Practical advice for scaling start-up marketing

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: There are a few thousand people you

Speaker A: could follow on LinkedIn if you want

Speaker B: to learn about startup marketing, but as with any social media platform, it's always a case of reader beware. In this episode of Conversations with Martech, we welcome Abby Strong, Chief Market and Customer Officer at AH Kribble, to hear her experience scaling marketing at a startup. Welcome to Conversations with Martech.

Speaker C: Hi everybody, I'm Abby Strong. I'm, um, the chief Market Officer and chief Customer Officer at Cribble, where I have been for nearly six years helping to build the marketing practice as well as our post sales, uh, team, uh, here at Cripple, and, uh, super excited to join the Martech podcast today and talk about what it takes to scale startup marketing.

Speaker A: All right, thanks for being here, Abby. If you spend a lot of time in the marketing circles on LinkedIn, it's really easy to get sort of overwhelmed by advice for startup marketers. We got to remember that LinkedIn's a social network, therefore it's the highlight reel. It's not right. Um, but at a high level, like, what is the advice that people can come across in these areas? What does it get wrong or what does it overlook about startups? Because everything gets condensed into like, you just have to do this and this and it's a lot more complicated.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, and don't forget the part where it's all getting replaced by AI, uh, right now. But I think, uh, one of the most important, uh, things to keep in mind as far as startup, uh, marketing advice is that a lot of times it's all about how to do more, how do you add more channels, more content, more tools. And I think what it really overlooks is that none of that fixes a lack of clarity. If you can't describe the problem in one sentence, more marketing just amplifies confusion, uh, rather than actually helping you build, uh, the practice that you want.

Speaker A: All right. And a lot of startups, the founder is very much involved, very hands on. And when you talk about tech, a lot of those folks have technology and engineering backgrounds. And so what did they get wrong about early stage startup marketing?

Speaker C: Sure. Well, I think, you know, particularly with founders, you really have to manage the part where, you know they're building something. This is their passion project. You have to think if they've taken the time to found a company and really put their heart and soul into building something, it's a lot like, you know, like talking to them about a child or something that they're really, uh, really super passionate about. And so what happens With a lot of founders is they get really tied up in the details. Like they want you to understand the completeness of their vision and all of the different components that make uh, the company that they've founded different and special. And the challenge with that is that there's so much noise in the market already that buyers aren't really asking for a complete, a, uh, complete description of everything that a company can possibly do. They want to know how you solve a problem that they actually have.

Speaker A: Right. And so how do you have any advice on how to talk to those founders? Like you said, this is their baby and they, whether they admit it or not, marketing is probably not their strong point. Um, as a founder, as an engineer, I feel like as a son of an engineer I can kind of talk about this. Ah, they want to tell you what they built and how they built it, as you were just saying. And for a lot of people who are their icp, their core audience, they are like, I don't really care how you built it, I want to care what it does for me. Um, what's your advice on that? How do you get across that divide? How do you talk to this person who's so passionate about this, about that's great, but that's not the message that's going to work.

Speaker C: And I think that is the crux of finding the right team and finding the right combination of founders and marketers. And it sounds really trite when I say it here, like it's easy, but it is not. This is why uh, this is such a, like, certainly from a CMO perspective it has one of the shortest tenures in the C suite. And I think this is one of the challenges is how do you gain that trust? And part of that is uh, is that conversation about product. Like you have to show that you deeply understand what they are solving and how they are solving it and then help translate that into a message that resonates to the market and those value based outcomes and what, what the uh, end users actually do care about. But it, it cannot start with um, you know, oh, I think we should just have this high level message. You have to earn that trust, uh, with the founder or co founders, um, and really show them that you do deeply understand but you have rotated it to be for a specific set of Personas or uh, or, or to the audience that you're talking to.

Speaker A: So what are, would you would say the most common mistakes that you see startup marketers make?

Speaker C: I mean the first one is usually scaling too early, especially now I mentioned it Briefly at the beginning, but in this age of AI, how much can you do? How much can you solve, uh, by, by just figuring things out? It starts with clarity, like the number one, uh, the number one goal is to speak the language of the customer, build trust, and then figure out what you can scale, uh, as quickly as possible, measured as quickly as possible. These are all tools that are available to us today, um, even more so than there were six years ago when we started building Cribble. But it comes down to that clarity. Um, I was joking with my team even earlier this week. Is that what AI allows you to do if you don't have clarity and what you're solving is just confuse more people faster? Um, it really comes back to can you describe the challenge that you're solving with your company in one sentence or less? And if you can't do that, if you can't talk to a customer and then start to hear them repeat back to you, then none of the other things that you may be trying to do are going to matter, uh, right away because you're really just scaling confusion rather than actually scaling, uh, the, the, the challenge and, and, and helping the market understand what you're helping them solve.

Speaker A: So the old elevator pitch never goes out of style.

Speaker C: It never goes out of style. And it is the hardest thing and it should evolve with you as the company evolves too. There isn't just one sentence that's going to describe what you do forever. But I do believe that finding that nugget, uh, that actually says this is what we do and here's how we solve it, uh, will help you move faster across the board.

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Speaker A: Yeah. What are the signs to look for? You mentioned scaling too early. Big problem. I would imagine you may want to at the outset, say after 6 months we should scale this and after 12 months scale that. But that's sort of arbitrary. So what are like those signs? What are the green lights along the way to say, okay, it's time to scale up this or that as part of the strategy?

