Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth!

In this episode, “The New CMO Playbook: Aligning Expertise with Business Growth Goals,” host Kerry Curran welcomes Erica Seidel. Erica shares her unique perspective on recruiting and nurturing top-tier marketing talent that drives revenue growth. This episode is packed with actionable insights on scaling your marketing team and aligning your marketing expertise with business growth goals.

Join us as Erica and Kerry explore how today's CMOs can bridge the gap between strategy and execution, ensuring marketing has a critical seat at the strategic planning table. Whether you're aiming to double your company's revenue or scale sustainably, this conversation is a must-listen. Let's dive in!

Podcast transcript

Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth!
I'm your host, Kerry Curran, and this episode is, “The New CMO Playbook: Aligning Expertise with Business Growth Goals” With special guest Erica Seidel, Leading B2B CMO recruiter and founder of The Connective Good.

In this episode, Erica shares her unique perspective on what it takes to find and cultivate top-tier marketing talent that doesn't just make things look pretty, but truly moves the needle on revenue. Whether you're aiming to double your company's revenue or scale your marketing team for sustainable growth, this conversation is packed with actionable insights.

Join us as Erica and I explore how today's CMOs can be both changemakers and peacemakers, effectively bridging the gap between strategy and execution, and ensuring that marketing has a critical seat at the strategic planning table. If you're ready to align your marketing expertise with your business growth goals, this episode is a must-listen. Let's dive in!

Kerry (00:02.931)

Welcome, Erica. We are very excited to have you here today. I'd love for you to introduce yourself and share a bit of your background and expertise.

Erica Seidel (00:11.47)

Sure. Well, thanks for having me, Kerry. You and I have known each other, I think, a while. I've tried to recruit you for things, and so it's great to see you doing your revenue boost and great to chat with you. So I run a retained executive search practice called the Connective Good. And my tagline, as you know, is I place the make money marketing leaders and not the make it pretty ones.

I've been doing this for, my goodness, about 13 years. That's amazing. And I started this because I had, I had previously been at Forrester way back and I had recruiters calling me and they were saying like, wow, this is the best job ever. But they didn't really understand what they were recruiting for and they weren't really taking the time to understand me. And I felt like, well, maybe I could do it better by being very niche focused. So….

Initially, when I started my practice, it was the way I described it was the intersection between marketing and analytics and tech and data. And then I just was able to simplify it as I talked to many people and kind of shared my elevator pitch with them. I was able to kind of just characterize it as, no, I placed the make money marketing leaders, not the make it pretty ones. So I primarily work with B2B SaaS companies that are in some kind of scale up mode. So…

Maybe a $50 million company wants to become 100 million, maybe 100 million wants to become 200 million, could be 20 million wants to become 50 million, whatever. There's always these like, we're here and we want to get there. And I either am placing the CMO at a smaller company or I'm helping a CMO at a company of some size build their team.

Kerry (01:57.203)

That's great. And so expand a bit more on your, the make money versus make pretty kind of philosophy.

Erica Seidel (02:04.622)

Yeah. Well, I, right. So like I said, when I started it, it was a little bit like kind of jumbled the way I talked about it. But I was always pulled towards more roles that are like marketing analytics, marketing technology, marketing data, and felt more comfortable with those roles and less about the more fuzzier side of marketing. And I also thought it was important for B2B because, you know, B2C and B2B are different. In B2C, you have marketers who are more likely to have a background as kind of like a general manager. That's not always the case in B2B.

Kerry (02:36.467)

Hmm.

Erica Seidel (02:52.718)

Historically and again in B2B SaaS, now it can be, but usually you have people coming from product marketing or demand generation or corporate marketing. And so it was helpful for me to kind of characterize that.

Kerry (02:52.915)

Mm-hmm.

Erica Seidel (03:08.75)

Now, I will say that even if somebody is on the brand experience or corporate marketing side, I have seen plenty of those people being very much about making money. It's just more of a longer term thing. And for me, this ended up just resonating a lot with investors and CEOs who often don't understand marketing too well. And so I feel like I had to kind of really get it down to the essence. And this is something I always recommend.

Kerry (03:27.475)

Hmm.

Erica Seidel (03:35.918)

Candidates make sure they're talking about just the essence and don't anticipate that there's a ton of marketing knowledge on the other side of the table.

Kerry (03:46.355)

Yeah, I know we talked a bit about that, about how the kind of the marketing as a role, as a function, and as a part of the corporate strategy and planning isn't often or always recognized as a critical aspect of the strategy of the business and the fact that it does connect to making money and not only making pretty. And to your point, like it's...

You need both, but it's the connection to the making money side of it that makes the CMO's role more impactful for the business. So when you're talking to the CMOs, do they get that, or how are they describing what they're looking for?

