Amanda Malko (CMO at G2) on Marketing Org Structure, Revenue Marketing vs Demand Gen, Who Should Own Customer Reviews

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My guest on this episode is Amanda Malko. Hey everybody, thanks for listening to another episode of the Exit 5 podcast. My guest today is Amanda Malco and she is CMO at G2 and I'm excited to have this conversation. Hey Amanda, how are you?

Hi Dave. Great to be here.

Okay, we got connected recently. But you said you've listened to the podcast before. I got an icebreaker from a mutual friend, somebody on your team. He hit me right away and he said, ask her this personal fun fact. She's related to two of the three people who have ever escaped from Alcatraz. That's a real. That's. Is that a real stat?

That is a real fact. Yes, I am. And actually I didn't discover this until I was an adult and my mom, her sister was doing like ancestry, you know, really getting into that and she sort of casually drops, oh yeah, we found out were related to two of the three people who broke out of Alcatraz. Just sort of casually dropped that into a dinnertime conversation when I was home one month and I was like, that's surprising and shocking. But yes, I'm from Atlanta and they were both from Georgia and happened to be distant cousins from my grandmother. So there you go.

Is it your go to like team building icebreaker? Like when people have to say like two truths and a lie or something? Is that always one that you use?

It has to be like, I have to use that. So yeah, I don't know what it says about me, but there you go. If I ever get in a sticky situation, hopefully I can leverage some of my Genetic traits of getting out of it.

That's great. The other thing that I found that I didn't find it out, but I was shared this information. You were on the team when it happened, quite literally. For the famous Oreo Dunk in the Dark tweet. You were an agency leader at 360i. Can you tell that story?

Yeah, I mean, I wonder if people remember it. I know that some people do, but I don't know if everybody does.

But yeah, explain it for people that might not know or like for me, I forgot. And then I read the article and I was like, oh, yeah, I do remember that.

I'm kind of glad you forgot. I feel like it was everywhere for a while to the point where like some brands do something cool so we can talk about something else. So, yeah, I helped build and run an agency called 360i back in the day. I was there quite a while and this was sort of, I'm dating myself. But brands were starting to have a little fun on social. And there was this year of the super bowl where the lights went out and one of our clients was Oreo and we had a war room going, as you do when you represent a brand like Oreo who really wants to invest in social. And their whole strategy was really to be, and it seems so obvious now maybe, but to be a real part of pop culture. And in a way that was sort of self referential but not taking itself too seriously. And so our team acted really quickly and sent a tweet. And with some fun art, it immediately took off and became sort of the tweet heard around the world. And it was a cool thing to be a part of. And a big part of my role there was just to make sure people understood our story. How did it happen? Really make sure the world, the world knew about it. Using all the means at our disposal to make that moment what it was for the brand.

Was this your agency or you were working at this agency?

So I don't remember what my role is at the time. I had a lot of different roles there. I ended as chief marketing officer. I ran new business marketing, kind of executive sponsor over some of our key accounts among a variety of other roles over many years.

And can you explain this? There's a war room. So because you have this big consumer client like you all are hanging out in the office watching the super bowl.

And we got the copywriter and the art director. Yeah, yeah. The clients there, there's like, you know, you're sitting there all day kind of like What? Just riffing. Right. Which. Yeah. Physically together. Which right now sounds really nice. Like, just spend, you know, five or six hours talking about what's happening in the world, what's happening with the game, and what can we say that's meaningful and relevant here?

And so is it like, the game, like, once the game starts, you're on, or are you, like, thinking about stuff all day also? Yeah.

I mean, I think when it comes to social, the best brands have a real clear purpose for why they're there and a point of view and a tone of voice. And so in the moment, you're sort of just being you as the brand. Hopefully you're not having to think a lot about a lot of that foundational stuff. When you get in the room, you're able to just sort of show up as the brand and hopefully engage people in a fun way.

But, like, tactically, someone's literally making a. If you have an idea for something, someone's like, I'm going fast. I'm in Photoshop, or whatever.

That's how it happens. Someone was like, all right, what do we do with this? Blackout, blackout, blackout. Oh, you can still dunk in the dark. Great, I'm writing the copy. Someone's like, okay, we can do. You know, the artwork is like, the curtain's going down. It's black, but there's an Oreo, and it's going into the milk, which is white. And we're going to have fun with that. And, okay, who's the social person? Quick, put it on social. Got to get it up quick or it's not a moment. And then someone's like, okay, great. Now let's make sure other people see it. Who do we know that's going to retweet and share this? Let's make sure we, like, share this with the media. Who's covering what's happening right now? This is a fun way to break up. And otherwise, what's happening? It's literally middle of the game. There's nothing to talk about.

