Inside the Great Reinvention of the SaaS Marketing Org

Hello, and welcome to The Get. I'm your host, Erica Seidel. The Get is all about driving smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. This season's theme is all about SaaS marketing orgs and how they are changing in both seismic and subtle ways.

My guest today is not just any guest, but a friend of mine. I knew the first time we met that he had mad skills in marketing and many other things. Jay Roxe joins us today. Jay is the CMO at inriver in the product information management space.

They serve brands and manufacturers and retailers. They have an AI-powered platform that optimizes product experiences. We might hear a little bit more about this. Before that, Jay was CMO at HYPR and at BitSight, both in the cybersecurity space.

He has earlier foundational experience from companies like Rapid7, GE Healthcare, athenahealth, and Microsoft among others. His perspective is very much, I like to say, CMO+ since he has spanned product marketing, marketing leadership, product management, and general management. I'm really excited to hear him discuss what's now and what's next with SaaS marketing orgs. Jay, welcome to the show.

Hey Erica, it's great to be here and it's great to have a chance to record this. I'll echo back, the first time I met you, I knew we were gonna have a lot of really good conversations. And it's been years and we still have good conversations every time we get together. I am glad to have you on the show.

Maybe you could start, and just amplify my introduction a little bit, and maybe share a fun fact about you. I think the couple of fun facts, first job outta college, so before any of the stuff that you talked about, I got my start teaching programming in Singapore, which means, among other things, I've eaten three different foods that have appeared on Fear Factor. The place we have the office now in Sweden is actually directly across the street from the Museum of Disgusting Food.

So I walk by and I'm like, yep, eaten that, eaten that, eaten that. Okay. Have you had durian? I have had durian.

I am not a fan, but I have indeed eaten it, and was told I should consider it a delicacy when my boss had me over to his house to sing karaoke and eat durian, neither one of which I should be doing. All right. That is a good fun fact. I wanna go to this museum now that you're mentioning it to me.

Let's, and this is actually an important piece, is that inriver is a Swedish company and we're gonna be talking about organizations and so the global angle, the managing people across countries and cultures, that'll be interesting here. To start off, can you just give us an overview of the size and structure of your marketing org and major functions? How many people? Then, I'm curious to hear you drill into any unique choices organizationally that you've made that might be different or interesting to other CMOs.

So it's a medium-sized marketing org. It's probably between fifteen and twenty people, depending on where we put contractors in. I'm a big believer in bringing on people that can fill specific skill niches. One of the things I learned during COVID was the advantages of having truly remote and hybrid orgs.

So example, when I was at HYPR, my last stop, I was able to hire somebody I had worked with at Microsoft who was absolutely fabulous, had run significant orgs for Microsoft, to run brand and comms. She lives in Southern California. I never would've gotten her to move 'cause she lives two blocks from the beach. By building the right org, you can get the people you can't get otherwise.

You need to be a strong believer in hybrid and remote orgs with really good travel budgets. If you can't get the team together several times a year, it's really hard to make it work. When I came on board, we had people in Boston, we have people in the Malmo/Copenhagen area. We have people in the UK.

We have people in Amsterdam. What we also had, though, was inriver has an at-scale development and support team in the Philippines. So we looked into whether or not we could have really great talent for marketing that we could put in the Philippines, as well. We've actually augmented with people in marketing operations and with several people in the content org who're tremendous talent.

So we can really build a follow-the-sun-anywhere-you-go type of model to support some of the things we're trying to do. Cool. That's great. And then there's obviously some cost saving, I would imagine, as well with that.

There are. One of the things you become very aware of as you're managing global orgs is two things. One, time zones are real. My average day starts with meetings at five-thirty or six o'clock in the morning, which the rest of my family considers to be nuts.

And it really does, salaries, compensation, law, benefits really do matter as you go into different geos. Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about the team structure and what are the key teams you have?

Yeah. I don't know that the team structure is going to be all that unique compared to other places. We have product marketing and have staffed that to be very, very closely tied with the product teams so that even as things are ideated, the product marketing team is involved. We've got demand generation, which includes field, partner, digital, and content.

We have a brand team that's got responsibility for many of the things that we've talked about here, including the research and the social presence. We have marketing operations, and have built a customer marketing function. I think we'll go back to customer marketing as we go through this conversation because I think there's a lot of aspects of that that are starting to become even more relevant than they were a couple years ago. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm with you on customer marketing. That's cool. I can't wait to talk about that.

