The Get: Finding And Keeping The Best Marketing Leaders in B2B SaaS

 Hello, and welcome back to The Get . 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. I'm your host, Erica Seidel.  This is our fifth season! And in this season, we dive into the relationship between CMOs and Boards. How can that relationship go from...

This season on The Get podcast, we have stayed close to the theme 'Solving for the Scale Journey.' We have talked with marketing leaders who have scaled… and, in one case someone on the investor side who hires marketing leaders for scale-ups. We've looked at different dimensions around scaling: Hiring. Budgeting. Aligning with the Board. Getting the balance of brand and demand right. Balancing asp...

Sydney Sloan is a scale savant! I talked with Sydney as she wrapped up her CMO role at Salesloft, contributing to a huge scale-up. She has since joined Zoom as Head of Product & Industry Marketing. Sydney had so much insight to share. It was hard to pick out just a few highlights. I asked her how a CMO can balance "getting oars in the water quickly" while managing expectations that "Rome wasn'...

Khalid El Khatib is the Head of Marketing and Communications for Stack Overflow, which reaches 100MM people per month -- more traffic than the New York Times website! Khalid shares how his career path prepared him for this role, and how he has structured his organization to serve not just Stack Overflow's developer community, but also its paid SaaS products. You'll hear about: Avoiding the mistake...

Cynthia Gumbert is the CMO of SmartBear, the ~750-person PE-backed SaaS company that is on a growth tear, serving more and more software developers every day. Cynthia reflects on her transition from VP of Marketing to CMO. We discuss the difference between a marketing-centric mindset and a 'business first, marketing second' mindset. It's this 'business first' mindset that is key for a CMO in scali...

It’s every CMO’s complaint: “Everyone thinks they’re a marketer.” With so many people outside of marketing weighing in, this can make the CMO job challenging. Our guest today shows how you can harness the emotional investment that others in the company have.  Our guest is Justin Steinman, CMO of Definitive Healthcare, the healthcare commercial intelligence company. Justin joined the company t...

It's not in our nature to move slowly as marketers. We like to act, move, go, and grow, especially when there’s a scale mandate. But there’s wisdom and value in assessing first, like just pro athletes surveying the field of play to let the game come to them. We discuss the formula for successful scaling: Aligning on what scale means to your CEO and Board Avoiding overselling what marketing can do/...

Kristin Hambelton, CMO scaleup queen now running marketing for MineralTree, takes us on a deep dive of budgeting for marketing during a scale journey. You’ll learn: How do you communicate to a CEO and CFO that you are investing efficiently… without overspending When do you give budget back versus ask for more How to remind your peers of what marketing will and won’t do: “You won't get to scale say...

The CMO’s most important job when scaling? To create focus, protect focus, and seize control of the strategic planning process - not just for marketing but for the company as a whole. Here’s how to do that. Join Erica and her guest Jay Gaines, who runs marketing at insurance tech scale-up AgentSync,  as they discuss: How to avoid ‘random acts of marketing,’ reinforce the role of marketing as...

What’s it like behind the scenes when CEOs hire CMOs in PE-backed companies? Hear from a ‘talent whisperer’ from a PE firm. If you’re a CMO looking to work in a private-equity-backed business, or a hiring leader in a PE-backed company, you will come across the PE talent partner. Learn about the role of the PE talent partner in recruiting CMOs.  You’ll hear about the soft skills framework Brya...

Hiring great marketing leaders is not easy. Especially these days! The Get is designed to inspire smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.  I'm Erica Seidel, host of The Get. I run an executive search practice focused entirely on placing what I call the ‘make money’ marketing leaders -- not the ‘make it pretty’ ones.  I spend most of my time talking with to...

This episode wraps up our ‘diversity-in-B2B SaaS marketing’ themed third season of The Get, with not one but two special guests on either end of the age/experience spectrum, discussing their take on age-related diversity in the business world in general and in B2B tech in particular. Our goal with this episode is to raise awareness of age biases and address them in our B2B marketing world. This ep...

Jeff Winter is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rocket Software, a B2B tech company that helps companies innovate using the data and tech they already have. Rocket serves customers across the Fortune 50 and has a global presence. Jeff has had a prolific career including senior marketing roles at SAP and IBM before joining Rocket. Episode synopsis In this episode, Jeff and Erica talk about company va...

