Erica Seidel, the host of The Get, provides an overview of the key themes from this season. Erica runs The Connective Good, the executive search practice that specializes in placing CMOs and VPs of Marketing for B2B SaaS companies. She is known for recruiting the ‘make money’ type of marketing leaders, not the ‘make it pretty’ ones.
This episode serves as an executive summary of the learnings from our fifth season, which has focused on the CMO and Board relationship.
We cover:
- What do Board members want in a SaaS CMO? And how can you ace your interview with a Board member?
- Board meetings: How can you land on your feet once you are inside the Boardroom?
- How do you build a strong dialogue with the Board OUTSIDE of Board meetings?
- Serving on Boards: How can you become the CMO who gets tapped for Board seats?
I designed this season to be a guide for how to upgrade from one-way reporting to the Board to a two-way dialogue. With that ongoing dialogue and collaboration, both in and out of the Boardroom, both sides will learn more, and the business is more likely to be successful.
A huge thank you to the guests this season, who ranged from B2B SaaS marketing leaders, CMOs who have become Board members, and Board members/investors who are involved in hiring CMOs:
- Elana Anderson
- Kelly Ford Buckley
- Allison Dancy
- Evan DeCorte
- Jennifer Pockell Dimas
- Chris Fountain
- Sandra Lopez
- Madeline O’Phelan
Please tune in to each of their episodes. And, check out the episodes from the previous four seasons. Last season, for instance, we covered ‘Solving for the Scale Journey in B2B SaaS.’
To stay in the know for our next season, please keep following the show in your preferred podcast listening app.
Key Links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericaseidel/
https://theconnectivegood.com/
https://thegetpodcast.com/
-----
The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today’s top marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
This season’s theme is the CMO and Board Relationship in B2B SaaS: How can that relationship go from fraught to functional and even to fantastic?
The Get’s host is Erica Seidel, who runs The Connective Good, an executive search practice with a hyper-focus on recruiting CMOs and VPs of Marketing, especially in B2B SaaS.
If you are looking to hire a CMO or VP of Marketing of the ‘make money’ variety - rather than the ‘make it pretty’ variety, contact Erica at erica@theconnectivegood.com. You can also follow Erica on LinkedIn or sign up for her newsletter at TheConnectiveGood.com.
The Get is produced by Evo Terra and Simpler Media Productions.
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Erica Seidel (00:03):
Hello, and welcome to The Get.
I'm your host, Erica Seidel.
This season, the fifth season of TheGet, has been focused on the relationship
between CMOs and Board members.
For many CMOs, interactingwith the Board is about as much
fun as getting a root canal.
But what if you could make your CMOand Board relationship go from fraught
(00:23):
to functional, and even to fantastic?
If we haven't met yet, a brief intro.
I spend my days recruiting CMOsand VPs of Marketing in B2B SaaS.
So I have this unique perch toexplore the trends, tribulations,
and triumphs of the best marketingleaders and their organizations.
I've had a range of guests on my podcastthis season - marketing leaders who are
(00:45):
veterans at interacting with Boards,marketing leaders who are Board members
themselves, and a couple of Boardmembers without deep marketing expertise
who have hired marketing leaders andhave learned firsthand how valuable
the right CMO can be for the Board.
And speaking as a podcast host for justa moment, it's been great to hear from
so many loyal listeners along the waywho have found this podcast useful.
(01:09):
One person actually told me that I wasthe Terry Gross of the CMO podcast space.
I'm honored.
In this executive summary episode,I'm going to recap some of the most
compelling takeaways from this season.
One.
What do Board members want in aSaaS CMO and how can you ace your
interview with a Board member?
(01:29):
Two.
Board meetings.
How can you land on your feetonce you are inside the Boardroom?
Three.
How do you build a strong dialogue withthe Board outside of Board meetings?
Finally, four.
Serving on Boards.
How can you become the CMO whogets tapped for Board seats?
Ready?
Here goes.
(01:56):
First, what do Board members want froma CMO and how can you ace the Board
interview when you are up for a CMO role?
Some inside perspective from mebefore you hear from my guests.
I do a lot of searches for privateequity backed companies where
investors are active on the Board.
My searches that go the mostsmoothly have something in common.
The right Board members are involvedin the search process early on.
(02:18):
By contrast, I've seen searches go notso smoothly when Board members only
show up at the end and nix a candidate.
I'd rather have a Board member or investorbe like a cook in the kitchen as opposed
to the restaurant critic who only judgeswhat's on their plate without being
involved with how the meal was made.
So I personally have become a fanof Board members engaging throughout
(02:38):
the search, both with the searchprocess and with the candidates.
After all, the way you start arelationship is often indicative
of the way you continue it.
My guests this season all agreethat early engagement between the
Board and the CMO makes sense.
So what are Board members looking for?
Chris Fountain, a veteran Boardmember and operating partner
at private equity firm FrontierGrowth, shares what's on his mind.
Chris Fountain (03:02):
I like to understand their operating cadence.
The operating cadence just tellsyou how you run the business of
marketing, and what metrics do youuse to run the business of marketing.
I find that to be super insightful.
A marketing leader, I can'trecall where she was from, but
she said something very profound.
She said she realized the best use of hermarketing dollars were to give part of
her budget to the product team so theycould build a key product feature that
(03:23):
she thought was going to drive demandbetter than any marketing program that
she could invest in, in the timeframethat, in which they were evaluating
that resource allocation question.
And it was a brilliant perspective to me.
So if that marketing leader or anyexecutive is sitting around that
table, if they zoom out far enoughto be able to understand the business
holistically, all researchers are scarce.
Whether you're IBM or Wealthbox, you'vegotta make trade-offs and trying to get a
(03:44):
feel for that in the interviewing process.
You know, there's not one questionthat gets to that, but it's
something I'd try to get throughthe course of the conversations.
Erica Seidel (03:49):
Yeah.
Chris Fountain (03:50):
As a CEO, my dream was to have every executive
first be a general manager andthen be a functional executive.
To the extent they could understand howto build enterprise value, how to think
about the business from a financialperspective, how to think about the
business from a go-to-market perspective.
Cause business is a bigbalancing act at every level.
And there's big questions aboutresource allocation that had to
(04:11):
be made at the highest level.
And ideally you have an executive teamaround the table that appreciates the
fact that there are trade-offs acrossthe entire company that need to be made.
Erica Seidel (04:21):
So in a nutshell, Chris's advice is business
first, marketing second.
How can you best prepare fora Board member interview when
you are up for a CMO role?
Have your numbers at the ready.
It's great that you've contributedto increased revenue, market share,
profitability, but by how much?
Quantifying your businessimpact is where it's at.
But focus on the metrics that meanthe most to the overall business.
(04:45):
Don't make the mistake of getting too farinto the weeds and avoid marketing jargon.
Elana Anderson, a multi-time CMO who hasled marketing at Veracode and Demandware,
among other places, shares what to expect.
Elana Anderson (04:58):
I don't expect to talk deep marketing, you know
shop talk, with a Board member.
I've yet to find many who are deeplyinterested, you know, in the details.
So I tend to focus on talking aboutstrategy, the company, the market,
the market trends, the competitivetrends, the competitive landscape.
I talk about how I've moved theneedle, you know, in, in other
(05:21):
companies, how I've aligned teams.