Then you just sit back and wait, and the rest of your day just blew up after that, I'm sure. Or the rest of your evening.

Yes, it was an evening, and I do remember. I was like, well, there we go.

I wish I had a connection to every company because this is such a better way to start a conversation. I want to talk a lot about G2, because people are oftentimes most interested in team. You're running what you're doing now. But I got to talk about your time at Mailchimp. Because I mean, obviously I think what, what mailchimp did was incredible from a company and brand standpoint. And you had a, you had a run at, at Mailchimp where you're managing a team of 50 people. So if you just take me into the, your role for those two years that you were at at mailchimp. What did, what did you get hired there to do and what did you do at mailchimp?

I got hired to build. I think the charter was like build, build our partner ecosystem and our partner program and it kind of expanded from there. And one of the things that's really, I think unique about a company like mailchimp is there's so much affinity for the brand and you sort of start to look under the hood and you see opportunities in so many places. And so through the course of really thinking about the partner program, what we discovered is about a pretty decent size. I won't show the numbers, but I don't think they're public. Pretty decent percentage of the revenue was influenced by freelancers and agencies. That's the service partners who help small businesses use the tool. Small businesses have a lot to do and they're usually not super equipped to do marketing really well. Certainly email marketing very well. And so a big part of my focus was really on building out a community to bring those, those people together to help them connect with more of the 12 million customers we had and hopefully bring on a lot of new customers through the program as well as enable our existing ones. So it was a really exciting thing to work on. And ultimately I actually didn't sit in marketing, which was, was also really interesting. I had a team that was very cross functional across designers, developers. Like I had engineers, product marketing, certainly account management, customer success. So it was really fun to be able to build kind of a product and a community within the, within the overall business as part of that. And then I also built and ran mailchimp Academy, which is like our product training academy. So I got, I got to get really close to the product, which is always fun.

When you talk about community, how do you define that in that sense? Was it like a Facebook group, A Slack group? When you say you build community at mailchimp, what does that mean?

Such a great question. This is a big question. What is community? Dave, I feel like you have all kinds of thoughts on this topic. I think it depends on what you want it to be. For me and for the company, community met literally providing value in a way that brings those people together beyond just our company. If we can Bring them together and provide a space that offers value and value exchange to them, then it's not about us, it's about them. But if we can facilitate that, we're going to benefit. And so it came down to instead of building a partner program, we decided to really lean all the way in and say, we're just going to build a space for them. And then that became a. Well, we actually built a space for them in the product, and we designed it differently. And then we built a community. And yes, we had a slack community. We had an in real life community. We had like a whole host of different types of kind of events for them. We had kind of a referral and rewards component to the community. We did all kinds of things. And we actually worked with an organization called Creative Mornings, which is one of my favorite communities in the world. They host gatherings in over 200 cities around the world every single month and have over 200,000 people show up every single month all over the world to talk about one theme every month. It's incredible. And it's run by a handful of individuals. It's just very, very powerful. And so they actually helped us with the way that we built the community and the spirit we put into it.

That's amazing. So did you. It was like a sponsorship thing that you did with them or you created some type of relationship, like that was the organization that you were kind of latching onto?

Yeah, so we had a partnership with them that was more like a sponsorship where we would show up to their events, we would support their events, we supported their organization. But then we also just asked them to tell us, what have you learned and how can we learn from you about building a community? That the beautiful thing is that they have over a thousand volunteers. It kind of runs itself. And we thought that was really. I thought that was really impressive. And I thought, well, if we can build something that sort of can run itself, and we're facilitating that in all the ways that you need someone to facilitate it, whether it's money, space, et cetera, then that's really powerful. And ultimately, we wanted to help these freelancers and agencies kind of build a living on their own terms and use our product, hopefully, to help do that.

It's interesting to think about the mailchimp story because a lot of this was like, I think early pre, when you were there. But I think today, when people say community, I think they often think like, that means a channel, that means a place like, oh, we want to build a community at G2. What is the community It's a Facebook group. But I think of it actually the way that you talked about it at mailchimp, which is it's like a collection of all those different things. And it's like you build a community, which means lots of people know mailchimp and trust mailchimp and have an affinity for mailchimp. And so therefore, they are going to say good things about mailchimp, tell their friends about mailchimp. Use mailchimp. Like, and I think it can be a collection of those channels. It could be a podcast and a Facebook group and a event and a. Whatever. It's like people are hanging out with you when it has nothing to do with your product, but it's a related audience. It's not like you're trying to. It's still your icp.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think. And the thing that I would add is I also think it has to be more about bringing them together so that they can connect and learn from each other than to learn from you. Right. I think that's the other really important thing is you become the facilitator of people engaging. I mean, it's sort of like our communities in our own lives. It's about connecting with people. It's not about connecting with companies. The company can certainly be a facilitator of that. And there's a lot of great companies have created really powerful communities.

