From Marketer to Marketing Leader (Dave Gerhardt)

Foreign. Hey everybody that's here digitally, virtually today. I'm going to share some of the lessons that I wish I knew as a first time marketing leader. But first, just some quick background on me. My name is Dave Gerhardt. I started my career, I've kind of weirdly only worked in B2B SaaS for the last decade. Started my career at a company called Constant Contact. Then I worked at HubSpot for a little bit and then I was the first full time marketing hire at a company called Drift, which some of you may be familiar with. At Drift, I went from marketing manager to VP of marketing over a course of four years, helped build the marketing team from zero to 30 people. I guess one was myself and Drift has been an awesomely successful company and a lot of cool wins coming out of there. And then I left Drift to go be CMO at a company called Privy. Privy was acquired by Attentive Mobile in June of 2021 and now I spend my time today doing a bunch of different things. One of them is I started a community for B2B marketing pros. So just like you, just like me, it's called exit5exit5.com there's 3,000 members today. We have a bunch of content, podcasts and a community for B2B marketing pros. I know a bunch of you are already in there, so shout out to you Exit 5 members. Last year I wrote a book called Founder Brand which is all about helping startup founders really tell their story and become a center of the brand, which I think is such an underrated marketing tool that we don't often utilize. We love to go and market the product so often the founder story is so key to that business and I wrote a book all about that which you can go check out. And I also spend my time advising startups. So I've been lucky to work with the team here at Metadata. Gil, Mark, Jason, Alex and the team, I've worked with them over the last year, have gotten to know them really well and so I'm excited to be here and participate in this, in this event. And most importantly, I spend most of my time today with, with my, my family, my wife and kids. And my favorite inspirational business quote is that you are the average of the people that you spend the most time with. And for today most of my time is spent with a three and a five year old. So that is where this intellect I think is going to come from. So I want to share these lessons about going from marketing manager to cmo because I made the jump from marketing manager to CMO over a course of five years, which is a really accelerated time period. And I made a ton of mistakes along the way. I'm able to call them mistakes now because I have the, the wisdom of time and so I can look back and see some of those things. And so today I thought it'd be fun with this group to share some of the lessons that I wish I had knew then. Because what I learned the hard way is as a very different job from being a good marketer, so marketing manager Dave, to actually being a good marketing leader, those are, those are two very different things. We're going to go really fast today because we only have 30 minutes. I'm going to give you a lot of things. I'm going to talk through a lot. I have listened to presentations, I've watched a lot of presentations. I don't expect you to hang on every word that I say, but I think that you'll get one or two maybe new ideas or things that will help you get unstuck or maybe this will just feel like therapy to you in your current role. And so that's kind of how I like to look at these things. I think there's 15 lessons that I'm going to go through. If you get one or two new things today, I'll be really happy about that. So like I mentioned before, there's a huge difference between being a marketing individual contributor and a marketing leader. And making the jump from good marketer to good marketing leader is really about understanding that being a marketing leader is about, yes, having that marketing expertise, but also you need to add in the marketing management skills. And there's really three kind of buckets of things that we're going to talk to talk through today. So one of them is, is managing up. I think it's, it's so important for the marketing leader to have a, a great relationship with the, the CEO and managing up to your boss. We're going to talk about managing down. That is all about hiring and having a great team, coaching them to be successful and helping you to do the best job you can do. You can be as a marketing leader. Third piece of this is managing around. It's very tough to be a successful marketing leader without being able to influence and manage change across the entire org, from from product to sales to customer success to finance to, to ops. You have to be able to work with all those teams because as you know, marketing touches all of those departments. And so we've broken this talk up into those, those three sections I just, I do want to give you a little bit of a warning. If you were expecting a lot of data or science or fact based research in this deck, I have to, I hate to spoil it for you, but that is not, that's not where I'm coming from. This is all based on my limited experience in B2B marketing. And so there, there, there might be things that you disagree with, there might be things that you, you know, wish that I had like some, some proof. And all I can give you is, is my experience. And this is a, basically my, my, my rant and lessons based on, on those things. So first thing, let's talk about managing up. The number one thing is you have to understand what the CEO cares about. I see so many times marketers, we get so far in the weeds with the CEO and we're sharing with her all of the 50 to 100 things that marketing is doing because we want to show her how much we're doing and how