#87: Metrics That Matter, Product Marketing, The Path To CMO - with Lindsay Bayuk, CMO, Pluralsight

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike, and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more.

This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Demandwell. Building an effective SEO keyword strategy is especially challenging for B2B SaaS marketers, since the highest intent terms that we have often have low search volumes. And don't even get me started on how hard it is to do this with SEO if you're taking a category creation approach. If you go after the right keywords, though, your SEO can drive demand, but it's a delicate balance of relevance, intent, competition, and being able to listen to your market as an Exit 5 listener. Here's some help with your SEO you can schedule a keyword feasibility assessment to determine if your market, category and audience have the search volume and intent required for SEO to be a successful channel for your business. Schedule your free assessment right now@demandwell.com keywords that's demandwell.com keywords and get yourself some SEO help. You don't have to do this alone. 1, 2, 3, 4. Exit.

Exit, exit. Hi, Dave.

Whoa. It works.

I mean, we got there, we got there.

Wait, are you backstage or did you just hop on? Sweet.

I think I hopped on.

All right. Because I just hit Go Live. I was, like, waiting for you in the back and then you weren't there. And then I click Go Live and people are coming in live.

I'm seeing participants. So, yeah, I think.

Awesome. How are you? Did you have a. Did you have a board meeting today or you got rescheduled or you're. That's what you did before this?

I had an exec meeting that was hopping around the calendar, but we're in the clear now.

What's going on at pluralsight these days?

What's not going on? Well, we just wrapped a board meeting and we got a month ago in Q2, so we're just focusing on finishing Q2 strong.

Have you made the entire company shift? Is. Are you going to become an AI company like everybody else right now?

Yeah, of course. That's what everyone's. No, no. Exploring it like everyone else. But we haven't changed the name of the company yet.

Not yet. All right, so you're here, and the reason that you're here is because people have told me that they want to do more. They want to hear more about the path to cmo, what a high performing CMO does. And you and I have done some stuff in the past, and you're really great and easy to talk to, and I think this is going to be great. So we're testing this out in our new platform. So this will be streamed for members only. The people who are here will be members. But I'm also going to take this audio and use it for the Exify podcast. So somebody might be listening in the future. But it's a cool little benefit that we're going to do for members is to actually have people in here and allow people to ask questions, participate, and I can even invite people into chat. So first, before we get into the path, can you just give us a background on, like, who are you? What does pluralsight do? You're the CMO there. And what's the kind of, like, short backstory of your career to get there? And then I want to talk. I don't want to talk as much about, like, your career history as more of, like, what is the job and what have you learned is the job of the cmo?

Yeah, sure, there was a lot there. So you're going to have to help keep me on track.

I got you, I got you, don't worry. I don't know if you know this. I do this for a living.

So we're all right. So maybe I'll start with pluralsight. So, pluralsight, all we do is tech skills. So we have a SaaS platform that provides a lot of different ways to help engineers, IT folks, security folks, upskill and cross skill, so that they have the skills they need to build the products, their companies are building the tools, et cetera. And so all we do all day is technology skills. And yeah, the brief history on LB is that I'm a B2B SaaS junkie. So I've been in B2B SaaS my whole career, predominantly in product marketing, with a few little detours into product management. Joined pluralsight over six and a half years ago doing product marketing and was part of the team that helped us shift our positioning and messaging and yeah, was lucky enough two and a half years ago to be selected to be the interim CMO and then do the job which I've been doing for a while now. So here we are.

All right, beautiful. So you came up basically as a product marketer, like if everyone has a discipline, you kind of got to this job as a product marketer.

Yes, that's the bread and butter. Yeah.

And do you think that can anyone become a CMO from any of those disciplines?

I think so, yes. I think so. Because, look, I think as you grow and develop, I think having broad expertise and having tried a few different areas of marketing can be really healthy. And I think there are superstar talent in a lot of different functions. And as you talk about a lot, like there's no manual for marketing, there's no, yes, you can get degrees in marketing, but that probably looks a whole lot different than like living and operating in a marketing team today. And so, yeah, I think great talent could come from any function in marketing. I will say, generally speaking, or historically speaking, a lot of CMOs came up through digital when I think a lot of CEOs thought digital was the thing you had to figure out. And I think product marketing has always been a path to CMO because you've got that more strategic or market lens where you're looking at customer market positioning, all of that. But I think CMOs can come from anywhere.

Yeah, I think they probably skew towards digital slash, demand gen and product marketing, but there's definitely CMOs that have come up through corporate marketing or comms or brand.

