So one of the classic SaaStr posts we update and is even more true than ever: ask every VP you hire, especially your VP of Marketing, what they most want to do. Have them make a list.
And then realistically, they will only do the first 3-4. They may do a little of the other items, but especially VPs of Marketing (and CMOs) tend to most enjoy and specialize in certain parts of the marketing playbook. And those are the ones they’ll focus on:
Then the other day during a SaaStr Workshop Wednesday, I had a chance to reflect on the top things my VP of Marketing did her first 30 days at Adobe Sign / EchoSign … and the things she never did that much of. She is and was great. But there were parts of marketing she was good at and interested in … and parts that were less her thing.
The things my VP of Marketing did in her first 30 days:
- Weekly Webinars. My VPM immediately kicked these off her first 30 days and it just worked. Slowly at first, but it always worked. She never missed a week. Kudos.
- Whitepapers. These didn’t seem to work at first. All the leads seemed of low quality. But as time went on, I saw they did help with enterprise leads. Only a handful of big deals came via whitepapers. But big deals did eventually come from them. They were just a waste outside of larger enterprise deals.
- Lead Scoring. Obvious stuff today, but we weren’t doing any of this. She put this in place immediately. Interestingly, it didn’t really help at first with our first VP of Sales. But once we added Brendon as our VP of Sales, it worked wonders.
- Lead Routing and Optimizing Round Robin. Loretta worked on getting the right leads to the reps that were best at closing them. And not giving too many (or too few) leads to different reps. She enjoyed this and we probably got a 10%-15% revenue boost just optimizing this.
- Sales Team Support. My VPM #1 goal was to support the sales team. I love this. So what they needed, within reason, she did. It was telling she picked a desk right in the middle of the sales team.
- Sales collateral. To support the sales team, again.
- SEM (Paid seach). My VPM brought in a top SEM firm to get this going for real. It was never more than 10% of our revenue but it did work.
- Testimonials. She brought in 20-30 great testimonials, with headshots, video, etc. They looked great and were segmented by industry.
- Funnel and customer metrics. Within 30 days I finally understood how our leads (and customers) segmented by size, lead source, etc. Super helpful to know where to better invest.
She crushed these, and this is far more than most VP of Marketing do in their first year, really.
The things she was never all that interested in … so we didn’t do much of:
- Field marketing and events. I had to do this, it was just something she wasn’t that passionate about. Apart from Dreamforce, I’d often be at events, even manning a booth … all alone.
- Steak dinners. We should have done these. But it wasn’t her passion.
- BDRs and true MQLs. We didn’t really have a marketing team qualifying leads for sales. It was OK for us, but with hindsight it could have helped.
- Customer conference. We never did this until after Adobe acquired us and we hired a resource and got Adobe to produce it. We should have done this earlier.
- Travel for Work. Related to prior points. Some folks love to travel. Our VP of CS did, and it helped a ton with bigger customers. Our VP of Marketing didn’t. So you need to work around this.
- Reviews. Reviews were super helpful to us in the early days. We had 1000+ 5 star reviews on Saleforce platform before anyone else had 100+. Our VP of CS drove this, which was great. But it wasn’t an area of high interest to her. It required a lot of tailored outreach and hand-holding. She enjoyed the motions to get a few great case studies done, just not what it takes to get 1,000 5-star reviews.
- SEO. My VPM enjoyed SEM (although we outsourced it), but the less quantiative side of things in SEO wasn’t her thing. But she did at my pushing find us an SEO consultant that was actually good and solved a big issue we had a Google.
- PR. She did bring in some agencies but mostly just to do some PR. The A+ stuff I had to go get mostly myself.
- FUD and Counter FUD. This was important in our space but owning this wasn’t an area of high interest.
- Product Marketing. Mostly we just had 1 set of basic marketing materials, even though we had centers of excellence in tech, insurance, telecom, and more. We could have done a lot more here.
Doing more of all of these would have been great. All of them would have worked, and did work to the extent we did them.
But I know zero great marketers that want to do, and have the energy, to do all of it well. If you expect your CMO or VPM to do all of it, and especially, to do all of it with deep passion, you may be expecting too much.
Ask what they really think you should do. The top 3-4 things. That’s what they’ll do. And if that’s not what you need — move on. Find a different type of marketer. It’s OK.
(image from here)
