MKJ (00:01.036)
CEO Mischief Makers, welcome to the conversation. MKJ here, and I get to share with you a guest that I’ve connected with probably for maybe a year and a half. I don’t know when he joined Rise, but I think he was there in the beginning with the coin. But let me introduce you to amazing marketer and a futurist in my mind, Aaron Hassan. Aaron.

Aaron Hassen (00:01.746)
Mr. Kroeger, welcome to the conversation. I would like to share with you the guest at five.

Aaron Hassen (00:26.45)
I’m doing great. Glad to be here.

MKJ (00:30.252)
Welcome to the conversation. How you doing?

MKJ (00:36.716)
alright were you in rise the rise coin

Aaron Hassen (00:40.626)
Yeah, I’ve been there since the beginning.

MKJ (00:42.956)
Yeah, I knew it. I had a feeling. All right, so tell everybody kind of who you are and what you do. Just give us a brief little intro here.

Aaron Hassen (00:52.498)
Yeah, I actually started out in the Air Force and then I left the Air Force to start a company. So I had a business that I ran. It was an advertising company for about four years. It was acquired by a competitor and it’s in that process. I learned that I really liked the marketing side of business. So I wanted to be a marketer. I didn’t have a degree in it at the time, but I talked my first employer into hiring me and I’ve been doing it.

right about 20 years at this point. But I started as a founder and then became a marketer and that has really impacted, influenced and directed kind of how I approach marketing. So I’m glad to talk about different topics around go to market and a lot of these small businesses that I’ve helped sort of start from the ground up and gain some traction.

That’s really where my perspective has been over all of these years. And I’m still doing that now with Marketing, which is a fractional marketing team that helps busy founders and revenue leaders that may not have the expertise in marketing or the time to address their marketing challenges. We come in and do their strategy and then actually execute their marketing plan for them.

MKJ (02:17.388)
Wow, that’s awesome. So you’re still the founder though, right? Of that company and you just did some marketing.

Aaron Hassen (02:19.122)
Yeah, yeah, I’m back into this. I stopped on the corporate side about two and a half years ago was my last role and now I’m leading this company.

MKJ (02:33.42)
That’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s amazing when you start as a founder and you have to do all the things, everything, figure it all out from the ground up, just because you have this incredible idea. And then you find your place, right? What was, let me ask you this, since this episode is about mindset, our first episode always is, what was that mindset shift that you had to make from first off, founding your company and realizing marketing was your gig?

Aaron Hassen (02:36.306)
Easy win.

All the things. Have a great day.

Aaron Hassen (02:47.442)
in your place, right?

MKJ (03:03.326)
And then we’ll get into the whole corporate and then back into a founder after that. But let’s start with that. How did you how did you discover that? What was that shift that happened for you?

Aaron Hassen (03:14.258)
Well, I just think the way my brain works as an entrepreneur is I’m just a problem solver. And I do that as an entrepreneur with products and services, but I do that as a marketer as well. I’m helping customers solve their problems and their challenges. So I’m just trying to connect a customer who has a need and an issue with a solution. And sometimes that solution is our product and service, sometimes it’s not. But either way, I’m in the business of solving problems.

for customers. So that’s how it all ties together. And if you approach it from the customer perspective, I think you’re a lot more successful. And I think also when you approach it from the entrepreneur perspective, in terms of how you do business and how you come to the job as a marketer, I think you can become much more successful that way in not only helping the customer, but how you influence your internal

MKJ (03:53.516)
Mm -hmm.

Aaron Hassen (04:13.746)
team members and support your CEO and all of those things. I mean, just having that experience of being an entrepreneur really helped me understand the CEO, the board’s perspective and the perspective of the other leaders within the company, the sales leader in particular. Because when you’re having your own business and selling your own product, I mean, you’re out there, like you said, you’re wearing many hats and…

So you start to empathize with the other departments and the product team or the customer success team. And you, you know, you, I not only understand the customer challenge or seek to understand the customer challenge, but I’m trying to understand the challenges of all the other leaders within the organization so that I can support and help them and we can work together as a single team and go to market unified. So yeah, that’s how it’s really shaped my perspective.

MKJ (05:05.26)
So let’s dive a little deeper into that though, because when I think about a founder, I think a founder also wants to solve problems. So what’s that distinction? How is a founder’s role or an entrepreneur’s role in solving problems different from a marketer’s role in solving problems?

Aaron Hassen (05:08.818)
I think of them times.

Aaron Hassen (05:27.346)
Yeah, you know, a lot of, so for me, I, the distinctions are less so. So I try to make the, I try to reduce those distinctions, but there are distinctions as a marketer. We, you know, we take a certain, a specific view or specific role in go to market. So, you know, we’re thinking of, you know, how we connect what we do as a company, our products and services and our solutions.

with the challenges of the marketplace and the customer. And oftentimes that’s a matter of communication and a matter of positioning. And so we have to come at it from that perspective. As an owner and a founder, you’re coming at it from multiple perspectives. A product perspective, can I build the best solution to this problem? Can I understand the problem and then can I build the…

MKJ (06:11.404)
Yeah.