Yep.

I think a lot of it depends on your ability to be self aware and know what the job of the CMO needs to be.

Absolutely.

And like a younger me in my career thought that I needed to be an expert in all of those areas. I think that's not true. I don't think you have to be an expert. I think you have to know how to hire great people and bring on those experts. And I think that's how you kind of punch your ticket.

Yeah, exactly. Maybe to lean into that. So my expertise is not digital. I don't stare at like click through rates and CPMs all day. Like that's not the thing that I'm going to be an absolute expert in. So it was really important for me to hire demand gen and digital folks where that is their expertise. I know enough to be dangerous. I know what good looks like or at least I have the core metrics that help us assess what's working or what's not. But yeah, that was an area for me where I need talent who can own that and do that. I'm not going to be doing that on a day to day basis.

I have a similar background in that. That was the area that I was strongest. But I, and I don't know how to articulate this as a question so I'm just saying out loud, but okay, go for it. One thing that was really helpful for me was working. I think this is why like where you work prior to being a CMO matters is like when I was at Drift, I was able to be in charge of a function and work alongside other VP level people. And so even though I might not have necessarily, I've never personally owned a demand gen number or owned that team. But at that time in my career I had worked really closely with someone who was great at that and so I was able to see her operate. And so I then when I went to my next company I had a really good idea of like who I wanted to hire to do that despite never have done it. You know what I'm trying to get at?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You got to know what good looks like. And I think in order to build a great team you need to know how to assess what good looks like. And so you'll need either people in your network or friends, past coworkers that you can kind of use as your litmus test for. Does this person really have the chops to do what I'm hiring them to do? Totally agree with that.

All right, I'm tagging in. Amanda, look at me just working this Circle thing on the fly.

Yeah.

Amanda had a question in chat and I wanted to tag her in because it's more fun to hear this in her own voice. So, Amanda, if you can hear us, come off mute. And our friend LB is here to answer to. This is. You're now live on CMO therapy.

Sure.

So hopefully you can hear me.

Yeah, we can.

Hi, Amanda. Hi, how are you?

My question is, I feel like especially over the last couple years, SaaS companies in particular have been really focused on a lot of the short term gains at the detriment of long term vision. So I'm just wondering, how are you prioritizing and how are you thinking about short term incremental gains versus long term strategic decisions?

Do you have a specific example or are you just talking about everything?

But I guess, for example, we were just at Google Marketing Live looking at many of the innovations that Google has coming out, but they all seem very focused on short term incremental gains. And so the question in my mind lately is, well, if all we do is focus on short term incremental gains, what happens, you know, to the long term? So I'm just wondering, as a cmo, are you seeing the same thing and how are you balancing that?

Yeah, yeah. Dave, did you want to hop in here first?

Well, I was just going to say this is kind of the hard part of the job. You're definitely not alone in that. I think the reason this gets hard is because the longer term things are harder to measure and describe. And so it's much easier to be like, well, I know what another 50 grand on AdWords is going to do. I can like very easily quantify that where it's much harder for me to get that 50 grand and explain something that's going to help us do something in two years. And so it can also, it also depends on like, who you're working with. And sometimes you do have to kind of play the game and get a bunch of short term wins to then prove like, get, get things on the right track. And so it's like, it's easy to listen to like me or whoever on a podcast talk about like, you got to invest in brand and do the long term things. But I, I kind of feel like you only get that if you hit some of the short term goals and kind of like play that game. You need to play the game, get a bunch of wins under your belt and then they're like, oh, Dave, we trust you now to like, now go take 30% of our budget and go do it. Spend on longer term stuff or you need to be really good at selling the future thing and being able to like measure and quantify that and say, like, here's what I want to do, here's why, here's how we're going to measure that and like proactively package all that up. But I see Lindsey nodding along as well.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I was going to say, look, I think everyone is feeling that pressure of hey, I've got to deliver whatever it is, the bookings or the revenue today to earn the right to invest in those long term pieces. I would say being maniacally data driven is really important. So being able to say, hey, here's the return on those short term dollars, but eventually the efficiency of those short term dollars is going to erode and are we okay with that? And maybe certain companies are fine with that because they can't afford the luxury of the long term investments or hey, do we want to protect the efficiency over the long term by making these brand or top of funnel investments that yeah, I can't tie to a dollar of revenue or bookings that today, but I know they're going to help me preserve my efficiency over time. I think those are the conversations and a little bit to Dave's point, I think if you don't have the infrastructure, the data and reporting, or the trust with your cfo, your other executive team members, your finance team built around how those marketing investments play out over time, I think it's going to just be a much more challenged conversation and I think that's very real for a lot of CMOs right now. I had several conversations with CMOs where finance is deciding which marketing line items in the budget to keep or eliminate. And I think that's really hard because at that point it's not really in the hands of marketers. And as much as I love finance, they're not experts in marketing. Sometimes they think they are. Dave, that part you might need to edit out of the podcast, but yeah.

