CMO Spotlight | Matt Frisbie - Little Giant Ladders

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The CMO Spotlight is a chance to get an inside look into the minds and journeys of high performing marketing leaders. 

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Setup CEO Joe Koufman virtually spoke with Matt Frisbie, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Little Giant Ladders. In this interview, Frisbie demonstrates different ladder use cases in the Little Giant studio while walking the audience through innovation and product development procedures. 

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW AND READ THE RECAP BELOW. 

Q1 | Tell us about your career path.

Frisbie worked on the agency side for a number of years for agencies and as an owner, and even mentioned having a TV background (making selling in the studio an easy transition). Little Giant Ladders was Frisbie’s client, and he was brought in-house in 2019 to help the brand grow. 

“[Working for Little Giant has] been really exciting - we’ve got an incredible team and an incredible opportunity.”

Q2 | What have you learned while working for Little Giant Ladders?

Know the product you’re marketing.

“It's so important to know your product,” Frisbie shared. “If you know your product, you'll actually understand your customer quickly.” He explained that it’s the marketer’s job to understand and interpret the emotions of the customer and how they feel. “It's about peace of mind, it's about fun with the family, it's about speed...and so there's these different elements that you just have to tap into...that core emotion, and then you can kind of sell anything you want.”

Make people fall in love with your brand.

Frisbie’s team learned that people are a fan of the brand, not just the ladder, and that kind of support is exciting. “We find that they'll buy anything that we sell. We've got a variety of accessories, a variety of swag and different things...and they're almost more excited to buy a hoodie than they are a ladder.”

Innovate constantly.

“One of the things I’m most grateful for is, we’re constantly innovating.”

“It's critical to constantly innovate, it's critical to constantly launch products.” Little Giant is constantly innovating, including launching 38 products in the next 2 years. “It creates a ton of work, but we do the product innovation with a great engineering team, we have a great way to sell it here, the merchandising is critically important, and being consistent across all these retailers is a very difficult job.” 

Questions they ask themselves while innovating include:

• Is it engaging? 

• Does it convert? 

• How are we thinking about access?

• How are we thinking about proximity?

• How are we thinking about durability/sustainability?

Q3 | Is there a piece of advice that you would like to pass on to other marketers?

“Allow yourself to fail, and look at that as the opportunity for rapid growth.”

Frisbie noted that, while working for an agency, he had been fired almost 200 times. While he had recurring clients, there were those who terminated the partnership after a contract concluded. “We had clients for years, but being fired 200 times really teaches you a lot. I got hired also five times a week, and so that was a very interesting thing. So I would say, allow yourself to fail and celebrate those failures as a gift.”

Q4 | What is the biggest challenge that you're facing in your current role? 

Prioritizing the safety of a product without mentioning the word “safety” in marketing materials has been an interesting challenge for Frisbie. The team uncovered that people prioritize speed over safety and that 2000 people are injured on a ladder daily in the U.S.

“No one wants to talk about it ever. It's our least popular marketing, it gets the lowest engagement, but it's real.” 

As a solution to this problem, the team engineers safety into the product so that the consumer does not have to think about it. “They want speed, they want strength, they want durability, but I can't use safety in my marketing...so I have to engineer into the product so they feel safe without me using the word ‘safety.’”

Q5 | How do you mentor your team?

Frisbie uses a weekly method called “OKR,” or “Objective Key Results.” 

These are 15 minute one-on-ones designed to gauge the mindset of the employee. Instead of asking “how are you doing?”, Frisbie asks the following questions:

• How do you feel? 

• What went well last week? 

• What did you fail at? 

• What did you learn about it? 

• What would you never do again or what would you make a tweak to?

• Who crushed it last week and what core value did they emulate? 

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He ends on a gratitude note because “gratitude is infectious.” Frisbie shared, “when you spend time and spend that week thinking about - I got to give somebody a compliment - you pay attention to the good things they do. It builds trust. Being grateful will open up your perspective.”

For more marketing leadership advice and a view into the mindset of a marketing executive, be sure to watch the full interview with Matt Frisbie, and keep an eye out for more thought leadership from our CMO Spotlights.