Erica Seidel (05:23):
When you are interviewing with a Board,
realize it's a two-way street.
You'll be interviewing them, too.
The best candidates see it as developing arelationship, not just in a kumbaya sense,
but so you are aligned on expectations.
Here's Elana again.
Elana Anderson (05:38):
I'm asking about their understanding of the market and
the unique advantage of the company.
Why is this company going to win?
What makes them unique?
What is the outlook for the company?
Why is this company gonnawin over competitor X, Y, Z?
If competitor X, Y, Z might be a leaderand the company is not a leader, you know,
(05:59):
it gives me a sense of A, how much theybelieve, and also how strong the messaging
for the company, for the business is.
Erica Seidel (06:06):
What if you are not asked to interview with a Board member?
Ask for that meeting.
Seriously.
Don't be afraid to ask sincethere's so much you can learn.
Like, what are the Board dynamics?
What does the CEO struggle with?
What prospects are ahead for the business?
And when it comes to marketing,does the Board know what they know
and know what they don't know?
If you ask to meet a Board memberand you are told no for some reason,
(06:29):
think hard about what this says.
Maybe it's not the right fit andyou should look for a company that
believes in open access to the Board.
Let's move on to part two.
We will assume that you've gotten theCMO job and now you are in the CMO seat.
Huzzah!
Now how can you rock it in the Boardroom?
This is important because marketingleaders can succeed or fail based on
(06:52):
their performance during Board meetings.
Actually, a question I ask CEOswhen I start a search for a CMO is,
think of your last Board meeting,what marketing related challenges
did you struggle to get answers to?
Their answers tell me a lot about theCEO's view of marketing and also the
core of the job for their next CMO.
Going into this podcast series,one thing I wondered about was how
(07:15):
marketers could spend less time andangst preparing for Board meetings?
Many marketing leaders shudder at thetime and second-guessing that goes
into those Board meetings and it canseem like productivity really grinds
to a halt in the run-up to the meeting.
Evan DeCorte from Columbia Capitalis a PE investor and Board member.
He had a really usefulperspective when I asked how Board
(07:37):
meeting prep could be shorter.
Evan DeCorte (07:39):
I think Board meeting prep takes time because
it is, I think, for the business,like a moment of self-reflection.
What have we done?
What were the outcomes?
What are we gonna do differently?
How does this impact our viewon strategy or the market?
Those are not always easy questions toanswer, and if they are really easy,
like I, I might think it's time fora little more self-reflection, right?
Because very rarely are the thingsthat we're doing, even in businesses
(08:01):
that are just really doing well, easy.
Then we face tough questions thattake time to grapple with, right?
We are conducting a lot of activitiesand hiring people and running new
strategies and evaluating them andmeasuring them against the alternatives.
Like, those are complex questions.
Erica Seidel (08:18):
I found Evan's observation really interesting and it underlined what
I've learned from these conversationsabout how you can be more successful
and less stressed during Board meetings.
It starts with having a plan forhow you are looking to interact
with the Board in general.
The Board meeting itself is a sort ofcapstone, of course, but your interactions
overall should be less about a quarterlyperformance and more about nurturing
(08:40):
an ongoing symbiotic relationship.
A great example of this comes again fromEvan when he joined the podcast alongside
Jen Pockell Dimas, the Chief Marketingand Experience Officer for Telarus.
I collaborated with Evan and the TelarusCEO when I recruited Jen into her role.
It was awesome to have both Evan andJen talk, not just about each other,
but with each other on the podcast.
(09:02):
Here's a perspective that came to light.
Evan DeCorte (09:05):
I think what we don't want is hand waiving, a lot of vagaries
and big talk about what could be,or the things that are in motion and
what things maybe should look likein the future but it's hard to know.
Erica, you, you sort of pointed out,I say this all the time, but like
we have very simple reptile brains.
We are investors, right?
And our, our goal is to investmoney in the company and then to
(09:26):
sell or to recapitalize a businesssome way and get money back out.
A lot of what we are focused on iswhat is the result of the actions
that you're taking as a CMO, howdo they intersect with the strategy
of the overall business, and how dothey correlate with value creation?
Erica Seidel (09:44):
That pairs nicely with Jen Pockell Dimas's thoughts.
Jen Pockell Dimas (09:47):
We have understandings about how we want this company
to be understood and valued andwhat new markets we want to open.
We'll be able to see that we're havingsuccess there because we will begin
to create revenue in new directions.
We will see consistency in bookingscreation in directions we haven't
seen historically, maybe into a newgeo, maybe in a new product offering,
maybe in a new revenue source thatwe hadn't considered historically.
(10:10):
Those kinds of thingswould increase our value.
The squishy ways that this would showup, and every marketer hates this,
is our own customers saying to us,"Oh, I didn't know you did that."
Erica Seidel (10:21):
Another way you can be more successful and less stressed during Board
meetings is by getting alignment withthe Board on what they're interested in
seeing before you walk into the Boardroom.
Befriend the Board member who hasthe deepest background in marketing.
You can preview your Board meetingcontent in advance with that person to
get help in anticipating the reactions.
If it's your first meetingwith the Board, make it count.
(10:44):
Share why you have joined the company andyour thesis for the impact you'll make.
Kelly Ford Buckley has great advice here.
She's a marketing leader who pivoted tothe investment side and is now general
partner and COO at Edison Partners.
Kelly Ford Buckley (10:59):
I think the Board will always wanna know what are you
doing for the next 30, 60, 90, right?
Or what do you think of the current plan?
So I think it's a realopportunity for a dialogue.
I've always walked into thosefirst meetings with an existing
Board with my rookie observations.
And it's a great way toget a dialogue going.
Here are the slides, and this is whatwent on last quarter and I was here for
(11:22):
part of it, but maybe not even all of it.
Those are in the appendix.
I want my 20 minutes sharing my rookieobservations, why I took the job, what
I'm observing, here are the opportunities.
What do you guys think?
Am I missing?
Am I off base?
What a great way to start a dialogue.
And now you've set the tone for adialogue that can continue to take
(11:42):
place in every other Board interaction.
Erica Seidel (11:45):
As you settle in and as the business evolves with its
investment partners, your Boardmeeting content will evolve, too.
Chris Fountain, who's a veteran Boardmember and a former CEO, discusses this.
Chris Fountain (11:56):
It should be very clear what marketing's role
is in driving bookings growth.
Lead flow's great, but if you can'ttranslate that into won deals, people
are gonna be scratching their head.
What are we getting forour marketing spend?
So in my view, every Board meeting, onceyou've got the instrumentation of flying
the plane and that's gaining altitude,is important, and the really critical
(12:17):
instrumentation is demand, lead flow,and conversions to closed/won deals.
Along with that, I think, is ROI.
Good marketers, I think, understand howinvestments pay off from intangible waste.
Early in investment, for us, wewanna know that we have a very clear
picture of the voice of the customer.
Be able to understand that we knowwho our ICP is, our Ideal Customer
(12:39):
Profile, we know the buyer personas.
We know how we position ourselvesrelative to our competitors.
That has a time and a place,but you don't need to revisit
that at every Board meeting.
Erica Seidel (12:49):
Also, get over the impulse to talk about all the work you did and
how you've been spending your time.
You're in the job as CMO because theBoard thought you could do the job.
They trust you on the details.