I think it's an important guardrail. You can do it. But it's going to be tough to build an engaged and growing community if you don't really meet those guidelines. It's like there's always a slippery slope of at some point the company wants to sell into that audience. And I bet if you actually looked at the numbers, there's probably an insane amount of those people who are in your community were mailchimp customers. But it's not a perfectly linear funnel that gets them there.

So that's such a great point. You can have a space for selling into the community. Just make sure it's really intentional and not the primary purpose. And I think that's the kind of key distinction.

I remember, like, at early drift days, we had built up this audience. It was like, really early, pretty. Like, now we're going to launch our product. We had built an audience for six months before that. And I remember literally sending an email to people being like, look, I know you didn't sign up to be sold to. However, you've been getting our content for six months now, and we're about to launch our first Product. And since you're also in marketing, I would kind of be missing an opportunity if I didn't tell you that today. Introducing blank. I think it's totally okay to do something like that. Like, that tone acknowledges that I'm not just blindly selling to you now.

Yeah, and I think people get that too. They're there for a reason and they kind of get that. I do think the approach. It matters.

Okay, let's talk about mailchimp Academy. Actually, I want to steer you in a direction instead of just asking why you did it, because I think it seems to me like a wildly underrated product marketing strategy that B2B SaaS companies should be taking on. Like, literally create the training for your product because it also becomes a hireable skill. So I just, I see you nodding along already, but I'd love to hear, I'd love to hear, like, how you thought about what was the business case for mailchimp Academy and then how did you go and execute it and how do you see that related to SaaS companies today?

Well, the business case was, was really built around the partners. First. It started with, well, what does it mean to be a partner? How do you grow, like your status within the community in a way that feels like you've got some credibility? Because these were email experts. And so we were like, well, they wanted status. Certain people wanted to feel like they had some connection there in a way that they could show their skills both internally and then with their clients. And so we sort of built it as like, okay, well, we're. And that's pretty common. HubSpot does that you have some certification for your partners in the ecosystem. And so we built it for that. But we knew that it was going to be more than that from the beginning. We knew that we wanted to expand it to customers as well. I love what you said about it being underutilized. I think it's so true because a lot of times when we think about, well, what's our competition? It's sort of up leveling that question to what's our barrier to success? And oftentimes the barrier to success in B2B tech is actually, I don't know how to use it and I don't know where to get started. And so if you can lower the barrier there for your prospects and certainly help your customers, you're really going to have a leg up certainly over your competition. But you're also going to be addressing what many companies, number one barrier and obstacle really is, which is I don't know how to Use this. And I'm kind of like, unwilling to get started and. Or I'm going to use the thing that I've always used because I may not use it well, but at least it's familiar.

I also think it can be just like, think about how amazing something like Marketo, like Marketo Champions became as a.

Campaign for Marketo or Trailblazers at Salesforce, which now is synonymous with the brand Salesforce. Right. Trailblazers kind of became the brand in a way.

Do you think there's some level of, like, you can only do that if you're obviously, once you get to the scale of Mailchimp 2019 and the scale of the Salesforce and the scale of Marketo, can you only execute on this as a big company, though, like when it becomes in demand to be trained on your product?

No. I think certainly if you're gonna build like a big training academy and you've gotta get an lml, it can quickly add up. But the basics are just educate your customers before you sell them. I mean, that's really the basic principle here. And not educate them really tactically, like, how do I use this thing? And I think getting out of the mindset that training and education is something that starts after they sign the contract or sign up for the freemium, it starts before that. And I think just using education product, education as part of your B2B playbook can happen at all sizes. And in fact, I think if you're building a category, it's an imperative, no matter how big you are or small you are.

Can you say more about that?

Yeah. So if you're category, like I think about, you know, let's use chat now. Conversational marketing is an example. If you're starting out, I imagine early days, one of the barriers was just people should have this on their website, but they don't know it yet. And people say, okay, that sounds like a good idea, Dave, but I really don't know where to get started. And I don't have anyone on my team who really knows how to do this. And if they don't know how to do this and I buy it and I put it on the site and it fails, not only is it a bad prospect experience, but I'm going to be mad at you. And I don't really see that you're. I mean, I'm going to buy it from you, but I have to learn how to use it. And I just don't know that my team or myself can really do that. That's sort of the thing that's going through your prospect's mind and you're going, yeah, but you really need this. This is where the future is headed. And they're like, yeah, no, I get it. But what I'm not going to tell you is that I'm too scared to actually do anything about it because I don't know what I'm doing. And so if you could provide that education, whether you know it or not, it's addressing a FOMO that your customer really has, especially early on when they don't have a lot of places to look for success.

