2x CMO Sydney Sloan on helping Salesloft grow from $15M-$100M, Salesloft vs. Outreach vs. Clari, stunts, predictable revenue, managing the budget, managing your career in B2B marketing

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My guest on this episode is Sydney Sloan. She's the former CMO at Salesloft. Okay, Sydney Sloan, nice to finally get to interview you. We never actually spent a bunch of time together. We crossed paths at G2 a couple years ago in Chicago. It might have been my last like pre pandemic event. But I've wanted to get a chance to interview you. You've had an awesome career and you've done some really great stuff at a company a lot of people here will know, which is Salesloft. So thank you for doing this and I'm excited to get the chance to chat with you for a little bit.

I'm excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Okay, so you just spent how long at salesloft?

Little over three and a half years. 15. Let's see. I started what we were 15 million and finished over 130.

Holy cow.

This last. So it was a crazy run. Yeah.

Okay, so three and a half years ago, ish, you joined. Salesloft is doing 15 million. They're looking for a CMO. Take me back to that point in time. Who you were, what Salesloft was looking for and what like the mission was back then. And then we'll kind of go from there.

Yeah. So it was the first cmo, they were hired. They just took their C round, which is, I think a lot of times when CMOs get put in.

So they've grown to 15. Like they had marketing as a function.

Just they had marketing as a function. I think There may be 15 people. There was a VP that was leading the team and, you know, had some great, like grassroots, you know, stunt marketing and did some really crazy things at Dreamforce that, you know, we could go back and tell stories about. I wasn't there, but they still talk about them. And Benny offered president and like, it's great, great, you know, trying to build the brand.

Can you tell me about that? Even though you weren't there? What is this?

Benioffer, President Benioff for president. So they decided, and this probably would have been 2,000, gosh, maybe 14, 14, 15, that they were going to run a campaign for Benioff for president. And so they were looking for a Benioff lookalike and actually had a customer that looked like Benioff. And so the head of marketing and the CEO dressed up like security guards and they had Benioff for president little buttons and they were handing out flyers. And Mark got wind of it and was like, you got. And he came and he met the guy, came to the sales loft booth, met the guy, shook his hand, was like, this is great. I'm not running. And then, oh, shoot. The guy from. Adrian from.

Oh, it's Entourage.

Entourage, yes. Heard about that and like tweeted about it. And so we wrote a blog about the whole experience. It was one of the highest read blogs.

So this was. This was like Salesloft was going to Dreamforce. Like they had a booth at Dreamforce. What kind of like startup stunt could they pull to just basically get attention at the event? And they ended up getting Marc Benioff himself.

Yep.

That's amazing.

Adrian tweeted about it and everybody heard about it and the buzz was definitely there. So.

And then they were like, and next year we need a grown up to come in and run marketing here.

Well, actually they decided to do another stunt that didn't go so well. And then they decided, is that anything.

You could talk about or.

No, sure. I mean, Kyle probably wouldn't love it, but they decided to shoot $2 bills out of a money cannon and apparently where they over the bridge. And so they were flying around and they got into one of the. He was a cnbc one of the squawk box. I think it's his. His show. And so he didn't appreciate dollar bills flying into the show when he was on air and got tweeted about it. And so again, all attention. Press is good attention. But that one was like, well, maybe it's great.

It's been a while. It's been a little bit since I've heard. I didn't know those stories. It's been a bit since I've heard.

Like a good old fashioned stunt social marketing. Yeah.

That's amazing. The Marc Benioff lookalike. Okay, so you, you get there. What were you doing before? Like just to give some context.

Yeah. And I think it's probably good, you know, for people that are thinking about careers and planning. I had just been a CMO at a company called Alfresco. It was my first time being a cmo and I got some really great advice from a friend of mine that was said, you know, you get the CMO job the first time and it was a good company. It was in content management and we were a disruptor and we reshaped the category and so we had a lot of successes. Went from like 75 million to 110. So it was a big company for my first time CMO. But my friend said the next time, really be specific about the company you pick. Now that you're a cmo, the company become a CMO for and the next one is super important. And I spent, gosh, five or six months, I probably did 30 or 40 interviews. I talked to all the VC talent people and got to know a lot of the recruiters and settled in on sales tech. Like, you know what, I don't want to do martech. It's too crowded. I'd been in a developer company where, you know, marketing was important, but it wasn't. I couldn't go to conferences and talk about what we were selling and I wanted to have a role in it. And gosh, here comes sales tech. And so I actually interviewed at salesoft, Outreach and Clary. They were all getting funding rounds about the same time.