The Board may only be interested in aboutone of the ten things that you're doing.
As Elana Anderson says-
Elana Anderson (13:06):
Regardless of the scale of the company, the CMO
needs to focus on objectives, onoutcomes, on critical metrics.
You know, sometimes marketers are overenamored, you know, about what they do
rather than the outcomes that they drive,you know, and I think particularly with
the Board, it's about the destination.
(13:27):
It's not about the journey.
The journey really only matters whenthere's something that, significantly new
lessons that you learned along the way.
Whether those lessons were goodlessons, lessons that you wanna
repeat, or lessons that, you know, youtried something and it didn't work.
Erica Seidel (13:45):
Next, realize that your Board meeting is a great
vehicle for improving the salesand marketing interlock, and for
communicating that interlock.
Madeline O'Phelan is VP of Marketingfor fintech company Verity.
She discusses theimportance of Board posture.
Madeline O'Phelan (14:01):
I think in a Board meeting, it's also
really important to convey yourcollaboration amongst the teams.
And there are a couple key waysI think you do that really well.
One is reemphasizing points, right?
Each function has its fifteenminutes of fame in the Board meeting
and restating points over and overagain across all teams I think
is a great way to do that, right?
(14:22):
Or kudos between the teamsand Board meetings, I think
is also really important.
Being able to show that you havea good relationship with sales.
It might be a nuance, but it'san important nuance to be able to
show in front of the Board that youwork well together, that you give
each other praise when it's due.
Reiterating key points that yourpeers are making, kudos when they're
(14:42):
deserved, I think is super important.
Erica Seidel (14:45):
And Kelly Ford Buckley discusses the benefits of marketing and
sales co-presenting at a Board meetingand having a combined growth readout.
Kelly Ford Buckley (14:54):
I don't want the marketing department
readout and the sales readout.
I want the growth plan readout,the growth initiatives.
Listen, the Board deck goes out two,three days before the Board meeting.
The slides don't need to be read to us.
Like, we're reading, we're preparing,we're coming with questions.
We want data and we want insights.
We wanna know what you think is workingbased on the data and what's not working.
(15:19):
What are you doing differentlynext quarter to improve upon what
the data's telling you right now?
Erica Seidel (15:25):
And there's one more common thread when it comes to
avoiding anxiety and nailing yourpresence in Board meetings as CMO.
Contrary to what you may think,there is a place for qualitative
data, competitive insights,customer insights, and brand stuff.
Yes, even brand stuff.
Consider making it impactfulby being interactive.
Elana Anderson discussed this.
Elana Anderson (15:48):
You know that numbers are gonna engage the Board, but if you
have a topic that's short on numbers,like a, a rebrand topic, how do you
make that interesting and impactful?
I chose to make it interactive and usebrands that I knew they had opinions
on or would be aware of to make acase for why we had to do something,
you know, about our own brand.
(16:09):
I mean, and recognize thisisn't like an hour session.
This is probably
-Erica Seidel: Right.
-twenty minutes, you know, twenty-five minutes
at, at most that you have.
So it has to be im- impactful and quick.
And so I put up little brand elements,so a color or part of a tagline,
about a particular brand and hadthem, well, who is this brand?
(16:31):
And when you can immediately identify whothat brand is, that tells you something.
And, and then, and if I showyou, well, who's this brand?
And you have no idea who that is andit's us [laughs], um, you know, that,
that starts to unveil, well, we havesome opportunity or some work to do.
Erica Seidel (16:49):
I see.
Elana Anderson (16:49):
And then if you can compare and contrast, well,
here's how we're doing it today,whether it's a color change.
I mean, what is less interesting to aBoard member than, hey, we're changing
our colors from teal to purple?
But sometimes that does make a difference,and so to make it impactful, you get to
the opportunity and the whys behind that.
Erica Seidel (17:13):
Okay.
Here's part three of ourfour-part recap of insights
learned this season on The Get.
How do you make sure you have a greatongoing dialogue with your Board, not just
inside the Boardroom, but outside of itso that both you and the business succeed?
When companies engage me for new CMOsearches, one thing is so clear, their
previous CMOs have not failed forlack of effort or even lack of talent.
(17:36):
They have failed for lack of alignmentand lack of shared expectations around
responsibilities, timing, and resources.
A good example of this alignment andaction comes from Jen Pockell Dimas
and Evan DeCorte, the CMO and Boardmember pair we heard from earlier.
Evan DeCorte (17:52):
Jen and I sat down and went through our deck, like,
how do we think value gets created?
How do we think thatintersects with marketing?
And here's some example numbers.
Jen Pockell Dimas (18:02):
I do think it is important for me to be able to
speak to the value that I'm drivingin the business in a way that
our investors would care about.
One of the ways that Evan andI sometimes talk about this is
Big V Value and Little V Value.
And I think the Little V Value thathelps to drive pipeline and like
the things that I'm measuring on thedaily, weekly, monthly to say I am
doing these activities and they'recreating value in the business.
(18:25):
What Evan cares about is Big V Value.
I put some money in and three tofive years from now, I want it to
be more money that I'm getting out.
It has been hard in B2B marketing,historically, to draw a direct line
from the activities that you're makingto the outcomes that they're driving.
But now we're actually talkingabout Big V Value, the value of
this company, not just the value ofthese marketing activities that I'm
(18:47):
driving, this, this, my contributionto pipeline, whatever those things are.
This is about how am I increasingthe value of this company in market?
And that is not a conversationthat is necessarily one that many
are comfortable or fluent in.
That's the code switching that needsto happen between the operational
plan and how I'm executing today.
Erica Seidel (19:06):
Chris Fountain offers a useful analogy for what
he and other Board members arelooking for once a CMO is in place.
Chris Fountain (19:13):
The marketing domain should be able to give a heads up to
the business around future growth.
So the finance team does a rearviewmirror view of the business, right?
Marketing ideally can paint a pictureof trial activity or demo activity
or MQL activity - we can expectour bookings to trend as follows.
If you can create a heads updisplay that allows you to predict
(19:34):
with greater accuracy of thefuture, that's nirvana in my view.
Erica Seidel (19:38):
Another thing to navigate is how to respond when
your Board member proposes somethingthat you think is outlandish.
I talked about this with KellyFord Buckley, whose advice is to
try to understand the input andnot just dismiss it out of hand.
Kelly Ford Buckley (19:52):
You really do need to think about the Board
like a member of your team.
There's brilliance that lives inside thefour walls of your business and certainly
brilliance that sits in your Board.
And frankly, a lot of theseinvestors are domain experts.
They know your market really well.
And even if they've invested incompanies that don't compete with
yours, they're in adjacent spaces.
(20:13):
So it's like getting a marketperspective and a customer perspective.
So why not take that in?
I think the Board needs to be viewedas just another audience, but an
audience that's actually on your team.
And I think marketing leaders can oftenbe stronger internally than externally,
and more exposure externally withcustomers, partners, investor helps
(20:35):
build the knowledge, the confidence,the credibility that they also
need to be building with the Board.
So I think sometimes if you're toointernally focused, relying on sales
for your outside perspective, or notgetting enough direct customer or
outside perspective, you might notbe as comfortable or as confident.
I think it's some of those thingsthat remove the intimidation.
Erica Seidel (20:58):
So, you'll wanna communicate well with your Board and
provide that heads up display for thebusiness and focus on Big V Value.