Right, we're past that. There's no editing. There's no editing.

But anyway, so yes, Amanda, what you're feeling is very real and I think those conversations are harder the less data and trust you have. Slightly better, but still not easy if you have a lot of that trust. And I will say we're in the midst of a version of that conversation right now, so I get it.

Thank you.

All right, thanks, Amanda. Let me figure out how to send you back to your home, wherever that may be. There we go. Remove this co host. Cool thank you for that. All right, great. You can raise your hand if you're here, by the way. So since we got kind of like right into the questions aspect, that reminded me that there was a pre submitted list. So Sherry wants to know what do the regular reports look like that you have to share or present? What metrics matter the most and how much does data analysis play a role? So take us into what metrics that matter to you all.

Yeah, sure. And I'll also maybe share the context that our marketing team is a little under 150 people and I'm very lucky to have a robust marketing operations team. So all that to say, yes, data analysis is critical. It's really everything to me because that's really my responsibility is up to the board and to my executive peers. So the things that we stare at all day, every day is we measure pipeline. So we have a metric called marketing originated pipeline and then with an assumed win rate, we have a marketing originated bookings number as well. Those two combined with marketing owns a revenue number for our consumer business specifically, which is maybe a little unique from some other B2B SaaS companies. Think of it as like a self serve business. So pipeline bookings from the sales led side of the house and then an outright revenue number for the self serve side of the house. Those are the top three metrics that are really the outcomes or the business impact that I'm accountable to. There are other metrics obviously that we measure that are more leading indicators to give us confidence that we're on pace to hit those outcome metrics. But I have a, we call it the pipeline dash and it's got every region, every segment, every pipeline type and how we're pacing against the targets for that every quarter. And.

And how long have you been at pluralsight?

6 and a half years total.

And how many revisions or what version of the pipe this pipeline dash would you say that you're on?

Well, so I would say I've been in the CMO seat for over two years and you know, we might be on the fourth version of this pipeline dash, but we're pretty locked on the mechanics of it. Every year the targets change, obviously, but we've got a version we like that works for us.

Yeah, beautiful. I wanted to just share that because I feel like that it's very rare that it's one. You come up with one set of metrics one time and like if you've iterate, you know, you've iterated it on it four times in two years. So about once every Six months you kind of go and decide to rethink about what matters and how you look at something. And I just think that that's important. I think it. The metrics are important, but you have to be able to adapt and oftentimes the business may be different at your stage. The Stage apparel site is at now, but I think for some of the smaller companies out there, the guardrails and goals are going to change every quarter. And so you can't have misaligned marketing measurement with company goals. That has to be. They have to match.

Yeah. So maybe two things on that I will say I think the thing that we iterated on more so is we call it our marketing scorecard. So that sort of has the high level KPIs that most marketing team members can align their personal goals to. So that includes traffic. Yes, I said it. Traffic responses or kind of engagements. With all of our metrics we do look at op create. So how many leads or opportunities are we generating every quarter and how are we pacing on those? We look at a brand awareness metric every quarter. That might be a whole other podcast talking about how you measure brand awareness, but we do have a metric that we're trying to watch over time and then we actually look at in particular for us, we bought way too many tools so we're trying to reduce our martech spend every single quarter and then yeah, pipe bookings and revenue. So the marketing scorecard we've iterated on several times and actually been on this journey of simplifying it, which I think is also really similar for a lot of marketing teams. They try to measure too many things. You get all this split focus when what you really need is a lot of people marching towards similar metrics. So that's been a journey. The pipe dash in particular has been more clear to us.

