What It Really Takes to Build a CEO-CMO Partnership That Works

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, SaaS marketing orgs and how they're changing in both seismic and subtle ways.

Our guest today is Ashley Deibert. Ashley is CMO at Marigold. Marigold helps the world's biggest brands with loyalty tools, email marketing, and SMS solutions. Previously, Ashley led marketing for Piano, the digital experience platform, and she's also led marketing for Taplytics and Grapeshot.

She has a long history of not just leading marketing, but also marketing to marketers. We met a few years ago through a search I was doing, and we made friends. Ashley, thank you for joining the show. I'm excited to speak with you today.

Yeah, I am excited to be here. I was long awaiting this invite, so super happy to be part of the podcast. You could've come to me and said, "Oh, Erica, I'd love to be on the podcast." [They laugh] I never make the first move, Erica, come on.

Oh, oh, oh, okay. I have to make the first move. That's, that's great. That's hysterical.

So I am excited to talk about all kinds of things today, advice for up and coming CMOs, advice to CEOs who have failed at CMO hiring in the past, and just your take on where marketing orgs are going. Why don't we start with just quick intros. I'm wondering if you could just say a little bit about your role, your scope, and any kind of fun fact, like maybe how did you advance as quickly as you have in your career? Oh, sure.

Yeah, so nice to meet everybody. I'm Ashley Deibert, CMO of Marigold, as Erica said. I've been a career-long SaaS marketer. It wasn't intentional.

I just stumbled into it. My first job out of college I worked in a healthcare tech startup and I just couldn't quit it. I've worked in a range of organizations from five million to 500 million in ARR. I've seen a lot of different stages.

I've been acquired. I've been in companies that have acquired other companies, and I've seen a whole range of different brands and takes. I've been doing this for over twenty years, so I've definitely rode the wave through all the change that keeps marketing fresh, which is what is exciting to me as a marketer. How did I get this far in my career so fast?

I, honestly, from the beginning, I was really curious about all aspects of marketing. From my very first job, I was asking to touch more, do more, be exposed to more. I didn't get myself in just a one track rut, so to speak, for very many roles. My first role, my very first job, I literally sat between two salespeople and helped them fill out RFP responses.

And then I started helping with events. And then I was doing customer reporting and analytics, which turned into our newsletter. And then I worked really closely with our creative director, and then it just spiraled from there. So most of my jobs that I was doing throughout the early days of my career, I was working in either a smaller department within a bigger organization, or a smaller organization where I was just able to touch more parts of marketing.

Having that hands-on experience combined with just my natural drive to keep doing more faster and better helped me get to where I am. The fact that I can eloquently speak and be confident about all these different areas of marketing, and I'm not saying that I'm an expert in all of them, but that has led me to be able to scale this fast. Honestly, having really good mentors throughout my career that I actually listened to [Ashley laughs], that gave me really sound advice just on how to collaborate and communicate, and build your career, and actually listening to that advice and applying it, even if I didn't always want to, I think has led me to where I am today.

This is great. Some themes already are coming out. This one theme of don't stay in your lane and do talk to strangers effectively. I think a good marketer does that.

I have to ask, can you share a moment of mentorship that you, I don't wanna say enjoyed, that you didn't want to put into place at the time, but then you did and you're like, oh, I'm glad I did that. This was during my first VP role and I was leading a small team, five, six people. And the company was a sub $10 million ARR company. So I got exposed to a lot.

I got to touch a lot. And as the company started growing, leadership started changing. I did have a seat at the table, but there were other senior people brought in around me to help advance different areas of the business that I didn't really understand their role at the time, just due to lack of experience. I'll never forget, we were releasing a press release about a new product or a partnership that we were launching.

Maybe both. This consultant was brought in by the CEO and I didn't really understand his role and he started wanting to give feedback on the press release. And I got really, no, that's like, I've got this. It's my job.