Talk to me about where you see the SaaS marketing org going. I feel like you're good at seeing what's coming. Would love to know some talking points on what you see going on now, and what should other CMOs who are curious about the future of SaaS marketing orgs, what should they know? Look, I'm sure almost every guest that has come on your podcast this season has said you're AI first, or you're unemployed.

And that's really going to change how the orgs get built and how the marketing gets done. When I came on board, we went through and we fired most of our tech stack, like lots of different ancillary pieces. We're now bringing things back in as they serve specific needs or evaluating can we get them from our existing vendors? Do we need to bring on board point solutions?

In terms of forecasting the future of the org, i've joked with my team that adoption is the new MQL. It's a little bit tongue in cheek, but the fact is referenceability isn't just the keyword any longer, it's are people actually taking the stuff that you are rolling out, the new functionality that you create? Look, SaaS products get better every year. It's the promise of SaaS.

But as you put more stuff into the product, are people actually adopting and using it? It goes to the idea, I don't know where the quote came from, but somebody said, "Trust isn't a byproduct, it's a growth strategy." I bring that up in this context because as people are- we joke that SEO is dying. We've seen SEO volumes decrease by 20, 25%.

We've started to see more and more inbound demo requests or "Contact us" coming from people that said, "Chatgpt told me I should talk to you." The adoption, trust, and unique content and unique points of view are what's going to drive the LLMs and the new systems that people are actually using to identify the thing, the vendors they should talk to, the solutions they need. So it's the idea of adoption driving trust, driving sales. That's interesting because it makes me think about the role for corporate marketing.

I think that some people are saying, it's like brand is now sexy again. If you look at how we need to be connecting to micro influencers, and just be known in 95% of any audience is not buying at any given time, and demand is getting more expensive and, everything with AI seems to be pushing us towards this brand building becoming more of a thing. Would you agree and do you see that? Or would you not use the word brand?

Which is a kind of a loaded word. The word brand is very loaded because people look at brand and they think fonts and colors. And in fairness, in my last two orgs, I have redone the fonts and colors and the logo. But it was to change the perception of the company so that you're moving in- you always want to make sure when people look at you, that sort of first impression, it really makes people think forward-looking and gives them a dynamic picture of your organization.

The real part of brand is, what are you saying that's unique? We just released research that really drills in on how people are using AI in the environment today. Where are they adopting it? What have they adopted it for?

That's designed to start a conversation, and by starting a conversation, you're inviting more people to know you, but you're also inviting a unique point of view. When you say brand is relevant again, awareness and trust and favorability become metrics that are as important as anything else. Look, at the end of the day, SaaS marketing leaders are always going to be held accountable to what is the pipeline that's being generated, and how fast is that pipeline converting to revenue.

But in a world where content has become almost free to generate, finding ways to start the conversation and engender trust is the thing that has become sexy again. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.

Let's look at marketing ops, as well. As I think a long time ago we talked about MarTech and the rise of MarTech and the chief marketing technologist. So there are some of those people. But then I thought it was interesting how you said you fired your whole MarTech stack.

I didn't fire the whole thing. Okay. We went through and we edited out solutions we weren't using or weren't using as much as we could be. So do you think we'll see more orgs where the marketing ops people will become the kind of AI sherpas for the organization?

I think everybody in the organization really needs to be AI fluent. Orgs are going to become more diamond-shaped, and I know that's been said by other people before. Because it's going to enable more mid-level senior manager, director-level teams who are executing with urgency that have one or no reports within the organization. They don't need the staff they did previously.

So everybody needs to be AI fluent, but there are pieces of the AI conversation that really are better handled by experts. We've started to look at things like, we took this research we just did and we had 317 executives that we surveyed across two geos. We now have an AI assistant where you can say, I want a data sheet that cuts this by executives in Europe, in industrial manufacturing with between 502 billion in revenue. So make it that specific, and rather than having to get somebody to do the cut of the data, somebody does the analysis, the graphics team has to lay it out.

You end up in an environment where you can just do this all of a sudden, and it's one agent. Marketing ops is going through another revolution as a growth engine. We're even starting to experiment with the idea of do you have somebody on the marketing ops team whose job it is to create these agents? Or, these assistants that we were talking about to experiment with other ways of embedding into the org and can actually be a similar service and strategic model as content operations or as design, where the folks who are the leaders of those functions may have a strong point of view on like how to get emotion out of the content, but also can have a strong point of service function where if you need a design done, here's the ticket.

