Building Your Flywheel of Credibility: A Playbook for New CMOs in PE-Backed Companies

>> Erica Seidel: Hello and welcome to the get. I'm your host, Erica Seidel. This season we focus on the race to reduce risk when it comes to a match between a company and a cmo. How can you find out what you need to find out before saying yes so that you make a match that sticks?

So far this season, we've heard from several CMOs about how they reduce risk before saying yes to a role. What's most critical for them to find out? We've talked about the fears that companies have, uh, as they embark on a CMO search. And we've seen a model for how companies and CMO candidates can collaboratively de risk before joining forces.

We've heard from current CMOs as well as former CMOs who have gone on to roles like CEO or Chief Commercial officer or chief Revenue officer. Today we'll hear from a former CMO who has been immersed in hiring, uh, CMOs and enabling them for more than eight years as an operating partner at a top investment shop. I'm happy to have Gary Service join me on the show. Gary is an operating partner with Insight Partners.

He works across many different portfolio companies, helping them with hiring marketing leaders and with getting their go to market engines humming and bringing in AI to drive impact not just within marketing, but across the business. He's in a great spot to recognize patterns across marketing leaders and across SaaS companies. He's also former CMO at Syncsort. I first saw Gary speak at a pavilion event and thought, ooh, I would love to have him as a guest on the get.

Gary, welcome. >> Gary Service: Thank you. Thank you. Excited to be here.

>> Erica Seidel: I'd like to talk with you about before marketing leaders are hired and then once they are in the seat, you know, first I will say that listeners on this show, they either want to have a job like yours, so many people want to be an operating partner in marketing, or they want to get hired for a job where you're involved in the recruiting process and then you would be a coach for them. So I think your perspectives are going to be great. You are there to de risk a hire, and that's the whole theme of this season, is de risking the CMO recruiting process.

So in your view, how do recruiting processes for marketing leaders go wrong in your experience? >> Gary Service: Well, I think the issue for many of our portfolio company leaders, I'm going to call that the founder, CEO leader, is they will go into every search with a very clear idea of what they believe the organization's deficiency is. Now, sometimes that deficiency in marketing is based on a bias of who was ever in that role previously. I often say you can't hire your new person with just a focus on what the other person didn't do.

Well, my example is you had someone, they were always late to meetings and that really bothered you. They're always late for meetings. So gosh, we're going to make sure we hire someone who absolutely will not be late. And guess what?

They are not late. But you know what? They don't know how to spell you so focused on that one thing that they didn't do that you over rotate in what the job requirement is. That's where we can come in and have a business level discussion based on experience, based on what we're seeing, based on where that company is in their growth arc and help right size, what the requirements are, the competencies are to help them put that in a good rank order that not just reflects whatever the CEO founder sees, but also what we believe the business needs.

>> Erica Seidel: Got it? Yeah. So this overcorrecting, do you find that the overcorrecting is often for something interpersonal or something like. That example you brought up was a little bit more interpersonal.

Has nothing to do with what's on somebody's resume. >> Gary Service: It's a solid. It depends on that. Sometimes a leader is just annoyed about an interpersonal thing and it overtakes them.

But most have a good EQ and understand that they're looking for outcomes. And most likely the issue is the organization is not delivering on particular outcomes that they feel a change in marketing could drive. >> Erica Seidel: Yeah, let me ask you this too. Sometimes I found with my recruiting of CMOs that you have a company where they're.

To your point, their previous marketing leader was not performing, so the bar for them is almost laughably low. Oh, we need events to be working better or we just need leads, leads, lead. When actually marketing could be providing a lot more value to them. How do you navigate that?

Like uh, do you try to broaden their view of what marketing can do? And I'm wondering like what you say to get them to do that. >> Gary Service: Yeah, I think that's one of our highest value adds as we engage with these organizations. I am lucky to work in an organization with over 500 portfolio companies.

My data points, signal recognition and really just understanding of the different combinations and permutations of organizations is my value add. And I am, um, empowered to push back where others may not against what a CEO wants. If I've seen this story before. So my job is to use examples, you know, anonymized of organizations that may have been similar and what they chose to do, the kind of leader they may have chosen for the marketing function.

