Sequoia

Ace Marketer Lauren Vaccarello & Peak XV’s Pieter Kemps on the Art of Brand Storytelling

Lauren Vaccarello, Chief Marketing Officer at WEKA, chats with Peak XV’s Pieter Kemps about her results-driven approach to marketing, digital campaigns, and brand storytelling. Drawing on her extensive experience at global enterprises like Salesforce, Lauren talks about how companies can create brand narratives, hiring strategies, and leverage AI as a resource. She discusses the right time to announce a new product, setting monumental goals, and how to achieve them. This conversation was recorded during our Surge 09 US immersion in February 2024.

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TRANSCRIPT

Pieter: Actually, maybe before we go into more specific topics, maybe share a bit about your journey from those early days at Salesforce as well as the different aspects of marketing and how you developed in a way as a marketing leader. 

Lauren: I started off in digital marketing before it was a socially acceptable profession. I first got into digital in 2002 to 2003. It was such a different world and I really fell into marketing as this idea of how do I make money? It seemed so basic that I was in digital, I was also a salesperson on Wall Street, all at the same time, and like, how to pick up the phone and call leads, and then I was also running their digital marketing and I realized that some leads were better than others. And if I could figure out how to identify better leads and route them to myself, I would hit my numbers faster. And this was before lead routing, this was before lead scoring. And I pieced together this weird system, figured out tracking, I got myself better leads, I would hit my number with less time and it allowed me to do both of these. It was a really weird start.

And then I eventually started my own company. The global financial crisis hit, didn’t work out so well and I ended up at Salesforce and it was a totally different sort of trajectory. 

From performance to brand marketing [01:18]

And I joined as this hardcore performance marketer, “Give me a dollar. I’ll give you $14 back. This is what I’m going to do.” A very myopic way of thinking. And I had this great reputation and my whole team did for: “If there’s a new innovation, if something new is coming out, we will be the team that tries it, that tests it, that figures it out. We’re not going to force you to give us more headcount. We’re not going to force you to give us more budget. We’ll make it work. And when we do, then we’ll ask for it. And if we don’t, no harm, no foul.” 

And then one day I got a call and he said, “Hi, so we just bought an ad in the Wall Street Journal.” And it wasn’t an ad, it was the front page, print edition, Wall Street Journal, every Monday, there’s one ad, and Lauren, you are now in charge of that. And you now have to build out – and by the way, it’s for two years – so you now have to run this two year Wall Street Journal campaign. And it’s going to cost us $7 million a year.” And at the time I’m like, “I don’t have that much money. I am running all of the pipelines for marketing in the Salesforce. And I don’t have that much money. I have a number and a target on my back that I would kill for that budget. 

Like, “Why do I have to do this if they would just give me the $7 million? What I can do with that $7 million, and this is how I can make them back $15 million just by them giving me seven!” And every week I had to figure out what creative and what to put in this print edition 

Pieter: That sounds more like brand marketing.

Lauren: They gave the digital marketer who is in charge of performance and the pipeline number for marketing their first brand campaign. And I learned that if I do this to tell a story and if I… and Marc’s (Benioff) idea was [that] CEOs read the Wall Street Journal and every Monday when they get this, they’re going to see our ad.

So I sat and went, “What do I want them to know?” And every single week I would do a different ad and a different message. And it was a great way to get favors from other people in the company, because I’m like, “I’ll give you a Wall Street Journal ad, but you’re going to owe me a favor.” 

And so we built this whole year-long narrative. And after two years of doing this, the whole perception of Salesforce changed. It went from being the thing that your sales team bought that like your AEs (account executives) use, but it’s not strategic to one of the most strategic decisions that every company was making. Over the course of those two years, it became a CEO-level decision. It became a board conversation. And it wasn’t just the Wall Street Journal ad, lots of other things were happening, but doing that taught me two things. 

