Instrumenting the B2B Revenue Cycle
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Reducing Unnecessary CRO and CMO Turnover – Six Alignment Checks to Troubleshoot Go-To-Market Issues
Introduction The list of soundbite issues that cause CRO and CMO replacement is long: We have all heard these issues either directly when a recruiter calls or when we get an explanation for why an executive has been replaced. The problem with these sound bites, and the problem with acting on these soundbites, is that…
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How Ditching Personas Led Me to Six Practical Positioning Frameworks
A few companies ago, I joined as CMO after the previous CMO had spent considerable time and effort developing personas and ICPs. There were ten cardboard cutouts in the office to help reinforce the personas. These efforts were not out of the ordinary, and I was super impressed with the level of execution. There was…
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10 Tips for Marketing After an Acquisition
Congratulations! Your PE back company has just made its first acquisition. Now assuming the purpose of the transaction wasn’t just for the technology, what do you do next? This post comes from being on both sides of these transactions and, worse, joining companies after they had been on an acquisition spree, and the resulting roll-up…
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10 Marketing Lessons From Working as a PE Operating Partner
After running numerous marketing and sales teams over the years, I had the opportunity to be an operating partner at a private equity firm for two years. Operating Partners perform due diligence on potential investments, serve as interim operating executives where needed, do short-term projects in the portfolio companies and just generally support the portfolio…
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How a Corporate Messaging Update Can Break Your SEO Machine
Corporate messaging updates are common occurrence for a marketing team. Usually driven by the need to adjust to market dynamics, corporate messaging updates have the potential to impact site conversion in a negative manner. I once badly messed up a company because I redid the website to make it “on message”. The temptation to make…
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SDR Staffing Metrics – Start with Lead Quality and Volume
My last post dealt with five successful ways to deploy BDRs/SDRs for an organization. Use case #3 was inbound lead catcher. With this strategy, a BDR processes inbound leads and moves them to the next stage in the buyers journey. This post deals with understanding the capacity requirements to successfully implement this approach. When BDRs…
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BDRs – Five Use Cases for Success
(How not to build then dissolve your BDR team) There are a couple of flip flopping decisions that companies make on a routine base. Product marketing, for example, flips between marketing and product management. Product management is sometimes its own function, but other times it gets stuffed into engineering. Customer success teams can come and…
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Shifting to Product-led Growth
A common theme in a lot of CMO searches is the desire to find someone who knows how to do product-led growth models. The story for the hiring companies is somewhat similar – a company is looking to drive more volume sales with freemium models, or more e-commerce from what is today a classic MQL/SQL…
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7 Reasons Not To Modify Your CRM
A LinkedIn post the other week from someone who got HubSpot for Christmas got me thinking back to the simplicity and efficiency of having a fresh CRM without modifications. After working 20+ years with CRMs as a CMO, COO and VP of Sales, the modifications we do to our CRMs rarely provide the value we…
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Five Ways to Be the cMo – chief Mentoring officer
One of the best parts of being a CMO is mentoring sales and marketing talent. Mentoring shouldn’t just be 1:1, however. The key is to build an entire culture and organization that supports mentorship and career growth. Here is my list of 5 ways to create a mentoring culture in marketing and to become the…
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