How Chief Marketing Officers Drive Billions in Value for Their Company

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Today we are talking about how marketers can drive billions of dollars in value for their company, and we have a great guest to help us talk through that, who is an expert on this topic Joelle Kaufman.

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Welcome to the show, Thank you Great to be here, Eric.

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So why don't we start off by you sharing just a minute or two, a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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Sure.

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Well, I'm Joelle Kaufman.

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I've been a CMO, cro in Silicon Valley for the last 28 years, give or take a couple in the beginning where I wasn't in the C-suite quite yet.

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My companies have generated over $4 billion of market cap, some through exits, some are unicorns.

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I'm one of those rare CMOs that stayed with companies for three, four, five years, so really got to see multiple cycles and see how fast something that works stops working and how agile you have to be as a marketing leader.

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As my friend Christopher Lockhead would say, marketing is strategy and so we have to be strategic, we have to be tapped into the hearts and souls of our customers and we have to be great analysts and tactical and execution masters.

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It's a lot and tactical and execution masters.

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It's a lot.

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It is a lot and there are so many things, as things are evolving, that marketing leaders and CMOs need to master, to take things to the next level these days.

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In that spirit, we're ready to be inspired.

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Do you have a story for us about some of the most remarkable marketing you've done that you're the most proud of?

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So one of my plays is how do you make a small company seem big?

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Right, because at the end of the day, if you're selling B2B which I was, and enterprise, which I was, they don't want to buy from small companies.

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That's a high risk, possibly career limiting, career ending move.

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So you have to appear big.

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You have to have credibility.

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So one of the things we did it was great marketing is we said we want to understand how people discover the stuff they want to buy.

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So this was when I was at Bloomreach and I'm going to update the story for you real quick, but let me give you how it happened.

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And we said we need to understand how people discover things and how that's changing.

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Now it was 2012, 2013.

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We create an instrument.

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Now the first thing everyone should know is, when you create an instrument, you want to know what the answers are, that you want, what the headlines are that you'd like, not so that you get those headlines, because you might not.

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Data is data.

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You have to be true to the data, but you want to know what you're looking for.

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So what are the questions that would help inform this?

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Various hypotheses you're testing?

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We did, we had some.

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I worked with a great guy, sam Moore.

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He's wonderful.

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If you're ever thinking of doing a play like this, we created a survey instrument, we worked with some partners, we distributed it, we ran a good process and we discovered something remarkable.

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We discovered at that time that more people started looking for a product on Amazon than on Google.

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That's huge, right, it was huge, and nobody had ever said it before.

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So we took that nugget and the data that supported it and our interpretation of what that meant and our positioning as a technology that e-commerce providers were using to gain more visibility when people searched on their own sites on Google or what have you for their long tail.

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We took that and we created a whole PR and social campaign.

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I kid you not, in the span of a week we were on national news, we were cited.

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This became a huge story.

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We got over 1,500 unique press visibility, which, for a small company, took us from being what's a Bloomreach to, oh, bloomreach.

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They're the people that understand how people look for stuff.

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Okay, from that you can start to build a company with really great momentum.

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Now, how would you run that play today?

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Well, you'd use AI and you'd create what is the synthetic buyer?

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What is the persona I'm trying to understand.

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What are the big questions they have?

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And, by the way, what other data is already out there?

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Where can I find a unique angle given my unique value proposition and what's out there competitively?

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Where can I find an edge?

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And I think AI can help you with that thought process.

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You still should do the survey.

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You still should gather real data, not just synthetic data, because if it's synthetic data, anybody can get it.

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If they figure out the right prompt and you can't really back it up so you run it, then I would actually take the data, put it through AI to find more insights and compare it to what's in the news cycle and use that to actually hit the nerve and maybe not just one, but number two, number three, number four and make this a way that your brand is being lifted by data that people really want to know about.

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But that requires Eric being what I call a CMO 3.0, right, and I have a resource for your listeners where they can take a quick assessment and get the CMO 3.0 assessment and manifesto.

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That'll be available at my website, wwwgtmflowcom.

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Slash remarkable marketing, and so if you want to find out well, how close am I, what do I need to do and hey, what does this look like?

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And here's the thing I can tell you more about the CMO 3.0.

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But let me pause there because you wanted the story.

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Yeah, I think that's a great story, because you have to do something to stand out, to get people's attention, rather than just sending out a press release.

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You have to have an angle, you have to have a hook that really gets people interested, and it seems like you were able to come up with one that got massive attention.

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And I think, as startups go, I think that's something that's pretty hard to figure out how to do that right.

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It is, and AI is not going to tell you how to do that, unless you learn how to ask a very set, precise set of questions to help tune your thinking.

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It's a great research buddy.

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Ai is a great research buddy, but you have to prompt it in the right way, is what you're saying, right?

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You do and keep refining, keep engaging, keep pushing back.

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It's like the research intern you always wish you could afford, but you can't at a startup.

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And so, not to give away the secret of the assessment, but directionally, what does it take to be a CMO 3.0.

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Okay, let's take one step back.

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Let's talk about the drivers.

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I think the CMO job is one of the most exciting, fulfilling and challenging jobs in the world, and it continues to morph.

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So there are four drivers that have changed it in the last five years.

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Obviously, ai and advanced analytics.

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There's been a massive erosion of trust in institutions, which has empowered customers to make their own decisions.

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They don't trust you.

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In the last three years, every head of marketing, with the exception of the ones that are at, say, openai or what have you, is being told you have to grow with fewer resources.

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We have to be efficient, but, by the way, please get us 30%, 40%, 50% growth, but do it with 50% less budget and people.

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That's stressful, and then those people are working in a hybrid manner, so you can't even bring them together and get the efficiency of people collaborating in a room.