Yeah, that's a great, I mean, it's a great analysis. The best product marketing and the most in demand things from the sales team and others were like, we need examples, we need examples. People want tactical stuff. And so one of the most well received, like decks that we created while I was there was not even some sexy, crazy title. It was like 15 conversational marketing examples that your team can steal right now. And it was like literally slide one. We came up with 15 recipes of different things you could do. Because we wanted to show like, it's not just for this one function on your website. We named them all. And that deck became such a killer piece of product marketing. And I think like, especially in B2B, you're often selling to a Persona where it's like, it's actually, it's valuable for that person career wise, oftentimes to become an expert or be smarter at your product. Like, hey, I just took a chance. I bought this piece of software. It helped me do my job better. Now things are so much easier in my life. And I think you can, whether you sell to HR or marketing or sales, it's like, that is the best product marketing today in my opinion is the education you need, the great story. You need to be able to tell a story on top of that. But I think people want to see how it works. They want those examples, they want that education. So I think that's a great way to think about it.

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Yeah, I love that you said that about the best kind of thing that people wanted was those examples. And really hands on, oftentimes one of the best places to find it. And actually someone shared an example from one of our customers at G2 recently with me is to ask your customers how are they using this and getting smarter about how to use your product themselves. Recently we did that and one of our customers came back and said, well I wrote this 15 page guide that the entire marketing and sales team is using on how to integrate buyer intent and what it actually looks like on all of our flows, whether it's going to a salesperson or within our abm. And I saw it and I was like, this is genius. It is not the sexy stuff that's like, this is my beautiful story. It's literally a 15 page documentation on every step they took to make it a success and how they measured the results. And it's incredible.

I love that also, like, that's one of those things that gets created internally. And you're like, wow, this is so helpful, this internal. We're actually our own customer. I think a lot of people in B2B SaaS, not just marketing, you use your product. I'm sure if you were at Okta, was Okta using Okta? Was a marketing team at Okta using Okta back in the day? 100%. Was Salesforce using Salesforce? Is G2 using G True. And I think you have this built in ingredient which is like find the things that you're doing. The more you can use your own product and bake it into what you're doing and then go and teach. Like, I think that's another ingredient of the product. Hey, hey. Here's. Here's some recipes from our customers. Here's what we're doing. We're wrapping this up in a way that like, this is going to be useful for you. This is useful for us internally. You should go and check this out.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that.

Okay.

Education is the new product marketing, right?

Well, I think it's. Yeah, well, it should be that way. But also like you go to so many B2B SaaS company websites and I love the headlines and I love copy, but I think we sometimes we spend too much time on the headline and the copy and think that that's actually the most important detail where like you have a great headline. But then 80% of B2B SaaS websites I see, I don't actually know what the product does. And so I think you should be showing with examples. It's now table stakes to have 12 SaaS company logos on your website for social proof, right? Like I've seen HubSpot logo on everybody's web or whatever, right? Name a sa. But when you compare that with like and here's how they're using our product, I think that's, that's where this really powerful. Okay, we could talk about this forever. I got to talk about other stuff with you before we talk about G2 and your team and everything. I want to hear about that people are interested. You've been a CMO multiple times before and you go and take a head of and I'm going somewhere with this, so bear with me. You could take a head of X job at mailchimp. And yet your team at mailchimp is bigger than some startup cmo. You know, job title. Like I was CMO and I had a team of seven. So I'm sure at some point in your career you've thought about like just people often ask what's the difference between head of marketing and VP of marketing and cmo? As someone who's been a cmo, been ahead of been a cmo, can you just kind of like share some. What's your opinion on job titles and do they matter? Do they not? Blah blah blah.

I mean I definitely think they matter. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They matter. So if you want a certain job title, go get it would be my advice there. Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't matter. The question is also when. Why bounce back and forth between being a CMO and not a cmo? I guess for me I have always been motivated by creating new things and solving tough problems and hopefully cross functionally, which is something that's been pretty true throughout my career is like marketing plus mainly just because I think of like even in college I couldn't pick a major. I was an interdisciplinary studies major. So I made it my own. I think that's just kind of who I am. And so I'm much more motivated by sort of solving tough problems which I might seem, I don't know, trite. But then the title. I think the other thing is sometimes you need different experiences to become if you want to be a cmo, to become a better cmo. And I think for me that was very true. At mailchimp. I felt I needed different sets of experiences to really grow in the way that I wanted to.