I love the idea of the CMO scorecard. It's something that I've stolen from Tim Kopp. I think it's CMO VC blog. He has this just Google Tim Kopp K O P P CMO scorecard. And basically I like that because you need to define how you're going to measure marketing. And I think a lot of people struggle with well it's pipeline of course, but there's also other things you're doing in marketing that like have headcount and people that need to be measured in some way, whether that's reduce your martech spend or brand awareness. And so I kind of always found like going into the year pipeline might be one of the goals, but there's oftentimes like five literally just making it up on a whiteboard, like, hey, what are kind of five big buckets? And so like an example of being at drift was like create the category of conversational marketing or whatever, making that up. Right? That was a, that was on our scorecard and like, here's how we're going to measure that by X, Y and Z. Or write and launch the conversational marketing book and get copies to 10,000 customers within the first year or something. Like, you kind of need to like pull together this scorecard. It's not just based on pipeline. And I, I think that was something that I wish I knew about earlier that kind of helped me manage marketing is like, then you have this framework to present to the board, to management, to the rest of the company, like, hey, here's who we are as a marketing team and here are the five or six priorities that we have for this year. Yes, one of them is pipeline. That one's, here's how we measure that. But there's also some other stuff on there.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so I would actually say I have two kind of core slides because of course we all love and live in slides. One is a slide that does have that what are our priorities for the year? And they're kind of in a pillar format. And then we have the metrics that we're going to use to measure those priorities. And then those metrics are the scorecard and it's two slides. So again, it's not, you know, it's not some 100 slide deck that's really convoluted and confusing. It's pretty simple. And I think that simplicity is really important, like you said, to explain it to your exec team, to the board and to drive.

Today's episode is brought to you by ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift, at Privy, and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand Top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24. 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place with Ahrefs. It's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself. One of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool, which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore, It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you got to go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

Alignment and clarity for your team as well because as you get bigger, there's real loss and erosion of focus when you've got a bunch of teams.

All right, that was helpful. This question is from Megan. To what extent would you recommend having hands on experience running digital channels? Does that matter as you get more senior? I've always thought it didn't matter so much, but it can be hard with Pesky Imposter syndrome. We started to talk about this earlier, but let's close the loop on this and hear your answer.

Yeah, so I am super biased because I don't have hands on experience running paid media channels. So I guess I'm in the camp of you don't have to have that to be in the CMO seat. Because I've been doing it without that. And I think Dave and I said earlier, know what your strengths are and where you, where you lack experience or expertise and go hire for that. And so I understand the imposter syndrome. That was something that I had to get over. But again, at a certain size and scale you can't, you just simply cannot be an expert in everything. And you've got to have the right team, the right frameworks, the right instruments for inspection to know what good looks like and ensure that you're driving the performance of the whole marketing team. You can't be hands on, you can't do it all.

No, that's a good answer. It matters that you know about it.

Yeah, yeah, you absolutely need to know about it. And you need to ask questions and be curious about learning about new channels and what's working and what's not. But you can't be hands on keyboard the person spending money on Google Ads.

Right. And I also think a lot of this relates to the stage of the company that you're at too, where if you have a smaller team than Lindsey has a 150 person team, but let's say you have a 10 person team, right? You might then as the CMO of that team and that company, you might have to go and spend 15 grand a month on your own and be the point contact for an agency and do a certain task and then have to do it before you hire, before you hire in house. And so I think like you're also always learning and tweaking at different stages. Like I, I did something recently with my friend Tom Wentworth who's the CMO at Recorded Future and they have 45 people on the marketing team. But there's some areas of marketing where I know that he kind of still gets his hands dirty before having to like scale and hire that. And so I also think like what stage CMO do you want to be? Because as you get to, you know, 150 person, like Lindsey would probably be the first to tell you, like with 150 person team, like she better not be in the weeds touching all those things because that means that then she doesn't trust her team or hasn't hired the right people. Whereas like if you're a CMO of a 10 person company, like, yeah, you might actually have to be the one like managing the website for a little bit.

Yep, yep, totally true.

All right, here's a question from Patrick. What is your internal marketing presentation cadence and what do those updates look like or cover?

Hmm. Can I ask for more clarity. Is this to the exec team or is this within marketing?

Let's talk about both. Let's talk about like communicating. How often are you communicating to the company about what marketing is doing and what might be in that? How often are you communicating to the exec team and doing that? And then even let's talk about what do you all do internally with the 150 person org you have?