Erica Seidel (04:27.79)

When I'm talking to CMOs or CEOs? Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. So, okay, go ahead.

Kerry (04:29.075)

Sorry, CEOs. Let me start that over. Wait, hold on. Let me ask the question again. So when you're talking to CEOs, do they know what they're looking for in a CMO and the role of the CMO?

Erica Seidel (04:47.918)

Usually they need a little bit of help articulating it. And often what happens, as I'm sure you've seen in your career, is they're not quite sure if they need a chief marketing officer or a vice president of marketing. And again, this depends on the size of the business. And sometimes I'll work with businesses that are 30 million in revenue. And, you know, and that, that this can come up a lot because they're saying like, okay, well maybe, you know, we don't want the CMO is going to need to have somebody peel their grapes, we want to have a VP of marketing who's like the doer and that person can help us get from 30 million to 50 million.

And then maybe we settle in a CMO at that point or promote the person at that point. So I have this slide, which I can share with you, but it's basically a slide that I put together for one of my clients of, you know, do you need a VP of marketing or a CMO? And it's kind of like, you know, do you want somebody to set the growth agenda or support it? Do you want somebody to be more strategic or more operational?

Kerry (05:27.635)

Yeah. Yeah.

Erica Seidel (05:45.614)

Do you want somebody to have that multi-year view or quarter by quarter view? Do you want somebody who's going to hire the experts and be okay not knowing at all? Or do you want the person who's going to be the expert and feel like they have to know it all? Do you want somebody who's kind of board ready, you know, plunk them into a board meeting and they'll be fine. Or are you okay with somebody who's kind of developing board presence? Cause there's always trade-offs. And I mean, the thing about hiring marketing leaders, as I'm sure you know ….

Kerry (05:54.899)

Mm-hmm.

Erica Seidel (06:14.062)

… they can be very, you know, the people hiring them are like, yes, we want this. Yes, we want both. We want the strategic and the operational. We want the quarter by quarter view and the long term view. And I understand, right, because that, you know, is that marketing? Yes. Some questions I ask when I am meeting with, you know, meeting with CEOs or investors, because often investors are involved in my searches, is at the last board meeting,

What was a question that came up about marketing that you struggled to answer or that the marketing leader struggled to answer. So that can kind of pull out, you know, what, sometimes what the essence is of the need. And oftentimes, you know, they've been disappointed in their last marketing leader and you know, they're wondering like, is it the market or the marketer? That's a question that comes up.

Kerry (06:45.587)

Mm-hmm. Mm -hmm.

Erica Seidel (07:05.262)

And sometimes people say, well, we have activity, but we don't have results. Or, well, we don't have enough leads. The marketing leader is just saying they want to position, they want to do positioning and branding, but we don't have leads to feed the salespeople. But sometimes it's, we want a strategic partner. Like, what got us here won't get us there. We're at a stage of kind of like an inflection point where we need to tackle new markets and new products, and we're going from one product to multiple products or what have you.

And sometimes people say, this is the biggest company that many of us have ever worked in, and we need somebody who has seen this next phase of scale and wants to do it again. Or it could be like, we're heading towards an IPO, and we want somebody who has done that. So often it's this kind of somebody who has done this before. But really, I mean, I'm curious to hear your take having you know, been in similar, you know, conversations and rooms as me.

But, you know, I often think it's a little bit of trial and error where I often will present a few candidates and say, OK, this paints a picture, it paints the range of types of people. And you kind of see the reactions and see how people are gravitating. Usually marketing searches. There are a few more candidates than, say, I don't know. I don't know, CFO searches. But like what I understand is you could probably, you know presents three candidates and somebody will pick one. And in my CMO searches, usually the clients want to see five, six, seven, eight candidates before they pick one because there's so many different kinds of stripes of CMO or VP and marketing leader.

Kerry (08:43.347)

Yeah, well, I think that's part of the challenge, right? And it's like aligning the expertise of an individual with the expectations, the evolving expectations and changing expectations. Like when you're saying the marketer or the market, we've definitely seen in the last 18 to 24, 36 months, the market budgets have changed, but we had a kind of a great growth era from like 20 to 22.

Erica Seidel (08:52.462)

Yeah, yeah.

Kerry (09:12.531)

Despite COVID and then as 23 came out of it, 24, budgets have been tighter. What I'm hearing is marketers or the executive team is like, let's just get sales, let's just get sales and to your point, like, we don't have time for the branding and the strategy, but it's if you don't have that strategy. So it's finding the marketer that can parallel the path, you know, that this is what I'm doing for six to 12 months. This is what I'm doing for the next three months.