Yeah, that's kind of where I was asking you from because I think I've been at this point I talked to a lot of other people in a similar position where it's like it can be very easy to want to go jump and get the CMO job title at a 10 person startup. But that to me is really you're still just managing a team of one or two people versus like so what your title was not CMO@mailchimp. However, you had a multimillion dollar budget. You had 50 people on your team. That is based on the company size. And so maybe it is worth Taking that director level job at LinkedIn for two years to prime you for a team management role. How is leading a bigger team at mailchimp helps you kind of hit the ground running? Not that you're a first time CMO at G2, but you weren't going from a five person startup running marketing to running marketing at G2, where I'm sure you have a big team.

I think the biggest thing was actually less about the team. And so I think, you know, whenever you think about your career, someone gave me some advice when I was earlier in my career to think about what are you going to learn from this experience and how will that learning help you for what you want to do? Which sort of changes the typical like, I'm going to just keep going title, raise my title, raise my title. It's really about what do I need to learn to be better to get to the thing that I'm really trying to do, which hopefully isn't just a title, it's a problem I want to solve or a level of. I love leadership. I want to run a team of a certain size, whatever that looks like for you. For me, I wanted more experience in product and an experience design at a company that had significant scale. And I knew that and so I knew it wasn't going to be a CMO role because I hadn't done that. No one's going to put me in a CMO role in that and I'm going to get that experience. So I was like, was what do I do that gives me that? Because I think I need to understand product better and I think the experience design is something I want to get better at.

I love that. It's great advice. I mean it's very clear that you have like a. No matter what company you're working at, you have a very macro view of your career and you can see kind of the field and hey, this is what I want to go and learn at this stage. All right, let's talk about G2. You took the CMO job at G2 coming up on a year.

Yes, I just hit my year mark last week.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Okay, so can you take us into. People love this stuff. Bunch of future marketing leaders or existing marketing currently. So let's talk about G2. Can you break down your team and team functions and your direct reports?

Yes, absolutely. So I have a pretty, I would say classic structure. I have a VP of brand and communications, Palmer Houchens. He worked with me. We worked together at mailchimp. He's great. He oversees PR Brand creative. We have a great creative team that includes copy and design, social and events. I have a VP of Revenue Marketing and she oversees both the kind of typical demand gen and ABM functions for all of our segments globally as well as our marketing operations team which love marketing operations. So, so critical. They actually that team sat under sales when I arrived so we moved that over to marketing and then we have head of Product marketing. So we have our product marketing organization which actually also includes partner marketing and customer marketing for us. And then I have a head of what's called user lifecycle and community which is actually our buyer marketing. So we've got 60 million software buyers and growing all over the world who use G2 every year to look for software. Including new Fun fact, 100% of the Fortune 500 used G2 in the last 12 months to look for software. Her team actually handles all of the sort of buyer marketing and community building efforts that we're undergoing as well as buyer support. So we get a lot of support questions as you can imagine from people who are using G2.

Amazing people love this. So I want to come back to a couple things. VP Brand in Comms, VP of Revenue Marketing, Head of Product Marketing, Head of User and Lifecycle. I like the shift. Noticing a lot more CMOs who don't have like a VP of Demand gen. It's now called Revenue marketing. Why do you have that?

Great question. I debated the title. I think demand gen sort of to me is a function of revenue marketing in the sense that it's like driving inbound. Right. Whereas when I think about revenue marketing particularly for G2, we have all kinds of motions and we also support or want to support expansion. And so I want to make sure that I almost look at it as like product marketing is responsible for the revenue of our and utilization of our products and revenue marketing is responsible for the acquisition growth and soon for us expansion across our segments. And together they really drive a lot of the growth of the business.

Yeah, I love that. I think a lot of people I've been lucky to work with two amazing demand gen people and they both came from the same company and they both complained to me separate occasions like is silly. We're demand gen but we got to do everything. The team, whenever we're behind on the number, the team looks at us like what are we going to do? Demand gen team. And it's like that is. That is everyone's job. It should be everyone's job. But also there's multiple input. It's not just there's multiple ways to grow revenue. If you just look at the inputs from like inbound for example, or just the sales motion. But there is exactly what you said, Expansion, cross sell. There could be churn issues. So I think it's a positive trend. But I've also seen like it seems to demand gen can be a sticking point point at a lot of teams where like that becomes a team that feels like they have all the pressures, like the brand team is just supporting them. They got to go hit the number. And I think that's not the right recipe.

