#43: 16 Lessons I Wish I Knew As First Time B2B Marketing Leader

Dave shares the 16 lessons he wishes he knew as a first-time marketing leader, going from marketing manager to CMO in four years. This is a recording from Metadata's DEMAND 2022 virtual event in October 2022. The lessons include:

1. Forget the acronyms & best practices, use your brain. Ultimately there are only three ways to grow a business: get more new customers, increase the transaction value, increase how often people buy from you. You can get lost in the MQL PQL SQL SAL definitions and best practices. Get back to the basics and operate from first principles.
2. You need a story to be successful in B2B. Call it a category, call it a movement. Regardless, you need a story that people can bring to their boss about why they should buy your product beyond features + benefits. HubSpot created inbound marketing. Gainsight championed customer success. Drift conversational marketing. Each led through education + expertise and showed people a new way of doing things. Sell the vision and the story.
3. You need to sweat the "offer" - request a demo and contact sales are only going to convert for the highest intent prospects. You need other offers. HubSpot's website grader. Drift did a "test drive" to test the chatbot on your website before talking to anyone. Demandwell has a free SEO audit. Clari has a revenue leakage calculator. These are all smart ideas that are still further down the funnel than ebook but work to get qualified buyers in to eventually talk to sales.
4. Avoid incremental thinking. You can waste so many cycles thinking that the next homepage variation or the email series is going to be the thing that gets you out of the revenue hole. Rarely does "nurturing" solve the problem. Take bigger swings.
5. You must find a way to get on the same page as sales, no matter what. Find a way to put all the internal politics aside. You will never be successful unless you can marketing sales + marketing = revenue *together*. Find out how the VP of sales is comped and do everything in your power to get on the same page. Health teams gives bonuses based on company goals not team goals. Find out and fix it. Manage up to the CEO if needed. Life is 100% easier when sales + marketing have shared revenue goals.
6. Make finance and ops your best friends. YOU HAVE PLENTY TO DO ON YOUR OWN, YOUR JOB IS NOT FINANCE AND OPS I PROMISE YOU!!!! But instead find a way to make them your key business partners. Same way you need to be on the same team as sales, you need to be on the same team with finance and ops. Make them your best friends - collaborate on marketing as a business function Don’t be like 28 year old Dave “I got this myself” - DON’T GET DEFENSIVE - take the help, work together.
7. Show your work and master internal communication. Top complaint: I never know what marketing is doing. If you can’t get the people inside fired up, how will customers be? Top complaint: Marketing is doing a lot, but no idea how it fits our goals. You must always be sharing the bigger picture, related to company goals. Some systems I like: Slack: sharing screenshots, work in progress, teasers, etc. Weekly, monthly, quarterly recaps - here’s what marketing is up to . Take any opportunity to present to the company you can get. Create cross-functional check-ins with marketing, product, sales, CS, finance, ops, together. Marketing is the leadership department as Christopher Lochhead says. Make it that way. Lead by example. You're supposed to be the best communicators in the company right?
8. You must be able to articulate what your marketing strategy is. Don’t get lost in the tactics - see too much of this today. It’s the job of the marketing leader to have a vision for HOW the company does marketing. ABM? Product led? Both? SMB? Mid Market? Enterprise? Be intentional about your approach. You cant take the peanut butter approach and spread average stuff everywhe