It's my job. I definitely got like territorial about it. My mentor at the time who was, thankfully, honestly connected to the company through our board. So I was really glad that she had this front row seat, actually gave me this advice and she said, you know sometimes, we don't always have to take people's opinions, but we do need to listen to them.

And if they do have a voice and they've been asked to provide feedback and direction on certain strategic things in the business, you do need to engage them because if you don't, you are just seen as somebody who's really not great to work with. And I was like, oh, that, oh, it was like a little tiny gut punch. 'Cause you don't wanna be perceived like that. But honestly, as soon as I, as I like to say, opened up the kimono and share what you're working on and get the feedback.

And then there were some things that I did receive feedback on that I was like, I don't really agree with this, but I do agree with X, Y, and Z, but just not A, B, and C. And they were like great. That sounds good to us. Let's go with that version.

It was just this moment of it doesn't always have to come from you. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. Just because you own something doesn't mean you can't collaborate and take others' opinions. That was a really defining moment for me and one that I pass on to my teams even still today.

It's such a good learning because if it's not just your press release, but it's our press release, then it's also not just your failure if it doesn't work, it's everybody's failure. But it's also everybody's success if it does work out well. Exactly. And I have a very competitive nature.

I was a collegiate athlete on the track and field team. So it was my event, my sport. It wasn't even a team sport, and I played team sports, but I needed the reminder that building a company and a brand and growing is a team sport. It does take a village.

Whether it's a small marketing event or getting ready to take a company through an acquisition, there's strength in numbers. I can also see how sometimes people give you feedback and you feel like you have to take in every little piece of feedback from every person, and then it just takes forever to get something out the door. That's about learning how to gain alignments before you go through a process like that. You gotta figure out who your stakeholders are, who really needs to have a voice before you get to that point.

'Cause you could also drive yourself crazy in any situation, running around trying to intake everybody's opinions. I have produced major customer conferences and, as you can imagine, when you're producing a conference a lot of people are gonna have opinions about that. So aligning before we even kick off on producing such a thing on who are my key stakeholders in this, and that's who I stayed the course on. It's not to say that if somebody else outside of that came to me and said, hey, what about this?

What about that? That I would tell them to bugger off. You're [chuckling] not involved in this. It would more just be like, I really appreciate that.

We do have a committee working on this event. Let me take that back to them for consideration. Again, it's all about alignment from the jump on almost any project that you're gonna work on. Got it.

Great. Since we're talking a lot about marketing orgs and SaaS, can you give an overview of the size and structure of your marketing org? How many people, how many functions? Also, after that, curious to know if you've made any kind of org structures or changes or choices that somebody on the outside might find unusual?

Yeah, for sure. My team at Marigold is just shy of sixty people. We are a global team, and we are a remote organization. So I do have people in the US, in Europe, Australia, and partially in Japan.

The team structure is very specific in its setup and designed by me. I joined the company last year in November. I was brought in to make some shifts and changes and we did move things around. Where we're at today is that we have a product marketing function, and that product marketing function includes both our product marketers and our customer marketing team.

That's probably what I'm gonna come back to that might be a little unorthodox for some folks. We have a customer marketing and communications function. We have a growth marketing team that includes BDRs. They were moved from sales to marketing.

The business development function, it includes our growth marketing team, which is mostly field marketing and events. So these folks that are in region really deploying those on the ground programs across multiple channels. It includes partner marketing, as well. We have a marketing ops and digital functions.

So that is all the team that kind of oversees our tech stack, and email marketing and SEO/SEM, our website. I call them the plumbing of the marketing machine. Nothing can get out the door that, it has to go through them. Without them, we'd have a very broken, unusable marketing house.

Then we have brand and design. So that's my team of designers, video production, copywriters, and really in charge of stewarding our brand, developing that brand. Got it. That was not quite the structure that I inherited.

I did put that structure in place. We actually had product marketing under product, so that was moved under marketing. That's one area I'll touch on really quickly 'cause I'm really passionate about that topic. I've had this conversation with other marketing leaders and other product leaders and my view is that product's job is to build a really good product and marketing's job is to get it to the market.