I agree. I also think one of the challenges of having a team that's called revenue marketing is that it can create a perception that it's all on that team to drive revenue. And so I do think as a leader, if you have that as a function, you have to make it clear that just because that's in the name doesn't mean we don't all contribute. And so I think you have to find ways to kind of balance that because ultimately everything we do as marketers should be really growing, growing the business.

Okay, so that's a good segue into how do you set goals across the team? If you have these four teams, how do you make that happen operationally?

So we have a framework called that we use Salesforce uses it. Many people are familiar. It's called the V2 mom. So we use the V2 mom which every time I go to say the V2 mom, it's vision values, vision values, measures and methods. And so that's the well. And the O is obstacles.

What's the O obstacles? Oh yeah.

So we use the V2MOM framework, which is great. I mean it's very similar to okrs. If people are more familiar with okrs. We set a v2 mom every year for the company. We spent a long time on our V2 mom this year. And then we do team V2 moms that we kind of share cross functionally to make sure we put feel like everybody knows we got everything covered and we've highlighted any cross functional dependencies. And then I do v2 mom planning with my team and they suggest like what can we do to contribute to our own vision and how it's supposed to support the company.

Is that just the four leaders? Is that the four leaders? First you basically execs go and create the V2 mom. Cool. Amanda's got the mission. Now you go take the V2 mom to marketing. You sit down with your four marketing leaders and you have an off site and go and plan your V2 mom.

Yeah. This year we did it a little differently. We started with measures, which I really liked. So the measures are the goals, like the quantifiable goals you're signing up for. And we said, okay, outside of pipeline, obviously, what are we signing up to deliver? And then we worked and did, okay, well then how are we going to go do that? And you know, that was a really fun way to do it. And everybody kind of has contributions to that now on the number for pipeline sits with revenue marketing. But then we also did. We're doing a kind of fun spiff for the whole marketing team that if we hit our pipeline targets in the first half, you know, we have a little fun surprise. So everybody is really contributing to that. So I think it's important that it not feel like it's all on one team.

I wanted to just go into that because I think it's so important. It's like you could call it V2 mom, you could call it okrs, you could call it Dave and Amanda. It doesn't matter what you call it. It's like it only works when, like when the marketing goals come from the company goals, it's like. And when all the execs are on the page in that room. So it's not like sales has different goals and marketing, you need to all walk out of that room and walk. Real or not, everyone knows what the company goals and how marketing is going to contribute to that. It gets messy when each team's setting their own goals in a vacuum.

Especially with anything related to revenue and pipeline. You have to do it together because all kinds of assumptions get missed or made without discussion. If you don't have sales and marketing planning together. So I'm a big proponent of the planning together. It's much easier to say than to do. But yeah, have the hard conversations In January or February, whenever your fiscal starts, don't wait till you report Q1 and your CRO goes, wait, I thought you were going to contribute more to our small business segment.

I think that's that happens anyway.

It might. But at least you said, well, remember we talked about this.

Yeah, true. You have a paper trail. You commit committed to this. You were in this meeting and it.

Surfaces healthy discussions about where to focus that are really important for sales and marketing to be aligned on.

It gives you something to also push back on. You're like, all the teams in the company know what the marketing goals are. It's easier to be like, look, I get why this would be important. But as a reminder, Here are the five things that we're focused on in our V2, Mom. It's harder to say no when you can't say, when you can't show people what you're working on.

Oh, absolutely. It is the ultimate prioritization framework. Goals. Right.

You mentioned outside of pipeline and I'm working with a handful of startups right now and talking to people in the community and stuff. I think setting pipeline goals is easy, right? Finance or COO at some point is, hey, here's a number we're trying to hit. Everybody's working backwards from pipeline and that part is pretty easy. How you do that is hard. How you go and execute on this, hard. But setting pipeline targets is easy. Where a lot of marketing teams get tripped up is like, well, how do we set goals other than pipeline? So can you maybe tell us if you can like what some of those things are for G2 and then like. And then also how you then present back, hey, here are the four or five goals that marketing is focused on. It's not just pipeline.

Yes, absolutely. Well, at G2, it's, it's somewhat unique in that we're a marketplace. And so we're responsible not just for supporting the revenue and the business solutions that we provide to businesses, but also to growing our marketplace, to growing awareness, traffic and reviews on the site. And that's actually a function that I brought back over to marketing this year. And I think is something that marketing historically has driven quite a lot here at G2. And so it was sort of table stakes for us is growing both sides. And so we have goals around seeing our contributions and reviews from our community increase around investing in buyer community this year and growing the traffic on the site as well. And then brand awareness, really hard to measure. I would encourage everyone to have a metric and put it in there because otherwise it's very easy not to care about it. If you don't measure it, it doesn't matter. So pick something even if it's not perfect.