Also, I think there's a general acceptance that marketing definitely morphs as organizations grow and what the need was when an organization was say, sub $10 million is going to be different from the journey from 10 to 20 and 20 to 50, et cetera. Again, bringing the perspective of have you thought about what you might need at this particular point in the journey is another way to have the conversation. I'll tell you what I don't do. What I don't do is say this kind of person.

Our job is to have a conversation. Our job is to give information. And by the way, if the CEO founder says, hey, I hear what you're saying, but I really want this, I have to respect that. I don't work at the company, I advise, I give data points.

I want you to make your decisions with full information. And so there is where my role lies. >> Erica Seidel: Do you find that founder led companies take a longer or a shorter time to hire a CMO than non founder led companies? >> Gary Service: It depends.

I think that the more experienced the founder is and you didn't say first time founder versus multiple company. I think there's a huge difference between the first time founder knowing what they want versus someone who's gone through this before and seen what was successful for them. I think that's the bigger determinant. Less so about founder led versus professional CEO.

I also think there's plenty of professional CEOs that bring in baggage from um, previous interactions that may not be relevant for the company they're at. Um, the easiest example of that is you work for a Fortune 500 company at a certain scale as a CEO now you're working at a mid sized company with different resources, different challenges and you may not fully transferred your knowledge and therefore you're looking for someone in the role which ultimately won't be successful because they won't have the resources or they won't have the, the kind of ecosystem that you were coming from.

>> Erica Seidel: Yeah, this is so interesting, the whole, you know, scale thing, but yet I've also found that not every company's scale journey from say 50 million to a hundred million is the same, right? >> Gary Service: Absolutely not. >> Erica Seidel: It's all of this. It depends.

So any other thoughts on what risks that leadership, uh, teams face when they recruit CMOs? Are there other risks that come to mind that need to be addressed? >> Gary Service: Yeah, I think there's always the risk of misinterpreting what the organization should be Focusing on. Let me give you an example.

There's always, as you know, this great philosophical discussion of do I need a uh, leader that came from product marketing or did I need a leader who came from demand gen? And why would you choose that person? Part of that is what I like to simplify there. And I tell every CMO I hire, I'm not saying this is a threat, I'm saying this as a reality.

Deliver on your demand gen goals or lose your job. Also we can have a discussion about the beauty and majesty of all the things that marketing needs to do to deliver. But in reality that sausage making that the CEO and the board probably won't pay attention to, all they will pay attention to is what you deliver. I know the equation is brand plus demand equals growth.

You need to build your brand, you need to build a efficient, repeatable demand gen engine and that drives growth. The issue for many organizations is over rotating one way or the other. We need a demand genetic CMO and I'll say maybe, but I prefer a CMO who is more of a player coach. In demand gen.

They shouldn't be the ones doing demand gen. They should be able to know what questions to ask, to see around corners, to have experience to get their demand gen team do what they should do. Equally important though they need to have good sense of uh, what the M message and positioning us to be from a strategic level. So you need a strategic brain and a tactical brain and I don't like to compromise on that.

>> Erica Seidel: Yeah, it's interesting because so many companies say oh, what we really need is leads, leads, leads or ideally they'll say qualified demand or revenue. Ideally. But then sometimes there's a conversation of well do you just need a director of demand gen? >> Gary Service: Yep.

>> Erica Seidel: Um, just is too strong of a word but you know what I mean versus that strategery that you get with somebody who can be that player coach. I think that's really important. Can you talk about a really strong B2B SaaS marketing leadership candidate that interviewed with you and a particular example of that person. You don't have to say their name but what did that person do to stand out?

>> Gary Service: Yeah, so because similar to you, you do a lot of interviews and you have a group of areas uh, of inquiry that deliver bits of knowledge along the way. What I found in the candidates that have stood out to me, there are three things that resonate. The first is I always want someone to speak in terms of strategy and example. I identified this opportunity to build out product marketing because we weren't onboarding our customers well, that they needed more information about our product.

It's technical, awesome. But then translate that into numbers and examples after that. After we did that and partnered with our CS team, we saw uh, a 20% increase on retention around that. I want to see the connection between what you did and the impact.

Otherwise it seems like you could be making it up for all I know. I want to understand how it really works. That's credibility. The second thing is, uh, how they function in the larger org.

They will be part of a leadership team. As I'm sure you know. It's sometimes the things you don't say as much as the things you do say. In this particular case, the people that stand out are the ones that are talking about their collaboration with their sales partner or their product partner in a way that isn't sort of bolted on but is authentic to how they collaborate.