I've seen some situations where they're like, does product marketing go into product or does it go under marketing? It's kind of that division of labor. You set 'em up, we'll knock 'em down. It's your job to build, it's our job to make people buy it.

So that move was made and it was really helpful because my growth team and my content team, and my design team, and my ops team needed more understanding of what is the positioning of our products, of our ICPs, of our personas? Who are we selling to? What are we supposed to be saying to them? It was not quite connected when I joined.

It's now completely connected. I mentioned earlier that that customer marketing move was one that I thought long and hard about. First of all, if you are an organization that is anywhere near the forty million ARR market, and you don't have somebody on your team that's dedicated to marketing to customers, and getting customer advocates back into market, you need to think really deeply about adding that function. I'm fortunate that I have a whole team dedicated to this because of our size and scale, but this is the team who's really responsible for who are our customer champions and what are the stories that we can tell about them in the market, and how are we infusing them back into our marketing campaigns?

It's customer advisory boards, customer events, ongoing customer education. How are we getting our users, leveraging the platform more and understanding the full breadth of features and use cases of available to them? I put this specifically under product marketing because I thought there's no better center between what we build and how people use it, and then getting that into the market. So if we aren't able to really capitalize on those, customers who are really great at using our product and telling that story and making it really attached to the go-to-market, which is driven by product marketing.

I always tell my team, product marketing drives, they're the driver of the bus and everybody else is a passenger on the bus, and they're telling us where to go, but when we get there, we all gotta get off the bus and do our part. But customer marketing, specifically, I felt very strongly needed to be under product marketing to really create that cohesive unit and how we're framing up the go-to market for taking these products to market. Yeah. I remind my team, we sell products.

We don't sell air. We don't sell paperware. So the faster that we can get those stories connected, the better. Yeah.

That's great. Thank you for that overview. And just so I'm clear, Marigold, would you say it's a house of brands? Because it's the CheetahMail, and Selligent, and Emma and all these things all together.

So I'm wondering how that connects to your product marketing people? Are people across the whole thing or are they one per sub-brand? And are you building a branded house? Like I, so many questions.

Yup. Marigold is not a house of brands. That is a common misconception just because we are made up of a merger and acquisition of several best in class software companies. So Marigold is the product of the merger of Cheetah Digital, Sailthru, Selligent.

We have a product called Marigold Loyalty, which was formerly part of the Cheetah Digital platform. We have some other products. So the misconception there is that we are a house of brands. These brands, these are not separate brands, those are products.

So all of those things that I just mentioned are products that our customers can buy one or the whole thing. They all sit on what we call the Marigold Marketing Platform. Now, to be fair, if you run to our website before September 1st, you're not gonna see what I'm outlining. We are actually in the middle of a rebrand and a re-message to bring clarity to what is Marigold.

So this is a platform with multiple products across these different business units that can work separately or they can work in concert together. But some of our products have very different buyers or different use cases. As an example, Sailthru was actually purpose built for media and publishing. Selligent is a very similar tool to Sailthru, but it was purpose built for privacy-centric marketing.

We sell it a lot in Europe, as an example. Each of those products do have a dedicated product marketer. And then because we have an overlap with how we take these into different verticals, my content marketing team is verticalized. That's how those two work together.

So we have product marketers who just think all day long about the product, the product, the product. What's coming out in the product? How's the product work? How are people using it?

And then a content marketing team that says, hey, medium publishing marketer, and learns how to communicate with them and put together content that matters for them so that then when they are ready to purchase a product, we can say, okay, let's introduce you to Sailthru and Grow and Loyalty, and whatever you need. That's the explanation of how Marigold is set up. Great. Okay.

Thank you. That's helpful. And I'm looking forward to seeing the site as it comes together. It's my, it's my summer project with my team now.

It's a daily thing they're working on building. It's been a lot of fun. Cool. Very good.

