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Riverside Acceleration Capital
Portfolio CEO Summit
Topical Marketing Chats
Dave Kellogg
Principal, Dave Kellogg Consulting
12/9/20
davekellogg@mail.com
www.kellblog.com
@kellblog
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All Content Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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My Experience with Scaling and Marketing
Operating
• Ingres, $30M to $240/400M
• Versant, $1M to $30M
• Business Objects, $30M to $1B
• MarkLogic, $0M to $80M
• Salesforce, $3B
• Host Analytics, $8M to $50M
Board & Advisory
• Aster Data (exited)
• Granular (exited)
• Alation
• Nuxeo
• Profisee
• Advisory: Tableau, MongoDB,
Recorded Future, GainSight, Cyral,
Plannuh, …
ProdMkt
VP Mkt
CMO
CEO
SVP/GM
CEO

3.
Business Objects
QBR
April, 1995
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4.
Shameless Blog Plug
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Topics
• Thinking about marketing
• Professionalizing marketing
• Scaling marketing
• Managing the sales/marketing relationship
• Planning & budgeting marketing
• The age-old people vs. programs question
• Success metrics and KPIs for marketing
• Q&A
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How To Think About
Marketing
(And how you should encourage marketing to think about itself.)
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Note: I can’t find a source for this, so it’s from memory, taking liberties with the double quotes
Scott McNealy
at the Sun
Microsystems
Ten-Year
Anniversary
“I’d like to thank Engineering for building our
amazing products, Sales for working with our
customers to sell them, Customer Support for
working tirelessly to support them, Finance for
managing our resources and numbers, HR for
supporting our hard-working people, and
Marketing for, … for whatever it is they do.”
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8.
“Half the money I spend
on advertising is wasted;
the trouble is I don’t
know which half.”
John Wanamaker’s Famous Quote
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9.
Or, As One VP of Business Development Put It
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Marketing Exists To Make Sales Easier
(For example, here are some tactical and strategic ways they can help)
Tactically
• Getting leads
• Qualifying leads (SDRs)
• Running the website
• Running events/programs
• Building sales tools
• Telling customer stories
• Training sales
• Branding/swag
Strategically
• Company strategy
• Market research
• Strategic positioning (framing)
• Thought leadership
• Influencer and analyst relations
• Ideal customer profile (ICP)
• Product requirements input
• Strategic conscience (market share)
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11.
Professionalizing
Marketing
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Is This Your Marketing Head?
• Tendency in marketing, particularly
at smaller firms, to have
homegrown marketers
• It’s not always bad – they know the
product and the customers – but
they may not know marketing
• If you’re in the midst of home-
growing a marketing head, and they
are so inclined, get them to
professionalize themselves
• If not, at some point, you’ll need to
hire a professional marketer
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BTW, I Have This Issue in the Family
(My daughter is a recently graduated economics major working in brand management.)
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This is what I’m getting her for Christmas
See
https://kellblog.com/2019/02/28/the-three-marketing-books-all-founder-ceos-should-read/
https://kellblog.com/2014/06/15/ten-classic-business-books-for-entrepreneurs-startup-founders/

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Scaling Marketing
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Typical Early Evolution
1. Generalist
2. Demandgen/web
3. Events
4. Prodmkt
5. PR
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Conceptually, Marketing Has Four Pillars
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Product
Marketing
Positioning
Messaging
Sales tools
Demand
Generation
Website/digital
Programs
Events
Marketing
Communications
PR/AR
Customer Stories
Branding/design
Sales
Development
Inbound
Outbound
Hybrid

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Recruiting Tip
• You can NEVER find a CMO equally strong on all four pillars
• Think hard about your “pillar profile” before starting a search
• Contrast a (5, 4, 4, 2) to (2, 5, 4, 3)
• Be realistic: you only get about 15 points maximum (e.g., I’m a 5, 3, 5, 2)
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What a “50/50” Marketing Dept Might Look Like
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CMO
Prodmkt
Prodmkt
Competition
Solutions Demos
Demandgen
Website
Ops
Contentmkt
Digital/SEM Events
Fieldmkt
Intl
Comms
PR
Brand
AR Customer Social
SDRs
Inbound/X
Outbound/Y
Hybrid/Z
EA
Think of a continuum between one generalist and this;
where do you need investment to help sell more?
(I had to fight the PowerPoint org chart maker; view all orgs as flat reporting directly to their respective pillar head.)

