[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, welcome. In this podcast we talk B2B marketing and what it takes to know your customer innovate and profit. We're glad you made it. This is the campaign by 97th Floor.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello everyone. Happy Friday. I am Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor, a digital marketing agency built to deliver world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and enterprise organization organizations. Thank you for joining us today for another episode of the Campaign.
The Campaign is a B2B marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episodes of the campaign on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify
[email protected] today we've got a really great episode. Super excited to dive into the subject. It's all around cmos building trust with the executive suite and getting buy off on marketing campaigns, which is important now more than ever as things are kind of crazy. It's been said a lot that the CMO role is a little tumultuous, with tenure typically perceived as going down.
There was, however, a study recently by Spencer Stewart where they analyzed Fortune 500 companies. They found that generally CMO tenure has been slightly climbing, although it's still behind the rest of the C suite.
They've also found that CMOs tend to churn not because they are let go, because they actually advance in their career or they make lateral moves. So that's good. That's good news for the CMO. However, there's been a stat release where it's only 66% of companies in the Fortune 500 have a marketing leadership position which has actually been shrinking. So that may explain some changes in the tenure as well. All very fascinating, but we're facing some challenging economic times and some uncertainty which makes that CMO role even more difficult.
And for that reason I'm really excited to have on our show Carl Vandenberg, who's an amazing CMO and has the ability to shed some light on us to how we can best position ourselves within that role and best position our organizations in these kind of unique times here. So Carl Vandenberg is currently the CMO at Allumio and was named Cybersecurity Marketer of the year in 2020.
Carl has a 25 year track record of building high performance teams, products and businesses. He has held leadership roles in both early stage startups and 1 billion plus tech companies across US, Europe and Asia, working in both marketing and product and as a GM in cloud, analytics and cybersecurity businesses. Carl, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:02:53] Speaker C: Thanks Facton Great to be here.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Carl. I've really appreciated the content that you've put out thus far. You've shared so many great thoughts. One thing that I want to start with is you've talked about the CMO role being one of the hardest jobs there is. What about that role is just so challenging and so unique.
[00:03:13] Speaker C: Yeah. And this is a common conversation I have with fellow CMOs or others that are in marketing. And you know, I have a little bit of a unique perspective and I didn't grow up as a marketer. I run other functions and came to marketing and the marketing function a bit later. So I've been a gm, I've run product, I've done M and A. So I've kind of an outsider in perspective as well. And think about the CMO role is it's got the, in my estimation, probably one of the highest, if not the highest complexity to appreciation ratio of the C Suite. What I mean by that is the complexity of the role. If you think of the breadth of the role and certainly in B2B tech, where you have to understand technology, obviously not just the market, but the technology and the stack, because marketing is one of the biggest buyers of technology.
You got to understand data and analytics, you've got to understand aesthetics and psychology, you've got to understand strategy, you got to be operational because you got to run programs.
It is such a broad role and yet the recognition understanding of the function by the rest of the functions board is still pretty low.
And it's a function that's changed dramatically over the last few years. Just think, Covid is a classic example of how that's changed. And now with AI, it's changing even more. And so it's very hard for the board and the C Suite to keep up and to understand what's going on. And so you get this ratio of complexity divided by appreciation as an understanding and recognition. And it's very high.
In fact, as I said, probably the highest. And as a result, it's no surprise that CMO tenure is in the valley anyway. 12 to 18 months and you know it.
Maybe it's improving, as you said.
But part of my mission is also to help the rest of the C Suite and the market in general understand the value of marketing, why it is so strategic today, and so happy to do this here on this podcast as well.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Great. I'm excited to dive in. Yeah, I feel like that role sits right in the middle between art and science in terms of predictable and unpredictable outcomes from certain activities, which just makes it incredibly Difficult to both do, but then also communicate, especially with people who are more used to dealing with the science side of I do A, I get B.
And marking just unfortunately doesn't work like that as much as we want it to and as much as we try to, to measure it.