Wow.

And.

And they were, they were all hiring a CMO at the same time.

At the same time. And all great companies. And for me, I chose based on culture and the opportunity to learn and leadership. Those were the things that were important to me. Product, of course, like that was what the category was.

I think, I think you. Even before that though, I just did a podcast earlier with Emily and Kathleen from Market One MKT One. They both were first time early stage B2B SaaS, marketing leaders at multiple companies, Carta, Intercom, some other places. And they just were talking about how important industry fit is from a hiring standpoint. And it's like you might not have worked in sales tech before, but you can be in that world. And that just has such an underrated Part of figuring out where you want to go to marketing is like, where can you go Be successful based on what you know and what you feel comfortable about. Because if it's a, if it's a market that you have no idea about, like I always say I would be a terrible like developer tools or like cybersecurity cmo, because that's just not a thing that I'm, that I'm in. But it's interesting to hear how that was such a key part of like your first principal decision making process.

I was just advising somebody yesterday the same thing. I'm like, you know, she's a VP of product marketing and she wants to have a path. And I said, go somewhere where you know the industry already because then you can learn the other parts about being a cmo. And I knew the alfresco industry too. I knew content management and I marketed to developers. But. And that makes it a lot easy because you're learning other things. Like for her, she had to learn demand gen and metrics and budgeting. And so if you already know the market, that's going to make it a lot.

But at least it's those things on a topic that you know you're not also trying to like learn the industry. Okay, so you had been CMO before. You have a success, you have a win with Alfresco, you kind of get to pick this next level of your career is like you get to go pick now where you want to be cmo. You have this hopefully bidding war between these three companies in the same space. You go there. What is the mission for you coming in? In that first year, there's 15 people on the marketing team. The company's about 15 million in revenue. What do you come in as a new cmo and what did you focus on?

Doing first was always, for me it's about the team. And there's two teams. The first team and the most important one is my peers. And what role am I going to play in leadership. And I even told my leaders, the direct report leaders in marketing at the time. I'm going to spend a disproportional amount of time with the head of sales, the cfo, the CEO, and build the relationships with the leadership team so I can, I can lead first. And we'll also work on our team in the structure, which is the second part. It's like really figuring out from a functional design what's the right design for the team. What I generally do is like 18 months from now, like what does the team need to look like 18 months from now? So we know what our hiring plan is into the future and Then we can start creating pathways for people and in different roles as we know the team is going to expand. And I think that was important because what happened was that marketing went from this great. We produced Rainmaker annual event. We had these great stunts, but literally they sat on a different floor in a different tower next to finance, and they didn't sit next to the SDR team or the sales team. And it was like, wow, what is going on here? And so I really was focused on integrating marketing into the way that the business was run outside of producing great events. And that was probably the first success, was really working with the other leaders, building a cohesive go to market, and then partnering across the business for where can marketing help? Yes, of course, demand gen. And we need to build a predictable engine over time, but also in sales and in customer success for driving adoption. And those relationships hadn't really been formed yet based on kind of where the company was at at that stage.

Because it's got to be tough for you to come in and develop the right marketing strategy. There's so much nuance in a marketing strategy and so many ingredients. How can you develop the right marketing strategy if you don't know, what does the CFO want? What are the company's growth goals, and how does that match? Like, the way we're doing marketing? Do you have a budget? Do you not have a budget? Do you have CAC goals? One thing I learned is you don't have to make those things up on your own. As the marketing leader, it's like you have this peer. So finance is one example. Head of sales. What do you go into those conversations to do and how do you do it other than like, hey, cfo, let's get coffee. Like, how did you actually go and build that relationship? Let's talk about the CFO, specifically, just to give an example.

Okay, we'll talk about the cfo, but let's come back to, like, how do you do the strategy piece? So I had a fantastic relationship with Chad Golda. Such a great guy. And what was important for me, and I think this just has a little bit to do with my DNA too. And how I grew up was that he trusted me. I always think that I'm a steward of the company's investment to drive revenue. That's what marketing is. And so I wanted him to know how seriously I took that. And so I sat in his office and I said, hey, I balance my checkbook every month. I have one credit card that I pay off. And I just wanted him to know how fiscally responsible of a person I was. And here's my goal. My goal is that I'm going to spend 101% of my budget every quarter. And the reason I say that is because I never want my team to hold back from spending. I want them to always think about how can I spend just a little bit more on the things that work. So we're always moving forward versus, like, oh, I don't know if I can afford that. I mean, it took time. Like we were running in QuickBooks and you know, we weren't tracking any. You know, it was like, what analyst report are we? You know, it's a. But bills were coming at us that we had not budgeted. I didn't know about the budget for. So it took us maybe two or three quarters with this team, but we had a great rhythm. And that trust. Then when you have a great idea and you need funding, then you can ask for it because you built the trust over time.