It goes all the way through to here's your artifact. With an AI service function, whatever we choose to call it, you could see an environment where you have somebody who's the AI Sherpa, I'll take your phrase, and it goes all the way through from here's the strategic vision to, hey, I need an assistant that takes all of my customer videos and cuts them up into little pieces and enables the sales team to say, I'm talking to such and such a industry, give me a video that's appropriate.

So everywhere from the strategic to the specific. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

We should do this again in a year, Erica. 'Cause we're gonna have a very different point of view on how things have actually evolved. To that point, how do you hire for the now, knowing that the now is a little bit different than the next? Do you have a perspective on how do you hire, and I'm also curious about given the diamond shape, are you hiring fewer, say, interns?

Whole bunch of different questions we could get into there. It's an interesting mix right now. The core things you need are people who have curiosity and adaptability. They come into the interview conversation and they're curious, they're smart, and they're unexpected.

The things that AI doesn't yet do well is storytelling and creativity. Those are still the things that are going to help a company, help a campaign, help a product stand out. So those are some of the things that I'm looking for. These days I expect people to show up for the interview knowing about recent changes in my business, strengths and weaknesses relative to the competition.

You can ask ChatGPT two questions on your phone as you're waiting for the conversation and you've got all of that. One of the things I also like talking about with people is what have they changed over the past year? How have they changed how they work based on everything that's going on? I like that.

Do you have any advice for somebody who is a little, say, less fluent in AI, but they wanna hire people who are more fluent? How do they, how can they hire confidently without knowing the space as much as they could? Job descriptions and AI are changing faster than resumes can keep up. So there's very little way to say, gee, I'm hiring somebody that knows everything they will ever need to know about AI.

I just view it as a discussion. What's the reality? What's the hype? What have they done?

What are they doing next? What are they curious to do if they had time? If I had time, I'd love to take some Zapier if this, then that integrations and hook them up to the home automation I've done and just start to play with it. Probably don't have time to do that at any point soon, but how are people thinking about their work world, their personal world, and how things are going to change?

Yeah. And then I would also, for people that are working today, what are the capabilities of the tools they already have? They may or may not be using them. There are some vendors that have priced those tools to be impractical but at least be aware of what's going on in the environment.

Anybody who can treat this as a conversation about what are you looking for, what are you doing, that's probably gonna be the best way of assessing AI in the environment today. So what's interesting is I talk to people about what they're hiring for, what they're looking for, these themes come up a lot, right? Curiosity, adaptability, resilience, et cetera. And it's funny because from a hiring standpoint, those are often the last things that people look at.

And the first thing is just, do they know the industry? Do they have the same go-to-market motion fluency? Have they done, whatever, product marketing before, partner marketing before, whatever. Could you imagine a world where somebody just comes in and says, oh, I'm curious and adaptable in spades, and I haven't done even marketing yet, but I would like to work for you?

The diamond-shaped org makes that a little harder. Because when you're hiring people that are expected to be a little bit more senior and really operate with alacrity and smart use of tools, they also have to have knowledge in the framework. Like product marketing, I've got some strong learnings on product marketing from things I've screwed up and from working with products over time, and I do look to hire for some of that as I come in. At the same time, I do want the people that are like, we need to do this totally differently.

Yeah. Because the motion is going to change over time. So I think it's some from column A, some from column B, Erica. Yeah.

What about like the human side of hiring? Because you talked earlier about certain groups are gonna interface more with other groups. Obviously that's always been the case, and I'm wondering, now that the human context is mattering more than ever, can you double click on that? There's a few angles to it.

There's a lot to think about with human-centric leadership, and particularly as you're building challenges of remote and hybrid orgs today. And being very aware of, like in my world, I try to be very aware of time zones because if I shoot somebody an email at five o'clock my time, that's midnight their time. That may not be necessarily when everybody wants to be receiving new mails. From an org design point of view, you want to make sure all of the roles are evaluated very much in terms of where do you need person to person face off.

Your partners don't want to talk to your AI chat bot. They want to talk to a person who can help them, brainstorm with them, and give them context on how they plan the org. There's a theme of context is king that we'll come back to as we go through the next year, and I think as you and I probably go through the rest of this conversation, the other piece of human-centric leadership isn't just around hiring. It's around recognition.

We added in my work, we now have for each of our team meetings, we take the last ten minutes of the meeting and we do shout outs, like, who's done something great for somebody else recently? It was one of those where we tried it, we didn't know if it was going to work. You can try that and you get absolute radio silence, which is an awkward moment. One of the most successful things we've done in the meetings, like it was ping pong of everybody thanking each other and being very specific in such a way that I'm like, okay, this is a cultural artifact that we're going to explicitly support and create.