[00:06:00] Speaker C: It's a bit of both, right? It's a bit of both. I think that's the, the art and the science and I think that's where sometimes, you know, we or organizations get into trouble because if you look too much for the what's absolutely measurable and what's giving you an immediate return, it could lead to short term tactical thinking which doesn't serve the company well in the long term. We could talk more about that.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, we'll for sure want to dive into that.
So one thing that I want to bring up is opportunities within some market upset.
This is actually our 20th anniversary this year, so we have. Thank you. Thank you. So we've been through economic downturns before.
The earliest in that 10 years, the housing crisis. And I can say with certainty that in uncertainty, while a lot is doom and gloom, there's still opportunity for growth.
However, it requires a high degree of creativity and approaching things in new ways.
So I'm interested as marketers, like how do we make opportunities and thrive in chaos? Like what makes those marketers who win during downturns or win in uncertainty, what sets them apart? How are they thinking about and approaching the uncertainty differently?
[00:07:26] Speaker C: Yeah, I love challenges because and I think as Churchill who said, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste because in crisis is opportunity if you've got the right mindset. And I think we've all, many people hear about growth mindset also the perfect application of growth mindset. So in a downturn in uncertain times, as I said, people tend to run to a retreat to the short term tactical.
And so really the, at a very high level we get into some specifics. But really at a very high level, the if you want to be successful through a downturn and coming out of a downturn, it is to take and maintain a long term perspective.
And so as an example, and I alluded to this earlier, if in a downturn where obviously money's tight because, you know, we're not sure the way the market's going to go, we want to be conservative, that's understandable. But if then all you're doing is investing in, let's call it demand generation because that's the favorite, especially in tech is like give me some more leads then. Whereas that's necessary, you know, and certainly you want to, to continue to invest to some degree in in demand generation and lead generation.
The bigger opportunity actually is to build your brand because the rest of the competition is likely to be doing the same.
And so if you can be smart with a message that resonates obviously with what's going on in the market and you can invest more, you will grow your mind, share through a downturn and you will come out stronger as a better known, better recognized leading company that had a message and that's the messaging is important that had a message message that resonated during difficult time. And so that's an example of longer term thinking and resisting the urge kind of retreat to short term tactical execution.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: With the tenure of CMOs being two years or less, how does one balance sitting in that seat and having long term thinking? Like how long is long term?
Because you know, we don't know how long a recession may last. And you know, if we're not going to start seeing the upside of this brand investment for two years that may.
[00:10:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Outlast the tenure of that cmo.
[00:10:06] Speaker C: You know, that's right.
Hence the what I said earlier. So part of, you know why I tell people who are responding to be CMOs, just, you know, be mindful where you're getting yourself into. Far from the complexity and appreciation that we talked about, I said the additional tax of the CMO is you've got to be prepared to educate and evangelize with the rest of the C suite and with the board.
And so a big part of there's two things I would say. One is you've got to take your C suite and the rest of the company and the board along for the ride.
So it's going to be part, they're going to be part of the journey.
And so that means educating on what you're doing, the strategic rationale behind what you're doing.
That's one kind of. So they understand the logic.
Okay. The second is although there may not be short term bottom line results and in many of these longer term strategic investments there won't be, there will be some intermediary or leading indicators that you can point to. Right. That tell you, hey, what we're doing, an investment we're doing is having an impact brand index, isn't it? Is a classic example. Right. Where you know, I did this at a prior company, we went through Covid, we were creating a category, we were PE backed. So I mean you put all of those parameters together is probably like the hardest Time to invest in brand. And yet we did that intentionally and we had a brand index that we use was a composite. In our case it was a composite index. You can have agencies that will do, you know, brand awareness, you know, studies for you. We, we did a composite index of a number of indicators like press and analyst mentions and website traffic and things like that, but basically gave you a pulse or measurement of how that brand investment was delivering. And so you want to have those leading indicators that you can say we're making progress and here's the strategy and you know, based on, on experience and you know what we're trying to achieve, we expect this is the result over time.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: I like that. So you're, you are giving them some numbers and something that, I mean it's going to be.
