The Get: Finding And Keeping The Best Marketing Leaders in B2B SaaS

In this three-part series of podcasts – our Fractional CMO special – we explore the ‘what, when, why (and why not)’ of fractional CMOs. You will get a great flavor of whether this is the right path for your B2B SaaS company. We answer the questions you are most likely to have, including:

How is hiring a fractional CMO different from hiring a consultant and different from hiring a full-time CMO?

What are the key skills to look for in a fractional CMO?

How to get the most long-term value from a fractional CMO engagement?

What types of people do NOT make good fractional CMOs?

And lots more!

Mike DiPietro works as a fractional CMO exclusively with one PE company and its portfolio companies. Mike started in sales and evolved into marketing and GM roles and spent over a decade at Kronos. He was also CMO at HealthcareSource and ExtensionEngine.

Mike and Erica help us understand:

- The good, the bad, and the ugly of being a fractional CMO

-The blend of strategizing, coaching, and doing that you can expect from a fractional CMO

-The value that PE firms see in fractional CMOs: PE firms want their portfolio companies getting help seeing what good looks like, so they can grow as fast as the PE firms think they can grow

- How a CEO should frame what they need from a fractional CMO

-The difference between someone who has successfully been a fractional CMO and someone who is a “CMO pretending to be a consultant”

Erica Seidel’s conversation with Jason Seeba, SVP of Marketing at Eightfold.ai, is interesting and unusual because not only does Jason lead marketing at a talent intelligence company (and The Get is all about marketing talent!), but also because of his diverse background spanning demand gen, marketing, technology and marketing operations. Jason was Chief Marketing Technology Officer at Bloomreach, and then extended his role to take over all of marketing. And finally, he was a client of Eightfold.ai before he joined them full time as they were moving into the hyper growth curve.

Aside from sharing his own experience, Jason also shares his best advice for marketing tech pros that want to ascend to the CMO role. And he discusses why his golden interview question is “How do you get to know customers and what they need?”

For CEOs and CMOs who are hiring marketing leaders, you will find tips for finding and keeping the best marketing and martech talent, especially in uncertain times.

Of course, because it’s Jason and he’s from Eightfold, which is an HRTech tool for talent intel, you will also hear some really practical tips on how and when you can use tech to help you find and keep your best talent.

What happens when Marketing leaders take on Sales?

Scott Horn is the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) of PrismHR, a SaaS company in the HR space. He shares his story of life as a CRO after over 2 decades in Marketing. Prior to his role as CRO at PrismHR, Scott was Chief Marketing and Revenue Ops officer at [24]7.ai, and the chief marketer for Seagate. He also spent 17 years at Microsoft - a tenure almost unheard of in B2B marketing.

Scott is passionate about hiring great talent- and the key to that process is getting the interview right. Scott shares what he’s learned over the years when it comes to building great teams, and tells us how he is training his team to be great interviewers.

Along the way, he shares practical insights on:

- How to tell if someone “has self-awareness and wants to learn”

- The trick to hiring for that critical role of SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) and BDRs (Business Development Representatives)

- What CEOs get wrong when hiring CMOs

- Why your LinkedIn profile matters more than your resume to get the best job today

We all know that marketing needs to be authentic and tell believable stories. But aside from the marketing itself, the marketing leaders behind those strategies need to be authentic and believable too. Christina Mautz from Moz tells us why, and how she puts this principle into practice every day on the job.

This authenticity starts with the hiring process. When asked if she was a growth marketer, Christina replied. “No, I’m not.” A gutsy move in the current economic scenario, some may say. Listen to know what she did say, and how it landed her the job anyway.

Erica and Christina also explore why being a ‘consultant’ is not necessarily a bad thing when applying for a full-time marketing leadership role.

Christina shares her take on the ideal first 90 days as CMO, and the challenges and opportunities as she went about taking the reins as CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) as well as CMO at Moz.