To do all that, you will alsohave to master the subtle art of
navigating a Board that may notknow what good marketing looks like.
After all, the number of Boardmembers and investors with marketing
backgrounds approaches zero, ortheir marketing experience may
(21:19):
be from five or ten years ago.
So you will do best if youunderstand, educate, and translate.
You can offer an offline sessionto educate Board members on
a particular marketing topic.
It won't just benefit theirunderstanding of what you're doing,
but it will also help them in theirBoard service for other companies.
There was general agreement amongstmy guests that it is the job of the
(21:40):
CMO to translate the language ofmarketing into vocabulary that the
CEO and CFO and Board can get behind.
As you translate and educate,beware that some marketing terms
will fly and some terms will flop.
Allison Dancy, a veteran CMO, who wasmost recently CMO at Kibo Commerce,
talks about the marketing trigger wordsthat are likely to fly with Boards.
Allison Dancy (22:03):
Sometimes it's around ICPs or sometimes it's calibrating
around personas or sometimes it's,we need to go to ABM, cuz that's
what everybody's talking about.
And if you start to talk about brand,it really is the four letter word
sometimes to Boards because to themit means spend that they can't track
and therefore they don't wanna do it.
But you know, your brand is whatultimately gets people to make
(22:24):
the decision to buy from you, tostay with you, to buy more from
you, to have confidence in you tobe able to build a business case
that they're gonna buy from you.
So brand is, it is actually the secretweapon behind the scenes, but to a
Board member, it just means cost.
And so you have to be really careful.
Often they'll even see thewebsite as a brand thing and
they don't wanna invest in that.
(22:45):
I've had some Boards whereI can call that awareness.
It won't raise as many red flags.
I can talk about awareness or I can talkabout website technology, but sometimes
you have to be a little bit careful aboutjust using even the word brand I've found.
Erica Seidel (23:00):
While we're talking about marketing terms that fly and
marketing terms that flop, I wannaunderscore the elephant in the room
that Allison mentioned before (23:06):
Brand.
As she said, brand canbe a four letter word.
Boards wonder why a marketing leaderis investing in brand since it feels
like something that is untrackable?
Sandra Lopez had a great perspective here.
She has been in marketing leadershipand general manager roles in many
of the world's biggest and mostinfluential tech companies like
Adobe and Intel and Microsoft.
(23:28):
And she's a Board member herself forJunior Achievement USA and PureRed.
She shared how she models out brandinitiatives in financial terms to
get buy-in from her Board members.
Sandra Lopez (23:39):
Oftentimes when you are looking at brand architecture
strategies, what will that impactlook like in terms of lesser choice?
Is it gonna cannibalizeone or the other products?
That's yet another opportunity tobring the CFO into the journey and talk
about, let's do some modeling together.
Oftentimes what I had seen isbrand architecture strategies that
(24:01):
talk about the business rationale.
But there's no financial numbers.
They'll talk to you about what it'sgonna cost, what it's gonna cost to
overhaul the entire thing, and allthe collateral that needs to get
updated, both analog and digital.
Yet I never see, if we were tosimplify the brand, what could this
look like from a financial standpoint?
Or if we're gonna do a massivebrand transition and reposition
(24:23):
the brand in its totality from onepoint to another point, will it
alienate your existing customer base?
And if so, how?
Well, what, what could thatbe from a sales perspective?
So you can model all this.
Erica Seidel (24:37):
If there's one thing to remember when it comes to the
CMO and Board relationship, it isto move from broadcasting to the
Board to collaborating with them.
And with collaboration,there's both a give and a get.
Marketing leaders can be sofocused on what they are giving
to the Board that they miss theopportunity to get stuff in return.
Realize the Board is there to be helpful.
(24:57):
Interacting with them, it's anopportunity for free advice.
They will likely be flatteredto be asked, so don't be
reluctant to make an ask of them.
Elana Anderson discussed in detailhow she has incorporated the Board
into her marketing initiatives.
Elana Anderson (25:12):
I found that Board members are happy to participate and they've
been actually flattered to be asked.
At Demandware, uh, we had a Boardmember by the name of Len Schlesinger.
Len is a Harvard BusinessSchool professor.
He was formerly the COO ofLimited Brands, which in his day
(25:32):
owned, um, Victoria's Secret.
We had a customer conference thatwas a very successful event, but one
of the things that we were tryingto do was get more attendance from
an exec level audience, the truebusiness buyer, the business sponsor.
So I asked Len if he would co-chairor be the guest chair of an invite
(25:53):
only executive track, and thenhost a half day workshop for me.
And maybe that was a littlegutsy, but he was thrilled.
So we were then marketing an executivetrack with a well-known business professor
to retail, you know, commerce executives.
It sold out easily.
(26:14):
We had our ideal profilecustomer at this event, and the
actual event was incredible.
Erica Seidel (26:23):
The fourth and final part of our recap of season five of
The Get, how can you become the CMOwho gets tapped for Board seats?
Many of the CMOs I interviewwanna be on a Board someday.
And the ones that are on Boardstend to love the experience.
Not surprisingly, the supply ofCMOs eager to serve on Boards
exceeds the current demand.
That means the competition is tough.
(26:45):
How can you be prepared tostep up into Board service?
There are a few ways you can prepare.
First, get P&L experience andgeneral management experience under
your belt, even if this is outsideyour obvious marketing swim lane.
And, in a marketing leadershiprole, approach your work and the
way you communicate your work witha business first, marketing second
(27:05):
mindset, like we talked about before.
Also, plan ahead and try to find a bosswho will embrace Board service as a
part of your professional developmentand help you manifest a Board seat.
Next, clarify what your uniquevalue prop is to a Board.
What skill sets will you offer, andwhich types of companies are most
likely to benefit from your knowledge?
That way, when you get a call tointerview with a Board, you can
(27:27):
vet the opportunity correctly.
This is true also forCMO roles, by the way.
One of the best questions I've seenCMOs ask in interviews is, what's
the value you see in my skillset?
Here's Sandra Lopez withsome additional perspective.
Sandra Lopez (27:42):
People reached out to me for various Board positions, and I
remember one, it was all about supplychain and it was about transportation.
And I was so honored that they consideredme and they were considering me from a
digital transformation, but I was lookingat the Board requirements and the skill
sets that they were looking for, the topthree, and I'm like, I have none of that.
And I said to the, uh, individualthat was recruiting for him,
(28:04):
I'm like, you know what?
Super honored, yet it's not gonnabe the right fit because I will not
add value for what they're lookingfor from a talent perspective.
Erica Seidel (28:13):
Consider serving on nonprofit Boards as a practice
ground, but prioritize the onesthat are run like for-profit Boards.
Also, advisory Boards, which canbe quirky, can also be decent
stepping stones to Board service.
As you feel reasonably ready, askpeople who are Boarded up, meaning
at capacity with their Board service,to refer Board opportunities to you.
(28:33):
Here's Sandra Lopez's advice.
Sandra Lopez (28:36):
Listen, I've had amazing mentors helping me, guide me through
the path to Board of directors.
And I started, I would, three yearsbefore I landed my first Board.
You wanna land a Board seat sothen you're recommended by somebody
else for yet another Board seat.
And that's how the flywheel of that.