And from what I've seen, that's evolved. It used to be the CMOs primarily focused on corporate strategy and let's get that three to six months. Now we need someone that's gonna drive, fill our lead pipeline ongoing a lot now. So how have you seen it evolve over the past few years?

Erica Seidel (10:04.558)

Yeah, I mean, I agree, right? We were in this period of, you know, recruiting was nuts. For a few years there, you know, there were companies hiring calling me and saying, well, pay you double to do this search. And I'd be like, No, I don't want to. I don't want to be owned. You know, like, I don't know that just introduces kind of, you know, complexity to it. And, and I think in some cases, people hired great people, but maybe it wasn't their first, second, or third choice. And now they're seeking to kind of opportunistically upgrade the people that they had hired before. So I see in some ways, in some situations, there's an upgrade and this can be good, especially because it's like, well, a decent marketer can do okay if it's a...

Kerry (10:47.315)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Erica Seidel (10:55.95)

.. a tide lifting all boats. If the market is great, a decent marketer can do that. But if the market is maybe a little bit, if the waters are a little bit more choppy, maybe you need a more seasoned sailor, I don't know, to kind of navigate those waters. So sometimes it's an upgrading of the role. Sometimes, as you say, it is a kind of downscoping of the role. And it can even be downgraded. You know, some companies are saying, we used to have a CMO and this makes me sad, but you know, but you know, we're going to, our next marketing leader is going to be a VP of marketing. Maybe we put product marketing under product management. Maybe we put corporate marketing into its own kind of comms, you know, area.

That I mean, time will tell how this works and whether it works more for smaller companies versus bigger companies, because you don't have as much of that connective tissue across, you know, across marketing. And, and also, you know, if you're going to bump down the role of the CMO to a VP of marketing, I wouldn't worry so much about the titles, right? Because you got to have a VP of marketing was a really robust mandate and a CMO who's at a, you know, two person company.

Kerry (11:58.291)

Yeah.

Erica Seidel (12:16.302)

But if you're taking that marketing leader and bumping them off the executive team, as happens in some cases with a chief growth officer or chief revenue officer nestled in between, then the marketer's impact can be limited because a good marketer is kind of like a shuttle diplomat, right? They're connecting across all the different functions of the company and they're adding value. But if they're not in those conversations where...

Kerry (12:37.907)
Mm -hmm.

Erica Seidel (12:43.054)

… where they can kind of tap into the other areas of the business, then it's almost like their impact is downgraded even more. So that is a concern. I think there's also this, like you say, more of a focus on short -term. And most of the good marketing leaders I know are saying, well, I know short-term and long-term are both important. So let me, maybe I'll talk more about the short -term stuff, but I'm still doing the long-term stuff, right? I'm not getting any break from doing that. In terms of other things I'm seeing, maybe more of a focus on retention marketing, customer marketing, community building, there are a lot of spikes on that. Obviously, the AI, interest in AI, and as part of that, this kind of radical efficiency is...

Kerry (13:14.099)

Right. Right.

Erica Seidel (13:40.526)

… is kind of needed. You know, like a lot of companies are saying, it used to be growth at all costs and now it's growth at less cost. And, yeah. But you still need to hit that number. Exactly. Exactly. But I'm wondering what you think about like this, you know, kind of, you know, brain dump that I just gave you.

Kerry (13:48.019)

But you still need to hit that number. Yeah.

Yeah, thanks. No, like you're in it, right? You're talking to the decision makers and the executives that are choosing who's going to lead their marketing and their business strategy. And so, yeah, I mean, you're, I remember, when we talked before and you mentioned again, like marketing needs a seat at that strategic planning table and marketing needs to, it's not just to your point, it's not just the brand, but the brand and it's but it's not just driving sales.

It's that connected tissue between all the aspects. And you brought up community building, retention. That's where I see the critical aspect of marketing needs to be part of that strategic vision and plan for the company so that it is woven into all aspects. So that your client services or your client success or your delivery team is living and breathing the same messaging that your marketing is saying and that your sales is saying.

And I think that's where we need it, it's like educating the executives to understand that you're not just bringing someone in just to fill your lead pipeline for the next six months, that this is going, your growth will depend on that connective tissue. I love that concept. And it's, yeah, so it's been really interesting, but I think it makes your job even more challenging, because finding that leader that has the marketing that understands all the different components, the tech and tools that you could be using and being able to evangelize that across the organization. So it's definitely a challenging time for hiring and finding the right CMO, but also educating the leadership on everything that can be included.

Erica Seidel (15:48.302)

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting you said that, yeah, there's this focus on like educating and yes, the connective tissue, but also educating. And I think there's a lot of CMOs who are like, I should have a seat at the table. And it's like, well, if you're, if you're complaining that you don't have it, and then why is somebody in a new company going to give that to you? And so I think one has to be, earning that spot.