While it may not connect directly to bottom line, they can at least see and believe that those numbers will connect to bottom line. Right?
[00:12:37] Speaker C: Correct. Yeah. And like helping understand, you know, it's important we get into, you know, there's a lot of talk about roi. I'm a big believer in roi. And you know, that is really when I talk about ROI from marketing spend, it is really marketing program demand spend and dollars delivered at the bookings level. And that was something that I think ultimately CEOs and boards appreciate that kind of accountability for marketing all the way down to bookings.
But there are other things that you can't tie directly to bookings.
But we know that if a company. And go, go back to Brian, because this is one of my favorite topics simply because it's often the hardest investment a marketer to get, especially in certain companies where they're more focused on growth or they're PE backed or there's a various reasons why a brand is often hard. Is it seen as very fluffy and yet it's probably the most important.
And John Miller actually the, the founder of Marketo and he and I been talking about this and he's. I know he's a big believer in this too, that the playbook of marketing has changed and you know, brand really is actually becoming a lot more visible and strategic. But long story short, you know, the, the brand is another word for. It is like air cover or awareness. We know that for sellers when they're going to sell something, if the prospect at least heard the company's name, they're like more likely to engage.
Right. So that's kind of the obvious tie to revenue, but it's never direct. And so it's important, you know, to have. Yes, ROI is important, but I Wrote an article in Forbes a couple of years ago talking about return on objective versus return on investment. And the return on objective is we've got, this is how what we want the outcome to be of this investment. And the outcome can be a different, can be different things, doesn't always have to be revenue.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: What's a good example of that?
[00:14:47] Speaker C: Well, it could be, you know, I would say the like in. We just launched a new product. It's an AI CDR cloud detection response product.
As I told my team, this is like we're creating, it's a bit of a new category because we're actually spanning a bit of a technical between NDR category of NDR network detection response, the cloud detection response.
So it's kind of a new category. And so I said I'm more interested right now in the number of free trial signups. I'm not interested in bookings, it's too early.
So again that's not a direct link to ultimately at some point they will, you know, expect to convert. But that measurement is like I want like 100, whatever the number is, you know, per week or per month, free trials.
That's the immediate kind of return on the objective. The objective is to get people to sign up for a free trial. So it's measurable, it shows progress in the right direction, but it's not, you know, bookings.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: I like that because it seems like marketing teams, I've seen them get tripped up if they are encumbered with this roi, which again is a good thing and we should strive for. But sometimes it, if that is going to be the goal, it's going to prevent us from investing in certain tactics where we can't connect to ROI immediately.
[00:16:13] Speaker C: Right, Correct. And, and that's again, this is why I said, I mean there is a, you know, hard to quantify 30% tax on your day job. And, and that is to educate the. Because marketing is this a series of. It's both being strategic and operational, you know, long term thinking and short term focus. And that is a difficult balance and you need to do both.
But if you're only doing short term and tactical, you will not succeed and the company will not succeed. And that's why a marketer, you know, you need to help provide the context and the rationale behind the long term decisions because those are the toughest ones to justify when you're making an investment.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you think that CMO should approach that in stages or phases where you know, we're, we're kind of in the, the brand Awareness stage right now and then we're going to be going more short term or should they simultaneously with different teams tackle both?
[00:17:20] Speaker C: Yeah, it's look, I would depend on the situation that you land in. So my last company, you know, which is not atypical. They were, they had gone through five CMOs and I was the fifth CMO in five years.
And and so we needed to reestablish, I mentioned it was a company that was public, taken private, about half billion dollars in size. So you know, good size company and but we need to reestablish the trust in marketing.
And so really there the first thing was to focus on demand and build a very predictable demand model.
And the way that we went about that was and this is a playbook, you know, I'm also using my current company. It's very, very strategic. I'm very data driven engineering by my background. It's kind of an engineering background. So I'm very data driven. So it's like okay, let's first of all look at and use data.