important marketing is. And based on what I've seen in the companies that I work with today, most of that stuff doesn't matter. When you're talking about the, when you're talking with the CEO, there's really two things that that CEO cares about. And in no particular order, it's usually those, these two things. It's revenue and it's the story. And so when you're trying to manage up, it's very hard. Right? You have, you have so many things going on and you only have 30 minutes a week or 30 minutes every other week with the CEO. Right. If you're lucky, I would try to focus all of my updates and my communication about these two things and the story, meaning positioning, messaging, kind of overall arc narrative of the company. That's always going to be a work in progress, but it might not be something that you're actively working on in that meeting. And so if you're not focusing on the story in that conversation, I typically like to focus on revenue, right. The things that directly relate to building and growing pipeline. And I found that when you think of it like this, you kind of remove some of the stress on your plate because you only have so much time. Let's focus on the one or two big things that are actually going to move the needle. And for most CEOs, just simplify how you think about the things they care about. They care about revenue and they care about the story. Number two is you have to be able to show your work and you need to try to master internal communication. One of the Top complaints that I've seen and I've felt, and I still see this today, is the other teams inside of the company. They don't know what marketing is doing. They know that the marketing team is busy and everyone is stressed and there's a lot of things going on, but they are not really sure how the things that you're doing actually fit into the company goals. And so you need to make it your job to hammer this into the company. And every time you get the opportunity to present or to share an update about marketing, you need to relate this back to how it fits into your company goals. I learned this the hard way in my early days at Drift. We had something on Fridays called show and tell, where every team would present what they worked on. And as one of the earlier employees at the company, I was the only person doing marketing at the time. There's 10 other people at the table. They're all engineers and designers and people who had really cool, tangible things to show what they presented. And I remember my first week on the job, they were like, all right, let's. Let's go over to Dave. And what did you work on this week, Dave? And I was like, I wrote a blog post. And that was like the most humbling experience because nobody. It was just dead silent. Nobody cared, nobody understood why. And that was like my opportunity to have some. Eat some humble pie. Because what I learned was they actually have no idea. The blog post is just a tactic, right? Instead, next week, I needed to come back and I actually gave them a whole presentation. I said, hold on. Last week, I kind of threw up on myself and just said that I was writing a blog post. But really, let me tell you why. So here we're writing this blog post. We wrote this article this week, and here's why, right? Our goal right now is to build an audience. We're trying to grow our website traffic. The way we're going to do that is through organic content. Content. We think if we can do this, then we're going to be able to eventually generate this many trials a month. And if we can do that, you have to be able to show them. You have to be able to paint the picture like that. And so I think it's a safe mindset. It's safer mindset to operate from. If you can assume that nobody has any idea about how what you're doing impacts the company. Another thing that we did in the early days at Drift and even into year three and four of the company, that I was there, at least was there was a meeting called Monday Metrics where each team leader, marketing, sales, customer success, product ops, they would present what is, what is that part of the company working on this week. And so if I just got up in front of 300 people in the company and I said, hey, this week we're doing two webinars and we got these nurture emails going out like nobody's going to have any idea what we're doing. So I always took this as an opportunity to share like, hey, as a reminder, here's what our goal is for this month or for this quarter, right? And then talk about that. And so every opportunity you have to relate what you're doing back to the broader company goals and how marketing fits into that puzzle. That's the, that's the mindset that you want to, you want to operate from. So there's also kind of three, I would call them day to day, week to week, rhythms and routines that I really liked as a marketing leader to just keep everybody in the loop with what marketing is working on. So number one is Slack, right? Everybody's in Slack. There's a marketing channel in Slack. One of the things that I like to do is to share. It's to encourage the team to share like work in progress updates in the Slack channel. So typically we only like to share things when they're done or fully baked or perfect. I like to push the team to share screenshots of, screenshots of videos of articles of, you know, a screenshot of an email from a customer who you tested a new message with. Like the more you can show your work in Slack, it doesn't, it doesn't even have to be perfect. But then you have this channel where there's just kind of always marketing is always, it's always shipping stuff and you're sharing those updates directly in Slack and anybody can hop in and see what marketing is, is working on. The other thing I like to do proactively, and