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As your company evolves, so should your marketing leadership
A few weeks ago, we talked about how and when companies could extricate themselves from a founder-led sales motion.
Let’s turn our attention to marketing.
Just as sales and sales leadership needs to evolve through the 3P’s of GTM Maturity, so does marketing.
Marketing Leadership and the 3 P’s
Product-Market Fit (Ideation)
In this stage, you lack a fully developed product and are uncertain about its market fit.
You need marketing! Too many technical founders think that an immature product or a product-led growth motion negates the need for marketing.
But beware the other end of the spectrum. You also probably don’t need a CMO at this stage who doesn’t know how to roll up their sleeves and dig into the every day work.
You’re likely looking for a director-level individual contributor who may manage a small team of junior talent or perhaps a few contractors. They likely report to the CEO directly, or less often to a CRO.
Potential pitfall: No one is good at everything. Hire someone with strong demand-gen skills and be willing to bring on contractors to fill holes (SEO, PPC, design, writing, etc.)
Product-Market Fit (Transition)
With the right product-market fit, you shift focus to developing a repeatable, scalable process to increase market share.
That means you need a fully-fledged marketing team.
Depending on the specifics of your company, you may need a VP-level leader or a CMO. Either way, it should be someone who can still execute. You can’t afford to have a leader at this stage who doesn’t know how to use your MAP and just wants to strategize in meetings all day.
You may have a manager or director-level person running demand gen and overseeing a small team that handles things like events, content marketing, SEO, paid media, lead gen, and ABM. You likely don’t need an FTE for each role, but everyone does a little bit of everything.
The leader is probably overseeing brand, product marketing, and communications, whether that means they are overseeing a shared resource or managing agencies.
Potential pitfall: A team of generalists working on a variety of projects can get easily overwhelmed. Make sure the team is aligned on overall priorities.
Platform-Market Fit (Execution)
As your company evolves into a multi-product organization, the emphasis shifts from individual products to a platform approach.
At this stage, generalists who dabble in a variety of disciplines are no longer sufficient.
You need specialists in demand gen, product marketing, brand, customer marketing, partnerships, events, communications, ops, enablement and more. Each area will have at least one experienced leader who may have a larger support team underneath them.
Your leader is no longer working directly in the MAP or event platform themself. Their focus is on making sure that the marketing strategies run by their VP and director-level reports align with overall company strategy and vision.
Potential pitfall: Large teams fall into silos quickly. For example, demand gen might run a campaign highlighting a product feature that product marketing knows is unpopular. Perhaps lessons learned from email optimization don’t make their way back to the website team.
To minimize silos in a large enterprise marketing team, foster open communication and collaboration through regular cross-functional meetings, shared goals, transparent project management tools, and a unified marketing tech stack .
Don’t Get Ahead of Yourself
The brilliance of the 3P’s is that it allows you to right-size your efforts.
If you are in problem-market fit, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have an award-winning CMO and a brilliant, full-time brand manager. You don’t need it yet!
But if you’re in platform-market fit and you’re still relying heavily on a CMO who is writing email campaigns and a team of junior generalists, then you’re probably not optimizing your marketing investment.
(Is this a good time to tell CEOs at all stages to stop getting in the weeds of marketing and editing email subject lines?)
Who Should Be Your Next B2B CMO?
Picture this, folks: a conference panel, where we're dissecting the best-suited marketing background for the agile, strategic, data-driven CMO of the future.
We could debate this endlessly, but here's how the debate might go down:
The Argument for a Brand Marketer
Brand marketing is all about the long game.
It's about nurturing the company reputation, building trust, and creating lasting customer relationships.
A strong brand can make people loyal for life, and that means long-term value. Plus, it sets you apart from the competition and gives you that unique identity.
Consistency is key too, keeping that messaging on point across all teams and silos. When the going gets tough, brand marketers are the reputation saviors, helping you weather the storms.
Let’s not forget the strategic partnerships that can open up new horizons.
The CMO is a strategic role, and a brand marketer has the perfect skills to make sure that the marketing strategy is meeting overall corporate goals at the highest level.
The Argument for a Demand-Gen Marketer
Do you want immediate impact and leadership that values agility, experimentation, and data?
Look no further than demand generation marketing. These are the leaders who know how to adapt quickly and stay competitive.
Demand gen is all about revenue boost – identifying, attracting, engaging, and converting best-fit prospects into paying, renewing, expanding customers.
Demand gen is the money-maker, and a good demand-gen marketer can measure their impact on the board-level metrics that matter: ARR, NRR, and pipeline.
Demand gen marketers are also experienced at working well with other teams (sales, customer success, product) to make sure goals and messaging are aligned.
Since a CMO is tasked first and foremost with prioritizing strategies that directly contribute to the bottom line, a demand gen marketer is the perfect person for the job.
The Argument for a Product Marketer
Product marketers are the market whisperers.
They understand the market, specific customer segments, and the needs of every persona.
They tend to keep tabs on the competition and bring back intel that allows a company to make strategic moves.
Product marketers are often the architects of those winning go-to-market strategies, figuring out the right messaging and pricing and weighing in on motions and channels.
Product marketers also put their fingerprint on sales activation, enablement, and customer education. They bridge the gap between what customers want, what sales says you have, and what you actually offer.
A CMO with a product marketing background would be well-equipped to align the roadmap, the messaging, and the strategy to market needs. Not to mention, effective product marketing can drive revenue growth by identifying opportunities for product expansion, upselling, cross-selling, and optimizing pricing strategies.
So there you have it, the ultimate showdown of marketing backgrounds. Each one brings its own flavor to the table, but in the end, it's all about what serves your business goals best.
Think about which stage of the 3P’s you are at and what kind of background might serve your company best!
January 30: Webinar: Build Your ROI Playbook
All through 2023, we heard from tech companies that struggled with stalled pipelines, poor win rates, and poor renewal rates. One way to solve those problems is by clearly communicating ROI to prospects.
We’re hosting a webinar on January 30 with ROI and value experts sharing their best practices on:
How to get a third-party ROI study completed with a reasonable budget and timeline
How to choose customers to be involved, and how to approach them to increase the chances they’ll say yes
Product marketing ROI vs. third-party validated ROI
How to activate your sales team
How to turn one study into 12 weeks of product marketing
Join GTM Analyst Sarah Allen-Short in conversation with ROI experts like Chris Voce (G2), Corrina Owens (Purple Cork), and Tim Hillison (entrypoint1).
So much great stuff happening in the world of GTM! Coming up soon from us will be a report on Customer Time to Value and one on what makes a modern demand-gen marketer.
Stay tuned and stay warm!
Love,
GTM Partners