And so when you're looking forBoard seats, you also, like, try
(28:59):
to find somebody, it's called,you know, over Boarded where
somebody has way too many Boards.
Look for those individualsthat are Boarded up, that are
passing on opportunities cuzthey have too many Boards.
That's a great way just tostart to open up the doors.
Erica Seidel (29:17):
That's it.
Your guide for how CMOs and Boardscan promote their relationship from
fraught to functional to fantastic.
A huge thanks to all theguests from this season.
And, of course, if you wanna talkwith me about hiring a CMO or VP
of Marketing for your SaaS companyor your open Board seat, ping me.
Thanks for listening to The Get.
(29:38):
I'm your host, Erica Seidel.
The Get is here to drive smartdecisions around recruiting and
leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.
We explore the trends, tribulations,and triumphs of today's top
marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
To stay in the know for our next season,please keep following the show in
your preferred podcast listening app.
If you liked thisepisode, please share it.
(30:00):
For more about The Get,visit thegetpodcast.com.
And to learn more about my executivesearch practice, which focuses on
recruiting the make-money marketingleaders rather than the make-it-pretty
ones, follow me on LinkedIn orvisit theconnectivegood.com.
The Get is produced by Evo Terraof Simpler Media Productions.
Hello, and welcome to The Get.
I'm your host, Erica Seidel.
This season, the fifth season of TheGet, has been focused on the relationship
between CMOs and Board members.
For many CMOs, interactingwith the Board is about as much
fun as getting a root canal.
But what if you could make your CMOand Board relationship go from fraught
(00:23):
to functional, and even to fantastic?
If we haven't met yet, a brief intro.
I spend my days recruiting CMOsand VPs of Marketing in B2B SaaS.
So I have this unique perch toexplore the trends, tribulations,
and triumphs of the best marketingleaders and their organizations.
I've had a range of guests on my podcastthis season - marketing leaders who are
(00:45):
veterans at interacting with Boards,marketing leaders who are Board members
themselves, and a couple of Boardmembers without deep marketing expertise
who have hired marketing leaders andhave learned firsthand how valuable
the right CMO can be for the Board.
And speaking as a podcast host for justa moment, it's been great to hear from
so many loyal listeners along the waywho have found this podcast useful.
(01:09):
One person actually told me that I wasthe Terry Gross of the CMO podcast space.
I'm honored.
In this executive summary episode,I'm going to recap some of the most
compelling takeaways from this season.
One.
What do Board members want in aSaaS CMO and how can you ace your
interview with a Board member?
(01:29):
Two.
Board meetings.
How can you land on your feetonce you are inside the Boardroom?
Three.
How do you build a strong dialogue withthe Board outside of Board meetings?
Finally, four.
Serving on Boards.
How can you become the CMO whogets tapped for Board seats?
Ready?
Here goes.
(01:56):
First, what do Board members want froma CMO and how can you ace the Board
interview when you are up for a CMO role?
Some inside perspective from mebefore you hear from my guests.
I do a lot of searches for privateequity backed companies where
investors are active on the Board.
My searches that go the mostsmoothly have something in common.
The right Board members are involvedin the search process early on.
(02:18):
By contrast, I've seen searches go notso smoothly when Board members only
show up at the end and nix a candidate.
I'd rather have a Board member or investorbe like a cook in the kitchen as opposed
to the restaurant critic who only judgeswhat's on their plate without being
involved with how the meal was made.
So I personally have become a fanof Board members engaging throughout
(02:38):
the search, both with the searchprocess and with the candidates.
After all, the way you start arelationship is often indicative
of the way you continue it.
My guests this season all agreethat early engagement between the
Board and the CMO makes sense.
So what are Board members looking for?
Chris Fountain, a veteran Boardmember and operating partner
at private equity firm FrontierGrowth, shares what's on his mind.
Chris Fountain (03:02):
I like to understand their operating cadence.
The operating cadence just tellsyou how you run the business of
marketing, and what metrics do youuse to run the business of marketing.
I find that to be super insightful.
A marketing leader, I can'trecall where she was from, but
she said something very profound.
She said she realized the best use of hermarketing dollars were to give part of
her budget to the product team so theycould build a key product feature that
(03:23):
she thought was going to drive demandbetter than any marketing program that
she could invest in, in the timeframethat, in which they were evaluating
that resource allocation question.
And it was a brilliant perspective to me.
So if that marketing leader or anyexecutive is sitting around that
table, if they zoom out far enoughto be able to understand the business
holistically, all researchers are scarce.
Whether you're IBM or Wealthbox, you'vegotta make trade-offs and trying to get a
(03:44):
feel for that in the interviewing process.
You know, there's not one questionthat gets to that, but it's
something I'd try to get throughthe course of the conversations.
Erica Seidel (03:49):
Yeah.
Chris Fountain (03:50):
As a CEO, my dream was to have every executive
first be a general manager andthen be a functional executive.
To the extent they could understand howto build enterprise value, how to think
about the business from a financialperspective, how to think about the
business from a go-to-market perspective.
Cause business is a bigbalancing act at every level.
And there's big questions aboutresource allocation that had to
(04:11):
be made at the highest level.
And ideally you have an executive teamaround the table that appreciates the
fact that there are trade-offs acrossthe entire company that need to be made.
Erica Seidel (04:21):
So in a nutshell, Chris's advice is business
first, marketing second.
How can you best prepare fora Board member interview when
you are up for a CMO role?
Have your numbers at the ready.
It's great that you've contributedto increased revenue, market share,
profitability, but by how much?
Quantifying your businessimpact is where it's at.
But focus on the metrics that meanthe most to the overall business.
(04:45):
Don't make the mistake of getting too farinto the weeds and avoid marketing jargon.
Elana Anderson, a multi-time CMO who hasled marketing at Veracode and Demandware,
among other places, shares what to expect.
Elana Anderson (04:58):
I don't expect to talk deep marketing, you know
shop talk, with a Board member.
I've yet to find many who are deeplyinterested, you know, in the details.
So I tend to focus on talking aboutstrategy, the company, the market,
the market trends, the competitivetrends, the competitive landscape.
I talk about how I've moved theneedle, you know, in, in other
(05:21):
companies, how I've aligned teams.
Erica Seidel (05:23):
When you are interviewing with a Board,
realize it's a two-way street.
You'll be interviewing them, too.
The best candidates see it as developing arelationship, not just in a kumbaya sense,
but so you are aligned on expectations.
Here's Elana again.
Elana Anderson (05:38):
I'm asking about their understanding of the market and
the unique advantage of the company.
Why is this company going to win?
What makes them unique?
What is the outlook for the company?
Why is this company gonnawin over competitor X, Y, Z?
If competitor X, Y, Z might be a leaderand the company is not a leader, you know,
(05:59):
it gives me a sense of A, how much theybelieve, and also how strong the messaging
for the company, for the business is.
Erica Seidel (06:06):
What if you are not asked to interview with a Board member?
Ask for that meeting.
Seriously.
Don't be afraid to ask sincethere's so much you can learn.
Like, what are the Board dynamics?
What does the CEO struggle with?
What prospects are ahead for the business?
And when it comes to marketing,does the Board know what they know
and know what they don't know?
If you ask to meet a Board memberand you are told no for some reason,
(06:29):
think hard about what this says.
Maybe it's not the right fit andyou should look for a company that
believes in open access to the Board.
Let's move on to part two.