What would be a reasonable brand awareness metric that you would want?

It's one great way to do it is you can do things like social, share a voice, you can do pr, share a voice. You can do a combination of those things. It's not awareness per se, but it's sort of a proxy for how are you growing your exposure and engagement in the world. And then over time you can work on things like true awareness studies if that's meaningful for you.

I saw another pause there for a sec.

Yeah.

What if you're not in an industry that Has a lot of social chatter. What would you do?

You're not in an industry that has a lot of social chatter. A good example would be the developer community comes to mind, but they also have their own channels and other places. My husband's a developer, so I kind of think about often if I had to market to him what a tough job that would be. But I think PR can be one. Another one could be doing a sort of lightweight study, but not really overthinking it, just sort of saying, I'm going to go out and I'm going to. I obviously know who my prospects are and I'm going to get some familiarity with myself and other brands. And you can use a firm to do sort of a blind study of those people, knowing that you know who they are. And you can do some lightweight brand awareness studies. So I would at least try to do that to get a pulse on level of familiarity, if you will, for your brand versus others.

And then like, maybe, maybe year one, your goal could be like, establish a benchmark. And then year two could be see if you move the needle versus that benchmark.

Yeah. And so with brand awareness studies, you really want to set a benchmark and be. I mean, ideally you're. You can sort of measure every six months, but you're not going to see the needle move materially in that amount of time. It's sometimes helpful just to see, like, pulse check, am I going in the right direction? But yes, I would say, you know, every year feeling like you've got, okay, this is how we move the needle. Same with things like pr, share of voice, even social, to a certain extent. There aren't many things you do that are going to make you a breakout oh my gosh, overnight, other than maybe, you know, tweet during the super bowl, you know, there's not too much that you could do to kind of move the needle immediately in three to six months.

Yeah, I like it. I think it's practical advice. It seems to me like my translation is there's not a perfect way strive for eventually to do it with, you know, survey monkey, something, brand awareness, you know, aided unaided type stuff. Stuff. But just like have a high. It's like have a hypothesis and be able to explain that to people.

Yeah. And I think sometimes we get in our own way as marketers because we want it to be the perfect metric for awareness. And it's like, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect. You could acknowledge what it doesn't give you and still have it in there. If you don't put it in there, your board, your team, your company is going to just look at you as, oh, well, they drive, they help support the pipeline, which is not a good place to be.

Yeah, you got to be able to tell the story. I like being able to show like the company, like, hey, here are four or five pillars that we're focused on this year. One of them is deliver the pipeline number. But it's like, we want to launch and grow a podcast to do X, Y and Z. We want to do an annual conference with 500 attendees. We want to write a book. I like create, like having some type of scorecard beyond just the pipeline thing. So then you're like, hey, reminder. Here are the five things that marketing is working on. Everything that. Or it could be like, launch a community and get the first thousand members in our community. I think having those as like non pipeline goals is also important to show like the bigger picture.

Yeah, I love that. Well, we had four last year. I guess we have four this year too. And the other one, by the way, that we measure is nps. So we do marketing team enps. So we measure the sort of health of the team as well, an important one. And so we have our four measures. And then under that we have what we call key initiatives. And there are things like, okay, we want to launch our conference or we want to redo the website or you know, and we put some more what we call sub measures under those that will support them.

You have no analyst relations person on your team, do you?

No, we do not.

Why not?

Well, I think in many instances G2 is sort of. We are in some ways like a Gartner, if you will. I think the difference is our analysts don't decide. We let the customers share their voice and decide. And for that reason, we don't see ourselves as really catering to the analysts. We see ourselves as sort of championing the voice of the customer and. And that's what we focus on.

Teed you up perfectly for that. I was hoping you would say it because a question came up in the Exit 5 community the other day about bringing on analyst relations. And I'm not the best person to give advice on this. Although like most marketing types, I will give advice on it anyway when allowed to. But it just seems to me that that would be the metric to own. It's like, yes, could you spend 75 grand a year and have Gartner? And G2 is expensive also, but like, it's different. I can come back and say, look, we Have X. Like, this is, I think to me, G2 is like the best product marketing strategy. Ultimately, if I'm working for the company and they have the best, they're just blowing away everybody else in the category. With G2 reviews, like, that's what I'm leading with. It's no different than buying from a restaurant. It's like G2 has given almost like proof to what's happening from a customer standpoint. Do you see a lot of marketing teams that make like, G2 reviews like a key goal for their V2 mom?