You've been a CMO before, this is not your first rodeo, and some of the listeners on The Get are first-time marketing leaders, or they wanna become a CMO, and I'm wondering what's your advice to them, especially in this current climate of doing more with less, and I know you laugh. Everybody laughs, but they're gonna have hard conversations around that. So any kind of thoughts, advice, and such that you would give this up and coming crew? For sure, and I kind of touched on this earlier, I don't believe in doing more with less.

I believe in focus. That, to me, is even in times of when you might be flush and have more budget and resource to work with, or when you're meant to buckle down and strap in because you don't have as much to work with. I've been across both of these. I've had budgets from $200,000 to $20 million.

So I get it. The reality is, no matter what situation you're in, I don't think there's a difference to this. When you are a CMO, it's all about alignment because you are servicing the organization's growth. So one of the first things that I do when I come into an organization is there's critical people that I get aligned with.

Obviously the CEO, that's my boss. I need to make sure that what he or she believes to be the top priorities is what I'm driving towards. Obviously, the head of sales and understanding where their challenges are and where they need the most support. The Chief Product Officer is a big one.

I'm flashing back to my interview cycle with Marigold. I had the benefit of meeting all these people and I actually used my interview cycle to understand these priorities. I think that is an important piece of advice I would like to give to people. You should be aligned with everybody on your executive team.

I think there's core individuals who's ever in charge of operationalizing the organization and bringing revenue in the door. Those are your partners. Those are your best friends. If you're not aligned to what their priorities are and what they see that they need, as well as they're aligned to your vision for it, it's gonna crash and burn really quickly.

And I say that from experience. I have made that mistake before. Sometimes we are told one thing and then we get another when we get in the door. That's not our faults.

But it's learning how to ask those right questions as early as you can in a process to really get inside the mind of the people that are already in seat. They have a boss, it's usually a board. The board has expectations for growth and their vision for how they're gonna get to that growth is what you as a marketer have to understand and align to, and then also be able to say, and here's how I would help you achieve that growth. I just can't say this enough that I think that has to, it doesn't happen on day one.

Certainly doesn't happen on day ninety. It happens in the interview cycle. It really does. So if you could think about percentage alignment when you come into a role - Yeah.

Have you achieved 50% alignment by the time you start a role? Or is it more like 80% or is it more like 20%? I think that depends on both parties' ability to be really honest and ask the right questions of each other. Okay.

To be honest with you, when I came into Marigold, I felt like I was at 90% alignment. Because I didn't uncover like, oh, now there's new things that you guys didn't say to me were priority. Yeah. And look, as a senior leader, you're given the benefit of a longer interview process.

If you don't feel like you're getting all your questions answered, ask to meet more people. I do that every time I'm in an interview process. There's always usually something where I'm like, well, where's the customer success leader? Where's, if I just haven't gotten all my questions answered, I dig more.

Now, I have also gone into organizations where I felt like I was 10% aligned because what was said to me during a process was not reality once I got in there. I just can't say this enough to the listeners, that happens. It just happens. Nobody's perfect.

And sometimes, especially with first time CEOs, they're not used to those types of interview cycles. So I've had everything from kind of 10% to 90% alignment. But I would say, if you were at least halfway there, I think that you did a good job. But there's always gonna be stuff that kind of comes up.

The other thing that I wanna say on this is, it's also something that I deploy for myself is, I also realize when I come into a new role that there's gonna be, especially if you are the first time CMO or you're replacing somebody who's maybe been absent out of the seat for a while, remember that there's been a void. So a lot of people are like, great, the new person is here! [Excited clapping] I wanna talk to Ashley. I wanna talk to "insert your name here" 'cause I have all these ideas.

Welcome those ideas, but know that you have to be able to compartmentalize what is really on fire and what is noise. I'm always thinking about what do I need to stop, start, and continue? 'Cause you can't just come in and shut everything down, but you also can't take on too much at once or you'll just overwhelm and drown yourself. So it's really finding that balance.