Yeah, sure. So of course every quarter there's a board meeting. So every quarter we're reporting out to the board on prior quarter performance and what our upcoming plans are for the next quarter or half. So that happens every quarter. I would say on a monthly basis at a minimum, we're giving kind of a deep dive update on what's working, what's not within marketing. To my boss and the other execs, I would also say, look, we also have company town halls where every now and again I'm sharing updates. But we're, you know, we use Slack and I would say marketing communicating via Slack to sales success or even the whole company. We try to really be proactive about communicating things as they're happening with these other cross functional teams that are important partners of ours. So I wouldn't limit it to just kind of those formal meetings or formal reviews because marketing is happening all the time and we've got cool stuff happening that we want the rest of the company to know about. And then within marketing, I would say again, I'm not a huge fan of meetings. We try to really keep our meetings to a minimum, at least for my teams. So we have a weekly marketing leadership team meeting with my directs. We have a weekly meeting that my team gives me a hard time about the title. It's called the mmm, it's called the Marketing Metrics Medley. And every week we have kind of our core KPIs that I mentioned earlier that we report on how we're pacing on those core metrics. And then every week we have maybe two, maybe three teams within marketing give a readout on what they're doing, what they're learning, tests they've run and those rotate. So we keep a schedule of, of different topics. For instance, last week I think we had SEO, we had chat and I think we had paid media through readouts on what they're learning, how they're performing, et cetera. So really for me, well, I should say. And then we also have a marketing all hands every month with the entire marketing team. But really those four meetings, my leadership team, a metrics meeting and Then all and all hands, like, those are really the core meetings that I use to run my work. So hopefully that helps.

Thank you for that. Do you feel like you have too many meetings or No, I don't think.

That I am requiring too many meetings, but I think everyone thinks they always have too many.

I didn't even mean that as a response to what you just told me. I just meant, like, some people are just very, like, we have my company. We have way too many meetings. Are like, no, my company has a pretty good. Like, get things done.

Yeah. I think on the whole, we have more meetings than I would like, but I tried to not be a source of too many things, let's put it that way.

I almost panicked and hit end stream right there. For those listening at home, we're testing. We're learning on. We're learning on the fly here.

Learning on the fly.

All right, where did my list of questions go for you? Here it is. This is another one from Patrick. This is a complete sidebar. Actually, no, I don't want to take us here yet. I got a better question in the. In the chat. This is from Rachel, and she said, late to the party, but what did your road to CMO look like? Why don't you actually tell us that in a little bit more detail? So you mentioned going from product marketing to here, but, like, take me back into your marketing career. I'm. I'm guessing that you didn't get into marketing and say, I'm, I want to be a CMO one day. I don't know many that that's happened to. So what's your. What's your path?

Yeah, sure. So, like, any good cmo, my bachelor's is in finance, which makes perfect sense, right? I would say, look, I think my early kind of indications that I would land in marketing were that I really loved writing. So I always loved writing. I was a yearbook editor in high school, so there was always something there around communication and communicating clearly. And I did get my degree in finance and through some mentors, actually ended up getting a content marketing job again. Because I was like, okay, I can write. I can create content. Like, I really didn't understand marketing. It was more so just, hey, I'm going to get a job after college. And then I had a mentor of mine who was a CMO who had known me for a while, and he had said, you know, I think you'd be really good at this product marketing thing. And I kid you not. He got me an interview for a product marketing role, and I was living in Phoenix, Arizona at the time. It was August, and I sat in my car during a lunch break, air conditioning blasting and googled what is product marketing 10 minutes before this interview and read the Wikipedia page. And that is how I got my first product marketing job. I really didn't know much about it at all. Anyway, I loved it. I loved the combination of sort of analytical thinking with research and kind of quantifying markets and win loss and all that good stuff. And then I love the storytelling aspect about it and kind of the creativity that you have to have to be successful at product marketing. And parlayed that into several product. Product marketing roles at one point led product management teams, which I was really grateful for because we need to be such close partners. I learned a lot about what it takes to build great products. And ultimately another mentor of mine had been working at pluralsight at the time and said, hey, we just hired a new CMO and her first hire is a VP of product marketing. I think you'd be a great fit. Called the CMO had our first interview and her question to me was, how do you define product marketing? And I'd spent so much time thinking about it because I felt like product marketing is such an ill defined, or had been for me an ill defined function that I said, oh, I think of it in terms of four pillars. And I rattled off kind of my mental model for the definition of product marketing. And she said, that's exactly my definition too. And the rest is history. So got the VP role built out. The product marketing team started to take on customer advocacy, analyst relations, because those were kind of the most closely related to product marketing. Eventually took over brand marketing, and then when my predecessor was leaving, had owned a large portion of marketing, but definitely not all of it, and was really fortunate to be recommended by a lot of my peers for the interim role and ultimately got the job. So.

All right, I have a bunch of follow ups. Okay, number one, before we talk about CMO stuff, do you remember the four pillars of product marketing that you said? And what are they?

So I codified them in a blog post that I'm sure we can share. But the first is researcher intelligence, so you gotta start with research. You can't come in thinking you know everything. The second is messaging positioning, the third is buyer and sales enablement, and the fourth is launch.