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The Marketing/Sales
Relationship
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Sales/Mkt Partnership with Healthy Tension
“Tough love.”
“Sales is
my customer”
• Great marketers have a “Challenger Sales”
relationship with their internal customer, Sales
• Must remember in the end, that help is defined
in the mind of recipient
• Success indicators
• Live chatting on your staff Zoom
• Talking 1-3x/day
• Answer each other’s call, always
• 90% naturally aligned, 10% conflicting
See https://www.amazon.com/Challenger-Sale-Control-Customer-Conversation/dp/1591844355

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Marketing Planning and
Budgeting
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Dovetailing Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Top Down
• Percent of revenue
• Converge to benchmarks (e.g., KeyBanc)
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratio
• Prior-qtr S&M / current-qtr New ARR
• Sales/marketing expense ratio
• Changes to it often represent power and
politics more than business model
Bottom Up
• Inverted lead funnel model
• New ARR / ASP = deals
• Deals / s2 to close rate = s2 oppties
• s2 oppties * cost/oppty = demandgen
• Benchmarks and improvements
• Systems and infrastructure
• Headcount
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See https://www.key.com/kco/images/2020_KBCM_SaaS_Survey_8102020.pdf
See https://kellblog.com/2019/12/03/why-every-startup-needs-an-inverted-demand-generation-funnel-part-i/

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Balancing People vs.
Programs
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Marketing Budget Taxonomy
• The fear: marketing will spend all its
money on people
• The reality: you need people to spend
the programs
• Back in the day, you shot for 50/50
people/programs ratio
• Today it’s more complicated
• 45/45/10 people/programs/infrastructure
• 60/30/10 is more common
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Success Metrics and KPIs
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Marketing Success Metrics
Internal
• S2 oppty generation
• S2 = sales-accepted oppties
• Day-1 pipeline coverage
• Next-quarter pipeline day-1 coverage forecast
accuracy
• Cost/s2-oppty
• Pipe/spend ratio
• Sales satisfaction
• Run a survey
External
• Web traffic (company, competitors)
• Share of voice (e.g., Cision)
• Search keyword rankings
• Search featured snippet ownership
• Outside-in demand funnel
• Awareness, opinion, trial, consideration, purchase
• Requires custom research
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Q&A
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Appendix: Relevant Kellblog on Marketing Posts
• https://kellblog.com/2020/04/26/marketing-exists-to-make-sales-easier/
• https://kellblog.com/2018/05/29/the-two-engines-of-saas-qcrs-and-devs/
• https://kellblog.com/2020/01/24/the-evolution-of-software-marketing-hey-marketing-go-get-this/
• https://kellblog.com/2020/08/28/how-to-get-sales-and-marketing-working-together-presentation/
• https://kellblog.com/2015/02/13/managing-the-fundamental-tension-in-marketing/
• https://kellblog.com/2020/03/04/stopping-the-sales-marketing-double-drowning/
• https://kellblog.com/2017/06/13/dear-marketing-stop-putting-the-template-over-the-story/
• https://kellblog.com/2020/03/08/a-missive-to-marketing-impose-simplicity/
• https://kellblog.com/2017/02/09/the-evolution-of-marketing-thanks-to-saas/
• https://kellblog.com/2019/11/26/should-sdrs-report-to-sales-or-marketing/
• https://kellblog.com/2019/12/03/why-every-startup-needs-an-inverted-demand-generation-funnel-part-i/
• https://kellblog.com/2019/12/05/why-every-startup-needs-an-inverted-demand-generation-funnel-part-ii/
• https://kellblog.com/2019/02/28/the-three-marketing-books-all-founder-ceos-should-read/
• https://kellblog.com/2014/06/15/ten-classic-business-books-for-entrepreneurs-startup-founders/
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