I've been at two companies now where we started this proactively and I saw the rest of the kind of leaders across the company rally and do the same thing, is just sharing weekly, monthly and quarterly recaps about what marketing is working on. So this would be like a five minute kind of loom video with a deck and say it have three to five slides and it's like, here's what marketing got done this week and here's what we're working on next week. And then you can extend that out. Here's what marketing got done this month and what we're working on. Here's what marketing got done last month and here's what we're working on this month. Same thing for the quarter. The more you can not just share what you're working on. So A, you got to do that, share what you're working on, but B, relate it back to. And here's where that fits in our goals for this month. And I like to do that at the end of the week, the end of the month and the end of the quarter. Just, just really simple. The other thing that I always kind of took seriously inside of the company is presenting. I think anytime you have the opportunity to grab the mic and get on, on stage or on Zoom or whatever the format is and present and talk about marketing, like, take that opportunity. Because one of my favorite ways to think about this is from Christopher Lockett, who's, who's an amazing author and I realize we did him a disservice by spelling his name wrong here in this deck, but he always thinks about marketing is the leadership department. And I totally agree. If you're in marketing, right, you're probably and should be the best communicators inside of the company. Like, please use that opportunity to present and take any opportunity you can to grab the mic and share what marketing is working on as you can. Number three is you need a story. More than anything else, you need a story, but it's not just a story. You need a story that can become your strategy. I love this quote from Seth Godin. This was from an AMA that he did, an online Geniuses Slack community. Somebody asked him, hey, what's the difference between B2C and B2B marketing? And I think this perfectly kind of captures all of it. He said, the secret is understanding that the people buying from you are still people, but one big difference is that they're spending somebody else's money. Your job is to give them a story that they can tell their boss. And if you can't tell them, if you can't tell them a story and the only story, then the only story available to tell them is either, number one, I bought the product that we bought at my last job, right? Or number two, I bought the cheaper one because nobody's going to get fired from their job for buying the product that they've used before or buying the cheaper one. So this is the opportunity from marketing perspective is to give, especially in B2B marketing, is to give these people, the people are trying to sell to a story that they can take back to their, to their Boss. I know for me, as a marketer coming up in my career, I think HubSpot did an amazing example of this where There was probably five years before I even had the opportunity to buy HubSpot as a customer. But I was, you know, religiously following their blog and going to their webinars and going to their events, and they truly made me feel like they made me get smarter at my job in marketing. And so when it came to buying a tool like HubSpot, you're like, look, sure, maybe there's features that HubSpot has and Marketo doesn't or whatever. You don't, you don't have to play the feature war because we're already in the conversation because this company has become an expert to me and made me smarter in my job. And so the way that I like to think about this now is just like, I call it two word positioning, which is HubSpot was inbound marketing. Gainsight was customer success. Drift was conversational marketing. And this is really powerful because when you simplify the story to two words inside of the whole company at Drift, from the product team to sales to finance, right, Everybody had this frame. Like, what we're building is conversational marketing. So therefore we need a marketing strategy that positions us as the leader in conversational marketing. The product team needs to be delivering products and features and building a roadmap that helps us deliver on this vision of being the leaders in conversational marketing. The sales team has to be able to sell and educate people on why conversational marketing is a better way to do things. And so, so many companies, the story gets too complex. Nobody can repeat the, the company's tagline or they're, they're, they're worried about what the, the homepage headline is like. What's more important is this, this idea of like, what do you want to be known for? HubSpot was inbound marketing. Gainsight was customer success Drift, conversational marketing. You can call this a category, you can call this whatever you want. I think the simplest way that I like to think about is what do you want to be known for? And from a B2B marketing opportunity standpoint, I think that the best strategy that you can have is to position your company as an expert and as a leader in that space. And so for Gainsight, that means how do we, like, how do we educate people on customer success? How do we make customer success pros get smarter about their job? And I think this lends itself really nicely to figuring out, like, hey, what should our content strategy Be what does our product marketing strategy need to be? You can boil this all the way down to two word positioning. And ultimately this is only going to happen in a, in a healthy and effective marketing team if you have a strong relationship with the CEO. I think one of the things that I credit a lot of