Internal Marketing & What The CEO Really Wants From The Marketing Team

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us.

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This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by my friends at Metadata. Yes, they're my friends. I'm working with them right now. Hey Metadata, what's up? Metadata helps demand gen marketers automate paid campaigns and drive more revenue. If you work in demand gen, you know how running paid campaigns can create so many technical, mundane and repetitive tasks? You got 17 tabs open in your browser? More like 170. You're jumping from LinkedIn to Google to Facebook. Plus there's all the audience creation, creative and testing variations. It can be an entire job just to keep track of this stuff and make sure it all is running properly. And with humans doing it, there's bound to be a lot of wasted time and potential for mistakes and missed opportunities through AI and automation. Metadata frees you from having to manually do these tasks so you can spend your time on the work that matters most Strategy, creativity and the experimentation. Demand gen teams use Metadata to execute hundreds of campaigns without ever logging into Ad managers, automatically monitoring their campaigns and optimizing for pipeline and revenue and drastically scaling their performance before needing to hire more people or hire an agency. In the last two years, metadata has automated 92,000 campaigns and influenced over 2 billion in pipeline for customers like Zoom, Ramp, Pendo and ThoughtSpot. ThoughtSpot generated 5 million in pipeline in their first few months at a 1 to 6 spend to pipeline ratio. There's a stat right there. Write that one down. That's a stat that will get you promoted. If you're a demand gen marketer and you're running paid campaigns today, you really should consider using metadata. You can learn more about how the metadata team can help you do humanly impossible marketing. Marketingtadata IO that's metadata IO and make sure you tell them that you heard about them right here on the Exit 5 podcast.