Aaron Hassen (06:25.01)
an ideal solution at a reasonable cost, that I can deliver it in a way that offers value to them, but also to the other stakeholders. So your perspective is a little more global in that case, but I think that’s really important for marketers to have. They have to understand business as a whole and have a level of business acumen that allows them to

to play their role very successfully.

MKJ (06:58.06)
I agree 100 % because I love how you described it. And in a way, the founder really has to look at not just how can I solve this problem? What tool can I create? What product or service can I create? Because that’s where it comes from. That the person who’s the visionary that says, this is what I want to do and founds the company, starts the company or leads the company, even if they come in after that. But they also then have to, they have to find out who can I find to help me do this that can get on

on board with the vision that we’ve created, the the movement that we’re trying to create in the world, who can I find that that can help me do that? And for a marketing, especially for fractional, like CMO role, that’s a that’s vital, you are you are very, very close to that visionary person, and can help guide them from a communication, go to market and marketing perspective. So

Aaron Hassen (07:54.386)
Yeah, I remember one of the things I just started to cut in. As you said that, it made me think. I remember one of the things I desperately wanted so much when I was a founder was just to find someone else out there like me. You want to duplicate yourself. You’re like, I don’t have enough time or money or resources or, that’s our challenge is founding companies and building products. So it’s like, can I find someone who has my mindset? Can I find other partners that I can?

MKJ (07:57.74)
Yeah, go.

Aaron Hassen (08:24.018)
place in this company that we can do this together. And I often think of, you know, there’s a movie 300. It’s the story of the Spartans and how it’s just, you know, 300 soldiers, they were able to conquer, you know, huge armies and just do rather well on the battlefield. And that’s sort of how it is with startups. You’ve got to find that core group that you, you know, you can go to market with.

But if you do have a core group of folks who are very dedicated and singularly focused and on that same vision, that same goal and working together and aligned, boy, you can really change the world as you were alluding to.

MKJ (09:08.652)
Yes. And that, so the mindset that it takes to do that, you know, obviously there’s a lot of fear that we look at, and especially, I mean, you and I are, are going into not necessarily uncharted territory, but it is, it is a bit uncharted now. A lot of word of mouth is starting to come back. It’s something we’ve done for generations. This is how business has been done. We’ve got demand generation versus lead generation. You know, we’ve got all these category designers,

versus branding. It’s just a new way of looking at it, especially with the speed of communication that we have today. So from that perspective of mindset, how can you shift from all the typical go -to -market that we’ve all learned in dealing in business for 20 plus years? And we can adapt that. What kind of mindset do you need to be able to adapt the things that you’ve learned to the very

Aaron Hassen (10:08.274)
Very.

MKJ (10:08.414)
fast changes that are happening in our world, not just AI, that’s changing every minute, not even every day. It’s changing minute by minute. But what kind of mindset do you need? What are some of the key phrases, I guess, that we need to look at to be able to adapt to that and use it to our advantage?

Aaron Hassen (10:16.882)
Bye.

Aaron Hassen (10:27.41)
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think what you have to understand that what drives purchasing is trust. So we have to trust that this product or solution can solve this challenge. And what I’m about to invest in isn’t a waste of my time or money. And so we’ve been in an environment of distrust. And I think that speaks to the changes in the marketplace and how buyers are purchasing. And so we have to understand that as a marketer,

that we are in an age of distrust. And, you know, people, if you look at some of the research, the statistics, I’m often, you know, looking at all kinds of, you know, latest reports and news and research, and, you know, that’s part of our job and our role is to stay ahead of the trends and what’s going on and, you know, how is the consumer interacting? What are their needs and how do we communicate with them? So I look at things like, you know, the element…

Edelman Trust Barometer or Ipsos Reporting and Gallup, for instance. There’s a Gallup survey that said just 8 % of American adults rate the honesty and ethical standards of advertising practitioners, AKA marketers, right? Advertising practitioners as very high or high. So, you know, Gallup is saying, hey, there’s less trust in marketing and marketers and advertising out there.

you mentioned word of mouth, you know, and I follow Ed Keller and his Keller advisory group. He’s really the father of word of mouth and he’s done tremendous research and there’s been some research recently where he’s been looking at the creator economy and creators and also consumers of creator content. And, you know, just seeing the fact that, you know, today we’re tending to trust creators, influencers and experts.

you know, over the press, over company communications and things like that. So, you know, one of his stats through his research came out, it said that creator content is now trusted 2 .9 times more than advertising. And it’s actually more influential than advertising in purchase decisions. And that 80 % of those who follow creators actually take some kind of action.

Aaron Hassen (12:50.258)
So that action includes making a purchase. 43 % of those that were following creators actually made a purchase related to the creator’s influence. So these, we’ve got to look at trusted channels. We’ve got to look at trusted people. Our friends and our family we tend to trust, our colleagues and our counterparts, and also creators.