So this 101% of budget thing, can we talk about that a little bit more? Because I see a lot of marketing leaders that are afraid to use the budget or don't know how to use the budget. But I feel like it takes the wisdom of a second time CMO to come in with the gusto of saying we're going to spend 101%. So just why is it so important to spend the budget?

Because that's what fuels the demand if you're actually doing your job.

I thought you're supposed to brag about how you don't spend the budget and you have all this budget left over, but it doesn't seem like that's the goal.

No, no, no, no, no. They give you a budget for a reason. You're not spending it, you're not fulfilling what you've been asked to do. And you're given the budget based on targets that you need to hit. And guess what, you can overachieve on the targets. And if you're overachieving on the targets, you could keep spending. So the last year we were like at 150, 160% of our target. And I was over budget, but like a million and a half, I think. But I told my CFO I was doing it. The numbers were still coming in, you know, and we were still producing 70% of the net new business and that new logo. So, like, you have to keep. Why hold back if the demand is there that you can go get?

Because at the CFO level, basically, if the company grows, then the percentage can be the same, but it's a bigger percentage and so they're happy to fund that growth. It's conversations about getting more budget when you're not growing. That's where it comes hard. But I've put myself in a situation multiple times where the team, we were not hitting our goals and we were not spending our budget and that was the most frustrating place to be in. It's like you missed a number this quarter and we were 50 grand short on budget because that just shows me that there was a gap, there was a mistake that I made because if you have 50 grand and you had to go solve X problem, you probably could go solve it or at least make progress towards. And so that was an eye opening thing for me, which is, oh yeah, the mature CMO spends the budget. Why do they give it to you if you're not going to use it?

And if you're not using it, then they'll take it back and then you won't get it back.

Yeah, I think this budget stuff and like the people management stuff was the stuff that I really didn't think about. I was like, I use my ability as a marketer to become like cmo. But it was like these are the two areas that like, I just think people don't understand. Like this is what being CMO is about. It's this part. It's the building the team, it's the people management stuff.

You know, that's what you spend most of your time doing. Once you get in the bigger, you know, when the companies get bigger and bigger, you spend a lot of time talking about budget, about plans, aligning across the business, forecasting. My favorite meeting was in the joint pipeline meeting. We had it every other week for a while and then went to every other month and we went across the entire business. So it started with marketing in terms of marketing generated pipeline. So we were looking at pipeline generation. And then the SDR team would talk about across our inbound and outbound teams, kind of where they're performing across different segments. And then the sales team would talk about pipeline coverage. So what do we have in terms of coverage for the quarter and where we might have had gaps? And then the renewals team would come in and talk about renewals, churn risk, all in one meeting. So all the leaders across the business, the CFO and we would talk about the business and it was awesome.

So I mean you put this emphasis on building these relationships. In addition to that, I got to get my team right, but I also, I'm not going to be able to manage the team the right way unless I have these relationships.

And I think it also helps making sure that marketing just isn't like where's my leads kind of role. And instead it's the partnership and setting the strategy and go to market, aligning with sales, leadership and product on the markets we're going to go after and why and which ones go after and why.

Sometimes you have to get like there might not be a direct revenue thing that you're like working with CS on but like you have them to want to be your partner and it's not always a good thing.

It's totally direct revenue though. There's retention which is huge. There's growth, upsell, cross, sell.

Well, I meant more like just like a one off campaign. Like I think sometimes you have to just like go do things to make other teams and people happy for the relationship building standpoint. Because it only works when you're all like when you all believe in each other and like have the same goals and like you're not like I don't know what she's doing over there.

Yeah. And that could be as simple as offering like there was a new woman that was promoted into a VP role and just reaching out and saying, hey, I know you're new at this, I'm happy to help coach you, mentor you in this role. I want you to be successful.

