How to Buck the Trend of Short-Lived CMOs

Hello, and welcome to The Get. I'm your host, Erica Seidel. The Get is all about recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. This season we're looking at how SaaS marketing orgs are changing in both seismic and subtle ways, and we have so many people who are dedicated listeners of The Get. Just this week, I've heard from a bunch of CMOs who have said, wow, I listened to The Get and I learned this interesting thing, or I heard this interesting take, and then I walked into a meeting and put in practice what I learned. That is awesome. My guest today is someone you will learn a lot from. I'm speaking with Monica Ho, CMO of SOCi Monica is impressive in many ways, but one thing that will immediately stand out to you is that she has bucked the trend of short-lived CMOs. She has been in her role for a whopping seven years and eight months as revenue has grown more than 10x, from about ten million to over a hundred million. We're going to dig into that experience. If you haven't heard of SOCithey're all about AI-powered multi-location marketing. They're purpose-built for franchises and multi-location brands, and their platform helps those customers to centralize data, protect their reputation, and drive results at the local level. Today, we'll talk about Monica's journey leading marketing as the business has scaled how she structures her org, the role of AI in her org, her approach to hiring, and, of course, advice she would give to her earlier self and to others. Monica, welcome to the show. Thank you, Erica. I loved hearing your take on SOCi That was perfect. [Laughing] I always do a little research before I get started so that I can say it just right. I know there's a ton of work that goes into those words. I know you guys have evolved your positioning over time. We have. You nailed it. The multi-location specialty and that we help scale at the local level is really what SOCidoes. I love it. Love it. Great. So give us a little intro on you and maybe a fun fact. Sure. So as you mentioned, I'm CMO at SOCi I've been with SOCialmost eight years. Prior to that, I'd spent around seven years in a CMO role at a startup out of New York. So, really love the tech scene. I live in Austin, Texas. We moved here about six years ago, and I've been married for twenty-four years and I just sent my youngest off to college at Texas A&M. So just enjoying my new empty nester life. Yeah. As your heart floats somewhere else, it's a different evolution. I have some friends in the same boat. And they were like, oh my god, what do I do now? Well, you talk with me about your career. It's great. So you've been in your role for almost eight years, and, again, I think this is so unique because as we all see there's so much in the press and just in reality about people being in and out of their jobs in fifteen months, eighteen months. How have you stayed in the job through so many different iterations of scaling, and does it feel like different chapters? Can you talk about that for a while? Yeah, so I think I've stayed in the role as long as I have at SOCiand even in prior roles, because of two things. I'm very comfortable in a constantly changing and evolving environment. If I'm not in a changing environment, I produce that myself. That is just something I learned, a skill, early in my childhood. I also think it comes down to being able to execute at multiple levels of the organization. So in a scaling company, a fast-growing company, when you're early stage, you have to be very tactical. You have to roll up your sleeves. You have to get your hands dirty. Then, as the business grows, you have to be willing to let go, and you've gotta become a lot more strategic, take more of that oversight role, and you're kind of guiding the organization, but you're looking further out. Your role absolutely changes. I think you and I talked before, my title has not changed, but over the last seven-plus years, I've probably had four different roles, four to five different roles. At every major level, I feel like I've had a different job. Yeah. Yeah. So much to dig into there. Not to be too like a therapist, but you mentioned your childhood. Was there something about your childhood? Did you move around at a lot? Were you military brat, kind of thing? What made you like that? Because I feel like as we go through our lives, it gets harder, you build, and you build, and then sometimes you're in a maintaining mode for a while, and you're basically saying, I wanna break that maintenance mode. Yeah. So my background, I was raised by a single mom. Yeah. And my mom was married way too young and had children way too young. We lived in a house where she had two jobs. She was a waitress. She worked two waitressing jobs. We spent a lot of time with our grandparents, and then we also moved around a lot because my mother suffered from mental illness, so she was in and outta the hospital. So we would jump around a bit between family members, my grandparents, and then sometimes my father. In going through that, you learn how to adapt to change really, really quickly. And you learn that no one's gonna tell you what to do next or where you need to be. You just have to figure things out. One of the things that got instilled in me at that early age, just watching my mom and moving around as much as I did was a successful life has to be earned and re-earned over and over again. You're successful at something doesn't mean you're going to be successful for the rest of that tenure or whatever. I liken that to the CMO role. I had a great year. We crushed our goals. Guess what? No one cares anymore. What am I doing next year? What am I doing this next quarter? And that earned and re-earned concept is just really instilled in me. I really like that. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. It's so interesting how the foundation of somebody's life and the values that we learned growing up can really shape us. It's a question I ask in interviews sometimes, what are the values you grew up with and how are they affecting you now? And to your point, it's like you're only as good as you were yesterday. This is what an ex-boss of mine used to say. "You're only as good as you were yesterday." But I love your way of earning and re-earning. You've had these different chapters, have they roughly corresponded to scale? Were there moments of, oh, we hit twenty million and things are different? Oh, we hit fifty million and things are different? Or in your mind, do those chapters align with different moments? I think they aligned with different revenue chapters of our business. When I first came in, I was the first CMO. We had two people that were doing marketing at the time, and my job was about building our tech stack and a demand gen engine. Yeah. And so I was very much pushing the buttons, pulling the levers. As we then got out of that, ten to twenty-five million, we had to start executing a whole different strategy. We were looking different business targets. We were primarily selling to smaller, mid-market brands when I first started. As we got to twenty-five million, looking to go the fatter mid market and up market. And so we started executing ABM, which came with a lot of different changes. I had to hire different team members, and I had to restructure the org a bit. Then from twenty-five to fifty, we did something similar. We started executing a very different strategy, and then from fifty to a hundred, that was also very different. Yeah. So at every one of those stages I've had to rethink my organization. I've had to rethink our go-to-market strategy. And along the way we've also had some changes in leadership, as well. That also made the job a little bit different. Yeah. Fascinating. I've talked on this podcast with other people about this idea of somebody being like a Sherpa. If they've done a scale journey before and they're doing it again, it's like, okay, I've been up this mountain. But, each time the conditions are different and maybe the switchbacks you take or the particular route is different. Or the people that you're sherpaing or going on that hike together are different. What would be your advice for somebody who's facing a similar scale journey, as so many people are? All my searches are like, oh, we're twenty million, we wanna get to fifty million. We're three hundred million. We wanna get to a billion. Any advice for somebody doing that, aside from earning and re-running, like you said before? Yeah, I guess I would say if you're on a scale journey, nothing replaces hard work. I remember when I left my last post at the company out of New York and I came to SOCi At that company we'd scaled over 150 million, and now I was going back to ten million. I was like, oh, I miss that. I wanna get back into it. And I remember arriving at SOCiand I was like, what the eff did I just do? Oh my god, this is so different. Because it was so different, and it was still hard work. It was just different work. So knowing that you're gonna do some hard work is one. The other is, in any role that you're taking in a scale journey, aligning everything you do to revenue, everything. Priorities align to revenue, my metrics align to revenue. My team, we always have a very strong partnership and cadence with the revenue organization. Early, early in my career, I did work a sales role and that gave me a lot of empathy and understanding for what sellers have to do. So that alignment with the revenue and the marketing organization has been really, really important. Got it. Got it. Thank you. I've seen that situation as somebody they've scaled before and then they say, oh, I wanna do it again. And always on the recruiting side, you say are they really ready? Do they really remember what it's like when they have two people on their team and maybe their marketing automation is a total disaster? That's hard. You mentioned the aligning to revenue. Can I ask how that happens at, say, on the brand level? I could see where demand connects to it, but for a function that is traditionally less focused on revenue, how do you make that connection between long-term marketing impacts and current revenue? I always like to look at how it ties back to revenue, how it ties back to a metric. So when I look at the branding side and looking at some of the things that we're doing today, my team, my branding and comms team, and my demand gen team, they have shared objectives. So on the branding and comms side, they own our earned channels, so website and all those things. There's a percentage of website traffic that we expect to convert. That's owned by my B&C team. In terms of when you think about more modern marketing, we've really leaned out of traditional PR and media sponsorships and things like that, and we're heavily leaning into social. When you look at social, not just the amount of people that are seeing your content, but then engaging with your content and then continuing to follow all of that. To me, as we've grown in our digital channels, it does circle back into our inbound is getting better, our demand gen engine's better. So I just find ways to tie those two together. Even though it's really hard to draw a straight line to revenue, there's ways that you can tie it back. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Can you talk about a piece of career advice you'd give your pre-CMO self? It's interesting 'cause I just remember my last role when I was at the company in New York. Yeah. The company is called GroundTruth. It was the first time I had a CMO seat, and first time I was asked to be in board meetings. And I remember being really excited about finally getting the CMO seat and being in the board room, because you always want a seat at the table. I wanna know what's going on. I wanna be part of the decision-making. I remember one of the board members pulled me aside after my second board meeting and he's like, you and I need to talk, you need to get outta your head. Kind of caught me off guard. I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I really didn't say anything during the meeting. And he basically told me that's the problem. He's like, you earned a seat at the table and you're gonna lose it because you're not using it, and you gotta find your voice. What I learned from that is, again, you earn your seat at the table, yes, but then you have to make sure you have a voice and you've gotta keep earning that seat at the table. It goes back to what I said before, if I'm not coming with really good insight or an opinion or what we need next, I'm gonna lose that seat at the table. So if I went back to my pre-CMO self, it would be to get out of my head, find my voice. One of the things I remember so clearly was it was a room full of very big personalities, and I'm also a big personality, but I'm a little bit more thoughtful. I like to listen before I speak. There was no time for me to speak. There wasn't a pause, and what I learned is that I had to interrupt people. That's not natural for me, but in order to get my thoughts out, that was just an uncomfortable place I had to put myself in, and I got a lot more comfortable with it as I held that seat. I guess it's just finding your voice and making sure that you are using that to keep that board seat and to keep coming back. I'm also curious if you changed how you prepared for board meetings? There's the interrupting. I like that. It's very tangible. Was there anything else you did leading up to a board meeting that helped you find your voice when you were sitting in the board meeting? Yeah, with either one of my teams, it's always about having a reason to be there, so I feel like in my leadership team now, we do a lot of prep before the board meeting, so we talk a lot about our GTM motion. What did we say we were gonna do? What did we do? And not all the rosy stuff. But what didn't work? What got screwed up and what do we need to do about it? So there's a lot of prep that goes into that. And to be honest, it's not natural for a leader to be like, okay, let's not focus on the all the good stuff you just did. Let's focus on the bad stuff. Super uncomfortable. But a lot of prep goes into that and again, as you do it more, you get a lot more comfortable. Then the sessions are so much better because no one wants to talk about what went well. They wanna know what didn't go well and why did that get messed up? And what are you doing about it and what are you gonna do next? I always feel like I leave the board meetings learning something or with some sort of action item. So yeah, I think a lot of prep is essential. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. And then you're not in defensive mode. You're in collaborative, problem-solving mode. Yes. Yeah. Very cool. Let's talk about your marketing org, and can you tell me if AI has changed your org chart? Yeah. Everybody's talking about AI and how AI should give you all this efficiency and should do all these jobs for you. There's a lot of truth in that, but AI's not a silver bullet. It's definitely impacted my organization. I think it's impacting a lot of organizations, but it's not as clean cut as people would think it is. In 2023, I remember this so clearly, ChatGPT just came on the scene. I did a 2H planning offsite with my team and I'm like, we're gonna hit AI hard. We're gonna figure it out. I hired an AI trainer, got my team trained, we put in place AI guidelines. I gave everybody logins. And I'm like go figure it out. It's gonna make your job so much better. And it was interesting because nothing really changed. I really didn't see a lot of experimentation with any of the tools. I didn't think I was getting better copy or better campaigns. So it was like, okay, maybe we just need a little bit of- everybody's got their day jobs. Then we had this idea of AI specialists. Let's find out who's passionate about learning how to better leverage AI and bring efficiency into the org and let them lead trainings and use cases. So we did that. And then, honestly both of those ideas flopped for us. Throughout 2024, I was getting nervous. I feel like something should be happening with AI, but we really weren't seeing big impacts. Our tool set was evolving. Our marketing tech stack was getting more efficient, but like how we were applying it as a marketing team, we weren't doing much different. What I found really did change this year, at the end of '24 and going into this year, efficiency is a big deal. Everybody's trying to get more efficient. The market isn't great. So, it became more of a forcing function. It was like, okay, we've added all of these AI tools to be more efficient, but we're not seeing it. How about we don't backfill some roles? And how about we don't fill some of these roles? Two in particular, we have content roles, we had industry specialist roles. We took a good amount of them out of the organization. Now what? How are we gonna figure this out? Of course, it was a lot of fear. People were frustrated because we just changed everything. But the reality is, within a month or two, we were back to where we were. We had to learn how to leverage the tools. For instance, in the past we might have had an industry specialist that knew, say, financial services. All of our copy would be targeted to a financial service audience. Using AI tools, yes, you can train a GPT to write for that audience. But it's not just gonna work. You have to train the GPT, you've gotta set it up the correct way, or it's not gonna work out and you've gotta fine tune it along the way. So I think of it more of a finite investment in tools to train it and to get it ready, and then to get your teams using it. And then you do see efficiency from that. Overall, I hope that answered your question. I think more of a forcing function makes teams adopt quicker, and we have seen a lot of efficiency since this last year. It's funny 'cause when I recruit marketing leaders, I'm dealing with CEOs, and often investors, and they're not asking about AI skills in particular. They're asking primarily about efficiency, and however that happens. Often it is AI. But that's