If I said to you I'm super collaborative, well, that doesn't mean anything to me unless you've been giving me examples all throughout about how you are collaborating and how you are working with the different folks. And so first was credibility. Second is collaboration. The third piece is a bit harder.

How curious you are, how likely are to explore you and I could have an existential discussion about whether or not I need to hire a cybersecurity marker for a cybersecurity marketing job. My thinking is I care about you as a marketer, less so about your subject matter expertise as a cybersecurity marketer. Because if you've proven to me, and this is to my third point, curiosity. If you've proven to me that you're curious, you're capable of learning businesses and your track record shows this.

I've done this in this industry, this industry and this industry. You're more valuable to me than someone who just does cybersecurity marketing. The organization has plenty of knowledge in product teams, the CEO, all these folks that can give you the knowledge of this business, what to say to CISOs, what not to say to CISOs. Listen to customers.

If you're that person, that is a differentiator to me. >> Erica Seidel: That's great. So you have your three C's. And it's funny, the one about collaboration and listening to see if somebody has been talking along the way about a collaboration with sales or product.

Maybe you found this too. I find that listening to the parentheses helps a lot. In an interview, what somebody says parenthetically really matters a lot. I once interviewed this guy and he had talked about doing a lot of ghost Writing for the CEO.

And I thought, God, how does that influence your ego to put somebody else's name on it? And so I asked him and he was like, no, it's fine. If I was in a band, I'd be the bassist in the back, just thumping out the beat. And that was the whole pillar of him getting the job.

Because in that moment that I, uh, needed somebody who was going to be like that because the CEO was a strong personality in the world and that was it. And it's just so funny that it's like this parenthetical thing or to your point, something that's not there. >> Gary Service: Parenthetically, I agree. And again, I think there are many people that are just incredible interviewers.

They're really strong interviewers. And you need to be able to have other tools to break through a solid interviewer to understand the substance, the reality of how they work. I can't say just because someone doesn't mention collaboration in their responses that they're not collaborative, but they're more likely not to be collaborative if they don't. >> Erica Seidel: By contrast, is there somebody that flamed out recently quite spectacularly that sticks in your head?

>> Gary Service: I'm sure you've heard the analogy. Hiring someone's like dating. You know, the first date may be great, second date may be good, but then on the third date you understand something about them that's, ah, unexpected. And you're like, nah, I'm not really sure.

I think we're constantly testing our hypotheses and this is where back channel comes in. The flame out isn't as much what they did. It's us leveraging our back channel. And our back channel is not who the candidate gives to us.

Obviously our back channel is who we know, who knows them. You can't do anything about that. That's just part of the process. >> Erica Seidel: Fair.

And how about your favorite interview question? Do you have one that you ask of people? >> Gary Service: My favorite interview question is actually around the curiosity thing. I like to ask people, tell me about something either in your personal or professional life that you've recently taught yourself.

If the answer is nothing, or they haven't really invested in teaching themselves anything, then, uh, it really brings me to an idea of how curious you really are if you're not teaching yourselves new skills all the time. >> Erica Seidel: Okay, I like that with that. I know that you have this focus on AI within marketing and across a business for efficiency and other purposes. What are you looking for, if anything, with respect to AI in a CMO candidate at this phase of the AI Surge.

>> Gary Service: So first of all, one thing I'm not looking for is someone who's done it before because no one's done it before. It's hard to have experts in this space because it's a very muscle. They should have a perspective. I insist on having a perspective.

That perspective could be, I'm going to go slow for these reasons. I'm going to focus in these areas because I know that's where likely the impact is. But sometimes I speak to people and they're like, yeah, I haven't really got around to experimenting much with AI thing. I know it's going to be important.

They're not probably the best candidate. >> Erica Seidel: Okay, I like that. So having like a strategic perspective on it, but being curious, it goes back to your three C's a little bit too, right? Curious and collaborative.

Incredible. >> Gary Service: I think today the best way to view AI in marketing is be ready for iteration. Lots of going through and inventing and reinventing because the technology is leaping in discontinuous jumps. So with each new capability comes new implications for marketing.