I like that.

And there's a lot that goes into those, right?

Yeah, no, I think it's good. I think it's a good framework. I talked to somebody recently, actually, I did A podcast with a guy named Jeff Hardison. He is head of product marketing at Calendly now.

Okay.

And I'm pretty sure his definition of product marketing was, like, it depends. It depends on the company. And I do think there is also some truth to that too, in that, like, what product marketing does is often so dependent on, like, who else is on the team already. What's the strategy like? Is it product led? Is it sales led? As a more specific example, we were talking about, like, who owns pricing? And I talked about, with me, as an example, in my prior experience, there happened to be, like, a former venture capitalist, like, you know, Harvard ops type data person. And it made sense for him to own pricing and for me to own more of the, like, storytelling and packaging part of the pricing. And so in that company, that person owned it. But, like, there are examples of product marketing where, like, a product marketing person specifically owns pricing. Or there's just so much overload overlap in product marketing. Like, it's so close to strategy and pricing, and it's so close to product, and it's so close to sales that, like, it bleeds into all those different areas that I think, like, the ingredients of the company also matter a lot as to, like, what's product. What is product marketing going to be responsible for? But I think when you don't give it those four pillars, people don't know how to measure product marketing and they don't know, like, how to define what.

You should be doing. Yeah, exactly. So in my post, pricing is an asterisk. So totally with you on that one, Dave. That is very much an it depends question. And I think you're right. I've often said product marketing is like the glue of your go to market. Like, you have to connect a lot of dots, and that can look different in different businesses. But I would also say, I think kind of as an industry or like, as a function, even if you're a single product marketer on a team, if you're not doing a little bit of all four of those, you're probably doing product management or sales enablement or, like, you're probably not doing all the things you should, even if you're a solo product marketer.

All right, I'd love to make this an hour in product marketing. I could talk about that forever with you, but I. I remember that I took notes and I got. Dave, go back to your notes. All right, Question for you is, how did you change from product marketing Lindsay to CMO Lindsey? And how did you change what needed to change? What Lessons. Do you wish you knew earlier what's different? I'd love to hear all about that.

Yeah. So I would say one of the things that I started with, it was actually two years before I became cmo, I had this moment where I thought I could be cmo. Like, it was this aha. I think you mentioned earlier, Dave, very few people kind of come up in their careers thinking, I want to be a cmo. So it was actually two years before I got the job that I thought, oh, this is actually something I want. Like, that actually crystallized in my mind.

And what drove that, by the way?

I don't know the answer to that. I do remember I was on a walk, though, and I just had this moment where I was like, oh, I think this is what I want as my next step. Like, I think I would love running the whole org. And I will also say now I describe my role as being a conductor of an orchestra, that my job is really to make sure all of the instruments are playing the same song, because if the trumpets and the clarinets are playing two different songs, like, we're not making music that makes sense for the marketplace. But I had this aha moment, and I thought, well, I have never been a cmo, so I don't know how to do that job, so I should probably go talk to a lot of people that know how to do that job. So I thought, okay, I'm going to go learn. And I scoured the Internet for articles from CMOs. I asked for a lot of intros. I tried to gather mentors. Like, I just tried to learn as much as I could. And so that was even before I got the job. I would say I started kind of shifting my perspective out of functional excellence into more kind of horizontal. How do you make the whole team function? Before I got the job, I definitely got the reality check and shifted hard into that after I got the job, where I started realizing, you know, if you spend too much of your time focused on any one piece, just the whole engine isn't working. And so I would say that shift in perspective has been really big for me. I think we've talked a lot about being in the weeds and being a functional expert versus creating the systems that enable everyone else to be successful, extending that trust, hiring the right talent. And I will say I'm just really grateful. I've got a phenomenal team. And I think getting really clear about the talent you need, not just the skills and expertise, but the personalities that you need to create a healthy culture within marketing is really important. And so yeah, shifted perspective. Got really focused on talent. Spent a lot of time on org design, which I think is really important for marketing. Like org design looks very, very different in a lot of different companies. And I thought a lot about org design for my team. We've done three reorgs in the last two plus years. So that's been a big focus. Yeah, I think those are the biggest things that were shifts for me and learning to let go. My team would probably say if there's pockets of the org that aren't working, I should, I probably lean in too hard. But I, yeah, I love to win. I care deeply that we're doing great work and if there's some area that's not working, not performing, I kind of ask myself like, hey, have I set up our structure in the wrong way or do I not have the right talent? Like what pieces of my responsibility can I help change or shift to help us all perform better? But that's great.

