Modern B2B Blogs

Seeking a World-Class CMO for Marketo

By Jon Miller on August 30, 2010

Note: This post is more personal and Marketo-centric than the typical best practices and thought leadership I share in the Modern B2B Marketing blog.

It’s been a bit over three and a half years since Marketo started formal operations, and two and a half since we launched Marketo Lead Management. In that short time, we’ve transformed the marketing automation industry with our vision of powerful, revenue-focused software that’s also fast to implement and easy to use, and helped more than 650 companies accelerate their revenue growth. This has made us not only the fastest growing marketing automation vendor, but also one of the fastest growing SaaS companies of all time.

As co-founder and VP Marketing, I am extraordinarily proud of my role helping to drive that growth:

• Our revenue engine is one of the best I’ve ever seen, delivering $1.50 in first year bookings for every dollar we spend on sales and marketing (most SaaS companies settle for $0.75 or less). Our demand generation programs are a key factor driving that efficiency, directly responsible for 90% of our entire pipeline.
• We’ve been pioneers in the use of B2B social media and content marketing to generate awareness, organic traffic, and lead generation. As a result, almost half of Marketo’s customers can be directly attributed to our efforts with this blog, search engine optimization, and content.
• Our thought leadership has enabled us to create the industry’s most innovative products and positioned Marketo as the company to follow in our category.

Expanded Leadership to Accelerate Revenue Growth

All this growth comes with new responsibilities — and challenges. As Marketo has expanded past 100 employees, I find my time being stretched in multiple directions, making it hard to focus as much as I’d like on demand creation, innovation, and thought leadership.

Because of this, we have decided to expand the marketing leadership here at Marketo by hiring a Chief Marketing Officer. By hiring a world-class marketing mind, leader and brand builder, we will be able to refine our message, enhance our brand, expand the management bandwidth and talent on the team, and double down on our already successful marketing. Personally, I look forward to learning new skills and best practices from the new CMO, which in turn will make me a better manager and marketing leader.

The New Demand Center

Once we find the right CMO for this exciting but challenging job, I’ll be able to focus my efforts on leading Marketo’s “Demand Center” and on incorporating the best practices we develop into our products and our thought leadership.

The Demand Center is a new organizational design, originally promoted by SiriusDecisions. The increasing investment in demand generation – driven by the recognition that marketing can often scale revenue more efficiently than additional sales reps – is moving demand generation out of its semi-traditional home inside corporate marketing. At the same time, the expanding power of marketing technology and analytics, the rising importance of inbound marketing and content to drive leads, and the blurring of functional boundaries as marketing and sales work together as part of a single revenue cycle are all driving the need for the Demand Center.

Some of the key components of the modern Demand Center include:

• Content. Creating content to fuel inbound and outbound lead generation
• Lead Management. Optimizing lead nurturing and lead scoring to deliver high-quality sales leads
• Telemarketing. Coordinating lead qualification and sales development
• Infrastructure. Managing marketing infrastructure, including data and marketing automation
• Analytics. Using marketing analytics to measure and prove marketing’s impact on revenue

At large, global companies, the Demand Center also services as a “center of excellence” to coordinate leveraged programs and develop skills across the enterprise.

One of the most exciting parts of this role for me personally is the opportunity to use Marketo’s Demand Center as a laboratory to discover new marketing methods and test new ideas – and then to share our best practices with other B2B marketing and sales executives, and help incorporate them into Marketo’s products. I’ve found it increasingly hard to do this as Marketo has grown so explosively, and I truly look forward to spending more time on these functions.

Conclusion

Change can be scary sometimes, but it’s also exciting when it can help take the company (and my own skills) to the next level. Now, we just need to find and attract the right person – so if you’re interested or know someone who might be, please contact Peter Steinle, Managing Director at Kindred Partners: ps [at] kindredpartners.com.