We built our own machine learning model. You can buy these off the shelf now from ABM platforms, but we built a machine learning model that predicted, you know, the customer profile, ideal customer profile, the intent, all of that. We got that, you know, and put together and said okay, here are the accounts that we're going to target based on data, right? Then here are the Personas that we're going to go after and building campaigns that are Persona centric.
And then we took all of the activities that we've done historically, the tactics and we did a, we looked at the performance of all those tactics and then we built a forecasting model which basically said okay, based on these accounts and these Personas and these tactics, if I put this much money into this tactic over this period of time, this is what will produce for the funnel. And so it was a full forecasting model. And then, and I think you and I talked about this prior in a prior conversation offline is we basically ran marketing like sales which is like we came in with, we have obviously a plan for the year in terms of pipeline all the way down to bookings. Here's our. And I, I was, I said because I was having to prove marketing to the, this big P firm that put a ton of money in a go to market to re accelerate the growth of the company. And they were like okay, what's happening to our dollars that we're investing? And so I was doing, you can imagine a monthly funnel review with the board which typically doesn't happen.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:14] Speaker C: And so it was like, okay, here's my forecast for the quarter.
You know, we'd update it and you know, here's where we are versus. So I was basically running marketing like sales with I was over signing quota. Right. That is pipeline and bookings attribution to my team.
We were, you know, they were compensated based on that. We were running monthly forecast updates. So it basically helped them understand the impact of marketing in sales language, which everyone kind of understands.
So that built credibility. And then back to your original question. Once I had enough credibility within that kind of first six to nine months, I was able to start than talking about the longer term strategic investments that we needed to make.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Did you find that your models needed to be proven true before you earned that trust or did the very existence of those models when you.
[00:21:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's a great question. It was, I think the fact that they understood and you know, kind of understood the science and the logic and there was real data behind our decisions that already bought a lot of confidence the way we were operating like a machine.
And then, you know, we had an very aggressive growth target and we were, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll credit some good luck, excellent execution by the team. But we were hitting those targets. So that obviously helps as well.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Sure.
Some research came out recently that says roughly 60% of CMOs are first time CMOs.
And you know, obviously that. What was that?
[00:22:04] Speaker C: You know why that is?
[00:22:07] Speaker B: I'm, I, I assume it's because of the high amount of churn.
[00:22:10] Speaker C: Yeah, it's because, well, I think some of them turn CMOs and they're like, I'm not doing that again.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:16] Speaker C: So you get new ones.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Yeah. A natural byproduct of that is going to be that you have these brand new CMOs walking into these situations where there's low trust. Right. Similar to what you described and you have to earn that.
Would there be any other advice you'd offer somebody entering into that kind of role?
I think what you said of like set up some models, fill out your system, communicate very frequently with the board.
I think that's really great. Is there any other advice you'd offer to somebody who's kind of stepping into that kind of environment?
[00:22:52] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I think the, like your most important relationship outside of obviously your boss, the CEO typically. Right.
Is going to be with the CRO and so building a really. And you know, this is not something candidly, you know, to be transparent, that I've always done particularly well.
But I, I've learned over time that that is probably the most critical relationship to get right. So building really strong level of trust, understanding, collaboration with your CRO and then on the product side and the cpo. For me again because of maybe more in engineering product kind of strategy background, that's always been a natural for me. It's been like easy. I've personally I've had to work more in the kind of the CRO relationship but those two, because the product is, and I've been in, in you know, startup before where there was a lot of pressure on the go to market.
The reality was the product strategy, the product fit wasn't there ultimately and I, I don't think we saw at the time in hindsight became clearer. But so, but, but having that, you know, very tight link with the product leader and the product team so that you can take that value obviously and communicate to the market. And then with the, the CRO, especially in B2B tech, as you know, it is a buying first of all, you're going after a buying group.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:34] Speaker C: And it is that whole side of things is often where people get into trouble because as you know, one of the common challenges with marketing is how do you attribute value. Right. And the sourcing of deals is a bit of an antiquated metric. Kindly, but still it's there because in B2B there's like 15 people and we all touch those people of every function. So it's hard to attribute. But having that strong relationship with the CRO and then cascading it down to our teams is critical for a B2B tech company to be successful.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: There was something you said a couple years ago actually in relation to the CRO where you said it's our job to communicate to them or help them understand that we see this budget as budget that we're spending on their behalf.