And again, getting it back to okay, this is what I heard in the interview process, now I'm hearing new things. Hey, CEO, CRO, COO, whoever it is you're supposed to be aligned with, help me figure this out. Ask for help. There's nothing wrong with asking for help to make sure that your priorities are still what you thought.

That's great. Thank you. A lot of great stuff there. When we talked previously, you had mentioned this interesting thing you had done in a previous role where you went dark with BDRs, and you went dark with digital, and you focused more on brand.

Because it was the whole, okay, we can't do more with less, so we're gonna do more focus with less. Can you tell anything about that story? Sure. Yeah.

So I was in a situation at one point in my career where we had to make quite drastic budget reductions. You will, as a marketer, go through this at some point. Look, why do we go through this as marketers? Because marketing's the easiest thing to turn off, and to also turn back on, frankly.

You stop building a product, it's really hard to rebuild an R&D function to then build the product again. When the discussion was had about how much we were gonna have to reduce, I came forward, I said, okay, I'm gonna bring you some scenarios because I want you to understand what these scenarios look like and what it means for us in marketing, in terms of what we can invest in and where we put our resources in. And it wasn't just me saying a a bunch of channels on a piece of paper.

You have to put forward scenarios. Okay, in scenario A, we can cut out all the events, or in scenario B, we turn off all of digital market, whatever it is. Some things are drastic, some are not as drastic. What happened in that situation was I brought forth the scenarios.

I brought forth my recommendation on those scenarios, but also a reasoning behind why I thought that that was the best use of the money that we would be left with. And I did bring that alignment actually first to the Chief Revenue Officer. I was like, I want you to be aligned with what I'm gonna propose because it's obviously going to impact if we're telling your team, sorry, we're not going to as many events, or yeah, you won't see any ads showing up with our brand on it because we're gonna turn that off.

That was the first key step. Also, make sure you have a peer that's aligned to this before you bring it further up the chain. So that's what I did, and then we as a management team made a decision, this is where we're going to be making cuts. In this situation, we did end up cutting back investment in BDR, investment in digital, but we kept heavy investment in events and customer marketing mostly from the perspective of the data was showing us that we were gaining a lot of ground there.

And two, we did not want to take ourselves physically, like literally physically out of the market we thought would be detrimental to our brand. And we were also able to deploy some AI tools and stuff to make up for not having a BDR team. It's the same thing I've been saying. It's just about alignment.

That was the situation I went through. And I think we also picked channels that were relatively easy to dial back on when the corner turned. I see. Okay, great.

Thank you. Because I keep talking to CMOs about how the brand function, and brand is often a four-letter word, corporate marketing, PR, AR are becoming so much more important in an age of AI. So I think that's an interesting story for multiple reasons. Yeah, absolutely.

Can you talk about how you hire? Sure. Fast. [Ashley laughs] Fast?

I love it. How fast? In all seriousness, the moment that I have a role open, I'm like a crazed woman. I'm like, until this thing is filled, I can't not think about it.

I'm lucky that I have a great strength of hiring managers on my team who share the same sentiment. First, my view in this is the longer a role, the role has been opened and these days, we just got done talking about we don't have as much as we used to have in marketing. We just never will again. So every resource is precious.

Once I've even made it to the point of I've got the role open, it's obvious because there's like a massive gap that needs to be filled. And every single day that it goes by that's not filled, it's just, we're losing. The first thing that I always try to do when I'm hiring is tap my or other people's networks. I hate to say it, but opening up a role on LinkedIn these days is a very scary place.

I recently opened a role in the evening, and I woke up in the morning to almost 200 applications, and I was like...[laughs] Wow. What do I do with this? What do I do?

And again, I don't mind to go through resumes. I can look through resumes really quickly. But, that being said, it's not just for the pure volume that you'd have to deal with or scraping through resumes. Using your network has multiple benefits.

I'm always going to people that have already worked for me once or if they're not on the market, do you know somebody? Use that, keep that circle of trust as close to you as possible. It gets so much faster time to value if you can hire somebody that's already worked for you before 'cause you don't have to do the dance. It's like dating.