our marketing success to at drift was being really close and involved with David, the CEO. We collaborated so much on the marketing strategy and the story. We were always texting and riffing on this. And I think it has to be that level of relationship between the marketing leader and the founder CEO in order to really, to execute on this. Fourth thing is you have to be able to articulate your marketing strategy. This is something that drives me nuts because I see we just, we default right into the tactics and the channels and I see a lot of marketing leaders or marketing teams who aren't really sure what the actual marketing strategy is. And this might seem obvious, but this is worth like double clicking and pausing on this for what you're doing at your company. You have to be able to say like, what do we think that our marketing motion is? Is this, like how are we going to generate revenue as a company? Is this, is this sales led? Is it abm? Is it product assisted? Is it product led? That really matters. And you can really tell when a company is kind of half in and half out of one of these strategies. I don't believe that there's a perfect one. And I actually think you can be successful with, with any of these approaches. But it's about being, being committed to this as a team, especially as a leadership team. You have to have a very clearly defined go to market motion. Because so much of what you're going to do from a marketing standpoint is dictated by what this motion is. Right? The, the tactics and channels required in a, in a sales led revenue function are going to be much different than product led. And if you can't articulate that and think about your, your marketing strategy from that lens, it's going to be very hard to be successful. The other thing that's really important here, and I don't mean this to be like 101 level stuff, but I'm just like, I wanted to hammer this home here because I still see it all the time, is like, which segments are you going to sell to? Having that very clearly defined ideal customer profile really matters. I've been able to do the best work with the marketing team inside of a company when that ICP was really clear. When we're trying to be everything to everyone is when things get a little bit mushy. And I see this a lot inside of B2B SaaS companies. You kind of take one average theory on what your strategy should be and you peanut butter it across all of these channels. You got to focus. And as the marketing leader, you have to have a strong opinion about what your marketing strategy should look like. And the whole organization has to be aligned on those things. You can't have marketing thinking it's one thing, sales thinking it's another, product thinking it's another. And I really think that it's your job as the marketing leader to be the one to drive that alignment. You're not going to be able to solve it all by yourself, but you need to be the one who's raising your hand and like, if nobody's solving it inside the company, then make that your job. Be the one to get the right people in the, in the meeting and make those conversations happen. I think you also have to have a view on, on the market. And so you can't just do this in a vacuum because someone presented it, you know, in a virtual event or whatever. But look, take a look around and see what your competitors and what's happening with related companies in your industry. What is their approach to go to market. What are the gaps and opportunities for you to fill? And I also think you have to be able to have a point of view on what good marketing looks like. One of the reasons that I got along so well with David, the CEO at Drift, and Be Ben, the CEO at Privy was we spent so much time. Both of them were like, I want to do marketing like this. I love how this company does it. I want us to do it that way. And that for me as a marketing leader is amazing when you have a CEO that can @ least articulate, here's what I think good looks like. And so just make sure that you have a perspective, whether that is Slack or maybe it's Drift or maybe it's Attentive or Clary or Gong or whoever. Try to unpack somebody else's marketing strategy and take lessons from that and be like, hey, we want to do, we want to do marketing like this. Even at Drift, we took so much inspiration from companies who are not B2B companies. David was almost religious about saying, like, I want us to feel like a consumer brand. And that was great because that gave us a guardrail for figuring out what types of things in marketing did we want to go do and execute on. Fifth one is, forget acronyms. Use your brain and you have to figure out how to grow by using this thing inside of your head. I didn't go to school for B2B marketing. I know many of you didn't either, but you go on LinkedIn or you go to an event and all you see is these acronyms. Mql, sal, pql, whatever. I'm not saying these are not important, but ultimately we get obsessed with what we think are B2B marketing acronyms and jargon and benchmarks and all that type of stuff. Just one of the reasons why, one of the reasons why I had a couple of wins early in my career was honestly, I didn't know that much about B2B marketing. I was able to look at it and I got the freedom to do this from David, who's a CEO at Drift, to be like, look, forget about those. I don't care about those benchmarks. I don't care about those acronyms and the jargon. Like just, just use your brain. Like at the end of the day, there's only three ways really to grow a business. You can get more, you can get more customers, you can get those company, those customers to pay more when they come in and you can get them to come back more often. Like, just don't obsess over what you see on LinkedIn and in other