First of all, Marc is always right, whether you like it or not. And the second thing was like, you have to think bigger. You have to think further out. If all I did was take that $7 million a year and put it into demand, Salesforce would have done really well, but instead we opened up a bigger category. We opened up a bigger market and a bigger perception of Salesforce that has paid back hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade. 

So that is what got me out of being this like dollar-in, dollar-out marketer to really having this take of this convergence of demand and performance, and brand and positioning. As marketing leaders, we need to think five years out, we need to have a perspective on where the world is going, and then everything we need to do needs to build up to that so that in three years you haven’t dried the well, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to hit demand goals.

It’s going to be a lot easier for you to hit growth targets. So that was the big Salesforce piece. And then I ended up leaving, going running marketing at startups. I’ve done category creation and category development. I’ve worked in infrastructure software specifically because I was like, I think this application layer is getting a little bit too easy, let me do something I fundamentally don’t understand, which was like dev infrastructure and middleware and let me go and learn something I don’t know. And I went and did that and I learned [while] doing that if we can change perception of a company and go from a technical sale to a value-based sale, I can increase ACV (annual contract value), I can increase deal size. And that’s a lot easier than trying to get a faster flywheel.

Pieter: Was that similar to what you saw in Salesforce where as a performance  marketer, you may be selling features to sales leaders, CEOs on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. 

On marketing as an artform [06:00]

Lauren: Completely. And it was that same red thread that pulled all the way through. And then when I was at Salesloft, most recently, when I joined, they had this perception of being the happy Number 2. “You know what? They’re really nice people. They’re good at being Number 2.” 

And I joined and went, “Is the product worse?” They said, “No, why?” And I was like, “Then why are you so satisfied with being Number 2?” They’re like, “It’s because we run a really good business.” I went, ‘No, no!”

Pieter: You were trained by Marc Benioff, “Always be better!” 

Lauren: Exactly. There’s no Number 2. If we’re worse, then I have to work harder to not be Number 2. And we gave everyone this mojo and said, “Okay, we’re not going to… if you think you’re Number 2, the best you will be is Number 2. If you think you were Number 1, you have a real shot.” And we did this massive internal sort of change on our own internal perception, how we showed up in the market anytime we talked to analysts. 

And it is the…. you approach these things as an art form. And my little bit of high school theater training then came into good use as we basically trained everyone in every analyst call. So if you ever talk to analysts, don’t wing it. If you ever do a demo, it is like you were playing poker, and you were… think of it as a performance and you’re playing poker. Everything needs to be scripted. And when I say you were playing poker, when you talked to analysts, it’s not your hand. You need to think of who else you’re fighting against and what they might be saying to analysts and what their strengths are and their weaknesses are. 

Pieter: And you’re talking [about] Gartner, Forrester….

Lauren: Gartners, Forresters of the world. So when you’re talking to them. You’re dropping little bombs for who else they’re talking to. If you know they don’t demo live, you make sure you demo live, and you say it and you show it. So when they go and talk to your competitor and they go, “Is this live?” And they say, “Oh, no, it’s pre-recorded.” So we did a lot of that. 

And then on the side, I do a bunch of marketing-advising and CEO-advising. I joined my first board of directors four years, three and a half years ago, which we were talking about is a totally different take on the world and being able to sit on the side of the operator and then sit on the side of the investor and how I have to think about the world in both places.

Oh! One other thing backwards, I also spent two years sitting in post sales. And giving a marketer the opportunity to sit in post sales, I always refer to as my penance for being a marketer for 20 years is because I had to deal with all of the problems that I created when I owned a customer retention number.

And I learned very deeply, whatever you promise, whether it is an ad on the internet or the sales pitch, when they’re a customer, someone has to deliver on that. And if you don’t connect your message in the market with what your delivery team says and does, you are just opening yourself up to a massive turn issue. And I spent two years fixing that problem that a past version of myself had created.