Exit Exit hey everybody, it's Dave. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Exit 5 podcast. Today I'm going to do a little something different. Well, it's familiar but different. I just have a short episode which is just going to be me, no guest and I saw a message in the Exit 5 community on Facebook. Shout out to the Exit 5 community members if you're there. You can find the signup link. By the way, exit5.com if you're not in there already, but Austin posted this hey Dave, I may be in the vast majority over here, but I just wanted to say that the 10 minute podcasts you made over the holiday break were fire. Today's episode with Kaylee was fantastic. Kaylee Edmondson and honestly very applicable to my everyday life. So please keep those coming. But I've listened to Storia's strategy a few times now because it's short, honest and powerful. I'd totally take more of this is my off the cuff 10 minute story from being in the trenches pods. I don't know, just in cases you saw those as a temporary stop gap. I don't think they're less valuable form of podcast content. It's just different. So that was really kind of you Austin. Shout out to you. Appreciate that they were a stopgap. I had no real strategy. This was before I even named this thing Exit 5 and I just kind of had a rant and I recorded it in my phone and you are right, I enjoy doing these and occasionally I have some things on my mind so I don't know how consistently I'll do these. But outside of the weekly episodes, I thought it would be fun. And so I took a bunch of notes and I thought of a. I have a topic that has been on my mind and I wanted to try to put it down in podcast form. So that's what I'm going to do today. Okay. So this topic is. I don't know exactly what to call it, but it's about internal alignment. And one of the things that I've seen in the years that I've spent working in B2B SaaS, marketing roles at Drift, at Privy, at HubSpot, even as like marketing Manager Dave on through companies that I advise and work with today. And it's one of the biggest frustrations for me as a marketer, I define myself right or wrong. But as a marketer, I say that I like marketing. I'm in marketing because I love the creativity and I love copywriting and I love creative problem solving and storytelling, and I love those things. However, one thing that I've noticed, and I'm not the only person I've noticed, this is just my observation, right? So I'm not like claiming this is an original thought, but one thing that's super frustrating for me is that so much of the questions and challenges and comments about B2B marketing actually have nothing to do with the creativity, the creative problem solving. They so often come down. If you ran like the five whys on so many of the questions that you see in the Exit 5 community or maybe inside of your company, it so often comes down to being aligned internally. And I was very lucky at Drift and at Privy to have very clear goals, teams that were aligned on those goals. And it took work to get there. But especially in the early days of Drift, we were all on the same page, from VP of Marketing to VP of Sales to VP of Product to VP of Success to VP of Ops. We all felt like, honestly, we were on one team together and we each had a different role. My role was to do the marketing stuff. Will's role was to do ops. Julie's role was to do customer success. Craig's role was VP Product, and Armin's role was VP of Sales. And so we all felt like we kind of each have a piece of this pie. It's not just marketing's job, it's not just sales job, it's not just products job. We. We each are stakeholders in a different piece of this, and ultimately we're all supporting the business, and our goal is to help the business grow revenue. And so I've been lucky to be part of that team. But I think so many of the questions and challenges that I see are because it all stems. The root cause of that is not being on the same page. And I just can't emphasize enough how important it is to be aligned with revenue. It makes so many things easier. And this starts at the company level. At Drift, for example, the management team at the time, we all had company goals and objectives and management bonuses or whatever. Those were not tied to some vanity marketing metric like if we generate X email subscribers or website traffic. Each person on the team had a revenue goal. And if the company hit the revenue goal, that's when you hit your bonus. And I think that that was so simple and so powerful. But it's one way at the highest level to get everybody aligned. So I also think that you have to have the. If you're a marketer listening to this, you have to have the perspective that it's your job in marketing. The goal of marketing is to make sales easier. That doesn't just mean the sales team. To me, that means sales for the company. So, like whatever you're selling, whether you're selling iced coffee or CRM, marketing exists to make the selling of that product could be through sales, could be through channel, could be through partners to make the selling of the product easier. And so if you operate out of that framework, well, then we got to get aligned on what actually drives sales. And so I just scribbled down, I was drinking a coffee before this, and this is going to be all over the place. But that is. That's how it is. And you know, at least I know Austin will. Will like this, but I wanted. I came up with a little list of things that you can do to drive internal alignment. Because I think that we just spend so much time on the. On the channels and the tactics, and it's like, man, we just keep. We don't ever address the root cause. And it's like so much. It's hard in the short term because it can take hard conversations, but it solves so many of the problems if you can get aligned and everybody has goals around revenue. Okay, so here's some things that I jotted down to help you drive this. First of all, I think you need to take the mentality that it is your job. If you believe that marketing's job is to drive revenue. And you, you exist, your team exists, your function exists because your job and marketing, you're here to drive revenue. If you believe that, then I think that if nobody at the Company has stepped up to make sure that everyone's aligned on revenue, then like, why can't that be marketing? I love this line from Christopher Lockhead that I've quoted a lot, which is marketing is the leadership department. And I think that is so true. You can take that mentality and so, okay, you know what? Sales isn't talking. Marketing and sales are not talking to each other. Or you don't have a relationship with product, or you don't have the insight you need into the CEO or the roadmap or whatever. Maybe you might not get those things. But damn if I'm not going to be the one that's going to try and drive that alignment. I'm gonna try to make it happen. And maybe you know what, I tried for six months. I can't get the VP of sales on board, can't talk to CEO. I'm gonna quit this job and go somewhere else. That might be what it takes. And it's also a marketer's market right now. There's a lot of good marketing jobs. Not that I'm telling everyone to go quit your job, but like, I just think first principle is like, okay, you know what? We don't have the alignment at this company. I'm not gonna wait around for somebody. And you don't have to be the CMO to do this. You can do this in a marketing manager role. You can do this as an internal early stage startup, like ask these questions, ask your boss, ask your manager, like manage up, push up and you can ask these questions and hopefully you're at a place where those things are encouraged and people don't freak out when you start to talk about some of that stuff. But I would say, number one is take it as your job to drive alignment around revenue because you also, as a marketing person, you got to know.

You can't do it all.