forums. Like just use your brain. Operate from first principles. B2B marketing is not that different than any, other than growing any other type of business. So focus on these core things. Don't obsess over all the, all the jargony nonsense stuff that gets put out in the world. It's not that complicated. We like to over complicate it because it just makes for more content to go and create. Sixth thing is, you have to be able to think short term and long term and damn if this is probably like the number one thing that I wish I understood earlier. Short term thinking Dave versus short and long term thinking Dave. And it's really hard, right, because you're under a lot of pressure. You got to hit the number this quarter, especially right now. I know it's Q4 in a tight economy, nobody you know, it's. You got, you're, you're having a hard enough time to hit the number today. It's very hard to think about what you're going to be doing next June. But I promise you that the lesson I learned the hard way was in June, you're going to be like, damn, we're 20% behind. What can we do? And you're just going to keep chasing this game of like short term tactics where the easiest way to hit your number is to have invested in that channel last year. And I've made this mistake two or three times now, so I'm sharing it because hopefully you don't. A really simple framework is like if you're, you need to audit and look at all the things that you're doing. And if you're not spending at least 30% of your time, budget people, resources on the future, you're going to be in a tough spot. I wish that I did a better job of having new channels ready. And so like when you know the plan jumps 30% in Q2 of next year, you can't, you know, wake up that quarter and figure out what new channel is going to get you there. You got to be able to be testing and learning and scaling up some of those channels like behind the scenes now. And so you got to be able to think at least like 70% of your time and budget and resources is spent on hitting the number today. But you have to remember that a big portion of this 30% at least has to be about like laying the foundation for the future. Something that I've seen lately that I really think is great is from Chris Walker and Refine Labs. Their labs are talking about this concept of revenue R and D, which is a little bit more advanced than my 7030 framework. But I think it's a great way to like, they give you a framework to think about like running experiments now, looking for positive signals, finding ways to scale those things and get them repeatable. And then when you need that new channel in Q2, three, you know, Q2, Q3 of next year, you're not having to learn from zero. You're like, oh, this is great. We, we were testing this channel for three to six months now. We needed to start contributing 500k in pipeline, like, let's go scale that up. And then you have the, you know, you can make the case to the CFO to get 50 grand, 100 grand or whatever, you need to go out and do that as opposed to having to learn and scale in the same quarter. It's very challenging to do that. And ideally you have some portion of the team or everybody's job. You have time and budget carved out so people can do this. Let's talk about managing down. So we talked about managing up. Let's talk about managing down. You have to be able to push your team past incremental thinking. One of the lessons that I learned is we so often default to like if you're behind on pipeline or you're trying to figure out how to grow pipeline, we default to these tiny optimizations and updates like let's, let's redo the email nurture flow. Hey, let's. How many times does this happen inside of your company? Someone's like oh that's a great idea. Let's add it to the email nurture flow. I promise you that that is not going to be the thing that is going to make that, that big leap for your company. Typically that's going to come from figuring out a new channel, figuring out a different segment and different ICP to go after. I actually just saw this yesterday as we were putting the finishing touches on this presentation from. This is from Ganto Martin Ganta Vincas Ganta Venicas who is the SVP of Marketing at at Auth0 and he posted. I just want to read this really quickly. Years ago auth0 stopped growing in pipeline. We had to change what the marketing team was doing for six months to get us back on track. It was a hard decision but required bold decisions. We basically, he basically said they had 40 people on the marketing team. They took 20 of those people and focused them on top four kind of key buckets and experiments. They stopped their day to day jobs. They built four pods inside of marketing and they worked cross functionally. One group focus on the website and ab testing. One group focus on increasing top of funnel traffic. The other group focused on like finding alternatives to talk to sales whether that be chatbots or other kind of mid funnel offers. And then the fourth group took big bets by really like changing the signup flow. I think this is a perfect example of what I mean when I talk about avoid incremental thinking. This is something that's very hard to do because it requires change and having hard conversations with people inside of the company and being okay with missing your goals for a quarter. But this is what it takes to get out of a hole. And so if you're in a revenue hole right now, I promise you that the solution is not going to be more nurture emails, more website optimizations. It's going to be bigger thinking like this and you have to have the guts to be able to like blow up the marketing team and change what everyone's doing for three to six months to get out of the hole. As a result auth0 went from 20 million to 40 million