So yeah, okay, so we go back sales off 15 million. Once you build the internal relationships, then you gotta go build a team. Can you talk about your team structure and philosophy? Like from 15 million to a hundred million, what was the team? What did it turn into? Who reported to who? What's your kind of like preferred team structure?

So I always start with functional design first and I don't have a preferred team structure. And as like here's my formula, I think it really depends on the business and what parts of the business need more of my attention or not. And so I'll give a couple examples of that. So first I always start with functional design. Like here's functionally, you know, here's product marketing, here's communications, here's demand gen, here's customer marketing. And kind of write out what the responsibilities of those functions are. And I try to do that 18 months from now. So it's like, where's the business going to be? Okay, we're going to be a $35 million company. Like what does our team need to look like to support a $35 million business? Or when I was leaving it was like 250, like what does a $250 million marketing team look like? Let's design that. And I do it with my leaders and then we pull it back and create different scenarios to create career pathways for our top performers.

How do you come up with the benchmarks? So I see a lot of people ask questions about like team size benchmarks. Did you have any help from like finance or others on data of like, if it's 250 million, this is how big marketing can be. Are you making up team size numbers?

No, I would lean on our investment partners. So Insight partners, I use a lot like they're Vista company now. Vista would have that. And so I would review the org design. I would get what their org design principles were. They generally all have a view. When they have centers of excellence, then Gary's service at Insight is just amazing to work with. I would lean on them and that we would use that as a validation. When I was putting the plan together for the hiring plan. And then like I said, like the leadership team, I do a nine box process twice a year. So it goes around with merit. But. And we were growing so fast. And when you use a nine box, which is really about mapping potential with performance, that the people that were high potential, high performers should be in a path to being promoted. And so it's like if they're up in the top, right, then they need to be on a promotion path within the next three months because the market's so hot and people were recruiting from successful companies that they needed to feel that movement. And then once they're promoted, they go back to the center box and then they get to prove themselves. And so that's how we would look at top performers and making sure we had career pathways for them.

What is a nine box process?

So you can look it up just if you Google nine box, it is nine boxes that are low, medium, high potential on the vertical axis. And on the horizontal axis it's low, medium and high performance.

There we go.

They actually give labels for each one.

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But the idea is that you're mapping people based on their performance and potential against the role that they're in. So it's not against everybody on the team. You're mapping it against like what is my expectation for this role and this person in this role. And then if you're really good and I had a leader do this, so I modeled it after Elisa Steele where you openly discuss it as a leadership team. And so everybody does their own team and then the leadership team gets together and we share and we talk about people because maybe a leader has a expectation of a person in the role, but someone that works with them on another team doesn't or didn't even know that person was a high potential. And so they can invite them into a project that they're working on. And so it's a really responsible way in my mind using the leadership team to create the team and to make sure that there's those open opportunities. And you know, if somebody goes from one team to another, like we had a guy go from the comms team to Demandine because we were creating a new team. We're talking about it holistically. So it's definitely a philosophy that I believe in. Transparency with the budget, transparency with your people. Like leadership.

It gives the marketing leaders, I work with that person on the creative team. I didn't know that their boss views them in that light or I didn't know that they're actually not good to work with because you're not involved. And it's like a lot of the work stuff can be caught up in who's nice at the water cooler or whatever, but you don't actually know. So and so might not be like they're the right person in and they.

Might respond to every slack but they're actually not doing their day job. You know, like wait, they're really like, they're like, yeah, but they're not performing.

So if I'm director of product marketing and I'm on your team because in order to do this nine box, it probably can't just be like subjective on how you feel. Do you have some type of like scorecard first or bullets for like how you define. Here's what we expect the director of product marketing role at this company to be and then we use this nine buck system. Or is it more just like kind of you.

It's more subjective. Like you don't have to overthink it. I did have that at one point where we were doing baseball cards on every person.

Right.

You know what their strengths, where their development areas. I mean it's just a lot of work.

It's just like trying to get to the same result. Here's how your boss assesses where you are. So you're supposed to be these are my expectations.