You don't. We don't have all of the tools. We need product, we need partnerships, we need customer success and expansion, revenue and upsell and cross sell and all that stuff. Right? We need to work with the sales team. So you can't do this all on your own. And so once you operate out of that point, like, okay, yeah, it's not just website copy and nurture emails and ads that's going to get us to our goal. This has to be a, we have to be aligned at the company strategic level. So if you don't have that at your company, go and drive it. The other thing, the next thing I would say is go to the CEO Directly and say, we are not measuring marketing by revenue. I want to be measured by revenue. How do you want, like how should I be gold? I want to be gold on revenue. Ask for that. And the way that you can get to revenue is what is some type of proxy or leading indicator for revenue. Ideally at a company incentive level, you're going to be, you're going to be aligned on revenue. So hey, we need to generate, we want to generate $10 million in new revenue this year. How much of that is going to come from marketing? How much of that is going to come from sales? And that's the way that we're going to get to this number. And then from there you can figure out how we're going to set pipeline goals around that. And so I would push really hard for. And you can do this in any model, whether you sell to enterprise, you have PLG strategy. Marketing should own revenue. And at most companies that are listening to this podcast, you're gonna have a marketing team and you're gonna have a sales team. And the simplest way to figure out the revenue number is what's the contribution from marketing, what's the contribution from sales? And you're not working as siloed organizations to get there. Those are two different approaches that you have to hit the company revenue number. And so you have to work together, you're gonna help each other. You don't wanna create an environment where sales is disincent like sales and marketing are battling with each other. And so I think this is where the internal relationships are really, are really important. Which brings me to the next point of this, which is you need to be very close and you don't have to be personally close friends. I don't believe in that. But you have to have a close working relationship with the sales leader. You have to have a close working relationship with the sales leader. This is not rocket science, but there's a bunch of people out there that I know that are going to be listening to this and be like, I don't really have a close relationship with the sales leader. And oftentimes you'll realize that you and the sales leader actually have different objectives and you have different ways of measuring your performance. I was in a situation at a company where the VP of sales, the comp. The way the VP of sales was being comped was put us at complete odds with marketing. So despite the best of our efforts internally and doing all the rah rah company stuff, that person is never going to be incentivized for us to work Together because it was a bad thing. If marketing, if a deal closed via marketing versus a deal closed via sales because they didn't get credit for that, that screwed up from the beginning. I want to create a model where we both have kind of two different teams, sales and marketing. They're used in different ways. We want to work together to achieve the revenue goal. So you have to have that relationship with sales. And I think I use the word relationship because it's the only way that you're going to know the real internal things like hey, what how are you gold? Like what are your goals for the CEO? And you talk to the VP of sales and it's completely different. It makes no sense. Wait, that's out of whack. Then I'm going to go try to have a conversation with the CEO and say, well wait a second, this is a fundamental misalignment, can we get aligned on this? So you got to have that relationship. The third thing is almost in the same way as sales, the team leaders have to work cross functionally together. And you could have people at all different roles. You might have a cmo, a VP of sales ahead of product and there's a manager of something, a manager of something else. Right. Manager of CS doesn't have to be all C level because at different start at different stage of companies you're going to have all different roles of people. But there has to be someone, some one person who is accountable for that organization. And I would try to have some type of, I think at least twice a month have some type of, at least twice a month cross functional leadership meeting where it's not just marketing's job to present pipeline, it's hey, we're all in this together. So what's product working on? What are the product goals? How do those relate to revenue? How's the customer success team doing as it relates to churn and expansion and how those things relate to revenue? What's sales doing and how are we doing as the sales team relates to revenue? What's marketing? See this is when you add those pieces up together, that's how you're going to get to the revenue number. It's not going to be marketing working in a vacuum. Especially modern marketing today you're touching the whole funnel, right from prospect to raving customer, repeat purchase. Marketing is going to be involved there. And so you have to be involved cross functionally. Ideally you could even have this meeting every week. What if every Friday, every Friday morning you had a check in and ideally the CEO and the founders are in this meeting. And at Drift we had like the executive leadership team meeting that was weekly. But even in the earlier days when you don't have all the C level people, there's no reason why leaders from those units can't drive this together. And there's no reason why you can't as the marketing leader be the one to drive that meeting. Hey, I don't own all of the things of this meeting, but I want to get us aligned. So I'm happy to set up the meeting, I'm happy to send out the deck, I'm happy to ask for input, have some type of shared format where everyone's coming with one or two slides about what their org is doing. Talk about challenges, talk about roadmaps. Because look, many people that listen to this are working at high growth venture backed startups. Like these are companies filled with smart people. Why would you not want to open up your marketing challenges to get help from more smart people? I don't understand when people are so guarded about marketing that they don't want to let in other people. Like I am far from the smartest person in any room that I've ever been in but I've been decent at building relationships and understanding what other people need and making sure they see how marketing can help them and us achieve our overall goal. Because guess what, if marketing helps the company hit our revenue goal and everyone has some type of comp incentive related to revenue, everyone's gonna love marketing. It can be that simple. This is why this point drives me nuts. Because this is not creative problem solving. This is all about internal alignment. So I would push to have that cross functional meeting at least twice a month, ideally weekly. And I would push to not have it be just marketing presenting and asking questions. It needs to be. There's three, four, five of us, we all are stakeholders here. We all own a piece of this. What are your goals in product? What are your goals in sales? What are your goals in cs? And maybe step one is let's have that conversation. Let's figure out how we get aligned and then push up, manage up, present to the CEO about how you want to report. How do you want to manage these things together? What else do I have on my list? Number four is I also think you should take every opportunity that you have to present and talk about marketing in front of the company. Same point as before, like let the smart people in. Like if you have an opportunity to present to another team session, sales, cs, cross functional, hr, whoever, finance, take that opportunity. A it makes you A better public speaker. But B, you have another at bat to get in front of the company and talk about marketing and get smart ideas and get other brains on this than just you and the marketing team banging your heads against the wall in the marketing silo. The fifth thing that I would do is I would send a five minute weekly update. Five minutes. Please, please, please keep it to five minutes. You gotta keep it to five minutes. Five minutes is like there's so much scope creep in a 5 minute video at every company. The 5 minute marketing update always turns into 13 minute marketing update. And then the 13 minute marketing update turns into 18 minute video that gets sent out every week that nobody reads. And so you have to remember that it's not your job. The point of this is not to rush and blast out a five minute update about what marketing working on to the company and you know, clean your hands of it and you're done. Just like you're marketing to customers, your job is to actually make sure that the message is seen and heard and understood. And so I've seen this before where marketing sends out a weekly update but they just blast it out 4 o' clock on Friday. Everyone's already out for the weekend thinking about what they're doing. Nobody's paying attention to your, your marketing update on Friday afternoon. So think about how you're going to communicate this and understand that like your job is not done until people actually saw this update. And so don't let it creep in. Five minute max. I would do something like this. Number one. This could be one, this could be five slides. Honestly. First slide. Hey, here's our goals in marketing. As a reminder, here are the three goals that we have for this quarter this year. Whatever. Slide number two, pacing. Here's how we're pacing versus slide favorite. Mike Volpe's favorite slide at HubSpot became one of our favorite slides at Drift and others on down is the waterfall. The waterfall chart, right. That shows a lot about where you're at when you plot your goal versus your pacing. And so I would not hide from that. First slide is your goals. Second slide is your progress towards those goals. Ideally this relates to like most SaaS companies is going to be in month or in quarter. Here's how we're doing. Third slide is here's what we got done this week because not everything is going to be like a number in a spreadsheet. It could be, hey, we did a, you know, we're doing a website architecture re architecture thing and here's why this matters. And here's an update this week and so I like to have one slide that has a bunch of things that the team is working on to bring transparency into what the team is working on. I like to have a slide on what we're going to do next week. So hey, here's what we're working on right now. Here's what we're working on next. Oh, we have this event, we're doing this dinner here. We have this webinar that we're doing. We're doing this co marketing thing and behind the scenes we're working on X, Y and Z. I love sharing that type of stuff. Fourth slide is highlights. So I like to show wins because I think that it's contagious and so wins don't again, don't just have to be numbers. Wins can be screenshots, comments on LinkedIn, replies to email. I've had like mess, you know, great emails from an investor to the CEO about some portfolio company who saw your marketing and did XYZ show off the highlights. How many is that? One, two, three? I guess that's four. So I like to have the highlights and then that can be it. It can be four or five slides. But make this your own. Don't just use my bullet points. Like make it your own. What do you need to talk about? What do you need to share with everybody? What do you want them to know? And then think about the format. I like recording a video. I like having a deck that has those four or five slides. Sharing the deck so people could just flip. Like the deck should be readable on its own without the voiceover video. Here's the 5 slide update for marketing. You can flip through that. But I also like to have the video through it. And oftentimes I would have like little, little games inside of there. Like I might mention favorite song or something that I'm doing or watching right now and, and when I send it out to the company.