a good way to think about it. Some people have been talking about a diamond-shaped marketing organization where there's fewer earlier stage people in the org. Has that been a thing for you as well, this upleveling of jobs? Yeah, I think where AI has helped, it's allowed us to create more strategists than doers. So you don't need as many people to do certain things. Yeah. However, I will tell you, I was just having this conversation with one of my VPs. We had a really, really strong intern program this year, and what came of that is wow, the interns actually taught us a bunch of things about ways that we should be approaching some of these newer channels. And it was interesting the energy and the creative ideas that were coming back into the organization because you're introducing this younger generation. What you just said before, Erica, is true. AI is allowing us to not have so many doers, but bringing that younger talent into the org is still important. We were just talking about opening up two more junior level roles to support two of our teams just to get some more of that new thinking, creativity into our organization. But the org itself, if I were to say, where were we in '24 versus '25? I absolutely have less headcount as a result of a better tech stack, efficiencies that we've gained. I don't think all of it's AI, but a good amount of it is. Is there an example of one of these interns actually saying something or doing something that you say, ooh, wow, that was a good idea, I hadn't thought about that? It's not anything surprising, but we've been playing a lot with our social channels and trying to have a little bit more fun with our branding and TikTok is one of those newer channels. You've gotta approach TikTok in a very different way. It's so funny, but all of the content that our interns produced had so much better engagement than anything that we're doing. They were a lot more, I don't know, they had a lot more fun. They knew how to use a lot of the native tools within TikTok that my team wasn't leveraging. It was interesting. It was almost like reverse mentoring. Yeah. Having that younger generation in and playing around with some of our marketing, it was fascinating. I don't know if that's a great example, but that's one that was like man, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. For context, can you give an overview of the size and structure of your marketing org and what functions you have now? I know you said it's maybe a little different than it was previously. Yeah, so my org's pretty much the same. I still own the same function. So I own demand gen, branding and communications, marketing operations, product marketing, and our sales development team. That's my structure. At the beginning of 2024, I had seventy-one total headcount. Yeah. Today I'm at fifty-three. So the org has come down, what is that, twenty-five percent? A lot of that is due to restructuring. We restructured my demand gen team. I think our tool set has gotten better, so we didn't need as many doers for some of the strategies we're executing. A really big area of efficiency, though, has been in my sales development organization. Where we've really improved our headcount, our SDR to AE ratio with better tool sets, and getting more efficiency through tools. We've used Nooks, primarily, and Clay. That's really had a big impact and brought a lot of good efficiency with it. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing. On this podcast, people keep talking about the importance of experimentation and finding micro pockets of demand by experimenting deeply in certain ways. Can you talk about how CMOs should drive a culture of experimentation on their teams? You shared one example before with the kind of force it [laughing]. But any other thoughts there? Yeah, planning with your leadership team is really important, and making sure that you are setting your plan and your goals for what your team should be doing, but then carving out a piece of what do we need to improve upon? What should we be thinking about? And it could be one test, it might be a few tests. We're running a couple of tests right now where we're trying to get a lot more efficiency in our ad creatives. So we're testing tools and we're testing agencies just trying to see what is the right setup for producing multi-variant ads. Another one is, I've got my SDR leader, my DGM leader, and my head of mar ops. We've been talking a lot about additional efficiencies in our demand gen functions. It's really interesting, a lot of the things that my SDR leader and my DGM leader were saying, hey, there's an AI tool that could get this done. And my mar ops leader's coming back saying, well, that's just marketing automation. I can do that for you. So it's just really interesting. It's making sure your teams are collaborating. Carving out a little bit of your plan for testing and learning is so essential. We do this a lot with the team and they have a ton of fun with it. Yeah. So that's important. I don't think it's anything earth shattering, but it's just important to make sure you're doing it. Yeah, that's a good example. I like how you get into specific examples. It's awesome. Can you talk about how you hire? Yeah. Our hiring process hasn't really changed with AI. I know I've seen some really horrible videos of people now getting interviewed by AI and it messing up. Outside of using AI to help us better match applicants to the qualifications of the role, that's game changing because you have so many applicants and then just getting it down to the folks that are most qualified, AI's awesome at that. The overall interview process is largely human led. I feel like it has to be. Especially, at least SOCi we're remote. You are not sitting in the room with me, but I think seeing people, their mannerisms, how they speak, how they critically think, depending on the type of questions you're asking them is really important. So a lot of that is still done the traditional way where we have a screener. There's probably a person