It's like we've already been on several dates, even if we haven't dated in a while, we don't have to re-get to know each other. We can just get to what we need to get into now. Also, if you don't know somebody for a role, I'm always tapping other people or other CMOs. I'm in a CMO community.

I just posted there yesterday. I was like, I have six roles to hire and I immediately, you get the support. The other reason why I like that approach with networking is you never know when you're gonna need the network for your own person. So give back, get back.

That's how I see it. So the first thing when I'm doing hiring is I try to do as much networking as possible. Second thing that I'm really focused on once I have the candidates in place is I think there's a tremendous amount of talent out there, and in today's market, unfortunately, the talent pool is actually fairly deep. So you're gonna get people that have the experience, the hard skills.

My shift has now been from the beginning is the soft skills, is the culture fit. Is this person going to grow with us? Is this company going to give this individual what they need for their own career path? I think that's really important, too, is don't just be selfish in a hiring cycle.

Also think about, is this person gonna get what they need from you? Because if they don't, guess what, they leave. Yeah, good point. I'm really looking for and how do I look for that?

There's just, I do a lot of situational questioning in my interview. "Tell me about a time..." " If I was to reach out to your former manager, what would they say is your best quality?" You gotta put it in context so people are thinking outside of themselves, and also, see are they able to present themselves in a way where they're really connecting, they're not just checking the box in an interview, they're actually giving you real world examples?

There's something that I always do in every interview, which is I say, tell me about a time, it depends on the level. If they're a manager, I'll ask it differently versus an individual contributor. But I always ask a situational question about a time that they had a difficulty with another person or managing somebody or had to give somebody difficult feedback or had a clash with somebody during a project. 'Cause we've all had it.

And why do I ask that? 'Cause I'm looking for self-awareness. I'm looking for honesty. Nobody is perfect.

We've all had a situation where we're like, I would've handled that totally different. Yeah. But if you're like, oh no, I'm perfect, I'd be a little wary of that. So I really look for a high degree of self-awareness.

Those people are more coachable. They're more moldable. And honestly, they grow with you faster. That's interesting.

Yeah, I have a friend who said to me once, if you're pointing at somebody, you have three fingers pointing back at yourself. So you're looking for those three fingers pointing back at yourself more than the, "oh, it was their fault." Yeah, you gotta really listen to what the person is saying and read between the lines. I've definitely interviewed people before where it was like, oh yeah, well this project couldn't get off the ground because they weren't aligned over here and they weren't aligned over here.

It was what you just described. I'm like, and you bear no responsibility in this project? There's no, you know, no reflection? Hmm.

There's always reflection. There's always something that somebody could have done differently. Do you push for that reflection? Do you give them the chance to recraft their answer once they know that you're looking for some self-awareness?

No. Okay. No, because I don't wanna lead the witness. Yeah.

Yeah. And really, I still make hiring mistakes, so let's just get that out there. I'm not a perfect hire-er and sometimes these things just happen no matter how many interviews you've done. I think if you lead the witness, a smart enough interviewee will figure out how to tell you what you want to hear.

We've all had those people. We've all had those people who told us what we wanted to hear, and we fell for it, and they got in the organization, and it just wasn't a fit. That's why I've tried to - and again, I still get fooled once in a while. It's not a big deal.

My advice on the other end of that is move just as fast as you did to hire as to move on. Yeah. I don't mean that in a you should just fire people immediately. Give people the chance to grow and prove themselves, but I think a lot of us as leaders just know in our bones when something isn't a fit.

That's the other thing I would say in hiring, trust your gut, don't force it. Sometimes we get frustrated 'cause we're maybe not finding the right fit. And I know I said earlier, every day that goes by when we don't have the person is detrimental, but it sets you back even further if you do make the wrong hire and lead them and seed too long. So always trust your instincts.

Yeah. Got it. Now a lot of marketing teams are hiring freelancers a little bit more, people who are micro-experts in - Guilty. - experts in certain things.