Pieter: We see it a lot where companies create a certain narrative or a certain pitch in the market. But if the product and if the delivery doesn’t stack up, then ultimately in the market you will quickly lose credibility and you obviously will lose your customers.

Pain points to powerful narratives [09:26]

But let’s double click on a couple of [things]. It’s interesting that if I hear your story around your career: the performance marketer, and then the brand and more long term perspective, they seem to have some tension, but then also go hand in hand. 

And what are you seeing in your work with early-stage companies, where one of the things we’re seeing is: We see a lot of folks here with amazing products and the ability to articulate that, the ability to tie it out to bigger market shifts and to business outcomes, etc, remains very hard. Like when you advise startups, which I think you’re doing as well on specifically that topic, like how do you deal with that. And how do you take some of the lessons you’ve learned from the bigger guys?

Lauren: If you start and you lead with “This is why my product is so amazing and it does this thing, this thing and this thing,” they might care, but you’re only ever gonna get this much of the pie. A couple of basic principles: No one cares about you, they care about themselves. So what do they care about? What value, what problem are they trying to solve? And how is what you were doing solving a real, material problem for them? So one of the things everyone who has ever worked in marketing at Salesforce will reference this, and we used to call it the ‘crack slide’. This happened, this happened, this happened, the world has existed this way. There is this big disconnect between you and your customer, the way the world is and the way the world is going. And now we are getting to the other side and we’re getting to the other side. And this is how we are going to solve a problem you didn’t even know you had. And it is the Salesforce crack and the storytelling. 

So you built a product for a reason. You saw a need in the market and you saw a customer’s pain. You did the hardest part, which was building the product. Now you need to tell the story of why did I do this, why does this matter. There was this massive issue and challenge and problem. And I get it, I’m one of you. I see this, but you know what, it’s only going to get worse. Create that little bit of fear, create that little bit of uncertainty, and make them a little nervous, “Oh by the way, your problem is going to get so much worse, but don’t worry, we can solve your problem for you, and this is how we’re going to solve your problem for you.”

And then you back it up, because a lot of what I get, especially when working with companies in the dev spaces, that all sounds like fluffy marketing talk, so you have to do that. [The] problem gets bigger, we’re the solution. And then you back it up with a couple of data points. And you know what, this company solved that, and this is what happened and this is the benefit to them.

And then, here’s this other thing. And then this is where the customer proof or a data proof point is. And that becomes your narrative and the why. 

A lot of companies hate selling ahead. “My product does exactly this. My product does these five things and I will only talk about these five things.” What’s on your roadmap? These 15 other things. Are those 15 other things gonna happen in the next year? Yeah. Are they part of a bigger vision? What bigger vision are they part of? Why are you selling? Talk about that. People buy for the future. They buy for inspiration. People spend more money when they believe in the bigger future, the bigger world.

Pieter: And this is one of the bigger stuff that came up earlier. And you just mentioned there’s a problem and then the problem gets bigger. I think what Marc did and others do is not just “There’s this problem.” But there’s this old game and this new game, and it moved from this world to that world, and when you explain that new world, it has to be done in such a way that you don’t have to convince them, but they’re like gosh, yeah, it’s totally true. But no one has articulated as well. But thank you. And then if you then start positioning your category against it, it’s not just what you currently have but what that bigger vision is and you have to be upfront about that, ”Hey, some of that’s still in roadmap, but like still…”

The right time to market a product [13:19]

Lauren: Exactly. If it’s going to come out within a year, I’m okay. Talking about it two years out, like this is a crystal ball. We don’t know… If it’s going to come out next month, there should be no hesitation in talking about it – somewhere between the six month and 12 month is usually where people become comfortable selling ahead.