You can also be in a position that says, hey, I got this ChatGPT thing, I'm set. I think the other part, and I forgot to mention this as well, it's critical for me to see that someone recognizes that AI is as much a technical thing as a change management thing. And if they're not signing up for the change management to help their teams through this, then that is either you don't really understand the implications or you're not a mature enough manager to really drive, drive the kind of impact that you should be by leveraging these tools.

>> Erica Seidel: Think about, okay, so now you've hired a cmo, they're in their new role. What are the early things that you think a new CMO should do within your portfolio to get off on the right foot, to limit risk right out of the gate? >> Gary Service: There are several places they can focus that are important. The first one is being honest about the time they need to form their hypothesis or beliefs.

We default to 30, 60, 90 day plans, which is fine, but that is not a recipe for success. I'd rather you tell me. I need 60 days to talk to enough customers, do enough internal work, travel around the world to understand the differences so that you are making an informed decision. I think this is the only time in a new CMO's tenure that they will be afforded the luxury of time.

So if you say you need 60 days, take the 60 days. That's number one. Number two, the org, I expect that the marketing leader that comes into place is good at evaluating people, understands how to structure an org and whether they have the right people in the right roles. The right people in the wrong roles are just the wrong people.

And I expect a, uh, plan to move quickly to do that because a slow drip of this is bad. Pull the band aid off, make the changes. Know what you need to do. I, uh, say this to every cmo, that in the end, if you're not successful because the people below you are not strong, you have no one to blame but yourself for not making the changes you know you need to make.

Take your time, but make decisions pretty quickly about what you need to do. I will add a little AI bonus point on this. I'm encouraging CMOs today to think about whether they want to create a BG or an AG organization before generative or after generative organization. If you choose to do the BG organization, recognize that the responsibilities are going to change, the roles are going to change.

Or are you going to try to start moving your organization to the way technology is going to change the structure? For that reason, I encourage them to do a little more forward thinking about what people's roles are really going to be, where you're going to need. Do you need five creative people? Do you need as many writers?

Do you need more editors? What do you need? Based on how this technology is moving, you should have a point of view. The last thing I want to talk about is goals.

It is critical for marketers to be successful that they put a stake in the sand of what they're going to accomplish. They show progress against it and then, God willing, actually deliver on it. That is what creates trust and confidence in the organization about your leadership. If you don't feel comfortable enough giving the goals and the numbers and the specifics and showing progress regularly against that, the board, and in some cases co, but more likely the board, in the absence of information, assumes nothing is happening.

So I'm, uh, making this up. If you have an issue with the pipeline, show me how you're making progress on that. Show me that you put a plan in place. This is where I expected to be by Q4.

Here's where we are in Q3 and I believe we're going to hit it. Or be honest and say, I'm not going to hit it. And here's why. If you delude people into thinking you got it and then surprise them, um, that is the surest way to lose trust and confidence.

>> Erica Seidel: I like that. We'll call that diagnose. Don't Delude. Because you're looking for somebody to diagnose the issues and come up with the perspective of how to fix them.

That's great. >> Gary Service: Part about it is commit. That's the piece that I would add to it is diagnose, don't delude, commit. It's that commit that gives people confidence that you're willing to put your name behind it, put your org behind it.

>> Erica Seidel: And then it creates this kind of flywheel of credibility as you do that. >> Gary Service: Yeah, that, uh, would be the goal. >> Erica Seidel: You offer coaching to various CMOs across all the different companies. Is there a piece of coaching that's hardest for people to put into action?

Where you said to yourself, I wish I could get this coaching into their brains and their actions more easily. >> Gary Service: I'll start off by saying in that regard that among people who want to be operating partners, the hardest transition if you're an operator, is the fact that you aren't working in the business, that you can't just go in there and do it. Your job is influencing. Your job is advising, but it's not doing.

And that's why some people aspirationally want to be an operating partner. But maybe that's just not right for them. It becomes too frustrating. If every portfolio company took all my advice, that would be amazing.

Never happens. And there are a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's skill, sometimes it's will, sometimes it's that they're just having a hard time driving impact. I'll, uh, give an example.

There are many examples of this, but one that is common is the organizations that were traditionally doing volume velocity, kind of demand gen, and then saying, I think we want to move up market, I think we want to do more account based. Account based is a says, easy does, hard thing. It is, oh, yeah, I have a list of accounts. We've had lists of accounts for eons.

