• A Guide to Adding Roles to a Marketing Team – Roadmap to the 22 Core Marketing Skills

    A Guide to Adding Roles to a Marketing Team – Roadmap to the 22 Core Marketing Skills

    Startups start with a single marketer. They can get a lot done. These first marketers feel empowered to do anything to drive revenue, from email marketing to paid advertising to content marketing. What is the right second hire? Or third? Or fourth? Here is a list of nine suggestions for building your marketing organization. #1) Hire…

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  • Reducing Unnecessary CRO and CMO Turnover – Six Alignment Checks to Troubleshoot Go-To-Market Issues

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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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