I was going to ask you about what does it mean to think like an executive. And I think just in the interest of time, I think you basically just explained it, which is notice how for anybody listening, notice how. Lindsay, one time you didn't, you didn't say, you basically said nothing about actual, the actual marketing itself in the last 10 minutes. Right. And so a lesson that I learned the hard way is like, yeah, it's great to have creative ideas and be good at writing headlines or coming up with copy or creating campaigns, but none of that stuff is going to get executed unless you have the right talent and the right org design. And so what does it mean to think like an executive? It means like, it's like a portfolio strategy. You're the portfolio manager. You're figuring out like how do I need, I need to build this team to achieve this goal. And by the way, you're not going to do any of the work as the cmo. Like that's not your job. And the earlier that you can learn that it is all about people. Like if there's one magic pill to swallow for being good at this job, it's building the best team because that solves all of the problems. There's less internal politics and nonsense when it's a good team. Because a good team doesn't just mean good at their job, but how they work with each other. Blah, blah. You have self starters all of a sudden. Like plans that you used to have to make are getting made for you and they're getting made better and they're pushing you in the right direction. And so the quicker you can think like Lindsay and become this, like, talent evaluator and team builder is, like, how you shift. And I. I struggled with this, and I know a lot of people do is like, the hard part is, like, what got you into this position was being, like, the best marketer. Right? Like, Lindsay was probably damn good at product marketing, and that's what made her VP of product marketing. But then to be an effective cmo, you have to reinvent yourself. You can't just be a great. You know, you're not good at us being a CMO because you're great at product marketing anymore.

Yeah, I think. I think that's totally true. And I got asked recently, like, how do you create great marketing culture? And I said, well, you just have to be really good at hiring. And I think the person asking me that thought there was like, oh, certain things you do. And it's like, no, no, it's. It's all about the people.

What was it like being interim cmo?

Yeah, that was weird.

So you went from VP of product marketing to interim cmo?

Well, so I had picked up a couple other functions. So I'd picked up brand. I'd picked up brand design, content marketing, a few other things. It wasn't just product marketing to interim, but I would say, I mean, you could imagine you're in the role, calling shots, trying to make changes, knowing you may not be the final person in the seat. You're trying to earn trust and credibility with your directs who a week ago were your peers, and trying to earn trust and credibility enough to be offered the position from the CEO. So it's a little bit of a strange place to be, but I guess I had made up my mind, like, I got nothing to lose. Like, it's either me or not. So I'm just gonna start operating as if I have the role.

Here's a question from Rachel. Any tips for navigating a marketing reorg successfully? I was gonna ask you about this. You've done a bunch. You're thinking about it all the time. Maybe roughly every year you do a reorg. Any reorg mistakes or pro tips or what advice would you give to people go. That are going to go do reorg?

Yeah, I would a couple. So one, I'd be very clear about what is the job marketing needs to do for the next six to 12 months and really anchor all of your reorg, your design decisions around that goal. Like, do you need to go build brand awareness? Do you need to drive new pipeline, do you need to invest in some other objective and let that be your guide? I would also say getting really clear about your design absent people, like, you can really love the people on your team, but they may quit tomorrow. And you've got to, you've got to know that your design works. If they're here or not is really important. And then the third thing I would say is I had moments where I felt like the team had taken on so much change. I was nervous that we couldn't consume more change or more disruption. And so I made some kind of half step reorg decisions where looking back on it now, I'm more confident we could have absorbed more change. Yes, it would have been disruptive, but I wish I would have gone all the way and made every reorg change that I wanted to and maybe not hesitated in a couple places. And so I would say if you're a little nervous, I would just rip off the band aid and do it.

I love that. It's never going to be easy. Nobody likes change. Nobody's be like, yes, please change my world and who I report to again. But like, you got to just do it. You got to be able to do it.

Yep. You just got to go for it.

All right, we got to wrap it in a couple minutes. But outside of anything that we've asked you so far, is there anything that comes to the top of your mind or opinions you have about becoming a cmo, path to CMO your career that you think that people listening to this, who are you from five or 10 years ago would find valuable?