Pieter: Unfortunately for a lot of folks, when they think about marketing, they think about performance marketing. And I think in consumer or in social or in D2C (direct-to-consumer), etc., that is a very large part of it. I think in B2B (business to business) it’s a bit different. And so I actually had not wanted to talk about it, but since you’ve written books about it, I have to ask you about it, but specifically in those more B2B environments and more whether it’s a Salesloft, for example, there’s other companies in here that have similar sales motions, I’ve seen companies get to a 100 million ARR (annual recurring revenue) in enterprise sales without, with rarely any performance marketing, and they find other ways to build top of funnel. What’s your view? What have you seen to work? Because if you… there’s reality or perception you tell me, but there’s this idea that, when you get into performance marketing, it only makes sense when you, specifically in a market like the US, when you’re throwing millions and millions at it. Is that the smartest way? Are there certain hacks that you can do? Any thoughts around that, specifically that B2B environment?

Brand marketing 101: How to optimize resources [14:38]

Lauren: So the core principle that I will always sort of push people on is to make sure your website works. Your website tells your story. Clear messaging, clear positioning. There’s some basics on conversion optimization. If you have a website with a form on it, if you have a website where a lead capture is important, make sure it is easy to find that form. Make sure there’re CTAs (call to action) that are really clear and front and center. I am advising a company right now that is doing very well and I was like, it would be awesome if you put a CTA on the homepage. You have, I’ve just paid for myself, put a CTA on the homepage. Because you miss some of the basic things. Basic SEO (search engine optimization), so it’s the things that you’ll spend a little bit of time and money on, and attention up front, but it’s not going to be a huge dollar cost. 

The reason I always tell everyone to nail this: Your website is your capture for everything else. It is your storefront. It is how people will learn about you. So get this right, make it easy to understand your product, make it compelling. Again, if you have a product that is a visual product, a little animated GIF on the website that just shows people an insight into it, it’s great. There’s also some really good tech out there right now that lets you do live interactive demos that you can put on your website or you can send out in scale, let people try it and see it and get in there.

From a paid acquisition standpoint, it depends on your industry, what you’re doing. I tell everyone to go in and try things out. Try out AdWords. It may work for you, it may not. Give it a try. Social is still really good for most places.

Pieter: Some people, if I may interject, some people specifically in B2B say that the lookalike cohorts on LinkedIn, where they can get really specific in terms of the buyer. I’ve heard people say it works wonders for them. I’ve heard people say it didn’t work at all. What have you seen?

Lauren: There’s such amazing targeting on the internet right now. You can figure out my exact target audience are these 5,000 companies. It’s these five personas in these 5,000 companies. So it’s these 25,000 people. This is who my audience is. I’m going to get in front of them. I’m going to know every possible thing about them. I can target the heck out of them. And then you use the exact same generic content. And I was like, it’s so great that we all have access to amazing targeting. And then we use completely generic content. So you’re going to leave money on the table doing that. 

It is hard to personalize content to this scale that we all want. The good thing about how fast the market’s moving right now, there’s some really great tech out there that will take your core content, with gen AI (generative). We’ll say you’re going after a CFO (chief financial officer), CRO (chief revenue officer), CMO (chief marketing officer) persona. Give me the core content and the AI will spit out personalization across these three different personas. 

Do not use exactly what the AI says because it’s not perfect. Then have a person go through and clean it up, but it’ll get you there faster. So having that degree of personalization is so critical right now.

[In] some industries, I’m also seeing there are some specific personas or industries where LinkedIn is really popular and you’ve got a decent amount of LinkedIn influencers. Try building relationships with those people and getting them to start posting about you and selling for you. 

I did one sort of non-marketing tidbit that I talked to a founder about recently that I loved that he did this and thought it was like the coolest thing. He met with 400 customers last year, not 400 prospects last year. And he’s like, I need to, super early stage, he’s like “I need to really understand this. So I met with 400 prospects last year.” And how he ended up doing it: He’s like “I wrote this like script on LinkedIn and I look at who the target audience is and I sent them a note. And I was like, “Hey, this is my name. I used to be in your same position. I saw this problem. And I started this company and here’s a little bit about me and a little bit about my story. I would love to get your feedback on what I’m building. Am I doing this right? I would love your feedback. Am I doing this the right way?”