[00:25:28] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: Tell me, tell me more about what you mean by that.
[00:25:31] Speaker C: Well, what I mean by that is that we're, we're, you know, marketing and marketers are the experts in terms of how do we, you know, use these program dollars. Because marketing is actually has the biggest discretionary spend of any function because every other function is pretty much, you know, people marketing has all these extra dollars which is programs. And so but we're the experts in terms of how to deploy that investment essentially on behalf of the organization really in service of the sellers getting to their buyers. And so we come with our, our expertise but we really should have the mind and the way that I like to do this is really push this down to the sub regional level where the marketer, seller, their, let's say bdr, adr, str, however you want to call it, their channel. If you're every channel, you know, they're operating as I call often like a franchise.
They have a certain investment that they're making and then they have a dashboard that allows them to track, you know, is that investment producing value? And so really you want to push that accountability, that visibility, that autonomy down to the, obviously within the strategic framework, but they have local intelligence and every local market is going to be a bit different.
So that's, I'm a big believer that kind of franchise model. And again it really is marketing spending on behalf of the go to market organization, in particular the sellers. That's how we think about it.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: I love that. I mean the BDR and the sales rep in a certain sense they have eyes on the market that the marketer may not have and the marketer has the muscle. But without those eyes it's hard to push in the correct direction. Combining them all I think is brilliant tactic for getting, especially if you've got, if you're dealing with wide, a wide market.
So for these CMOs that are either, you know, facing some difficulties getting buy off or you know, some rough market or brand new cmos, you have a framework that I think is a really great starting place.
It's simple and easy to understand.
But it's what you call the one page marketing plan.
And I'm going to share that on my screen. If you're listening on the podcast, you will be able to find a copy of this on niceeventfloor.com however, if you're listening live today, you'll be emailed a copy of this as well. So I'm going to show this on my screen and then Carl, if you wouldn't mind walking us through this, that'd be great. So let me.
All right, so tell us, walk us through these columns here in this.
[00:28:38] Speaker C: Yeah, so as my team knows well, and I am a big believer in general and marketing in particular is to keep things simple.
We live in a very complex world of way too much information and as a result nobody retains anything. And so when it comes to messaging, your product or brand positioning or whatever, you want to keep it simple, right? The KISS principle is incredibly important.
Same goes for, and I mentioned a lot of our job in marketing is to communicate what we're doing, why we're doing, what we're doing.
And so I use this framework as a very clear, simple way to communicate what marketing is up to on one page.
And so this is something you can use with pretty much anyone because it's simple enough that you can get the value.
And it starts with the business, one of the top priorities for the business. And so, you know, every company should hopefully have their top level company goals, objectives.
Then you want, you want to identify how can and how is marketing best suited to support those business goals or objectives. Right. That's kind of the marketing priorities.
The strategy is then how do you execute? Right. What's the approach you're going to take to execute on that priority?
The tactics, or I sometimes call them big rocks. These are, this is not like a list, a laundry list. These are kind of like really the, the needle movers in terms of the main initiatives or actions that you're going to be taking as a marketing organization. Sometimes I'll also have another column in there which is the investment because people like to see what's the investment you're putting behind it.
And then of course, importantly the KPIs. And again, less is more. So typically, you know, and the one I have currently for my current company, there are like turns out five business goals.
As a result, we do have five marketing priorities in support of them. The strategy again is succinct, but it captures at a high level what we're doing. And then I have like three, probably three, four tactics or big rocks.
And then I have probably two KPIs. And so those KPIs, then there's like 10 in total.
I turn them into a CMO dashboard that the executive team and the board has access to. And so it's very simple. At a very high level you can see is marketing making progress against the most important things we've set out to do.
[00:31:38] Speaker B: I love this. Now this is not, you know, there's not a channel column. And I'm wondering because a lot of people will build their marketing plan sometimes around channels, which I don't think is ideal. I think this is a much better play or way to think about it.