Do you? Okay. [They laugh]. Guilty - I mean, it's not a bad thing.

I think it's fine. I'm wondering, do you have the same kind of bar for them as you do for full-time people, given that, they can have an impact? Like you were talking about this mentorship experience early on, and it had to do with this consultant who was in the organization who was probably a freelancer on steroids. So any thoughts on that?

Yes. So yes, I hire freelancers. Totally depends on the need and where we're at in a project or if I wanted to just be something that I need quick versus long term. I would say for me, I've categorized freelancers and consultants into two different buckets.

There's more of the kind of, we're bringing you in to do a project for three months. It has a start point, it has an end point. We don't really need you to operate as an integrated team member. Versus we're bringing you on, you're kind of here full time.

You're in our Slack channel. You're showing up to the team meetings. You're acting as one of us, even though you're a freelancer. So I just wanna get that out there that first, I have two different schools of thought on that.

On the first one where you're more project basis and you're not gonna interact with as many people, I am less rigid on interviewing them in a true interview style and think if they're a fit with the team because they're just not gonna have as much interaction. More it's like can you do the project? Is the price right? Are you available?

Check, check, check. Good. And that being said, I always, again, try to tap my network for those people. 'Cause we can just go faster.

With the freelancers that are acting more as an integrated member of team and might even be in a potential temp to perm situation, absolutely. We will do an interview cycle. It'll be a little lighter and faster, but they still need to meet a couple of people. I'm still encouraging similar question sets asked.

Because ultimately, and like right now I would say most of our freelancers are more in our creative and design team. That was really important to me because I needed people who could get in here and operate as one of that team and be really attached to the brand. So how they thought about brand and approach to that was highly important, even though they're just freelancers. Thank you.

That's helpful. Now, you've been through various processes of finding your roles. I'm wondering if you could step outta that a little bit and maybe think about CEOs who have failed at hiring CMOs in the past. What would be your advice to them?

I imagine there's something around alignment with the CMO candidates and such, but is there anything else? Let's define failure. Like they made the hire and then it just didn't work out? They were never able to make a decision?

All of the above? Let's say, well, any of the above, but, you know, a mishire. We have so many people where it's like, oh wow, I had this person, they were here for six months and I realized they were the wrong fit. Maybe they had the wrong emphasis in their skillset, or sometimes it's a cultural thing.

But you're right, sometimes a CEO will throw up their hands and be like, oh, sorry, I'll just work with what I have 'cause I can't quite find this person yet, or they'll call me up, but whatever. I have lived through it. It does happen. Don't take it personal [Ashley chuckles].

But if I look back on the times that we definitely weren't aligned and it just didn't last that long, there's a few qualities that I recall. And this is not singling out anyone, it's actually I've seen this quality in multiple kind of failed CMO hires. One is that I think, and this is true for any role, but especially with marketing, if you're hiring somebody to run the department, let them run the department. You did hire this person for a reason.

Yes, you do need to be aligned on where you're going to be focused and where you're gonna be spending the marketing dollars. That goes back to everything I was saying earlier about getting aligned super early, even in the interview process. But if you do that and you still are not relinquishing control and letting them run things and sticking your hand in it every other day, it's not an enjoyable experience for a marketer, but honestly, for anybody. I don't think anybody wants to be micromanaged like that at their job.

I have talked to a number of CMOs who have experienced this, maybe more so with first or second time growth stage CEOs. I think for some it's really difficult because when you don't, just because you don't understand something doesn't mean that it's wrong. So I think that's the next thing I wanna say is let's make sure that there's alignment on what does success look like? And if you as a CMO or marketing leader, whatever title you have, don't necessarily think that those are the right outcomes to be measured on, challenge it, but be ready to explain why.

Also, I don't think that enough marketing leaders also gain board alignment early enough. And to me, this is a personal red flag. If I'm not exposed to at least one board member in an interview process, I would definitely... Maybe not a red flag, but a pink flag.