We will assume that you've gotten theCMO job and now you are in the CMO seat.
Huzzah!
Now how can you rock it in the Boardroom?
This is important because marketingleaders can succeed or fail based on
(06:52):
their performance during Board meetings.
Actually, a question I ask CEOswhen I start a search for a CMO is,
think of your last Board meeting,what marketing related challenges
did you struggle to get answers to?
Their answers tell me a lot about theCEO's view of marketing and also the
core of the job for their next CMO.
Going into this podcast series,one thing I wondered about was how
(07:15):
marketers could spend less time andangst preparing for Board meetings?
Many marketing leaders shudder at thetime and second-guessing that goes
into those Board meetings and it canseem like productivity really grinds
to a halt in the run-up to the meeting.
Evan DeCorte from Columbia Capitalis a PE investor and Board member.
He had a really usefulperspective when I asked how Board
(07:37):
meeting prep could be shorter.
Evan DeCorte (07:39):
I think Board meeting prep takes time because
it is, I think, for the business,like a moment of self-reflection.
What have we done?
What were the outcomes?
What are we gonna do differently?
How does this impact our viewon strategy or the market?
Those are not always easy questions toanswer, and if they are really easy,
like I, I might think it's time fora little more self-reflection, right?
Because very rarely are the thingsthat we're doing, even in businesses
(08:01):
that are just really doing well, easy.
Then we face tough questions thattake time to grapple with, right?
We are conducting a lot of activitiesand hiring people and running new
strategies and evaluating them andmeasuring them against the alternatives.
Like, those are complex questions.
Erica Seidel (08:18):
I found Evan's observation really interesting and it underlined what
I've learned from these conversationsabout how you can be more successful
and less stressed during Board meetings.
It starts with having a plan forhow you are looking to interact
with the Board in general.
The Board meeting itself is a sort ofcapstone, of course, but your interactions
overall should be less about a quarterlyperformance and more about nurturing
(08:40):
an ongoing symbiotic relationship.
A great example of this comes again fromEvan when he joined the podcast alongside
Jen Pockell Dimas, the Chief Marketingand Experience Officer for Telarus.
I collaborated with Evan and the TelarusCEO when I recruited Jen into her role.
It was awesome to have both Evan andJen talk, not just about each other,
but with each other on the podcast.
(09:02):
Here's a perspective that came to light.
Evan DeCorte (09:05):
I think what we don't want is hand waiving, a lot of vagaries
and big talk about what could be,or the things that are in motion and
what things maybe should look likein the future but it's hard to know.
Erica, you, you sort of pointed out,I say this all the time, but like
we have very simple reptile brains.
We are investors, right?
And our, our goal is to investmoney in the company and then to
(09:26):
sell or to recapitalize a businesssome way and get money back out.
A lot of what we are focused on iswhat is the result of the actions
that you're taking as a CMO, howdo they intersect with the strategy
of the overall business, and how dothey correlate with value creation?
Erica Seidel (09:44):
That pairs nicely with Jen Pockell Dimas's thoughts.
Jen Pockell Dimas (09:47):
We have understandings about how we want this company
to be understood and valued andwhat new markets we want to open.
We'll be able to see that we're havingsuccess there because we will begin
to create revenue in new directions.
We will see consistency in bookingscreation in directions we haven't
seen historically, maybe into a newgeo, maybe in a new product offering,
maybe in a new revenue source thatwe hadn't considered historically.
(10:10):
Those kinds of thingswould increase our value.
The squishy ways that this would showup, and every marketer hates this,
is our own customers saying to us,"Oh, I didn't know you did that."
Erica Seidel (10:21):
Another way you can be more successful and less stressed during Board
meetings is by getting alignment withthe Board on what they're interested in
seeing before you walk into the Boardroom.
Befriend the Board member who hasthe deepest background in marketing.
You can preview your Board meetingcontent in advance with that person to
get help in anticipating the reactions.
If it's your first meetingwith the Board, make it count.
(10:44):
Share why you have joined the company andyour thesis for the impact you'll make.
Kelly Ford Buckley has great advice here.
She's a marketing leader who pivoted tothe investment side and is now general
partner and COO at Edison Partners.
Kelly Ford Buckley (10:59):
I think the Board will always wanna know what are you
doing for the next 30, 60, 90, right?
Or what do you think of the current plan?
So I think it's a realopportunity for a dialogue.
I've always walked into thosefirst meetings with an existing
Board with my rookie observations.
And it's a great way toget a dialogue going.
Here are the slides, and this is whatwent on last quarter and I was here for
(11:22):
part of it, but maybe not even all of it.
Those are in the appendix.
I want my 20 minutes sharing my rookieobservations, why I took the job, what
I'm observing, here are the opportunities.
What do you guys think?
Am I missing?
Am I off base?
What a great way to start a dialogue.
And now you've set the tone for adialogue that can continue to take
(11:42):
place in every other Board interaction.
Erica Seidel (11:45):
As you settle in and as the business evolves with its
investment partners, your Boardmeeting content will evolve, too.
Chris Fountain, who's a veteran Boardmember and a former CEO, discusses this.
Chris Fountain (11:56):
It should be very clear what marketing's role
is in driving bookings growth.
Lead flow's great, but if you can'ttranslate that into won deals, people
are gonna be scratching their head.
What are we getting forour marketing spend?
So in my view, every Board meeting, onceyou've got the instrumentation of flying
the plane and that's gaining altitude,is important, and the really critical
(12:17):
instrumentation is demand, lead flow,and conversions to closed/won deals.
Along with that, I think, is ROI.
Good marketers, I think, understand howinvestments pay off from intangible waste.
Early in investment, for us, wewanna know that we have a very clear
picture of the voice of the customer.
Be able to understand that we knowwho our ICP is, our Ideal Customer
(12:39):
Profile, we know the buyer personas.
We know how we position ourselvesrelative to our competitors.
That has a time and a place,but you don't need to revisit
that at every Board meeting.
Erica Seidel (12:49):
Also, get over the impulse to talk about all the work you did and
how you've been spending your time.
You're in the job as CMO because theBoard thought you could do the job.
They trust you on the details.
The Board may only be interested in aboutone of the ten things that you're doing.
As Elana Anderson says-
Elana Anderson (13:06):
Regardless of the scale of the company, the CMO
needs to focus on objectives, onoutcomes, on critical metrics.
You know, sometimes marketers are overenamored, you know, about what they do
rather than the outcomes that they drive,you know, and I think particularly with
the Board, it's about the destination.
(13:27):
It's not about the journey.
The journey really only matters whenthere's something that, significantly new
lessons that you learned along the way.
Whether those lessons were goodlessons, lessons that you wanna
repeat, or lessons that, you know, youtried something and it didn't work.
Erica Seidel (13:45):
Next, realize that your Board meeting is a great
vehicle for improving the salesand marketing interlock, and for
communicating that interlock.
Madeline O'Phelan is VP of Marketingfor fintech company Verity.
She discusses theimportance of Board posture.
Madeline O'Phelan (14:01):
I think in a Board meeting, it's also
really important to convey yourcollaboration amongst the teams.
And there are a couple key waysI think you do that really well.
One is reemphasizing points, right?
Each function has its fifteenminutes of fame in the Board meeting
and restating points over and overagain across all teams I think
is a great way to do that, right?