Would a, would a channel strategy appear within two different rows?
If they like, I guess. How would one think about that? Like would I put two channels within two different rows if they attack two different business goals? Or where would that, where would that.
[00:32:16] Speaker C: And just to be clear, Paxton, when you refer to channel, you're referring to like a marketing channel.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:32:23] Speaker C: Not like a reseller or correcting channels. Yeah, marketing channels. Yeah. So marketing channel for me is really just because the level down on the big rock for me would be. So, for example, you know, like in this year we have one of my big rocks, which is a very big rock, but one of the big rocks was to launch this new product that I alluded to earlier. So that's one line that was, you know, four months of work with 20 people.
So in there you have all of the marketing channels. So we have a separate program.
Right. Or a separate, like an asana. In our case, he's asana or Monday, whatever your project management with like 100 line items. And there's all of different marketing channels in there and you know, sub KPIs. That's not the right love. That's too tactical generally for this level, which is again meant to be for the rest of the company. C suite board.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: Right, Yep. I like that.
Yeah. I think too many people get caught up in saying, okay now what's my search strategy? What's my, you know, more important.
[00:33:40] Speaker C: Just not at this level, which is again, if you want to capture everything on the page and you know, again, it goes back to also what you report out in terms of funnel. You know, as I said, my case back at the. My last company for that first year was a little bit particular situation where I was reporting out every stage of the funnel, which is unusual, but normally I would do, you know, maybe meetings and pipeline and bookings.
That's the sort of thing that people will care about. So in my, you know, obviously driving pipeline for the business is in support of the growth of the business is one of my priorities. And so we have KPIs around.
You know, what is the, the pipeline that we want to generate and then pipeline efficiency, how efficient we get in terms of the dollar spend and the pipeline we generate from that dollars. Those are probably my two KPIs in the demand section. So I have nothing about MQLs or different channels that's too granular for this level.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: Right, right.
This is such a great.
I love this one pager. And I can see, you know, that's gonna have a big impact on getting buy off, getting investment. It's gonna have a big impact on rallying other teams and other members of the C suite and really helping them see where these dollars are being spent. I love that.
Like one big takeaway for me is that mentality of these dollars are being spent on your behalf. And so I have a certain amount of accountability to you about how these are being spent. I'm still the expert and you know that that needs to be, that dynamic needs to be there. But I'm accountable for this, this spend and this, this one page marking plan I think is a brilliant way to achieve that.
This is, this is so great. We're again we're gonna mail out this one pager to everybody in attendance and then if you're listening to this after the recording you can find
[email protected] Carl, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a fantastic discussion. I really appreciate your insight here.
[00:35:45] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it's been great and happy to spread the message and encourage all those marketers out there to continue the journey. It's not easy, especially with all this change in AI that created the conversation for another day. Paxton it's going to change dramatically the marketing function but also how buyers buy and I think it's fascinating. I love change but not know now everyone's comfortable as I love it but it's going to make marketing even more interesting and even more strategic. And so I just encourage people to follow their passion. Marketing is a great function in spite of everything else I've said. I think there's a lot of opportunity and the world needs better marketers.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: So yes, yeah, I and we'd love to have you back on to talk about AI. I mean that it's the conversation that is happening a lot to the point where some people are getting sick of it. But don't get sick of it because that is what's happening.
No, it's not.
Thank you again so much for joining. Thank you.
For those tuned in listening, if you're registered again watching live, you're going to get this template in your inbox on Monday and then you can find this@@nice floor.com after the fact.
Tune in next week. We're going to be joined by Ryan Nelson, CMO at Stack Adapt at Thanks for listening.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: The campaign is produced by 97th Floor, a 20 year old marketing agency that helps companies like McKinsey, Pluralsight and Check Point know their customers, execute innovative campaigns and drive profitable growth. If you have an allocated growth budget and product market fit, we'd love to do research and build a proposal for you. Visit us at 97th Floor.com and if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe. See you next time.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Sa.