Pantheon is building the world’s best web ops (website operations) platform to empower marketing and development teams to take control of their websites. Christy Marble, the Chief Marketing Officer of Pantheon, is a global SaaS growth marketing expert with over 20 years of experience leading all facets of marketing. Prior to Pantheon, she served as CMO of SAP Concur, and CMO of Visier. Episode syn...

Openpath offers cutting-edge workplace safety and security solutions though touchless access control. It is a hardware and SaaS company with about 80 people. Kieran leads marketing for Openpath and has previously led marketing at Belkin and Radioshack. He has been recognized by Forbes as one of “ The World’s Most Influential CMOs 2020 ”. Episode synopsis In this episode, Kieran and Erica delve int...

Concur is a global SaaS leader in travel and expense management. David Hsu is the Global VP of Marketing Data and Technology and has worked in senior marketing roles at IBM and CA in the past. At Concur, he leads a global 30-member team with the mandate to support marketing with analytics, automation, martech, and project management solutions and services. His team balances both transactional, pro...

Eric brings nearly two decades of experience as a senior go-to-market leader in high-growth technology businesses, including as CMO for Sovos, and as CEO of mobile startup Zerista, which he successfully exited. Quick Base is an app development platform that helps problem solvers of any technical background to work together to create an ecosystem of applications safely, securely, and sustainably. E...

With 25 years in B2B Marketing, including start-ups and companies such as Akamai and Silicon Graphics, Jenny features on the Top 50 Women in Revenue That You Should Know and the Top 60 Most Influential Marketing Thought Leaders list. She’s been a part of not one or two but 11 successful exits! ActiveCampaign is a Customer Experience automation company which has grown from 60 to 600 people over the...

Lori Cohen, a veteran CMO and a veteran fractional CMO, has worked with several different growth-stage B2B SaaS companies. In this episode, Lori and Erica talk about how to drive optimal value from a fractional CMO engagement. Highlights: -The differences among a full-time CMO, a fractional CMO, and a consultant While alignment with the CEO and building trust with the team remain the same, the key...

Todd is a fractional CMO in the Bay Area and also the co-author of the book ‘Beyond Product.' He's on the board of directors of MOCCA (Marketing Operations Cross-company Alliance) and has previously served Verisign, Neustar, SAP, and IBM in a variety of senior marketing roles. Highlights from Todd and Erica’s conversation include: - Who needs a fractional CMO and when (hint: It’s not just for earl...

In this three-part series of podcasts – our Fractional CMO special – we explore the ‘what, when, why (and why not)’ of fractional CMOs. You will get a great flavor of whether this is the right path for your B2B SaaS company. We answer the questions you are most likely to have, including: How is hiring a fractional CMO different from hiring a consultant and different from hiring a full-time CMO? Wh...

Erica Seidel’s conversation with Jason Seeba, SVP of Marketing at Eightfold.ai, is interesting and unusual because not only does Jason lead marketing at a talent intelligence company (and The Get is all about marketing talent!), but also because of his diverse background spanning demand gen, marketing, technology and marketing operations. Jason was Chief Marketing Technology Officer at Bloomreach,...

Three-time Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Tricia Gellman has been there and done that at Salesforce Canada, Checkr, and now, conversational marketing category leader Drift. Aside from sharing the story of how she came to be the CMO at Drift, the conversational marketing company well-known for its non-traditional brand building and marketing methods, she and Erica talk about: ● Hiring your first CMO...

We all know that marketing needs to be authentic and tell believable stories. But aside from the marketing itself, the marketing leaders behind those strategies need to be authentic and believable too. Christina Mautz from Moz tells us why, and how she puts this principle into practice every day on the job. This authenticity starts with the hiring process. When asked if she was a growth marketer,...

What happens when Marketing leaders take on Sales? Scott Horn is the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) of PrismHR, a SaaS company in the HR space. He shares his story of life as a CRO after over 2 decades in Marketing. Prior to his role as CRO at PrismHR, Scott was Chief Marketing and Revenue Ops officer at [24]7.ai, and the chief marketer for Seagate. He also spent 17 years at Microsoft - a tenure almo...