Pieter: Very non-salesy, non-threatening, pure, like asking for feedback.

Lauren: He had meetings with C-levels at Intuit and they are a sub five million ARR company, and he’s like, “We’re not going to sell it to Intuit right now, but I’m building this relationship and I have this.” And it’s been incredible! And now we’re like, okay, how do we scale this, because this is working really well.

Pieter: Changing course a bit. We talked about the branding and positioning a bit, performance marketing, top of the funnel. Specifically in B2B, there’s a lot of focus these days and you were in Salesloft and so anything sales tech, anything like account-based marketing what have you seen there? And should folks think about account-based marketing only from targeting and segmentation or also from a bigger role during the sales process or what have you seen there?

Using account-based marketing to drive goals [19:58]

Lauren: Where account-based marketing works really well is it can force alignment between sales and marketing. If you are selling to SMB (small and medium-sized business) mid-market, it’s probably less important… Maybe you’ll use it as sort of, “Hey, we’re going after this industry, this persona.” But if you can work with sales, if you were selling to the enterprise, you have bigger deals and you identify, “Here’s a hundred accounts. Here’s a thousand accounts to go after.” It provides a large degree of focus within the organization and then marketing and sales can go after them together. 

Marketing, again with some of the targeting on LinkedIn and other places through a ton of content marketing as well, you can start to really build that air cover, get these specific people to know who you are, know why you matter and to get excited about you. And then it makes it so much easier for sales to go in and start to make it a lot easier for them to get deals. 

Again, there’s some really good sales tech out there right now. What’s coming out with gen AI is so good. Because you have these companies that you can go in and say, “Roughly, this is what I think my target companies are.” They will come back. They’ll look at intent. They’ll look at changes in job title. Then they’ll overlay that with potential persona data for you. Then they’ll split up, spit out a target account list with individual personas in those accounts that could be interested in your product right now. And then you can build automations and automated personalized email outreaches to these people.

And it is the work that used to take weeks and weeks and months to put together that you can now do in a couple of days.

How to align marketing & sales teams [21:41]

Pieter: Maybe double click on one aspect of that, because we can talk a lot about sales tech and we can talk a lot about marketing, but ultimately you’re trying to drive sales and you just mentioned as part of ABM (account-based marketing) it drives alignment in sales and marketing. And that is important because it’s often not very aligned and there’s often friction between the two. What have you seen there? And maybe specifically again, in some of the… not just the later stage company you’ve worked in, but the early stage companies, how can you drive? 

Like when we talk and we talk with companies here, we often talk about your go-to-market engine and then it will define what that means, but basically it includes marketing and your sales and they have to work in unison, but often they don’t. 

Lauren: A 100%.

Pieter: Any tips there or best practices you’ve seen? To force that alignment in a way.

Lauren: Shared goals. Having the same number, the same shared goals are going to be critical. And what I have seen too many times is, and this will be a soapbox I will not torture you all with. Marketing will be metriced on how many marketing qualified leads do you have? And then sales is looking at revenue and marketing is, “Oh my God, I hit my lead number.” And sales is, “We missed our revenue target by 30%.” Or you have the reverse where sales is, “I hit my revenue number, but marketing, you screwed up and you didn’t hit your lead target.” And you’re like, “Didn’t we all win? We just hit revenue?” 

So first of all, your marketing team should never ever be measured. Their ultimate success net metric should never be marketing qualified leads. I will rant about that. I’ve been literally ranting about that for 20 years. Minimum focusing on pipeline. A simple nuance that a lot of companies miss is when marketing talks about pipeline and sales talks about pipeline. Marketing will be talking about the pipeline that is being created and sales will be talking about the pipeline that is being closed. That difference is what causes a ton of friction.