Yeah. And then people are like, absolutely, that person's knocking out of the park. They have huge potential. Or gosh, we thought they had potential, but it's not happening. And. And then collectively too you're seeing how people are moving and, and sometimes people move up and sometimes they slide back and there's different reasons. And what is that reason? Did they have something going on in their life? You would give them a job that they weren't ready for? And we need to re scope the role. And again we're talking about it as a leadership team, like how do we make sure. And I think this is as a leader I enjoy doing the most, getting people into the right role. When that magic happens, like I moved this woman from product marketing to analyst relations. Oh my God. She found her space in the world and it was just so wonderful to see and she was so good at it. And that's an example of the org design where that year, one of our three objectives for marketing was to be the leader. We knew the category was going to be formed and so it's like we got to have somebody dedicated to analyst relations and that person's going to report to me because I need to be directly involved. And then over time she ended up reporting to the head of communications, which is hard because you go off the leadership team. But she was, we talked about it openly. She knew it was going to happen. I just actually was texting her before getting on this and she's still building, you know, a team, she's still learning, she's taken on customer marketing. But at that point in time it was important for her to directly report to me because that was one of the most important initiatives that we were working on in that year.

And like, holy cow, how much leverage did you just get because you found this role on your existing team, like if you like had a cold role and you posted that, you know, head of analyst relations, it probably wouldn't have been as good of a fit.

So the leverage marketers make great AR people.

This is awesome. People love the behind the scenes on the team stuff. Also, I think it gives you another framework to hold people accountable. As the marketing leader who's like, you have somebody on the team who's been a low performer month over month over month over month and the team is dragging, unfortunately, you're going to have to have a hard conversation. You're going to have to learn for the first time how to manage this person out of the team. And I think that can also be a thing of that is like how long do you let someone go on? And when you don't have that transparent process across the team, then nobody really knows how to manage that process.

You're so right. And what's magical about it in a, you know, in a Positive learning way. Because a lot of, you know, when you have leaders, there were some leaders that had been leading for a long time. You have new leaders and they still depend on each other. They don't always come to me. And so the relationship they have, like my team, one was the executive leadership team, their team, one was their leadership team. And when we're in those conversations, then after the fact, they can hold themselves accountable to each as well. So, you know, I know that someone contacted someone, was like, hey, you know what, you put that person down in the bottom left last time and you haven't managed him out yet.

Like, and, and by the way, that person keeps dropping the ball with my team when we're trying to do X.

Like, you got it, you got to take care of that. Like, as much as we hope this person, it's not changing there. It's a wrong fit for the role and you have to do the hard.

Part, which is great. It like totally gives you the tools to facilitate because it's not just like you as the cmo just like having these like side conversations with everybody. You're. You're basically putting, the team's got to operate and you're going to make everybody talk to each other and work together through that.

And when they do that and we lead collectively, then, you know, our job is to work ourselves out of a job. And so, you know, I had to, I had a health issue. I had to be off for four weeks and everything kept running amazing.

I mean, not your health issue, but like, amazing that like you could, you can go and do that and like come back and like, probably the leverage that that created, like you were gone for a month. The team probably bonded while you were out and like had to figure things out on their own. You come back, you're like, stepped in.

Helped each other swim, you know, got up to the leadership level and took over and got that exposure. And you know, we should all be creating leadership teams that can hold it up, you know, so we can continue to challenge ourselves or take breaks when we need to.

And to the many stressed out, overworked marketing leaders that we all know, how many marketing leaders, Cindy, do you know that you mentor or talk to that are like, I can't take time off, I can't. No, I can't. Well, like, that's a huge red flag to me about the health of the organization where if like you as the marketing leader can't give yourself a week off or four days off or two days off because you think the team is going to collapse without you, then like whoa, then this is where you got to learn how to manage yourself and manage your team.

Yeah, exactly. 100% agree. Like your job is to build a high functioning leadership team. There's. It's actually my personal mission now if you look on my LinkedIn is to be a Level 5 leader and working in life and to lead by example and level five leaders coach level four leaders which then are able to direct leaders. So when a team is getting like I think my team at Salesoft when I left was about 70 people and at that point then you know you've got two or three levels of leadership and so you have to manage people differently. If they're first time manager with their or third time manager that manage people who manage people, there's different requirements that they need from you. And so to understand all those different levels is important.

Let's switch gears from team stuff and just talk about, let's talk about tactics for a second. You come in going from 15 million to a hundred million over three years. Amazing. Nice little number to put on your LinkedIn profile. Were there specific things that Salesloft was underinvested in from a marketing standpoint that you kind of plugged the gap because there's so many 10 to 15 million dollars revenue companies that don't have the full marketing playbook. I'm just interested to hear what, what it was at salesloft that you kind of saw.

