Hiring a CMO is one of the few extremely high revenue-impacting decisions a company can make. Yet many companies make a mistake when hiring a CMO. Getting this hire wrong is costly and impacts all areas of the business.

The challenge is that every business is different, and so is the expertise required from the CMO. Your unique business context needs to play a significant role in determining what to look for in a CMO. Too many businesses hire a CMO who would be a perfect fit for someone else’s business, not theirs.

For example, if your product has a low ACV, you need a more inbound-focused (paid ads, SEO etc.) CMO. If you sell a more enterprise B2B product, you need a CMO who understands ABM and partnering with sales teams.

Understanding this distinction is the difference between a successful CMO hire and one you have to replace in less than 18 months.

If you want to grow your brand, focus on how much value you deliver to customers.

How they perceive you has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with their experience. The better their experience, the better the value you deliver, the better the transformation you provide, the more your brand will grow.

Going upmarket is one of the most talked about strategies inside B2B companies. The reason is straightforward: enterprise customers are stickier, have higher deal sizes and better retention rates.

As B2B companies evolve, they inevitably land at the idea that landing one enterprise client is equal to landing several, if not hundreds, of SMB or Mid-Market clients.

However, they almost always rush to assume that their product will be a great fit for customers upmarket.

Just because the customer is in the same “category” does not mean they have the same level of product-market fit as your customers.

Going upmarket is almost like launching a whole other product to a whole new market. This means:

-Your product feature set needs to match their needs

-You need to spend time in product development cycles with customer feedback to improve your offering

-You need to create new messaging and positioning to compete in the new market place

-You need to create collateral, webpages,...

If you look through your Closed Won reasons of most companies, you'll find that the top 4 reasons deals close are:

1) Repeat Customers

2) Referrals / Intros

3) Word of Mouth

4) Brand + Content

The common thread between all of these is pre-built TRUST. Deals close because customers have confidence that you will be able to resolve their pain point. The higher the pre-built Trust, the easier and faster deals close.

Despite this reality, companies spend far less time into "Pre-Building Trust". Instead, they think focus on channels where there is no pre-built trust and then wonder why their conversion rates are low and CAC Payback Periods are sky high.

Instead:

-Ensure new and existing customers have the best possible onboarding and experience

-Focus on best fit prospects and landing more of those people where you know you can deliver exceptional value and high NPS scores

-Build differentiated content and presence in the marketplace to have a brand that stands for something beyond just...

Depending on the segment you’re going after, different channels are relevant.

A low ACV with a large TAM and many targets likely needs to focus on SEO, Paid Search and Paid Social. Conversely, having a high ACV with a limited TAM and few targets implies the need for ABM, Sales Enablement and Customer Marketing.

As a general rule, the higher the Price and Annual Contract Value for a product, the lower the Total Addressable Market. The lower the ACV, the higher the TAM.

These two dimensions largely govern what avenues a particular business should take because as ACV shrinks, a company has a much lower amount of Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to work with to have a healthy Payback Period.

To put it another way: When deal sizes are smaller, you need to invest fewer dollars to acquire customers in order to break even in a reasonable amount of time.

When there is a mismatch between the approach a company should take and the one it actually takes, havoc ensues:

-The chosen channels...

The return on Product Marketing efforts is infinite because it impacts all business metrics.

As we get better at targeting our ideal customers:

1) Overall funnel efficiency improves

2) Gross margins go up

3) Win rates, LTV and NRR dramatically improve

4) Customers are happier and refer more business

As a company builds a more focused Messaging, Positioning and Go-To-Market, the lost revenue from bad fit customers is more than made up by the increased volume and revenue from its best fit customers.

This trade-off isn’t visible initially because you have to say no to revenue before you start landing more of your best fit customers. That’s why founders, CEOs and executive teams get uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to say no to revenue.

The better companies get at saying no to bad revenue though, the more their revenue quality improves. It also brings way more focus to the entire business because Product, Sales and CS all align around helping best-fit customers succeed.

Understanding exactly who your software is for is critical. In trying to build a bigger business, a lot of founders end up trying to be everything to everyone, even though a smaller group of customers are really their biggest champions.

The key is to break down the customer data by Segment, Vertical, Industry, Size and Geography and compare them against each other using KPIs such as Demo to Opp Rate, Opp to Close Rates, Net Revenue Retention and Net Promoter Score.

A lot of this data sits inside companies but is never actually compiled and analyzed by the marketing team. The better your analysis of your existing customers, the better you will understand who to go after going forward. The more specific your definition of who you're going after, the better.

This is how TAM and segmentation analysis gets tighter and your CAC comes down because you are focused on your best fit customers.

A good way to think about building Marketing Sophistication is as a pyramid:

Layer 1 (Foundation): This is where most of the groundwork of a mature marketing engine is laid.

Layer 2 (Programs): This is where most of the actual value from marketing is created, the programs and campaigns to run, the content that is created.

Layer 3 (Resourcing): This is where the right team and budget needs to be procured from the CEO and the Board

Layer 4 (Outcome): This is the ultimate goal of driving revenue growth as a result of all the other layers of work.

Each box in the pyramid represents a key area where the company needs to build sophistication. What’s important to understand is that sophistication does not imply being world-class in that area. In a lot of founder-led businesses, the answer is to get to “good enough” so that you can focus on driving revenue.
Every company wants the outcome of predictable revenue growth, but most have not done the fundamental work required.

It’s easy to build content on platforms early on. Organic reach is easier, audiences are more engaged, content is less saturated.

As platforms mature, all of this goes away and standing out is much harder. This has happened with every platform over time:
-In 2010, you could rank on the first page of Google with a basic Top 10 article. You can’t do that anymore.
-In 2014, you could get way more views on YouTube by uploading selfie videos on basic How-To topics. You can’t do that anymore.
-In 2016, you could build an audience for your Podcast by just doing 30 minute episodes. You can’t do that anymore.
-In 2019, you could write a text-only post on LinkedIn about a challenge you overcame and reach thousands of people. You can’t do that anymore.

Add to that the layer of AI and how everyone is capable of producing higher-quality content at a significantly faster rate.

To succeed in an AI world, it’s important to understand a few things:
1) Longer form and...

One of the biggest mistakes made by marketing departments is that they do things in random order (which is often the wrong order), when there are far more qualified prospects to build assets, campaigns, and programs for.

To do things better means doing them in the right order:
1) Start with campaigns prospects in-market and ready to make a purchasing decision.
2) Ensure you have the right product marketing, sales enablement and conversion content in place to nurture them to close.
3) Work backwards to prospects who are less ready to buy but looking for a solution of some kind, build more nurture and educational content to get them to a stage where they are ready to make a purchasing decision.
4) Work backwards to prospects who are not even looking for a solution and help them solve pain points with tools and resources. Nurture them to a stage where they understand what kind of solution they should be looking for
5) Work backwards to prospects who are not even problem-aware and create...