(14:22):
Or kudos between the teamsand Board meetings, I think
is also really important.
Being able to show that you havea good relationship with sales.
It might be a nuance, but it'san important nuance to be able to
show in front of the Board that youwork well together, that you give
each other praise when it's due.
Reiterating key points that yourpeers are making, kudos when they're
(14:42):
deserved, I think is super important.
Erica Seidel (14:45):
And Kelly Ford Buckley discusses the benefits of marketing and
sales co-presenting at a Board meetingand having a combined growth readout.
Kelly Ford Buckley (14:54):
I don't want the marketing department
readout and the sales readout.
I want the growth plan readout,the growth initiatives.
Listen, the Board deck goes out two,three days before the Board meeting.
The slides don't need to be read to us.
Like, we're reading, we're preparing,we're coming with questions.
We want data and we want insights.
We wanna know what you think is workingbased on the data and what's not working.
(15:19):
What are you doing differentlynext quarter to improve upon what
the data's telling you right now?
Erica Seidel (15:25):
And there's one more common thread when it comes to
avoiding anxiety and nailing yourpresence in Board meetings as CMO.
Contrary to what you may think,there is a place for qualitative
data, competitive insights,customer insights, and brand stuff.
Yes, even brand stuff.
Consider making it impactfulby being interactive.
Elana Anderson discussed this.
Elana Anderson (15:48):
You know that numbers are gonna engage the Board, but if you
have a topic that's short on numbers,like a, a rebrand topic, how do you
make that interesting and impactful?
I chose to make it interactive and usebrands that I knew they had opinions
on or would be aware of to make acase for why we had to do something,
you know, about our own brand.
(16:09):
I mean, and recognize thisisn't like an hour session.
This is probably
-Erica Seidel: Right.
-twenty minutes, you know, twenty-five minutes
at, at most that you have.
So it has to be im- impactful and quick.
And so I put up little brand elements,so a color or part of a tagline,
about a particular brand and hadthem, well, who is this brand?
(16:31):
And when you can immediately identify whothat brand is, that tells you something.
And, and then, and if I showyou, well, who's this brand?
And you have no idea who that is andit's us [laughs], um, you know, that,
that starts to unveil, well, we havesome opportunity or some work to do.
Erica Seidel (16:49):
I see.
Elana Anderson (16:49):
And then if you can compare and contrast, well,
here's how we're doing it today,whether it's a color change.
I mean, what is less interesting to aBoard member than, hey, we're changing
our colors from teal to purple?
But sometimes that does make a difference,and so to make it impactful, you get to
the opportunity and the whys behind that.
Erica Seidel (17:13):
Okay.
Here's part three of ourfour-part recap of insights
learned this season on The Get.
How do you make sure you have a greatongoing dialogue with your Board, not just
inside the Boardroom, but outside of itso that both you and the business succeed?
When companies engage me for new CMOsearches, one thing is so clear, their
previous CMOs have not failed forlack of effort or even lack of talent.
(17:36):
They have failed for lack of alignmentand lack of shared expectations around
responsibilities, timing, and resources.
A good example of this alignment andaction comes from Jen Pockell Dimas
and Evan DeCorte, the CMO and Boardmember pair we heard from earlier.
Evan DeCorte (17:52):
Jen and I sat down and went through our deck, like,
how do we think value gets created?
How do we think thatintersects with marketing?
And here's some example numbers.
Jen Pockell Dimas (18:02):
I do think it is important for me to be able to
speak to the value that I'm drivingin the business in a way that
our investors would care about.
One of the ways that Evan andI sometimes talk about this is
Big V Value and Little V Value.
And I think the Little V Value thathelps to drive pipeline and like
the things that I'm measuring on thedaily, weekly, monthly to say I am
doing these activities and they'recreating value in the business.
(18:25):
What Evan cares about is Big V Value.
I put some money in and three tofive years from now, I want it to
be more money that I'm getting out.
It has been hard in B2B marketing,historically, to draw a direct line
from the activities that you're makingto the outcomes that they're driving.
But now we're actually talkingabout Big V Value, the value of
this company, not just the value ofthese marketing activities that I'm
(18:47):
driving, this, this, my contributionto pipeline, whatever those things are.
This is about how am I increasingthe value of this company in market?
And that is not a conversationthat is necessarily one that many
are comfortable or fluent in.
That's the code switching that needsto happen between the operational
plan and how I'm executing today.
Erica Seidel (19:06):
Chris Fountain offers a useful analogy for what
he and other Board members arelooking for once a CMO is in place.
Chris Fountain (19:13):
The marketing domain should be able to give a heads up to
the business around future growth.
So the finance team does a rearviewmirror view of the business, right?
Marketing ideally can paint a pictureof trial activity or demo activity
or MQL activity - we can expectour bookings to trend as follows.
If you can create a heads updisplay that allows you to predict
(19:34):
with greater accuracy of thefuture, that's nirvana in my view.
Erica Seidel (19:38):
Another thing to navigate is how to respond when
your Board member proposes somethingthat you think is outlandish.
I talked about this with KellyFord Buckley, whose advice is to
try to understand the input andnot just dismiss it out of hand.
Kelly Ford Buckley (19:52):
You really do need to think about the Board
like a member of your team.
There's brilliance that lives inside thefour walls of your business and certainly
brilliance that sits in your Board.
And frankly, a lot of theseinvestors are domain experts.
They know your market really well.
And even if they've invested incompanies that don't compete with
yours, they're in adjacent spaces.
(20:13):
So it's like getting a marketperspective and a customer perspective.
So why not take that in?
I think the Board needs to be viewedas just another audience, but an
audience that's actually on your team.
And I think marketing leaders can oftenbe stronger internally than externally,
and more exposure externally withcustomers, partners, investor helps
(20:35):
build the knowledge, the confidence,the credibility that they also
need to be building with the Board.
So I think sometimes if you're toointernally focused, relying on sales
for your outside perspective, or notgetting enough direct customer or
outside perspective, you might notbe as comfortable or as confident.
I think it's some of those thingsthat remove the intimidation.
Erica Seidel (20:58):
So, you'll wanna communicate well with your Board and
provide that heads up display for thebusiness and focus on Big V Value.
To do all that, you will alsohave to master the subtle art of
navigating a Board that may notknow what good marketing looks like.
After all, the number of Boardmembers and investors with marketing
backgrounds approaches zero, ortheir marketing experience may
(21:19):
be from five or ten years ago.
So you will do best if youunderstand, educate, and translate.
You can offer an offline sessionto educate Board members on
a particular marketing topic.
It won't just benefit theirunderstanding of what you're doing,
but it will also help them in theirBoard service for other companies.
There was general agreement amongstmy guests that it is the job of the
(21:40):
CMO to translate the language ofmarketing into vocabulary that the
CEO and CFO and Board can get behind.
As you translate and educate,beware that some marketing terms
will fly and some terms will flop.
Allison Dancy, a veteran CMO, who wasmost recently CMO at Kibo Commerce,
talks about the marketing trigger wordsthat are likely to fly with Boards.
Allison Dancy (22:03):
Sometimes it's around ICPs or sometimes it's calibrating
around personas or sometimes it's,we need to go to ABM, cuz that's
what everybody's talking about.
And if you start to talk about brand,it really is the four letter word
sometimes to Boards because to themit means spend that they can't track
and therefore they don't wanna do it.