Speaker C: I think the number one thing is what? And I can't say it enough is that spend time with the actual customers and prospects. And what you want to hear is the message that you are trying to get out there repeated back to you or the questions that come back to you like uh, the most powerful thing is hearing a customer say like uh, I want to solve a problem in this way. And you're sitting there going, that's what we do. Um, and so how do you, how do you scale? That is, is actually spending time with the customers and, and helping, helping even solidify the message that you've created and hearing it coming, repeating that problem back to you. And so I think the patterns become really obvious. Uh, and if you don't hear that, I think one of the biggest uh, challenges besides scaling too early is believing your own marketing. Um, I think that's something else that you run into in startup land too because you do have this passionate founder that's like this is the world and it's so different and this is how I'm going to go out and solve all those challenges. And you're like, okay, I'm going to market that. And then everybody uh, that's inside the company believes it based on, you know, just the uh, passion that everybody says it with. But if you don't hear your customers repeating it back to you and then you may just join a lot of the other ranks of folks who are out there scaling, uh, confusion rather than clarity.

Speaker A: All right, you touched a little bit earlier about building out the team, the marketing team at a startup. And I think if you hung around LinkedIn long enough there's lots of uh, discussions. Who's your first hire? What's the first position? What's the most important position to fill. Let's talk a little bit about where do you start and when do you start?

Speaker C: When you. So obviously I'm going to have a little bit of a bias being a product marketer by trade. M But I do think especially in a technical, like a, ah, technical startup, um, and base, if you are selling to a technical Persona, you really do need a product capable ah, person. You need a deeply technical human that can understand this is what we're building, here's who we're building it for, here's the problems that we're solving with this product so that you can scale the rest of it. I fundamentally believe AI is changing how we work and so it is going to become a lot more of a skills um, like I, you know, I have the ability to operate AI to help me scale and um, and build these different GTM systems that are going to um, that are going to help automate all of the things that I want to do. But I also believe that they can only scale what the message is. That, that one sentence message, uh, that actually says here's what we build, here's who we build it for and here's why we built it.

Speaker A: All right, so you're a product marketer.

Speaker C: It's going to be your start with product marketing. Yes, technical marketer in general. Like as long as that person can create that base content and deeply understand who they're building it for and why

Speaker A: and probably connect with that founder who's an engineer and knows the story. All right, so uh, after your product marketer, where are you going to go next?

Speaker C: Next you need um, a martech person. So this is not something that you can fake. Like no matter how many uh, how many tooling and uh, uh, different agentic systems are out there, fundamentally you do still need one to make sure that you have your customer PII safely contained, that you are figuring out who you're allowed to contact when you're allowed to contact them, what you're going to scale out to this audience as you're trying to deliver your message. And so uh, this is a highly technical role also in a different capacity, less so about understanding the message and more so about what does the modern tool stack look like and um, how do I build that automation so that I can take the content that the product marketer and the found are working on and scale that out to the market as a whole.

Speaker A: All right, so you are the chief market officer, but you are also the chief customer officer at Cribble. So as far as building out the sales and the customer success folks, what is your advice there and how does that sort of, does it sort of move in parallel with the growth of the marketing team?

Speaker C: It uh, yes, it moves in parallel with the growth of the customer base, I would say. So I am, I am deeply passionate about not selling shelfware. I think it's the most dangerous thing in enterprise software is you can get folks to believe the problem enough to buy it, but not enough to adopt it. Uh, and so then it's just a churn risk and so your business isn't going to grow. And so I really think that there's a lot of uh, cohesion between what we do with marketing and trying to gain attention, get folks to understand the problem, enter into a sales process and then once we have that uh, PO from them, now we have to make sure one do they see the value that we promised them, uh, are they on that adoption curve that we need in order to hopefully, uh, get not only a renewal but also an upsell, uh, so that we can grow MDR and all of the other SaaS metrics that our investors love to see. Um, and then building those champions. A lot of that is what we do on the marketing side too. So to me, I see a lot of synergy between the two teams. But I also think that this is, that is the flywheel that we're all trying to build and the piece in the middle, the actual sales, uh, uh, activities. I work with a partner, uh, who run our CRO who does that. And thank goodness, because I'm really good at spending money, not asking for it, um, but, uh, ah, that's really how we work it out at Kribble.

Speaker A: You mentioned SaaS metrics. There, uh, are also, I think if you look at LinkedIn, there are SaaS and startup people. What, what is the makeup of a person who succeeds in the startup culture?

Speaker C: I don't think there's one definition of anybody that, um, that can make it at any stage of a company. I think the most important thing is that, you know the stage of company that you are, are in and that you are willing to adapt to that stage. Like, if you get a bunch of people that keep going, oh, I liked it when it was smaller or I liked it when it used to be this way. Those people have to go as quickly as possible. That's not how you scale. Because if you're constantly looking backwards, then you're not growing and changing. Um, obviously I could say all the things that you probably read online. You need a growth mindset. You need to be all about fafo. That's something that's important to us here at Kribble is like, go try it, figure it out. If it's not working, then pivot quickly and change. But I do believe people can adapt to any stage of a company. But you have to buy into the stage that you're at and each new time, um, go and say, okay, I'm excited about this stage of the company. I'm not going to keep asking for it or like wishing that it was what it used to be or what it could be someday.

Speaker A: All right, Abby Strong, Chief Market Officer and Chief Customer Officer at Cribble. Thanks for joining us on Conversations with Martech.

Speaker C: Thank you so much.