Bringing new people into your business is exciting and it’s important to get the right match, all the way down to someone who fits that stage of the company. Through experience building great teams in her career, Amanda Malko, now the CMO at G2, knows what to look for in job candidates. Going beyond assessing their ability to complete tasks and looking for a future team member who is right for this stage of your company. High-performance team building takes an added layer of thoughtfulness as she explains.

“I look for people who are right for the stage of the business are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”

Not everyone who’s good at working at a corporation is good at working in a startup environment, and the sooner you find that out, the better! In this episode, Malko, an expert in the world of martech, gives insight into how she thinks about testing new tools, and the way she determines usefulness. She shares great insight from personal experience about how to get the survey results you need to make the best choice for your business. Get a pen, and get ready to take some notes on this episode of Marketing Trends. 

Main Takeaways:

• Over-Indexing on Immediately Gratifying Ad Spend to Your Detriment: Keep your marketing budget diversified across channels, resisting the temptation to over-index on the immediately gratifying or easy to measure. It is easy to get drawn into the depths of marketing analytics because that is important and essential to running a good marketing team.
• Every Detail, Down to Word Choice Impacts Survey Results: Direct communication with your customers is the best way to know what they want from you and your product or service. Running a useful and accurate survey is more complex than dropping some questions into a Google Form and blasting that out to your email list. Every word that you use in your questions, the way you order the questions, and the format you choose to allow your respondent to select will all impact the data that is generated
• Retention of Customers is Essential for Growth - Don’t Over Invest in Acquisition: Especially as a new business or brand, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle for new eyeballs. Even as a newer company, you should have already been thinking about what is going to keep people around. The value of a returning customer is the foundation for a strong business and for the growth of the company.

Key Quotes:

“We hear a lot about sales and marketing fighting for credit. It's really hard for that to happen if you have shared goals if you're both driving towards the same pipeline of revenue goals and you're getting at it in complementary ways, but if you each have your own targets and they don't align at the top that is where you get a lot of that.”

“Because more things are going digital and you can measure more. As a result, we tend to over-index in what's measurable and immediately gratifying. That's true to who we are as humans. Social media is instantly gratifying and that's [also] true with our budget. You put a dollar in and within three months you see the dollar out, who doesn't love that?”

“I really look for people who are right for the stage of the business and are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”

“A lot of software businesses are waking up to [the fact that] retention is sort of the foundation for growth. If you over-index on the acquisition, you're going to find that in a couple of years, (maybe even in a year) you've got a leaky bucket. Make retention the number one metric, if you put those acquisitions. And so we do; retention is our number one metric, followed by acquisition.” 

“Some best practices [for surveying] are: Be focused on what you're trying to achieve. In surveys the longer the survey, the less likely are you to get [a lower] number of participants, but [also lower] quality of the feedback. Be really clear about what's essential and what's kind of nice to have. Definitely know how you're going to evaluate it cause that'll inform what tool you use. Ask the right questions.” 

Bio:

Amanda Malko is the CMO at G2. She is a go-to-market leader who thrives on leading high-performing, cross-functional teams. Her career focus is on hyper-growth companies working at the intersection of marketing/creativity/technology.

Formerly she was the lead of the partner marketing and programs team at Mailchimp, Inc's 2017 Company of the Year and G2's #4 Best Software Company, and before then she was CMO of 360i, named one of the 25 most influential marketing agencies of the 21st century (acquired by Dentsu) and CMO of Tongal, a global creative marketplace with 120,000 writers, directors, and animators. She’s served as Head of Marketing of IgnitionOne, a SaaS ad tech platform, and was the first sales and marketing hire at Massive, a video game advertising platform (acquired by Microsoft). She is a regular advisor to SaaS startups and media companies.

She frequently writes and speaks on marketing in the digital age, and has appeared in publications and on stage with AdAge, MediaPost, Mashable, AMA, 4As, Forrester Marketing Forum, CMO Assembly, and others.

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