and a couple years later they had a 6 and a half billion dollar exit to Octa. I'm not saying that was directly because of this. But I just think it's a perfect example of what I mean when I talk about avoiding incremental thinking, especially as the marketing leader. It's your job to be able to think like this and be okay with taking big swings. Number eight, please. You gotta be able to think hard about offers. Dan Kennedy, one of the my favorite direct response marketers, salespeople, copywriters of all time. He worked on proactive, Walmart and QuickBooks. He says your marketing needs to have an offer that tells your ideal prospects exactly what to do and why they want to do it. Right now it should be irresistible, time sensitive and give them transformative value. The offer. Right? That marketing is about the offer. And then in B2B marketing, our offers are typically like start your free trial, request a personalized demo or contact sales. Right. Who the heck who wants to do any of those things? Like maybe the urgent people who are like so hot to buy and they want to do this right now. But that's not going to be the majority of the people that are aware of your company. And so you really got to push hard and try to come up with more middle of the funnel offers that address the selfish benefit of what is in it for me as your ideal customer. So for example, you know, we, we love to, to kind of shit on webinars and B2B marketing. But is the webinar bad? No, it's just typically that we've, we've kind of gotten used to webinar being a, being a code word for like a boring one hour presentation. Right. What if, what if the webinar offer was like, hey, you want to become a better rapper? Well, we have Jay Z on this webinar and, and he's going to teach you how to write legendary lyrics or you know, in an hour zoom call. Right. Is the webinar bad? No, that's an amazing offer. The webinar is. It is the offer. You got to be able to think about that. I think Privy's done a great job of this. They sell to small e commerce businesses. So here's a session that would actually be useful. Hey, steal this expert approved playbook to have your best Black Friday Cyber Monday ever. That's coming up in 30 days. That's a great offer for somebody to actually like. Should I spend an hour of my time or watch the recording? Should I actually spend my time on that? So you got to push hard to think about the offer. Some, some legendary offers that are not just request a demo or not a webinar HubSpot, Website Grader. Right. They sell a market automation and website performance and SEO tools. So they built Website Grader, which is go in, plug in your website. We're going to tell you all the things that are broken and wrong about your website. And by the way, wink, wink, nod, nod. You know how we're going to solve that problem? Well, by using HubSpot. We did this at Drift, something similar where you could test a chatbot on your site without having to talk to anybody. Demand. Well, they sell an SEO tool, they give you a free SEO health audit, which is a great idea. And I, I've seen this one recently from Clary that I like a lot, which is a. Where are you leaking revenue? So plug, plug some stuff in and we'll give you an assessment. Number nine. You have to have the keys to create momentum on your own. So often today, the biggest spikes that you create in marketing are going to be based on these big launches that you do on your own. You don't need to wait for Gartner or Forrester to write about you. And I actually believe you don't even need to wait for the product team to deliver some big stuff. You can be your own publisher as a marketing team today through content and through channels like this virtual event is a great one. Podcasting. You have the tools to be your own publisher and create your own launches and momentum. One thing that we did at Drift was we had monthly marketing launches. We called them marketable moments. They were on the calendar. No matter what was going on, the first Tuesday of every month, we were doing a marketable moment. It wasn't a blog post. It wasn't just a webinar. It was something bigger. It pushed us to come up with a big. What's a big launch? Something that we can do on our own to get, get more people talking about us or give us an excuse to go back out and talk to potential customers and potential buyers. We called them marketable moments. And that really allowed us to create our own momentum. And then when you do get ammo and stuff from the product team, it makes it even more, more powerful. Same way. I also believe, like you have your own channels, you don't have to wait. Like I said, you don't have to wait for Gartner to validate you to be your own publishing publisher today. Like, look at, look at what Metadata has done, for example, with their podcast and their efforts on social and content here today. You can be your own publisher. Think like that. Don't think that you have to Rely on these other people to write about you in order to get the word out. You have all the tools that you need today as a marketing team. Number 10 is you have to get comfortable making bets without perfect data. If you wait around to get perfect data, it's going to be too late and rarely are you going to have that perfect set of data. We love marketing attribution. Marketing attribution does not tell you, does not tell you what to go and do next. You still have to make a bet on where you're going to go and spend your time and spend your money. So I like to think of marketing strategy as portfolio management management. It's never going to be perfect. You're never going to have all the data. You have to be able to act and make decisions and knowing that ultimately you're placing bets and that you're hoping