I think there were a couple of things I we did well and then there's a couple of things I wish we would have done better. And there's so many pieces to the equations of what creates success. I think for us we were in a very hot market and a very competitive situation. And so the companies got to draft off each other for a lot of that. Like, you know, people were part of the like who's going to win. And so that created a lot of market dynamic that was good for both companies. What we didn't have was the way that we were running when I got there marketing it was like all leads went to SDRs, there was no lead management, there was no lead scoring. So we hadn't really invested in the engine and you know, a little bit of that. You know, the founder believed that the only reason marketing did get to him is because Outbound didn't get it to him first. But when you're scaling at that stage, when you get to 50, you know, it's not sustainable. And so one thing that we did was we moved the inbound team into Marketing and kept the outbound team in sales. And boy, did that ever change everything. Like immediately our numbers went up, like by 237% because we were tracking, we were finding the top producing lead form. You know, like from the time you fill out a form to the time you talk to somebody, you know, was over a day, guess what? We got it down to under two minutes.

You say you moved to inbound. You like, like SDRs, like inbound.

Inbound SDR team started reporting to marketing and that was a massive change.

And I think too, you can probably just split the funnel. Like it just makes it like, okay, sales is going to own all this outbound stuff. Marketing is. Well, they're going to close inbound. But we, it gives you like a very kind of vacuum sealed look at like what do you own and where should you focus?

Right at the time we started, we still had that separation and then we decided, you know what, we're going to handle all inbound, even if an SDR had already been touching. Because we've got this process nailed. Like our inbound SDRs knew how to take those first calls and convert them into meetings. And we were able to change the messaging on our website based on the questions. They're like, you know what? I always get this question. I don't understand exactly what we do. Are we a CRM or a marketing automation? Well, guess what, that was the opening line to our website. And so we filtered all of those calls out. So we're having high quality calls. And what ended up happening, Dave, was the segments started to change and so we were, we were running kind of an SMB play. And then we had enterprise. So we were doing account based strategies for enterprise for which outbound is the primary. And for SMB, inbound was the primary. And when we went into new markets like Europe, Inbound was the primary. We were building awareness, we were driving demand and inbound was, you know, generating 70, 80% of net new business. And so we were funded like that too, because we knew where it was coming from. But that also gave us the mechanics and the measurement to start giving credit to marketing, which hadn't happened before because everything was going through outbound. And so it was like every deal started with outbound versus starting with what brought the customer to the party.

What was it that worked about the strategy and product marketing of. You mentioned it earlier, there's three competitors in the space. Everyone's kind of shopping between I want to buy sales, engagement, whatever you call it, I'm going to look at sales loft I'm going to look at outreach, I'm going to look at clarity. How did you think about marketing within that context? Because I think you have to know that coming in, you're driving a ton of demand from inbound. How are you competing in that world?

I think you have to know, are we first in or are we second in? So if outreach got to them first, we'd run a different play than if we got to them first.

How would you know that?

Could you know that when they would come in inbound, generally in the inquiry call, you'd be like, are you already talking to somebody else? And like, oh, yeah, we're already, you know, and so. Or no, we, we heard about you and, and so the conversation is very different because are you setting the stage or are you responding to somebody else who set the stage? And we ran very, very dedicated, competitive takeout plays. We had, you know, if all the SEO in the world, you know, and, and we all, we were all watching what each other was doing. So, you know, of course by the minute we were, we would update it, but, you know, there were definitely specific. We would, we would treat it differently. Did we land first or did they land first?

And how did you think about measuring content? Because I think Salesloft did a great job of like putting out a lot of good content for salespeople into the world. It's not a direct response funnel. You know, I didn't just read your blog post and call sales, so. But with inbound and content being such a part of your business, how are you thinking about measuring content?

Well, I mean, I have to give credit where credit is due. Gong did that the best. Gong nailed content like you guys did.

And theirs was mostly like LinkedIn and then like two kind of long form things a month.

Exactly. I mean, and they're still doing the same formula, but it's really working. It was, you know, drive awesome content for salespeople, regardless if it's aligned with their product or not, and then get them to click on it, sign up to the newsletter, send the newsletter to them, build up their database, build up fans and followers, and hats off. I think that was. I advise people all the time to copy the Gong model, but you have.

To have the patience. Like, I think you have to have the intention and the patience. And the intention I think is like, we want to build an audience of salespeople so we can then sell them. That's different than like, because it doesn't work if, like, in that Gong example, if the day after you sign up for the newsletter, which is just strictly content. If the VBA sales wants to call those leads, that also doesn't work. It's like, you have to have the vision and be like, no, we're building this content strategy because we want to build an audience and over time, we're going to nurture them into X.

