The VP Marketing Show

“It’s like a drug. I can’t kick the habit!” Kathleen explains why she loves being the first marketer in at high-potential startups, and what keeps her coming back to build successful teams again and again. We explore how to choose the right startup to join, and why she wants to meet the board before signing on. We dig into the challenges of working with first time founders, and marketing-savvy CEOs vs. technical founders. She also explains which functions she hires for, in what order, and why.

He built a community with crazy-high levels of engagement amongst his most important customers and prospects. He led with value, real value, and fought back internal departments and partners who wanted to jump in and extract value at the expense of the bigger prize. He built relationships, pipeline, and revenue, and he’s got the numbers to prove it. This is an inspiring story of challenging conventional B2B norms and staying laser-focused on customer experience and big long-term wins. Say hello to Symantec’s Steve Tso.

Today’s guests have a great story to share. League is several years into their ABM journey, and it’s a key element of their very successful move up-market. WAY up-market. They’ve nailed a lot of things that many companies either overlook or fail to get right: Deep sales and marketing alignment, simple, clear objectives and metrics, leveraging the power of peer to peer outreach, doing things that don’t scale, personalization that builds real relationships, and much more.

You’re a marketing leader. To a great extent, your success is going to depend on how well you work with the sales leader. It’s often said that if these two fail to work well together, it’s the marketing leader who’ll be shown the door. In this episode we dig deep into getting this critical relationship right with Kyle Norton, Head of Retail Sales at Shopify. We talk empathy, trust, frames of reference, objectives, data, reporting, RevOps and much more.

Executive recruitment veteran Mike Fox gives us an inside view of marketing leadership hiring through two lenses: The lens of the firm (what sort of marketing leader do we need?) and of the individual (how do I position and market myself for career success?) We explore the importance of self-reflection by the CEO, implications of the booleanization of the hiring process, how marketers can stand out as providers of vital solutions vs. being just another job seeker, and much more.

Matt Amundson, VP Marketing at EverString, takes us on a wild ride through TV in the 90’s vs. today (and what we need to learn), the often-overlooked importance of emotion in B2B, the impact a powerful rallying cry and a growing community had at a famously metrics-driven tech company and much more. We talk about who’s getting it right, and how a different mindset changes everything. We explore two paths to growth, and why one is more powerful, more scalable, and harder to measure.

James Winter, VP Marketing at Brandfolder, explains why they maintain flexibility in their metrics and why a successful quarter is one in which they hit any one of their big three targets. He holds some opinions that differ from the crowd, including why you should start your career at a big company, why job hopping is a good thing, and that 80% of the value a SaaS marketing team delivers isn’t where most people think it is. He also speaks to the massive value of purposefully building an informal bench of outside experts for help and much more.

Nicole Wojno Smith, CMO at UserIQ, is leading the move from heavy inbound reliance to targeted, multi-threaded, multi-touch, multi-channel account-based marketing. We talk ideal account identification, engaging multiple stakeholders, and multi-channel online and offline cadences. We discuss the evolution of their metrics, lessons learned, connecting brand to revenue, career advice for up and coming marketers and more.

Michael McCunney, VP Marketing at Revenue Analytics has built an eight-person marketing team from scratch in under six months. We explore what he looks for when recruiting, and how to structure a marketing team from the ground up. He discusses the recent business model pivot to more SaaS and less bespoke service provision, the essential role marketing plays in pipeline acceleration, career advice for up and coming marketers and more.

Jasmine Martirossian, VP Marketing for TÜV SÜD Americas, recently moved from a smaller company to a 25,000 person global organization. We talk about how different that environment is, and what challenges and opportunities it presents. We explore the recent establishment of a global center of marketing excellence that unifies tools and processes to break down silos and maximize global collaboration. She shares insights into building a culture of ownership and testing, how to help every employee build their personal brand on LinkedIn, and more.