Mario Neto: That’s a really cool story. I have so many comments about it. Do you know where the word soccer comes from? Have you ever heard the story?
Antoine Vial: I do not know, actually.
Mario Neto: Yeah. It was back in the 1800s, 19th century, in England, just before it came to the US, and they had rugby, so it was called rugby football. It was starting to grow, starting to become popular, and they created the first football association, and in order to differentiate it from rugby football, they just started calling it “association football.” Then it became “assoc,” and then it became soccer. When it came to the US, that’s the word that stuck. But it comes from that association — I can’t really remember the whole story. If you Google it, you’re probably gonna find it.
First of all, first comment: I didn’t know about your diplomacy path, and as a fractional CMO —
Antoine Vial: As a CMO, as a company CEO, there’s a lot of diplomacy involved. You’ve gotta be a diplomat in a sort of way. You’re always dealing with conflicts, with people, with things.
Mario Neto: Like that — that could be a whole conversation on its own. When I look at my career, I also ended up in marketing through a bunch of different things that happened. But I am where I am today mostly because of photography and video. I was passionate about cinema and films and things like that, and I have a business degree — I never went to anything related to arts. I was working at the alumni program back in my university, and I was kind of stuck because it’s a relationship program — a lot of marketing involved, event organizing, relationship management. You have different kinds of leads because you need to bring people back to the university to help, to donate and things like that. It’s some kind of marketing. That’s when I started doing marketing and social media and things like that. But I was in love with filmmaking, and I wanted to maybe shift my career to filmmaking.
A friend of mine back then had opened up a video production agency, and I was like, that would be really cool to work there, because I would be close to cameras, I would learn photography, I would learn how to operate a camera, I would learn how to edit a video, I’d be surrounded by people that do it. I was starting to learn how to write scripts, and I wrote a few personal fiction TV pilots myself.
Antoine Vial: Very cool.
Mario Neto: So I started going into filmmaking, and started working there. He had a position to build his sales pipeline, and I was like, yeah, I’ll do it — I’m good with relationships, I can build relationships. But I had no idea what I was doing, really — what a pipeline was, how to create a pipeline, how to do cold outreach, any of those things. I just jumped into it just so I’d be close to the cameras.
About six months in, I hadn’t built a pipeline, I wasn’t bringing in any clients, and he was like, I can’t pay you if you’re not generating results. And I was like, what can I do, how can I change this? Then he came to me — he had gotten his master’s in the field we made the videos for, which was training and development, learning and development, HR. He had a huge network of people he knew in the industry — learning and development directors from all the major companies in Brazil. So we had the knowledge — he was a teacher, he was teaching it, he was bringing knowledge from the US, from things happening abroad, way before they launched the books and translated them to Portuguese — and we had a video production company. That was almost 15 years ago, and I said, hey, let’s launch a YouTube channel — YouTube is blowing up and people are on it, let’s launch a YouTube channel. But I also didn’t know too much about marketing, and I didn’t know how to do inbound marketing or content marketing.
But we started the channel, and it blew up in the industry — we had about fifty thousand followers.
Antoine Vial: Amazing.
Mario Neto: We started doing in-person events and getting sponsorships, and money started flowing in way more than the video production side. The production company wasn’t bringing in that much money, so we decided to stick with the channel, close the video production company, and focus solely on the channel — and most of the leads that were coming in wanted to do consulting with us, wanted us to teach them how to build learning programs for their companies. We started doing that, and that’s how I really jumped into marketing, and my career grew from there.
I ended up working for a while as a video producer for a startup — that’s when I went into the B2B SaaS world. Back then I was producing videos, editing, writing, and working with the things I wanted on the side, which was part of my skill set. I was like, yeah, I like working with video, it’s more of a hobby now — it gave me skills I can use in marketing, but I want to talk strategy, I want to talk about content strategy, I want to talk more about how to bring in leads, and at the end of the day how to increase the pipeline. By then I had learned I wanted to bring in leads, MQLs — and I started jumping into that, and that’s how my career ended up bringing me to where I am.