Just keep talking. I mean, you're the master at this point. This is what happens.

Exactly. Everybody wants to do that. Everybody wants to do this. But I think you said it the way that you described how Gong did it, which is like, you have to just back all the way out and be like, Dave and Sidney are going to build a media company and it's going to be a blog and a podcast for sales pros. You and I would have much more success building that if we didn't work at a software company. Because oftentimes that's where all the nuance comes in. Well, oh, we want to sell to those leads or we want to do X or how are we going to measure that? Who's going to fund that? But I think that's when it works best. You saw this with it's why outreach buys sales hacker, for example. But this is exactly the gong and the drift and the salesloft content stuff just played out.

So the two things that I think we could have done better on was content and community. And so on the content front, like, I did measure, yeah, like, which are the best performing blogs and what assets are being used and shared. But what I would do differently is be more specific on the audiences. I think we were trying to cover too many audiences and then you start mixing messages. So we wanted to have what happens if you're running account based. And so we need to talk to marketers that care about account base. And what happens if, you know, we need to talk to SDRs because they. But now we want to talk to sales leaders. And so we were trying to really cover too many audiences with the same message, which doesn't work. And so I think, you know, we started to refine it down and say, no, we just want to talk to these audiences. I'm doing some advisory work for Sales Impact Academy right now. And like, same thing. It's like, really know your. Like, who do you want to talk to?

It's almost like if you use sales office example, like, it's almost easier to do better content marketing in the early days. Like, it's easier to do better content marketing at 15 million because you kind of only have one Persona, one product. But yeah, I don't blame you. Like, at a hundred million, there's all these different business lines and priorities and units and like, well, we don't just sell to one person. This is like, so how do we come up with a content strategy that appeals to all those.

A hundred percent, 100%. And what I think when I look back at it, you know, for people that follow the sales, tech industry clearly went after the sales leader. So they were going after sales leadership and Gong was going after the account executives and the others were. The other ones were a little bit mixed. Hold on.

I'm not cutting this out, by the way. That was for the listeners. Nobody heard anything. It just was silence. And I said, I'm not cutting this out.

Thank you. My parents don't understand podcasts yet.

Who does? Who?

There's the dog. It's all good.

I usually have naked children come sprinting in right about now.

So that's my little puppy right there. Where is she?

Mine is on the couch behind me right now.

Lucy, it's sleeping. Lucy makes appearance for a pretty common. Sorry about that, Dave.

No, this is great. What's your opinion on category creation? What does that mean?

It's like a necessary evil. I mean, I've created categories, I've reshaped categories, I've tried and failed to create categories. I mean, first of all, it's hard, right? It's hard to create a category. The benefit of creating a category is all of a sudden people budget for it. You know, it's a. It's a line item. It's, you know, like, I know I need to get sales engagement or I know I need to get conversational marketing and who should I go for? And then, and then as long as you're in the top, right, you know, you're going to get a shot at the business. And so I think it's important for, you know, with especially industries that are growing so fast, like when Martech exploded, like, how on earth could you keep track of those 7,000 companies? So you had to start putting them in categories. So you like, how do these fit together? When do I need what? And so I think for that reason, just to organize all the pieces, you know, it's helpful to have categories.

Like, do you define it as recognized by X Analyst Report?

I think it's different stages now. So I love peer reviews. So I'm a big fan of G2 and TrustRadius because I think that they've made it easier to see early stage categories form and the rallying of companies behind those categories much sooner than the traditional analyst. And so my experience has been like working with the peer review site to try and think about how these categories fit together.

That was a big deal for us at Drift. I think we didn't do. There was Gartner validation, but I think the bigger deal was there was now a category on G2 for conversational marketing. And even, same in your world, there was a category for sales engagement. It's just interesting to think about how people should think about what's the thing that they want. How do you define category creation? Because I think there's also another side of this that gets mixed up in this, which is all just like, what do you want to be known for? There might not be. Where do you rank on Forrester and Gartner and G2, but what do you want to be known for? And so whether G2 validates it or not, if people start saying salesloft is sales engagement, that to me is also category. It's like, how do people talk about you?