So when they’re talking about it, just have that nuance of created pipeline, closed pipeline. It’ll make communication so much easier. Otherwise, it may take you literally nine months to realize you’re not talking about the same type of pipeline. One is creation and one is closer to revenue. Share metrics and then also have it as if you hit your revenue number, everybody gets to celebrate.

Something that I’ve done, which is a little bit controversial, but it worked: I had field marketers that were aligned with RVPs (regional vice presidents) and sales, and the sales RVPs are all compensated on revenue and commissions and the field marketers have to be aligned with them. They will think about two quarters out: Do you have a pipeline? Are you closing? They are so in the weeds with numbers. But they weren’t bonused on any of the successes around that. So I would end up spiffing my field marketers on revenue for their territories. 

Pieter: Spiffing?

Lauren: So I would give them, “If you hit special incentives they should be… So if you, if your territory hits their revenue target, I will give you $10,000.” And they’re like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yep! You will get 10,000 if you hit the revenue target.” And that it’s not my goal to hit revenue, it’s the salesperson’s goal. My goal is to hit the pipeline. That all goes away when they can make $10,000. And then they will do whatever it takes. Which is, I will help find leads. I will work with the sellers to make sure deals close. And part of really good enterprise marketers, don’t just think about how to give you a qualified lead that hits the pipeline, I will set up opportunities to help you close that deal, to move that deal along the funnel.

Pieter: Yeah, I was catching up with having dinner with the CMO recently and they had a whole, they had a breakout year last year when many SaaS companies were struggling. And so we asked what contributed to that? And one of the things they mentioned, two things, one, which comes to the shared objective when she joined 7% of net new ARR was coming from marketing and then for years it stuck at 30%. 

And now after actually two years of investing in brand and more, overall awareness, they hit 50%. And so 50% of net new ARR came not just marketing influencer support, but directly. And the fact that she talked about that goal, not MQLs (marketing qualified leads), but it ties into what you said, like it’s a shared objective.

But then they set up this whole project about what they call deal acceleration, where they basically said, “Hey, like ABM is not just about top of funnel and getting leads”, but once, they were in a very competitive process, they would actually map out 10 to 15 influencers, buyers in the buyer organization, and start marketing, not just the 25,000, but these 15 people so that they appeared bigger and mightier and more powerful and more ubiquitous than what they actually were. So it was like, “Should we buy this small company?” “No. They look huge.”

Lauren: A 100%. And that’s what I love about especially if you’re going after open deals, It’s not an infinite universe. It’s not that much money to do this. And the other people that you target are the ones you don’t always think about, procurement, legal. The people who have the power of no, or the power of… 

Pieter: The veto teams we call them. 

Lauren: The veto teams. And you do a little bit with the veto teams. It’s a great strategy, it is not that much money. 

One other thing, which is my slightly controversial thing, is sometimes internally like the mojo is not quite there. Maybe the sales team has had a rough couple of quarters. There’s this school of thought of like when you do advertising, you always block employees, like block employees. You don’t want to waste money on employees. I love spending a little bit of money with my online advertising-hitting employees because if you’re salespeople, see you all over the internet. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, I work for such a cool company. Look at how great we are!” And you’re like, “Exactly. Now get on the phone.” So I will always put a little extra there. 

The other ones that I’ll do if we’re thinking about targeting creatively, press and analysts, and I will do specific custom audiences on reporters, key reporters, key influencers, key analysts. Because I just want to be top of mind. When the journalist writes about somebody, it’s like that inception that I’m in the back of their head. So how do I just make sure I seem a little bigger than I am? I’m omnipresent. I must be spending so much money on advertising. I’m everywhere. And I’m like, “No, I know who you are. And I’m just everywhere in front of you.” 

Pieter: Exactly. That’s the targeting. And again, some of this is more late stage, but I, that same CMO I was chatting with, they mentioned that they’d figured out the G2 algorithms and they knew the criteria and they have a dedicated team of seven people, each been assigned four or five criteria and their entire job is to just score high on that and it’s paying off, right? It’s really interesting. 