But you know, your brand is whatultimately gets people to make
(22:24):
the decision to buy from you, tostay with you, to buy more from
you, to have confidence in you tobe able to build a business case
that they're gonna buy from you.
So brand is, it is actually the secretweapon behind the scenes, but to a
Board member, it just means cost.
And so you have to be really careful.
Often they'll even see thewebsite as a brand thing and
they don't wanna invest in that.
(22:45):
I've had some Boards whereI can call that awareness.
It won't raise as many red flags.
I can talk about awareness or I can talkabout website technology, but sometimes
you have to be a little bit careful aboutjust using even the word brand I've found.
Erica Seidel (23:00):
While we're talking about marketing terms that fly and
marketing terms that flop, I wannaunderscore the elephant in the room
that Allison mentioned before (23:06):
Brand.
As she said, brand canbe a four letter word.
Boards wonder why a marketing leaderis investing in brand since it feels
like something that is untrackable?
Sandra Lopez had a great perspective here.
She has been in marketing leadershipand general manager roles in many
of the world's biggest and mostinfluential tech companies like
Adobe and Intel and Microsoft.
(23:28):
And she's a Board member herself forJunior Achievement USA and PureRed.
She shared how she models out brandinitiatives in financial terms to
get buy-in from her Board members.
Sandra Lopez (23:39):
Oftentimes when you are looking at brand architecture
strategies, what will that impactlook like in terms of lesser choice?
Is it gonna cannibalizeone or the other products?
That's yet another opportunity tobring the CFO into the journey and talk
about, let's do some modeling together.
Oftentimes what I had seen isbrand architecture strategies that
(24:01):
talk about the business rationale.
But there's no financial numbers.
They'll talk to you about what it'sgonna cost, what it's gonna cost to
overhaul the entire thing, and allthe collateral that needs to get
updated, both analog and digital.
Yet I never see, if we were tosimplify the brand, what could this
look like from a financial standpoint?
Or if we're gonna do a massivebrand transition and reposition
(24:23):
the brand in its totality from onepoint to another point, will it
alienate your existing customer base?
And if so, how?
Well, what, what could thatbe from a sales perspective?
So you can model all this.
Erica Seidel (24:37):
If there's one thing to remember when it comes to the
CMO and Board relationship, it isto move from broadcasting to the
Board to collaborating with them.
And with collaboration,there's both a give and a get.
Marketing leaders can be sofocused on what they are giving
to the Board that they miss theopportunity to get stuff in return.
Realize the Board is there to be helpful.
(24:57):
Interacting with them, it's anopportunity for free advice.
They will likely be flatteredto be asked, so don't be
reluctant to make an ask of them.
Elana Anderson discussed in detailhow she has incorporated the Board
into her marketing initiatives.
Elana Anderson (25:12):
I found that Board members are happy to participate and they've
been actually flattered to be asked.
At Demandware, uh, we had a Boardmember by the name of Len Schlesinger.
Len is a Harvard BusinessSchool professor.
He was formerly the COO ofLimited Brands, which in his day
(25:32):
owned, um, Victoria's Secret.
We had a customer conference thatwas a very successful event, but one
of the things that we were tryingto do was get more attendance from
an exec level audience, the truebusiness buyer, the business sponsor.
So I asked Len if he would co-chairor be the guest chair of an invite
(25:53):
only executive track, and thenhost a half day workshop for me.
And maybe that was a littlegutsy, but he was thrilled.
So we were then marketing an executivetrack with a well-known business professor
to retail, you know, commerce executives.
It sold out easily.
(26:14):
We had our ideal profilecustomer at this event, and the
actual event was incredible.
Erica Seidel (26:23):
The fourth and final part of our recap of season five of
The Get, how can you become the CMOwho gets tapped for Board seats?
Many of the CMOs I interviewwanna be on a Board someday.
And the ones that are on Boardstend to love the experience.
Not surprisingly, the supply ofCMOs eager to serve on Boards
exceeds the current demand.
That means the competition is tough.
(26:45):
How can you be prepared tostep up into Board service?
There are a few ways you can prepare.
First, get P&L experience andgeneral management experience under
your belt, even if this is outsideyour obvious marketing swim lane.
And, in a marketing leadershiprole, approach your work and the
way you communicate your work witha business first, marketing second
(27:05):
mindset, like we talked about before.
Also, plan ahead and try to find a bosswho will embrace Board service as a
part of your professional developmentand help you manifest a Board seat.
Next, clarify what your uniquevalue prop is to a Board.
What skill sets will you offer, andwhich types of companies are most
likely to benefit from your knowledge?
That way, when you get a call tointerview with a Board, you can
(27:27):
vet the opportunity correctly.
This is true also forCMO roles, by the way.
One of the best questions I've seenCMOs ask in interviews is, what's
the value you see in my skillset?
Here's Sandra Lopez withsome additional perspective.
Sandra Lopez (27:42):
People reached out to me for various Board positions, and I
remember one, it was all about supplychain and it was about transportation.
And I was so honored that they consideredme and they were considering me from a
digital transformation, but I was lookingat the Board requirements and the skill
sets that they were looking for, the topthree, and I'm like, I have none of that.
And I said to the, uh, individualthat was recruiting for him,
(28:04):
I'm like, you know what?
Super honored, yet it's not gonnabe the right fit because I will not
add value for what they're lookingfor from a talent perspective.
Erica Seidel (28:13):
Consider serving on nonprofit Boards as a practice
ground, but prioritize the onesthat are run like for-profit Boards.
Also, advisory Boards, which canbe quirky, can also be decent
stepping stones to Board service.
As you feel reasonably ready, askpeople who are Boarded up, meaning
at capacity with their Board service,to refer Board opportunities to you.
(28:33):
Here's Sandra Lopez's advice.
Sandra Lopez (28:36):
Listen, I've had amazing mentors helping me, guide me through
the path to Board of directors.
And I started, I would, three yearsbefore I landed my first Board.
You wanna land a Board seat sothen you're recommended by somebody
else for yet another Board seat.
And that's how the flywheel of that.
And so when you're looking forBoard seats, you also, like, try
(28:59):
to find somebody, it's called,you know, over Boarded where
somebody has way too many Boards.
Look for those individualsthat are Boarded up, that are
passing on opportunities cuzthey have too many Boards.
That's a great way just tostart to open up the doors.
Erica Seidel (29:17):
That's it.
Your guide for how CMOs and Boardscan promote their relationship from
fraught to functional to fantastic.
A huge thanks to all theguests from this season.
And, of course, if you wanna talkwith me about hiring a CMO or VP
of Marketing for your SaaS companyor your open Board seat, ping me.
Thanks for listening to The Get.
(29:38):
I'm your host, Erica Seidel.
The Get is here to drive smartdecisions around recruiting and
leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.
We explore the trends, tribulations,and triumphs of today's top
marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
To stay in the know for our next season,please keep following the show in
your preferred podcast listening app.
If you liked thisepisode, please share it.
(30:00):
For more about The Get,visit thegetpodcast.com.
And to learn more about my executivesearch practice, which focuses on
recruiting the make-money marketingleaders rather than the make-it-pretty
ones, follow me on LinkedIn orvisit theconnectivegood.com.
The Get is produced by Evo Terraof Simpler Media Productions.
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