinkedIn where I'm And it's not always people who want to engage us with some sort of paid project or something. I actually welcome conversations. People ask, real quick, what's your favorite such and such system? Or, we've got this, have you ever seen that before? I love that stuff. And I think of it, like you just said, the adding value. I think of those interactions as paying it forward a little bit and and staying sharp on the leading edge myself. And you never know someone who's not a customer now that we can add some value to three years down the road. They may have a need that they do not have today and can't even predict today. And all of a sudden they have it and they remember and say, You know what? That was a great interaction. I'm going to reach back out to Innovation Vista

Paul: 30:32

You'll remember how you made

Jeff: 30:33

I say that to really say, reach out and and we will, I will personally, or I will get you to the right consultant. Even if it's just a quick 10 minute, Q& A sort of thing, we're happy to get it.

Paul: 30:47

Thank you very much for your time, Jeff. It's been a pleasure chatting. And thank you at home for coming along and watching. I'll see you next week on MarketPulse Pros Pioneers for another episode.