Yes, but not pounding their fist for it. And I just wrote something yesterday and it was about, I brought up this notion of a CMO is also a chief marketing education officer. So we've talked about there's chief marketing officer and obviously there's this whole chief market officer concept, which I think is great.

Kerry (16:38.131)

Yeah. Interesting.

Erica Seidel (16:40.27)

As part of that, when you're hiring this person, they are also going to be a chief marketing education officer, meaning they often have to educate the company about what marketing is, what marketing can do for the company, and to do that in a way that is not too strident.

And, but it makes it feel as if, you know, the company is, has already been going in this direction and they're, they're helping them like kind of shepherding them along. Like I, I often think about it as this kind of paradox between this, like that you have to be a changemaker and a peacemaker at the same time as a marketing leader. And, and, and part of that is kind of bringing people along with you and making, making it seem as if they're not making as much of a change as maybe they are.

Kerry (17:15.923)

Yeah. Yeah.

Erica Seidel (17:28.75)

Those are the best marketing leaders, in my view. It's not about technology so much. As long as I can hire somebody who can manage that, and as long as the data is not a total mess. But it's becoming that kind of educator in chief for people who probably, like CEOs or investors, who very few of them, maybe one in 100, will admit they don't really understand marketing. I did have one who, God bless him.

Kerry (17:51.795)

Yeah.

Erica Seidel (17:54.35)

And, you know, but they think they understand it and they, and of course, since marketing is often the growth strategy for companies, like often companies are bought or, you know, invested in with the idea that, marketing and sales are going to fuel the growth and that's great. So who's going to admit that they don't really understand the aspects of marketing. And that's why the ability to, for other marketers to educate in a unique way is I think really critically important.

Kerry (18:24.691)

Yeah, and it's interesting too, because for the concept of the people that say, I don't understand marketing, for me, I'm like, wait, it's not that hard. But then as we start peeling back the layers, it is complicated and there is a lot to it. And again, it's not just something fluffy and it's getting more complex and more critical. And so from your perspective, what would be your… do you have an overarching recommendation for the brands that need to see growth, what they should be looking for in their CMO?

Erica Seidel (19:01.358)

I mean, it depends, you know, for each company, it's different, right? And, you know, you have to look at what they have, you know, what stage they're at and what they have in place now and what's the marketing team like. And, you know, I often just build with them a kind of structure like, OK, you're whatever, 50 million now you want to get to 200 million. You are, you know, one product you want to get to four products. You have one go to market motion. You want to add in a channel motion. I don't know. I'm making this up. And, and then it's like, that's often kind of like an overall business kind of from two, but then we can present that to marketers and say, Hey, this is, this is the mandate. And that kind of helps us structure the search.

And so, you know, there's always some combination of product marketing, you know, slash messaging, positioning and, and demand marketing operations. Although marketing operations, it can make everything go so much more smoothly and efficiently if it's, if that's done right. But often the CEO is struggling to understand the other aspects of marketing, you know, corporate marketing brand, brand demand and product marketing that the marketing operations get kind of nestled under business operations or demand, which, okay, but sometimes that's its own pillar in and of itself.

Kerry (20:31.219)

Yeah, yeah. No, as you just pointed out, it's very complex, and it's not one size fits all. And I think it just, again, points to the fact that the strong CMO needs to be able to pivot and apply different levers, and that it's not just one lever. I think that's kind of the key component. And it takes time.

I mean, they have to speak to investors. They have to speak to finance. They have to speak about the product. They have to speak to sales, you know, especially. One key thing is like, what is that person's relationship with the sales leader? What a backdoor reference is saying about that. And also, in many cases, a CEO is looking for that strategic partner to kind of chart the course of the business.

Erica Seidel (21:24.75)

One thing I often will say to candidates is ask a CEO, who do you turn to? When you're looking for that kind of friend or who's your go -to person, see who they gravitate to to help them think of new ideas or such. Because that's telling about what orientation their CEO has.

Kerry (21:50.899)

Yeah, no, that's great. And that's a really strong recommendation. And thank you. So you've provided us a lot of food for thought when it comes to kind of the right match for strengths and capabilities and skill sets, but also what the hiring committee and the CEO need to be thinking about as well. Because obviously the goal is to set everyone up for success. But yeah, this is great. Thank you, Erica, so much.

Erica Seidel (22:18.606)
Sure, no problem.

Kerry (22:20.659)

All right, great. Well, hopefully we can have you join again. You were talking about as you're talking about sales and marketing, I was like, that's a whole other podcast. So we'll get you back for that one. But thank you. We really appreciate your time. So thanks so much.

Erica Seidel (22:29.102)

That is a whole other podcast. Yeah, no worries. A pleasure to chat with you, Kerry.