Open-Source Start-up Marketing Strategy: Sometimes you need to poke the snake (episode #147)

I love the movie City Slickers.

If you’re unfamiliar, Billy Crystal is a Manhattanite, has a midlife crisis, and goes out West on a cattle drive to try to figure life out.

Spoiler alert, the crusty old cowboy teaches him that the secret to life is – ‘One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shhh…” Well, you get the idea.

It struck me that this is a great brand lesson as well. You’ve seen the stats – our ideal customer simply gets hammered with messages every day. And there are so many things your internal team could work on. How to break through the noise? How to prioritize? I love what my next guest told me – “If you don’t have one clear position of who you are and why they should care, you’re just throwing spaghetti at a wall.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I sat down with Margaret Dawson, CMO, Chronosphere [https://chronosphere.io/].

Chronosphere has raised $343 million in three rounds. In its Series C round in 2023, the company was valued at $1.6 billion.

Dawson leads global marketing efforts at Chronosphere, overseeing a budget of $12 million and a team of 23 working on digital experience, corporate communications, demand generation, customer marketing, ABM, Marketing Ops, and Product Marketing.

Lessons from the things she made

• If you don’t have one clear position of who you are and why they should care, you’re just throwing spaghetti at a wall
• Sometimes you need to poke the snake
• Integrated marketing moves the needle
• Mentoring is a two-way street
• Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should
• Don’t focus so much on winning each battle that you lose the war
• If you channeled the characteristics that made you so competent and made you authentically you, you would have the greatest power
• We do not serve ourselves or the world by hiding our light or being afraid to stand tall

Discussed in this episode

Join us on July 30th at 2 pm EDT for AI Hackathon: Build a powerful lead gen agent in just 90 minutes [https://join.meclabsai.com/mec-050-masterclass] (from MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa’s parent company).

Outside-In Messaging: Nothing counts more than the language of the customer (podcast episode #75) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/outside-in-messaging]

The 4 Pillars of Email Marketing [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/email-marketing/4-pillars-email-summit-2014/]

Building Brands: People and culture matter a lot, mentorship matters even more, product matters the most (podcast episode #119) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/brands]

Marketing Campaigns: Lose the brand ego and lean into humility (podcast episode #130) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-campaigns]

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