things that work out too often. Earlier in my career, I was paralyzed without perfect data and not able to make decisions. I think now almost I have the opposite problem which I make really quick decisions without the data. Be somewhere in the middle, be okay with making decisions without all the data. Number 11 is your job is to get the job done. This was the biggest shift for me as an individual contributor to marketing manager. If you are the marketing leader and you're trying to do all the things yourself, you are never going to survive. And you're also, your team is going to hate you. So you have to be able to change your mindset from like, it's not your job to do it, it's your job to get the job done. And that can mean through, through people, through programs. I can tell you that your CEO, your, your boss, whoever that is, they don't care if you spend that money on an agency or if you hire people or if you spend it on programs they want you to hit. And so once you can like free yourself of thinking like, well, I gotta show them that we did this all in house, doesn't matter. Use, use your budget and use your programs to your advantage. Your job is to get the job done, not do it all yourself personally. Somewhat related to this is when you're talking about hiring, you have to be able to test into the job or at least do a part of it internally before hiring externally. I think I look back at every hiring mistake that I've made in the past and it's because we didn't kind of already have that role tested and proven before we went and hired for it. So in the early days of drift, I was ahead of marketing we wanted to do more events. Our first move was not, well, I wanted it to be, but the CEO said, no, sir, we wanted to go and test events as a channel. He wasn't like, yeah, go hire an event person and go test events. He was like, nope, you're gonna go. You figure out events for us. So you go run three events this quarter, figure out what works, what doesn't, what might work for our audience, then you'll actually know what good looks like. And you can model this and scale this and then we can go hire somebody. And I just think that that was such an important lesson and you can do this. So maybe that means, hey, you think partner marketing could be a channel for you? You have a great product marketing person. Maybe she could take on partner marketing as, you know, 20% of her job for this quarter. And then you can go and figure out, like how you're gonna, how you're gonna scale that and what good looks like to hire that person full time. Number 13, you have to make hiring your job, not a side project. And so obviously you've read every business article ever and they talk about people are everything. I had read it too, but I didn't feel it really until I was able to go to my second company where I was running marketing, which is Privy. And so at Drift, we had an amazing team, but I made a lot of mistakes and spent a lot of unnecessary time and budget to get there. And that was because I was only spending 25% of my time on hiring and building the team. Or I thought, well, we're not hiring anybody right now. And so I don't need to be going and hire and build pipeline. But the same way you build sales pipeline, you don't just go and get it when you need it, you get it before you need it. And so at Drift, I was kind of always in the weeds, always reacting to things versus at Privy, I had, I got to hire a team from scratch and we hired a different profile of people. And that allowed me to basically give me 85% of my time to think like strategically about the business. Same way you hear about CEOs talk about work on the business versus working in the business. That was the difference that I felt. And the only way you're ever going to get there is if you make hiring your full time job, even if not hiring right now. I got this lesson from somebody they used to work with. He was like, look, I always keep a dream list of candidates, even if my company's not hiring right now. I have this Spreadsheet and I got LinkedIn profiles and names of all these people that I would want to hire if I had the opportunity. I think you could at the bare minimum always be doing that. A next level up from that would be like, this is why LinkedIn to me is not just about vanity metrics. Especially if you're hiring and building a team. Being out there publishing content, positioning yourself as a, as a thought leader in your space can be a huge advantage from an employment brand standpoint. I mean, how many, how many people do you think like Udi at Gong has gotten to work for him because they've seen his content, you know, on LinkedIn or I think about Jason and Mark and Gil at Metadata and the stuff that they've been putting out that, that stuff works like a magnet for candidates also. And so you, you got to make that a part of your job. You also can't just outsource the, outsource this to HR and recruiting. You're going to have an HR team, you're going to have a recruiting team. But their, their job is not just like hand deliver you dream candidates on a platter. Obviously if that could happen, that's great, but who's going to know more about the right marketing candidates to hire you or the recruiter? You have to be involved here. Mike Volpe, who is a mentor of mine, he was a CMO at HubSpot. He was, I think one of the greatest people I've seen at this. He was always meeting people, always connecting with people, always kind of putting out content about marketing and his philosophy and what they were doing at HubSpot. And that led to him basically having a, a roster of people to, to pick from. When it came time to hiring, they, they wanted to go work with Mike. So you gotta, you have to make this part of your job. This is a reminder