in my team that's interviewing ahead of me and then it's me. That's still done that way. I definitely expect different things out of applicants in terms of their testing and learning with AI. And in other roles, I expect them to be pretty, almost having a point of view that they might be sharing via LinkedIn. They might be sharing that through their posts and different things like that. Let me pause. Does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, that's helpful. When you talk about a point of view on LinkedIn, are you talking about an AI point of view or just a point of view in general about their function and how they see their function and how it's evolving? First, as a marketer, I think it's a shame if you have a really great applicant on paper and you go to LinkedIn and they don't know how to use the tool for their own branding. I mean, LinkedIn is for marketing yourself, and you go to a profile and they haven't posted, they don't have a picture. That's a shame, and I expect that. I'm in digital marketing. I expect you to know how to use these tools for your own benefit and the benefit of your company. I don't typically give interviews to people if I don't see them interacting online in a way where they understand how to do it. I just hired a head of product marketing and I remember going through the candidates and they all looked great on paper. The way that I actually gave people interviews was I checked out their LinkedIn. I wanted to see if they were talking about AI, if they had a point of view on it, and using their posting for that. And for folks that were dead, like they didn't say anything, they didn't get the interview. To me, I just feel like you should, in a product marketing role you're applying to a digital, ajentic company, you better be out there and have something to say. If not, you're just probably not the right person for the role. That's fascinating. It makes me remember a person I placed several years ago, this is like, thirteen years ago, who was a whiz in marketing analytics. And he had no, almost no LinkedIn presence, no picture, nothing was updated. I just met him through a friend and he said, oh, it's because recruiters just ping me all the time. I just focused on the job and everything. But that was a more behind the scenes job. I see your point that if you're gonna be in product marketing, you might be an evangelist for the company. And if you look at what the company does, yeah, it makes sense. That's very interesting. Is there a particular question you ask in interviews that you find particularly revealing? I love a particular string of questions. There's three in particular. Okay. And they're super basic, but the way it's asked changes the candidate's brain on what I'm asking. So I ask who their most recent boss was? I ask them to tell me their name, and sometimes spell it for me. So who did you report to? Okay. Okay. Tom Johnson. Is it J-O? Okay, perfect. Okay, so what would Tom tell me about your superpowers as a marketer? What is your power? Because there's a name and it's your boss, they get really specific about, oh, he used to love this, and he would say that. And then my follow up question is okay, so then what would Tom tell me about your areas of opportunity? Again, it gets into a very specific, oh, my last review, he brought this up, and here's why. It gets away from the generic what are your strengths and weaknesses? Because everybody's got an answer for that. But when you ask somebody about somebody's perception of you then you're trying to put it in that frame, I think you just lose that whole structure. Oh, of course my strength is this, and I'm gonna turn my weakness into a strength. Some really interesting things come out. I just have found that to be really enlightening. If I'm hiring for a manager, I always ask them how they avoid surprises? I leave that pretty open because I think managing people is one of the hardest roles, and I love to hear what people come up with when I say, how do you avoid surprises? It could be from your employees, it could be from the market, but I always love those questions. That's so cool. Yeah. The first one it's kind of top grading light. Do you guys do a full top grading, or whatever the methodology is, do you do that or is it you're taking just that piece of the threat of reference trekking to the interviews? We did the whole training on Who, which Yeah. -was awesome. But I've taken bits and pieces of it that I love, and that one in particular just seems to always, I always get such good insight out of that question. Yeah. Yeah. It's the specifics that come up and then you have to interpret the specifics. I really like that. Awesome. I like your other one too. So finally, this season we're looking obviously at how SaaS marketing orgs are changing in both seismic and subtle ways. How would you describe these changes in a sentence? And it could be something seismic, something subtle. What's a big takeaway for where we are as an industry in SaaS marketing leadership? Over the last year I think there's been seismic shifts because of the speed at which everything is moving. When you look at your organization, we talked a little bit about this, but I think the roles are changing. Job functions are changing. Marketing stacks are changing because the tools are evolving really quickly and I think, as I mentioned before, being able to adapt to a quickly and changing environment is becoming a core competency because of how quickly things are moving. And I think that's not gonna change. If you look at the speed at which things are now evolving, we are at a pace we've never been at and it's not slowing down. So we've just gotta get used to this new speed. Yes. And earning and re-running the seat. I love that. Thank you so much. Monica, it's been great having you on the show. Thank you so much, Erica. It's been a pleasure being here. That was Monica Ho, CMO at SOCi 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 TheGetPodcast.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.