Absolutely. We see it all the time. It is becoming more and more of a key, like, really a KPI that's on the minds of even the cmo, which certainly at mailchimp, we really cared about it. And, you know, the only way that you're going to get in a leader position on, you know, our grid reports is by having a velocity of very positive customer reviews. Now we have an algorithm. It's obviously got more complicated than that, but it really comes at its core. It's, you got to have happy customers that are going to share what they love about your product. And I love that. I mean, that is the reason I came to G2, because I believe ultimately, as a software buyer, that is what I care about, including when I was an enterprise, you know, in an enterprise company and buying software. I want to hear from my peers. That's really what I care about. The people who are using it day in and day out.

Are there things that you think you can do as a marketing team? Like, if you're not the CMO of G2 for a second, can you raise the needle on G2 reviews other than, like, have a great product? How can you. How do you own that? And who should own that? Like, should product marketing own that?

Oh, I love this question. Okay, this is great. So for reviews, I think the two most common places it sits, product marketing and customer marketing. I think it can naturally fit in both places. On the one hand, it's all about making sure that you are positioning your products in a way that reflects the excellence of your products. On the other hand, because of who we are as G2, the way you do that is by leaning into the voice of your customer and asking them to give you and to share their review. So customer marketing is a natural place that it fits. Ultimately, it's sort of like very few people are willing to just like, oh, I'm going to go leave a review of this software. I love it so much. Touch. It's not top of Mind for our customers. But you'd be surprised if you ask them. And so there's a whole host of ways to do that. You can even work with your product team. We've got integrations with Pindo and Medallia and other companies on the way that you can actually integrate those moments within the product experience so that hopefully they're having a very delightful experience. Maybe you've even measured that. It's a delightful experience. Great time to say, hey, will you leave us a review? You could integrate it into your customer communications. If you've got a newsletter that goes out, why not have a reminder in your newsletter every time it goes out? Hey, by the way, you can leave us a review on G2. Your CSMs, they talk to your customers all the time. I've heard of people doing sort of like a spiff for the CSMs and saying like, okay, this quarter we're trying to get x number of G2 reviews. We're going to have a leaderboard for who gets how many. So all kinds of fun ways that you can generate more reviews. But your customers will champion you. But often only if you ask. And that's true for everything, not just reviews.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of companies now. It's like the category creation playbook has been less about Gartner and Forrester and more about can G2 create a category? It's like that's become the big thing. Can I ask your opinion on category creation? Do you need to create a category?

So I think the answer is it depends. I don't have a good yes on this one because I think there is a downside to it. Right.

Is G2 creating a category? Would you say what you're doing is creating a category?

I would say review sites, yes. Was a new category at the time. Yeah.

So you've already done that. Basically, now you are that. And there's other review sites.

It is a dangerous place to be if you're a category of one that's not a category. Right. I think we all intuitively know that. I think the challenge. I see a lot of people rush. They get so excited to be like the bright, shiny object. I gotta go. I am the pioneer. I'm creating this new category. Make sure that the category deserves to exist and you have competitors or it's not a category. It's just you wanting to lead out in front for some reason that maybe actually puts you so off in left field that your customer kind of goes, huh, I don't see anyone else over there. So you want to make sure that even if you're pioneering, you see a path to having a category which by its very definition has competitors.

Right? Like, if I started a company and I was like, where the category of marketing software reviews, that to me is like a niche. That's a focus area, but you're in this broader category. I also think it's been conflated. Is that. That the right word conflated mixed up with just like, what do you want to be known for? I don't think you have to create a category. I think it's important for people to know how to talk about you and have to think about you. Right? Like, oh, G2 is. Is X. Drift is conversational marketing. I think we've gotten really caught up around, like, well, what constitutes a category? You know, is that a Gartner report? It's like, do people know HubSpot is inbound marketing. Mailchimp is email market is email marketing. Drift is conversational marketing. Like, do people know you for something? That's a.

How I think about it, that's such a great point. Like, you can have a point of view. It doesn't have to be the category. In fact, I would argue you should have a point of view and you should be in a clear category. Right? And your point of view can be thought leading, category leading. But don't conflate the two things.

Or, like, it has to be so obvious. Like, 10 years ago, or whenever G2 Crowd was started, it was like, oh, there. There is no Yelp for business. Okay? We created that. Okay? That is a new thing, and someone.

Will always be first. But it doesn't really get defined, in my view, as a category. Until there's competition, people are willing to pay money for it, and it serves a very clear need that is not served in another way.

Okay, Amanda, thank you for doing this. I could interview you for two hours and we could talk about everything and everyone and every piece of G2 marketing or. But we only have an hour. 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 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 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 editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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