[Ashley laughs] I would be concerned about that. The board is the CEO's boss. If there's a board in the situation, most of us are dealing with that type of role. You wanna understand what their mindset is.

What do they care about? What are they looking for? Do they care about marketing? Do they not care about marketing?

That's the last thing, I think, that a CEO needs to really think about the relationship that the organization and the culture around marketing that they desire. Because I've seen and lived through many situations where it's like, oh, well yeah, we gotta have marketing, but "gotta have" versus we need to embrace and make this core to our go-to-market. Marketing is part of go-to-market. It's literally in the title [Ashley laughs].

And really having an understanding of that definition. I'll give a bonus one. What tends to happen is that a head of sales is almost always, not always, but I think you would agree with this, hired before the head of marketing. Yep.

Okay, fine. And sometimes at the same time. That relationship has to be solid from the beginning. You cannot have sales and marketing leaders who don't align and don't get along, and, frankly, don't have just like, fun together.

We're out here selling software. We're not saving lives. I do think that's a really critical piece that the CEO needs to make sure those two people are one. I often say to people marketing is not a request box.

We're not like, please put all of your suggestions here, and then we'll just pull 'em out one by one and go execute them. That's not to say that we're not open to ideas and collaboration, but I've seen too many CEOs think of marketing as just they are there to get done what we think are the right things to get done. That's why I say about let them do their job, like, let them cook. Give them a chance to fail before you stop them in their tracks.

That is such an important thing. Also, marketing does not happen overnight. Yes, there are definitely things that can be dialed up and turned on fast. If your CMO is sitting around doing nothing for ninety days, that's a problem.

I'm not saying that just get carte blanche, but it's not like, oh, we applied for one award and suddenly we've got an influx of leads. I think there needs to be more patience applied to the role. Yeah. Yeah.

Great. Thank you. A quick question here. I know you went through this career transition within the last year and when you met with CEOs, did you see any themes around their expectations around AI for marketing leaders?

I'm starting to see people be like, oh, I want somebody with an AI first marketing acumen, or AI fluency. Whether they are or not is a different thing. But did you find that, and anything you could say about that? For me personally, actually, no.

That topic didn't come up for me a lot. I think the topics that came up more for me with regards to that, there's still just a lot of how do you scale marketing? Which then was an opportunity for me to talk about AI as part of that process rather than vice versa. So, it all connects back to we know that marketing budgets are pretty much permanently shrunk into a different state for the majority of the organization.

The questions that I got were more like, how would you apply these dollars? How are you going to scale this? We have big goals. How are we gonna get there faster?

Then that's an opportunity for me to talk about appropriately where AI can come into the picture. I'm not advocating for AI to replace anybody's jobs, but more to augment them. I use the example of when I didn't have a BDR function, I stood up some AI infused outbound BDR motions, but a human being still had to step in. Then I realized that even if I have a BDR function with humans, which thankfully I do now, that's just gonna be their little sidekick and support tool.

But now we don't need teams anymore of forty BDRs picking up the phone calling every day. So those are more of the examples where that topic came into play. Got it. Great.

Thank you. My final question for you, 'cause I know we're running out of time. This season we're looking at how SaaS marketing orgs are changing in both seismic and subtle ways. And in one sentence, how would you describe that?

You could pick something seismic or something subtle or something both. Hmm, this is a good one. I think this is a seismic one. For the first time in a long time, more and more are moving towards a structure where they're referring to anybody who is responsible in the go-to-market as part of the revenue team.

So the lines are, in a good way, getting blurred. And I say this from experience at Marigold. We think of product and marketing and customer success and sales and operations as one unit, and we are all referred to as the revenue team, which I'm really grateful for because I think that it's very true. I'd love to see more organizations move to blending those together, of course, with their distinct leaders under each function.

I saw that at my last organization as well. Great. Thank you. This has been fabulous.

Thank you so much for joining the show, Ashley. It's great to chat with you. It was great to chat with you too. Thanks, Erica.

That was Ashley Deibert, CMO at Marigold. 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.