So identifying those cultural artifacts and maintaining them. It becomes a core part of the human-centric leadership. I like that. Talk about customer marketing a little bit more.

That's also where the org can interface in a human way with customers, prospects, partners, customers who are coming back, et cetera. I love the whole customer marketing domain. I had a really interesting org at athenahealth. I've never seen any place else, and we will probably never build again, but I had the product managers who run the alphas and betas.

I had product marketing. I had pricing. I had documentation, and I had customer marketing. In the same org.

So when you think about that, we could as a company, develop and test something, set adoption goals, measure customer value during the beta, have product marketing put it in market, have pricing decide whether or not we are going to get paid for it, have documentation tell people how to use it, then have a customer marketing team that was really accountable for meeting those adoption goals and making sure the customers were both aware and satisfied. And then you can close the loop all the way back to what's the next round of things you need to go do?

It was a very full stack customer marketing org at that point. I think for many organizations, including the one I'm building now, it's how do you develop more of a connection with customers? With customer marketing, it's a combination these days of what is the customer's relationship with the company? How are they learning and using your product?

How are they learning about the new innovation you have coming? That can be directly from you, it can be through a partner. What is their overall sense of advocacy for what you do, and this isn't just in the NPS sense, although that's an important tool. It's how are they feeling about you?

What are they saying about you? The old saying is, brand is what you they say about you when you're not in the room. Yeah. And the customer marketing becomes such an important piece of that.

Particularly in a SaaS world where they're looking at you at the end of every contract cycle and saying, am I using these guys? Do I like these guys? Is there an alternative? Yeah.

Cool. We've covered a lot. Can you take a step back and think about what advice you would give your pre-CMO self? CMO is a really interesting job and it's one of the most broad jobs in the organization.

So the advice I would give my pre-CMO self and the advice I try and give my CMO self is prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. What are the three things that are important to get done? But for people that are listening to your podcast, as a CMO is evaluating a position, can you and the CEO align on what changes hiring the CMO is designed to create? Does the board want the same change?

And does the CEO really want that change, or does he or she have a sort of intellectual curiosity about that change? Look, this has to be a very tight fit between the CEO and the CMO, so really spending the time to get into it. And just like I was talking about with AI, the best way of interviewing is just the discussion. Mm-hmm.

The best CEO conversations I've had, so this would be my advice to the CEOs, is just take one of your gnarliest problems, start talking about it. Make it a conversation. How would the CMO approach the problem? And is this the way you'll want to be approaching problems as you go into building the team, building the organization, building the company?

I like that. I've seen CEOs do that every once in a while. They don't do it usually that much, but it's so great. It's like, oh, here's a question that maybe it has nothing to do with marketing, and just see how the person, reacts.

I'm gonna pick on something you said, which was sometimes people have an intellectual kind of curiosity about a change, but they're not really ready for it. The appetite is not there. Like, innovation is needed but not wanted. It reminds me of when everybody wants to write a book, so many people wanna write books.

Maybe not everybody. But the question is, do you wanna actually have written the book or do you want to actually write the book? Because they're two different things. I wanna have this behind me is different from I want to actually do this.

And I think that's what you're keying into. Well, I'm a lifetime runner, and there's a real difference between people who want to train for a marathon and people who want to have run a marathon. Yes. It applies to being a CMO as well.

You've gotta love the process or at least most of the process- Yeah. - in order for it to work. That's great. Thank you.

So I know we're running out of time. Final question for you. This season we're looking at SaaS marketing orgs, how they are changing in seismic and subtle ways. Can you pick either seismic or subtle, and just in one or two sentences how would you describe these changes?

One, I love the phrasing of seismic and subtle. That's a good one. Content is no longer king. Context is king.

We need to acknowledge that we've all said the customers have done 75, 80% of their research by the time they reach you. That number is actually going up. It's so easy for people to understand your organization. Being able to understand the context in which they are framing the problem, being able to understand the context of the industry as a whole, and really helping to give customers a feel, or prospects a feeling of that context based on what you know, based on how you can analyze their problems, based on similar customers is going to be the king of, that's going to impact how we choose to feed the GPTs, how we feed, how we build and structure customer marketing and marketing as a whole, and how we build out organizations like Marketing Ops.

Tying back to this idea that we talked about a second ago of do we actually have a team that is helping to sherpa AI into the organization? Yeah. Yeah. Great.

Thank you so much. This has been great having you on the show, Jay. Appreciate it. Erica, always a blast and I look forward to our next conversation.

That was Jay Roxe, CMO at inriver. 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 and not 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.