Three-time Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Tricia Gellman has been there and done that at Salesforce Canada, Checkr, and now, conversational marketing category leader Drift. Aside from sharing the story of how she came to be the CMO at Drift, the conversational marketing company well-known for its non-traditional brand building and marketing methods, she and Erica talk about:

● Hiring your first CMO: what to think about (and what’s the hardest thing about it)

● The CMO+ Role – how the role of the CMO is morphing

● How B2B CMOs can be more CX-focused

● How to achieve CEO and CMO alignment

● How CMOs can move from scrappy to scale

● Tricia’s personal examples of marketing org and culture design – mistakes and learnings

Prital Kadakia leads the Growth team at Serent Capital, helping portfolio companies to scale up, drive results, and find the right leadership talent. As a sales and marketing expert at a PE firm, Prital’s work with portfolio companies spans sales force effectiveness, pricing, operational efficiencies, strategic partnerships, strategy development, procurement, and digital marketing.

In this episode, we talk about how PE investors work side by side with portfolio companies, including how they look for the ideal marketing talent, what they expect the CEO and CMO to know about growth marketing, and how to navigate the challenges of hypergrowth.

Here are our top themes and takeaways from the conversation:

1.Things for CEOs to think about when finding the right marketing leader

● Context in which the marketing leaders were successful in earlier roles

● Ability to own the bookings and results (something which is not core to every marketer’s DNA, but is a crucial flag for PE investors, who are focused on close alignment between marketing and sales), ability to forecast into the future - most B2B tech companies have long sales cycles, so focusing on the right metrics that will have a material impact in 6/12/18 months is crucial

2. Common pitfalls for CEOs to avoid as they search for their marketing leader

● Not having clarity about what you want

● Hiring a CMO when a VP of Marketing would be more aligned to the stage and pattern of growth

3. Tips for marketing leadership candidates: what to keep in mind if you are a potential CMO being interviewed with someone from the PE investor side for your dream B2B SaaS job! (Hint: know thy investor, and thy ROI!)

Erica Sheehan is a cybersecurity marketing whiz and the VP of Marketing at Guardsquare, a Belgian mobile application security company that she is helping to expand to the US market. Aside from stints at Novell and Oracle, Erica was most recently VP of marketing at ObserveIT. During her tenure, the company quickly grew 4X and was recently acquired.

Erica is a great example of a marketing leader who has successfully gone from larger to smaller companies. Hear what it means to make that switch, why being analytical is crucial to the marketing leadership role, how high-performing marketing leaders should evaluate a potential employer; and what it’s like to build a marketing team in a rapidly-growing company.

Here are some of the themes from the conversation:

1. The difference between average and great in a B2B marketing leadership role

2. Why analytical skills and field marketing experience are both important in shaping a marketing leader

3. How CEOs can assess if a marketing leader coming from a large enterprise to a high-growth smaller company can ‘scrap’

4. The trend of the CMO or VP of Marketing reporting into the CRO (as opposed to the CEO)

5. How to know whether you need a marketing leader who is more demand-oriented, more brand-oriented, or more product marketing-oriented

6. And finally, some unmissable insights into hiring and building a marketing team in a high-growth environment

In this episode, Erica calls on Drew’s experience as a marketing leader to talk about shepherding a marketing organization through hyper-growth, how to get beyond interviews, and how to get insights into candidates’ behavioral profiles to build high-performance marketing teams.

As the first marketing lead in a legacy business that did not have a history of organized marketing, Drew has not just transitioned The Predictive Index brand into the digital world but has also built marketing into a lead and revenue generation function that numbers around 60 members today. What sets Drew’s perspective apart is his focus on culture, values, and healthy conflict as cornerstones of building great marketing teams that can sustain and grow along with the business.

He shares his advice for new CMOs that are reporting into the CEO for the first time (instead of reporting to a CMO), insights on what makes CMOs and their teams fail, and his own THREADS value system at The Predictive Index.

Here are some of the highlights from the conversation:

Marketing leaders need to be able to give away their Legos: marketing typically overlaps with product, sales, and operations; and based on the business context, marketers need to demonstrate that they can keep the things they are amazing at and give away the things other experts/functions are good at.

CMOs – and entire teams - don’t fail because of lack of effort or ability, but due to a lack of alignment and clear role design. They fail because of misalignments between the CEO and CMO around expectations, responsibilities, authority, resources, and incentives.

Even in hypergrowth situations, results are not everything: CMOs should hold people accountable for quantitative business results and also for behaving in ways that match the stated culture of the organization. It is the job of the head of Marketing to manufacture and create the right environment and culture for great chemistry to happen. Drew discusses how he spends more time on the people components of his job, making sure his team members are upholding their core values framework, and celebrating wins around these core values. Net: performance is important but not above values.