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They're all over the place, which is great because you can have resources that are working from all over the world, but really hard for collaboration and decision-making.

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So the pillars of a CMO 3.0 is one.

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They are an AI first executive.

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They're always thinking how could AI make this better, faster, give me an edge?

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They are passionately number two, passionately customer centric.

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Not I have a customer marketing person, but rather knowing my customer, knowing what they care about, what their careers are about, what their urgency triggers are, and delighting them is central to my strategy.

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Number three they are masters at the art of alignment.

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They are always aligning.

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You've got to think of your startup kind of like a Jeep on a back road there's ditches, there's bumps, there's logs, there's water in the way and you are always realigning those tires.

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And that's part of your job.

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Five years Period, full stop.

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And most of the people who have risen to the CMO position have not had to be revenue accountable.

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They have not had to understand what it takes to move a deal through the pipeline, get it to the close and get it to renew and expand, because that was sales and customer success.

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It's not because of erosion of trust.

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The customers at the center, you in marketing, are responsible for facilitating the whole thing.

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And finally, back to my friend Christopher Lockhead, if you want to break through the noise, it's not going to be a survey.

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The survey was a vehicle to establish us as a personalization powerhouse.

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We could anticipate what people were looking for and present them with it when they showed up at your site, we were defining a category.

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So the fifth thing of CMO 3.0 is they are well-versed and confident in category design.

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Oh, Joelle, you make this sound so easy.

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It's really hard I mean really, I think most CEOs and CFOs expect the CMOs to just be magicians and do magic to make all these things that you said happen.

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But I do really like your five pillars there.

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I think that's a good guideline for what CMOs need to do looking forward.

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It is an ever-evolving job.

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And when you say CMO 3.0, what do you think the biggest shift is between how people were thinking about things as CMO 1.0 or 2.0, what do you think the biggest shift is between how people were thinking about things as CMO 1.0 or 2.0?

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What do you think is the biggest leap?

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I'm curious.

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Yeah, so 1.0 for me is the CMO spokesperson brand, all of which is really good.

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So I want to say these are accretive, they're not exclusive.

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Cmo 2.0 cared a lot about growth and pipeline Growth, pipeline, growth, pipeline.

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That's part of their game.

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So now we have to do brand message, growth and pipeline through technology and through strategy, because the speed of change and the intensity of competition and, frankly, the new thresholds for success, right, they've gone up very considerably and so you have to morph and, eric, this is a very hard job.

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I mean, my business now is actually working with CMOs, cros, ceos, on their approach to doing this job.

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They're pacing themselves for the learning they have to do and for the hiring they need to do and for the kind of team they're actually going to construct and run and align.

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These are the things as an executive you have to do.

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You're not going to be able to be expert at the five pillars.

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I would say you have to be an alignment expert.

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You're going to be revenue accountable and the strategic part AI first, customer centric, category design those are table stakes.

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But you're not going to be an expert at creating campaigns or doing the PR strategy or the whole marketing, packaging and pricing.

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You're going to need to be able to put together a team, a team that uses AI, that can do that at a higher rate of efficiency than has ever been done before.

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The bar is high for sure, that's true, and I think that you have some great strategies here that can help marketing leaders rise to the occasion, so I encourage everyone to check out that resource.

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I do have one more question for you.

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Based on all the great stuff that you have done, I'm really curious what advice do you give people when they're in a leadership role and they get thrown a curveball?

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What is the one or two things you tell people to do when that happens?

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Okay.

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So, number one, when you see the curveball, I want you to take a breath, maybe three or four box breaths.

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So you take four counts in, hold four out for four, hold four.

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That actually levels out your parasympathetic nervous system.

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That's important because curve balls are moving slower than they appear.

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Your knee jerk, I have to react, is as if a bear is chasing you.

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There's no bear.

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That doesn't mean it's not bad.

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We talked before you started recording.

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I'm an intergenerational cancer survivor 10 cancer experiences in my family, including my own in 2023.

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So, like, these are real curve balls and you're seeing real curveballs as a CMO.

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So breathe, recognize.

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You have time.

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And then what I think a curveball approach is is knowing what's important, knowing what your strengths are, adopting a mindset of possibility, harnessing the resources you've got and recognizing this is the time you must lead, which means you have to communicate, commit and collaborate.

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So if you go to gtmflowcom curveball approach, you'll see that laid out around a home plate diagram, and so it's pretty easy to remember.

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But the first thing if you remember nothing else is slow down.

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That's great.

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I encourage everyone to check that out.

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I know thousands of people have benefited from your advice in this area, which is why I asked the question, and I think take a deep breath, like you said, and don't panic and you have more time than you think is always a great place to start, but there's a lot more to it, so I encourage everyone to check that out.

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Anything I didn't ask that you'd like to share with the audience today?

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So for people that might be earlier in their careers and they think they want to be a CMO, because it is really a great job.

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It's really hard, but it's a great job.

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A great job it's really hard, but it's a great job as you are building your collection of experiences.

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Spend time in sales, get out in the field, even as a marketing person.

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Spend time with prospects and customers.

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You can't be in a tower behind your computer and hoping.

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You need to be engaged with real people and you need to understand deeply what is the problem.

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We can solve for them 10x better and you have to believe it in your heart.

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And there's a new SDR for Navon and when I asked him what keeps him motivated because the SDR job is also hard and repetitive and he said I actually feel bad for people that aren't using my product.

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I know it's so great and it could help them so much and I just want to help them.

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That's what we have to feel.

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That's what every one of us has to deeply feel.

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Amazing advice, joelle, thank you so much for being with us today sharing your story and your insights.

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I'm going to link to the resources that you mentioned and your website in the show notes so people can go there and learn more.

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Really appreciate you being on the show today thank you for having me, eric, this was fun.