to, to go do this even now, right? You're, you're, maybe your company just did layoffs. You're not hiring. So does that mean that for six months you should just go ignore candidates? No, go start a lunch, start a breakfast. Even if you're not hiring people right now, you should always be talking and seeing who's interesting out there on the market and knowing what good looks like. And the last piece of this is managing around this seems so obvious. But you have to find a way to get on the same page as sales. Like revenue is really the only thing the company cares about, what the CEO cares about, the board cares about. So if you're in marketing and you're in sales and those two teams are not on the same page and something is fundamental. And I think one of the biggest challenges in the B2B SaaS world is that sales and marketing and other teams are not aligned. And it's not for any other reason than like how those teams are are actually gold. And so I'm going to try to flip through this a little bit. But too often the reason that those teams are struggling and have problems with each other is not because of some creative problem. It's because fundamentally they have different comp plans. Sales is getting comped in one way, marketing is getting Compton another. And those things don't add up. You have to understand the incent that drive the organization and you should push the CEO or others to be like, look, I want sales and marketing to be measured the same way. Obviously there's different inputs there, but you have to create a culture where everyone, the team leaders on the revenue function are measured on revenue, not some random metrics inside of each team. And so if it's not working like that inside of your company, again, be the one to drive the change and fix it. It's going to make your life much easier or else like I think so often this is the root cause, but we don't want to go and address this because, because it has so many like other issues related to it. But this is where this is often the root cause of so many sales and marketing revenue challenges. When those two teams work together, life is so much easier, I promise you. Somewhat related to this is understanding finance and Ops. Number 15 is your job is to be the marketing leader. Don't become finance and ops. And I know that's a common narrative. You got to understand finance, you got to understand ops. Totally agree. You have to understand those things, but don't become those things. Make best friends with those with those two teams. I think you need to look at those at finance and ops the same way as you look at sales, which those are collaborators, those are partners with. You treat marketing as a business function. And so like at Drift, two of my most valuable colleagues were VP of OPS and VP of finance. Right. My job is not finance. You don't want me building the model. Earlier in my career, I thought I had to be the one to do that. Later in my career I realized, oh no, we're all working on this together. These are my business partners. Treat them like that, collaborate on revenue together. Sales, ops, finance, marketing, products, CS should all be collaborating on these things together. Marketing drives revenue, but marketing can't possibly own Revenue solo. You have to be able to work with everybody. Okay, that was a lot. I tried to jam in basically 10 years of my career into a 35 minute presentation. I hope you got at least one new thing out of that. If you liked anything that I talked about, you will love what we do and the Exit 5 community. Go and check out exit5.com. Feel free to send me a note personally. Here's my email. It's dgaveart.com thanks to Gil and the Metadata team for having me. I hope this is a great session for you and I will see you around to make your life much easier or else like I think so often this is the root cause but we don't want to go and address this because it, it has so many like other issues related to it. But this is where this is often the root cause of so many sales and marketing revenue challenges. Challenges. When those two teams work together, life is so much easier, I promise you. Somewhat related to this is understanding finance and Ops. Number 15 is your job is to be the marketing leader. Don't become finance and ops. And I know that's a common narrative. You got to understand finance, you got to understand ops. Totally agree. You have to understand those things, but don't become those things. Make best friends with those with those two teams. I think you need to look at those at finance and ops the same way as you look at sales, which those are collaborators, those are partners with you treat marketing as a business function. And so like at drift, two of my most valuable colleagues were VP of Ops and VP of Finance. Right. My job is not finance. You don't want me building the model. Earlier in my career I thought I had to be the one to do that. Later in my career I realized, oh no, we're all working on this together. These are my business partners. Treat them like that. Collaborate on revenue together. Sales, ops, finance, marketing, products, CS should all be collaborating on these things together. Marketing drives revenue, but marketing can't possibly own revenue solo. You have to be able to work with everybody. Okay, that was a lot. I tried to jam in basically 10, 10 years of my career into a 35 minute presentation. I hope you got at least one new thing out of that. If you liked anything that I talked about, you will love what we do in the Exit 5 community. Go and check out exit5.com. Feel free to send me a note personally. Here's my email. It's dgaveart.com thanks to Gil and the Metadata team for having me. I hope this is a great session for you. You and I will see you around.