That's not what makes account based. The hard part of account based is how you get marketing and sales working together, making sure you have the right KPIs, figuring out which are the tactics, planning it out in a longer form. There's a lot of things that go into making account based successful. I can do sessions, we can do workshops, I can give you frameworks, I can show you how to do it.

I can give examples of companies that have done it. I just can't do it. And some people know how to take that information and action on it, and others struggle. >> Erica Seidel: Well said.

Right. A lot of people want to be operating partners. They like the idea. They fancy themselves showing the way and telling others what to do.

But you have to stand back a little bit. And, uh, that must be hard. I feel like that's like an emotional maturity piece. That must be a piece of it.

Two other questions for you. Can you think about back when you were leading marketing in an operating role like that sync sort, for instance, what coaching now would you give yourself before you took that job? Is there a regret that you have looking back like, oh, okay, if I had only known X or if I had only done Y, I'd feel better about myself. >> Gary Service: What I like about that question is part of what I tell people all the time, that if I were to go back and be a cmo, I would be such a better CMO than I was back then.

That is partially because if I said to any candidate, how many companies have you worked for? They'll say, I've worked for seven or eight or whatever it might be. And I've learned these different things. I meet with seven or eight companies every few days.

I am getting different combinations of problems and different issues and things that you would think would go one way, go a different way. And my reference base is just so much bigger than it was when I was there. I think what that, uh, would allow me to do is be much more realistic about how I plan out what we are doing. I'll tell you this awful story.

I remember we used serious decisions back in the day before Forrester bought them and used their benchmarks. Not having any better benchmarks. I committed to one of the serious decision benchmarks that was there. And the Gary of today would never do that.

I understand too well how benchmarks are put together. I understand how I would apply it or what I would do. It was just a massive mistake doing it the way I did it. And that's just one of many because I've made so many mistakes in retrospect that I now know so much more about that I would approach it completely different.

>> Erica Seidel: Fabulous. I appreciate that. Last question for you. This is a little bit of a non sequitur, but since I have you thoughts on marketing under the CRO, there's a bit of this, I hate to say a trend.

Some companies are nestling marketing under the Chief Revenue Officer and separating marketing out into its different component parts. The product marketing goes under product. Others are keeping it as a function under the CEO. Thoughts on when and where this is working and whether you think this would be temporary?

Any thoughts to share? >> Gary Service: I think first you need to ask the question, why is that happening? The reason that is happening is because marketing has lost the confidence of the organization. The leadership may or may not still be there and they are, uh, saying, okay, we want to change this because we weren't getting what we needed out of marketing.

Where are we seeing when any of those combination of strategies done work for more than a year or two before they come back to a more true it creates a whole new set of problems. Going back to my original comment, I have a bias against solving for the problem that I had before and then I create a whole set of new problems by what I've done. This is a perfect example of that too. Now messaging, uh, becomes fragmented because product marketing is doing one thing that is under product management now, but that's not really helping your demand gen team.

But sitting over in another place and you may have a CRO that is really only a sales leader but now has marketing reporting to them so they can't be the player coach. Every choice has repercussions and implications and if you are doing it, I would step back and say, why are you doing this and what are the issues there and how could we solve it? And uh, again, I know plenty of leaders have made the choice to do that, but I've not seen it work. >> Erica Seidel: Okay, yeah, I know it's a controversial topic these days and I think the proof will be in the pudding.

One, two, three years down the pike here. Awesome. I know that's a bit of a downer to end us on, but I did want to get your take on that. Thank you so much.

We have covered so much ground. I feel like there's so much good insight here and people are going to love listening to this. So thank you. Thank you so much, Gary.

>> Gary Service: Thank you for having me. This is fun. This is the easiest part of my day. >> Erica Seidel: Wonderful.

Okay. And yeah, you could just point people to this podcast and say, oh, you don't have to meet with me, just listen to this. That was Gary, Service Marketing operating partner at Insight Partners. Stay tuned for the next episode of the get, coming in a couple of weeks.

Thanks for listening to the get. I'm your host, Erica Seidel. 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.

If you liked this episode, please share it. For more about the get, visit the Get Podcast.com to learn more about my executive search practice which focuses on recruiting the make money marketing leaders rather than the make it pretty ones. Follow me on LinkedIn or visit theconnectivegood.

com the get is produced by Evo Terra and the team at Simpler Media Productions.