An unhealthy lack of conflict is as problematic as unhealthy conflict. Drew adapts Patrick Lencioni’s concept of 5 dysfunctions of the team to share his idea of a layered pyramid: trust is at the bottom, which leads to healthy conflict; the conflict leads to commitment, which leads to accountability. Only when you have this in place can the team start driving towards sustained results. Sometimes, marketers have to pull conflict and differences of opinion out of people to avoid a culture of appeasement.

Are you looking for culture fit, culture add, or culture stretch? When it comes to choosing and integrating new members into a high-growth marketing team, it is important to know when you need what.

David Badler is a Partner at Susquehanna Growth Equity, leading the value creation practice. He partners with CEOs and their teams to accelerate growth by collaborating on key strategic, go-to-market, talent-related, and operational areas. The fund has invested in 55 companies and has over 30 active portfolio companies, of which about 20 are B2B SaaS companies.

In David’s words, “My job is to help CEOs grow their companies from $20 million to $100 million plus,” In this episode, see why he refers to CMO searches as ‘revenue searches’- and how CEOs can ensure they find marketers who can lead growth.

When it comes to marketers worrying about the title they will hold in a high growth company (VP Marketing or CMO) -- or whom they will report to (the CRO or the CEO) David quotes Sheryl Sandberg: “If you are going to get on a rocket ship, try not to worry what seat you are on”.

He also shares how CEOs can avoid their preferred CMO candidate getting vetoed by investors, and the pitfalls to avoid while searching for the ideal CMO. Hint: it’s all about getting your scorecard right, and aligning with the board and investors well in advance.

Want a peek into the scorecard that a CEO of a B2B SaaS company could be using to evaluate CMO candidates? Here are some key elements from one CMO search:

- Lead and demand generation experience, with a focus on the functional expertise that matters to the company - inbound versus outbound

- Numerical fluency

- Demonstrated ability to work with sales to drive revenue

- Strong marketing operations ability - putting fundamental processes and systems in place

- Scale, speed and impact in past roles. For example, someone who made a great CMO at a $5 million company may not make a great CMO at a $50 million company. Someone who has never owned a function but excelled at parts of it may do really well stretching into a larger role.

Join Erica and David as they walk through exactly what investors are thinking when they are helping their CEOs and Founders find the right marketing talent to help grow into their next set of millions!

Mike and Erica discuss the challenges and opportunities of building marketing teams at a hyper-growth company.

Expanding from 65 to 500 people. Onboarding 50 new hires per quarter. Growing 50% YoY, A marketing team that’s getting bigger and stronger each quarter – if that’s not hypergrowth, then we don’t know what is!

We talk about how the role of a marketing leader grows and changes as the company grows, and some of the challenges with hiring ahead of plan, based on Mike’s experiences at Coveo.

We also talk about the need to balance ‘scrappy’ and ‘scale’ in a hyper-growth environment. For example, would you as a CEO hire a CMO who needed to ‘stoop’ into the role (someone coming from a much larger firm that has already done a big revenue climb) or ‘stretch’ into the role (someone who has not yet been the top marketer, or who comes from a smaller firm)?

Mike offers 3 tips for anyone taking on a marketing leadership role in a hyper growth company:

- Bring data to every marketing conversation, including data from existing marketing programs and data from across the company - to make themselves more credible to the leadership team.

- Build a culture where people expect change. Embrace change, but also build a strong vision for what you are trying to achieve as a marketing team, along with a strong set of shared values.

- "Hire people that scare you a little.”

In our organizational design segment, Erica and Mike speak about specific org structure changes that Mike helped make to marketing at Coveo. He shares two - about centralizing shared services between customer acquisition and product marketing; as well as building collaborative crews who don’t have a hierarchical responsibility to each other but work together on various time-bound or ongoing business initiatives.

Finally, our last segment takes on trends that will impact marketing leadership in B2B SaaS companies for 2020. Here are some that stood out:

1. CRO titles and how that’s going to impact the marketing org structure in high growth enterprises

2. Marketers mastering data for real revenue outcomes

3. More intentional role design for marketing leaders

4. Putting content marketing on a diet

5. The need for B2B SaaS marketing leaders to talk PE

What do you think? What trends will impact the role of the B2B SaaS CMO in 2020 and beyond?