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

Yeah, I'd say PS reply back to me if you heard my favorite song or something like that in there. And I think email and internal wiki are best for something like this. I think just posting it in Slack and then bouncing for the weekend is not the way that to do this. So make sure that people are actually going to see it. That's it. How's that? Austin, how we doing? These are my notes. So look, if you're listening to this, if you made it this far, I want you to take one or two things out of here and be the change and be the force inside of your company to drive alignment. All of the channels and tactics and all that stuff. It's going to go nowhere unless you're aligned like this. And it's one of the reasons why I think I have a hard time giving marketing advice sometimes. Because we had such great alignment in the early days of drift and what we did at privy from the CEO down, very clear goals, very clear responsibilities for marketing and everybody being on the same page with what, what marketing was doing. So I want you to have that for your company because I see, I see how much we. It's an uphill climb if you don't have that. So, all right, I'm out of here. I got to take the dog out for a walk. I hope this was really helpful. If you're in the Exit 5 community, leave me a comment in there. Ultimately, I'd love to get some ratings and reviews on this podcast. I think the podcast is really valuable. We've been doing it a bunch, but I haven't pushed for reviews. So leave me a review. If anything, it's kind to see that makes me happy. Otherwise, if you're not already a member of the Exit 5 community, you can go there. Exit5.com we'll have the new website up soon, but for now it's a little coming soon splash page. You can still click and join or get on the email list there. Otherwise, I hope you're having a productive day, productive week, productive month, doing whatever you're doing out there in the marketing world and I will see you or hear you. Well, I won't hear you. You'll listen to me and others on the next episode of the Exit 5 podcast. Bye Exit 5.

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