And so creators and influencers, and that’s why you’re seeing a lot of brands turn to micro influencers, not necessarily celebrities because they’re not very trusted, but looking at micro influencers. We’re looking for people like us that have some expertise. And then we tend to find them in different channels today. As you know, we’re going to our communities and more

what they call dark social, but these are our trusted channels, places we can communicate with these folks in a private way, whether that be on WhatsApp or Discord or Slack that aren’t necessarily tracked and traced and then cookieed and marketed through. So this is the way of the world today, and I think we have to pay attention to that. We have to build trust. And we know as marketers, you start with awareness.

and then it goes to affinity. They have to like you and then it goes to trust. You have to earn that. But we need to bring them through those stages in order to get trust from consumers in order to then potentially have a customer.

MKJ (14:32.972)
Absolutely. I love that there are so many ways we can look at that that lifecycle, if you will, awareness, and you said affinity, and then trust, I kind of look at it as curiosity, the affinity part, if we can help customers actually become or consumers actually become curious about what we’re doing, and start investigating, because what is it another Gartner poll, you know, 75 % of consumers,

especially B2B, don’t want, they want a rep free sales process. They want to be able to do their own research and then decide when to buy, no matter the price point. The price point could be thousands and thousands. They still want to do their own research. They don’t want to talk to a sales person. And so if we can create that environment of curiosity before we get to trust, because that’s, it’s required, why would they trust us if they’re not even curious about what we’re doing or even

Aaron Hassen (15:25.042)
We also.

MKJ (15:32.734)
feeling like it’s something they might need. So how are you okay, we’ll get into the next the next conversation with innovation. But coming back to that mindset issue, you talked about trust. How can we as marketers be open?

to these new ideas instead of taking and going, nope, I have to do Legion. I have to go do an ad and bring people through a funnel and then get them down to a conversion, whether it’s an OTO or an upsell or a down sell or, you know, how can we, how can we move away from that? Those blinders that we put on saying, this is the only way to do it and open to all of these new possibilities at Keller and the other information that you mentioned to actually be a little risky in that.

Aaron Hassen (16:19.345)
Yeah. I think marketers want to be effective. I don’t think they come into their job every day wanting to fail. And so, you know, the question is, you know, when things aren’t working anymore, are you ready to change? I mean, you know, marketing automation, HubSpot and all of that’s wonderful, but it just is less and less effective. You know, the digital advertising, social selling, all of that sort of thing, while it may have worked for a moment,

it’s working less and less. And so where do we turn? And, you know, what we do is we try to figure out what actually works with consumers. And yeah, it’s, it’s harder word of mouth is harder networking is harder. but that’s what happens when, people distrust. I mean, they then think of yourself. I mean, you know, if you’re in a situation where you’re constantly barraged with messages, people,

are trying to manipulate you or lie to you, and you’ve got to solve real problems and you have limited resources, limited time to do so, you’re going to sort of protect yourself. You’re going to go to people you trust, and that’s what’s happening in the market. So when that happens, we have to make adjustments. And I think it starts with listening first. So you really have to listen to your customer and understand what their issues are, what their challenges are.

They’ll actually tell you where they go for information. What are their most trusted sources of information? We know where it’s moving away from. It’s moving away from where they might have gone before. Even reviews and things now, you’re starting to see the statistics go down in terms of the trust for reviews because they’ve been gamed. These things, they work until they’re gamed. When you’re getting 15 messages a day, automated messages a day, you…

You start to figure out their automated messages and you’re like, hey, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not reacting to that anymore. So we really do start to look at ways to influence a buyer from the perspective of relationship and networking and their circles of trust. So working with micro influencers and things like that to who go out there and put out content that’s valuable to these customers that can solve their problems.

Aaron Hassen (18:40.786)
Well, they’ll then take recommendations from those individuals. And also, how do we influence their colleagues? Like we mentioned, they’ll go to their colleagues. So how do we influence the people who are in their communities and those that they seek and they go to for answers? We can do that, but we have to do it in a different way, in a very human way, in a respectful way, something that earns the referral. So…

We’re back to an environment, although digitally, we’re kind of back to an environment where maybe we used to be 30, 40 years ago. And so that’s where we are. And so we have to start from there. So I just recommend, like I said, listening to your customer, understanding where they go for information, really caring to serve them, using those trusted channels that can really connect you with the community that’s around them.

focusing on the relationship, which is a long -term play, to be honest, and not a short -term one. You’re thinking more about the lifetime value of a customer rather than how many new brands you’re putting on, how many new logos you’re bringing in, and driving the numbers this quarter versus this year, and then offering consistent value. Just coming…

They have to trust that you’re going to be there on a consistent basis. And like I said, you have to earn those next steps. But you know what? You’re going to feel really good about your job, honestly, because it’s what you want as a consumer too. So when you’re giving your customers and your consumers what they need, which is also what you need, there’s an integrity to what you do.