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say. I think one of the things I feel like I've learned the hard way maybe is that about every six months, you do have to continually educate your peers and the rest of marketing or the rest of the company on what's new and evolving in marketing? Marketing changes really fast. There's a lot of new channels, new ideas, and I think sometimes within marketing, we take that for granted. And for folks who aren't paying attention to those new channels, new ways of operating, this white paper performed really well. So we're actually shifting a bunch of our strategy to go do more of that. And these ads weren't performing, so we're shifting that. I think there's a velocity of marketing that we, when you're in it, you kind of take for granted and you need to bring the rest of the company and the rest of your executive team along for that ride. And I've had to learn that lesson more than once. Like you have to evangelize marketing and the rapid evolution of it to the rest of your peer group and the board. And don't assume that just because you told them once that it's permanent or that they'll remember. And I think that's really important. Just being an advocate of marketing and really continually reminding people how valuable marketing.

Is and why that's a good one. And having, I think having an opinion like being, to be in that role, you should be a subject matter expert on marketing and what's happening in the industry. You don't have to be that. But I think it's going to be very hard to like be great, be one of the great CMOs and push your organization if you're not that person. And so like you should be researching what's happening with AI right now, understanding how other CMOs are structuring their org. Like how are other companies dealing with budgets and layoffs? I feel like the best CMOs that I know are the ones who are plugged into all that stuff. Not like, you know, I'm sure when you were going through your reorg, you probably had two or three CMO friends or peers that you've built through the years to get a sense of like how they have things structured and that makes you very valuable. And so a huge value add is like traveling for work and going to an event and meeting with a bunch of other CMOs might get you a quarter's or half a year's worth of like internal knowledge that you can use to help do your job. Super important. That's a great one.

Yeah. Critical.

Is there anything that you like? Can you think of one particular? It doesn't have to be like a specific, like I messed this thing up, but just something that's changed about you as early cmo, like from two years ago to how you do things now.

Probably too many mistakes to list your day for good.

I want it, I want people to hear you say that.

Yeah, too many mistakes list. Look, I, I think I just, I want to get better all the time and I don't ever pretend that I've got all the answers, but I do want to constantly learn, constantly read like you just mentioned, like constantly talk to other CMOs at different stuff stages to learn lessons they've learned the hard way. I prefer not to learn them the hard way if I can. Yeah, look, I, I think one of the lessons that I've learned, someone mentioned earlier, imposter syndrome. Like, I think you get more confident in some of those instincts around, hey, I made the wrong hire or, you know, that metric has been in the red for a little too long. We gotta dig in there and like, not accept. Expect the team to push on it, you know, finding those places where it's like, it's my, you know, I'm the one that needs to push on that or change this call. I will tell you, my team loves this story. My very first hire is cmo, right? So just got the job. Lots of pressure, was a direct report of mine, and I hired this person that I thought we really needed. And within 48 hours, I knew I'd made the wrong hire and I actually let that person go after one week on the job.

Well, I've done that.

And so I felt like, man, so much egg on my face. Like, my first hire was a total mess. And I was just at the in time, you know, feeling like, wow, this is so embarrassing. You know, like a year and a half later, we were at this exec retreat and that was held up as an example of higher, slow, fire, fast. And my CEO was saying more of you should act like this and, and make those calls and be quick about assessing if you've made a poor choice. So anyway, yeah, no, it's good to.

Hear you say that. I think as the more mistakes you make, like you have to, for anybody, the best way to learn is always going to be by doing. And you, you can't. You can watch every Saster video and look at everything online you can find about whatever, but until you've done it, it's going to be hard. And I think as you grow in your career, you also become more. More comfortable. Like, imposter syndrome might always be there, but you become more comfortable with it. And I'm much more comfortable now being like, yeah, I have no idea how to do this thing, but I'm going to try to figure it out. Verse I think 10 years ago in my career, I'd be like, yeah, of course I know how to do that and I'm awesome at it. And that becomes easier. So it's good to hear you say that.

Anyone who's a little too confident is a good tell that they don't really know everything they say they know.

Yeah. All right, Lindsay, we got to let you go. This was great. Thank you for hopping in with us. People can go and find you on LinkedIn. How do you say your last name? What's the right way to say your last name? Yes, Lindsay Bayock. She's the CMO of Pluralsight. You can go check her out. Go to LinkedIn, send her a connection. That's my favorite call to action is go connect with her. Tell her that she was so dang relatable and helpful and made you feel better about the path to cmo. Lindsay, thanks for doing this. I'll see you around. I'll see you on email and enjoy the rest of your day. You're great. Always good to see you.

Always good to see you day. Thanks so much.

Bye Bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of 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 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 Hack. That's 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.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's gonna be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not, it's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that show what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year. Planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to Paramark. Com Office hours. That's Paramark. Com Office hours.