Yeah. And I think too, Dave, it gives you a chance. There's two other pieces of it that's really important from a marketer's perspective. When you're talking about categories, you're talking about a vision for what can be, not what product I'm selling now. So all of a sudden, you could talk about the category. You could shape the category into something that's a step or two ahead of where your product's at. And people buy into the vision of the category and what it can be. And then you talk, you know, your sellers sell what's on the truck. So I always say there's a difference between the way that marketing markets, the vision and the category, and then how we support sellers for what we have today. That is the foundation for what the category can come from.

So good. I'm clipping that out. That's going to be my clip. Because this is the number one thing that companies I work with, people I'm talking to, whatever. This is the number one thing. It's like, well, but this story doesn't match what we sell today. It's like, great. This is not the homepage. The homepage is like, I'm in your store. What things do you have available on the menu today? But also I want to tell you a little about. A little about how this is not the only thing that we're building. Here's where we're going, here's why, here's how we see the market. Because then you go back to a scenario where it's like, Sales off, outreach and clarity. Well, one way to win in that market is to have vision and to say we can solve this problem today, but also here's where we're going to go and imagine a world where we can blank. And so the way you articulated that about what the sellers are doing versus what the vision is, I think is really spot on.

Yeah. I actually have a picture that I write on whiteboard that's like vision, reality and it's like, here's marketing messaging, here's sales messaging and where they intersect and why they're different.

Yeah. Okay, let's wrap up in two minutes. Give me some common advice that you share with people privately. Mentorship about the path to cmo. Things that you've learned, one or two things that you wish you knew. Then give us some CMO wisdom.

The first one is that you don't have to have done every job in order to lead people. I think that was a fallacy that I had early on is like, I have to have demand gen experience. I have to have this, I have to have that. And it's like, no, no, you don't. Like almost it's impossible in marketing. Believe me, you don't want me doing your creative and or nor do you.

Want me doing your math. So it's okay.

Yeah. So you know it like recognize what you're good at. Hire. I mean this is common, right? Like, you know, where's your gaps and how do you learn enough to be able to direct them but and empower them to do that and learn over time.

Don't you feel like you learn a lot? Like if you pick one channel product marketing, don't you feel like you learn those other things? Because ultimately you become a peer of those other functions and you're working with them and you kind of get that.

By working with those As a CMO or as the peer coming up like.

On the path to cmo, like instead of worrying about being everything, if you become, you know, VP of Product marketing or Director of Product marketing, you're going to have to collaborate with demand gen. You're going to have to collaborate with content. So like focus on that.

Yeah. I spent 15 years in product marketing at Adobe, so I do think that is the one role where you get exposed to a lot of the business and cross functionally, where maybe in creative you don't get that same experience.

So I do think there's a lot of CMOs.

Yeah, product marketers make great CMOs, but so do great demand gen or brand experience, depending on what the Company needs. And so that's generally what I say is like really understand where your strengths are. And I think that CMOs do have to understand demand gen now. I think it's such a core part of what we do. And I know when I got into my first CMO role, that was probably my weakest area. And so I spent a lot of time with serious decisions advisory and I hired someone who was really, really good and I hired an agency that was really, really good and just tried to soak up, teach me, let me learn. Like, you know, make sure you know the, the great thing about the serious decisions. It was called the CMOS CMO Advisory Service. It was like, it felt like I was on guardrails. Like I couldn't, you know, they were making sure I didn't make big mistakes. And so, you know, if you have the capacity to get mentors or to get advisory services. As a first time cmo, I think it's. It was super helpful for me and I recommend it to others.

That's great. So like help with strategy and decision making. Like just give you something to react to models.

Like, you know, that was the time where we're changing from waterfall to account based strategies. It's like, well, what should I have? Like, do we have mql? Do we not have mql? You know, like all of a sudden that world was turning upside down. And I would say the same for product marketers if we're going to product. Like every time I hire a product marketer, if they haven't taken the pragmatic product marketing course, I invest in that. It is the foundation. You will learn so much and then have a common way that you can approach it. So you know there's good resources out there.

Well, especially like when you have common ways to approach and manage things, I think that gives you a big advantage too.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Sydney Sloan, this was amazing. I could talk to you for another hour at least. But you. We all have other things to do, so thank you for doing this. A little bit of a glimpse into your experience at Salesloft and your life as a two time cmo. You are Sid Sloan on Twitter and sid Sloan on LinkedIn. But most people have already seen your year. We'll link to all your stuff. I appreciate you. I hope we can talk more in the future and I'll see you around.

Thanks, Dave.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and Check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast setting and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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