On defining your ideal customer profile [29:04]

A quick lightning round. I’ll throw some, I’ll throw some statements at it. You say yes, no, and why and it’s okay to quickly say how you view it, but the first one being defining your ICP (ideal customer profile) should only be done at 10 million ARR scale.

Lauren: Hard no. 

Pieter: Hard no?

Lauren: Hard no. In the very, very beginning, like sub 1 million, have a conceptual idea of who your audience is and sell and see who buys your product. You have 15 customers, 30 customers, you start to get ideas of who your ICP is, it doesn’t need to be set in stone, it doesn’t need to be that way forever, but once you have an idea, go heavy after those people. 

Every minute you don’t spend on your ICP is a minute you could be spending on someone who has the highest likelihood of closure. I will say [that you] review your ICP every six to twelve months when you’re at an early stage because it might have changed or adapted, but know who your audience is. Sub one million dollars, sell to anybody, but you got thirty customers, you should have an idea.

Marketing vs. Sales: Who to hire first? [30:08]

Pieter: Gotcha. Okay. Second, your first marketing hire or you should make your first marketing hire before your first sales hire.

Lauren: No. As an early stage company, the only thing you should care about is building a product and getting sales. I love marketing and I’m a marketer. You don’t need a CMO and that in the beginning, we come later, we’ll be pissed that we came later because we’re strategic and we’re important, but you need the salesperson first.

Pieter: Third, and one topic I’m actually quite passionate about, but we didn’t get to talk about, product marketing – underappreciated in B2B companies.

Lauren: No, product marketing is like the rock star of every marketing department.

Pieter: But if people don’t talk about it, it is underappreciated almost, like we’re under emphasizing.

Lauren: I am… Maybe I’ve just worked everywhere where the product marketing team is like, “Oh my gosh, they’re the greatest team in the world.” 

Pieter: Oh wow, okay.

Lauren: And marketing operations, nobody cares about, but marketing operations is the team behind the scenes.

Pieter: So maybe there’s a bit too much of me in there. Like I mentioned earlier, articulation and positioning, etc., is so strong in the US very often in companies. Maybe it’s because of that.

Lauren: It’s so funny because in all of my experience, the first marketer you hire is a product marketer, like your first marketer, your first marketing leader is a product marketer. With marketing leaders, you have product marketing leaders, you have like performance marketing leaders. And once you have one, your next one tends to flip to the other and flip back and forth. First one’s your product marketing leader. What’s your story? What’s your positioning? Why does this matter? Then you hire the junior performance marketer underneath them. And then eventually you swap the other way, but yeah.I was like, you should always have the product marketers are so important.

Pieter: I know companies that are, where there’s a team of 20 marketers and only a single product marketer.

Lauren: Oh my gosh. For me, that’s insane. I was like… I grew up in this school where it’s like, the product marketer is the hero and then the rest of us are expendable. We’re like, “You guys are replaceable, but the product marketer is a genius.” They are the ones who know the market, the strategy, where everything is going.

Pieter: Any questions from the audience? 

The right time to hire a product marketer [32:14]

Audience: What point do you think that a product marketer should be hired, whether that’s… And what sort of milestones would you look for if you were that person coming in. What sort of indicators would you want to understand about the business before coming in as well?

Lauren: Great question. Ideally, some product-market fit. You have a handful of customers, you start to get that. You’ve got some product-market fit, but you need to figure out repeatability, messaging. You’re getting away from the pure founder-led sale. Then bring in that sort of product marketer who can be more strategic. They’ll do messaging, positioning. Honestly, the early ones have to be good writers also, because at a later stage you can get a product marketer and a writer. Early stage you need a product marketer who also is a writer.

Audience: So just to add to that, would you say then that, that product marketer is more taking that existing, what, what’s working well and then blowing it up and making that work 100x rather than creating a whole thing from scratch?

Lauren: It depends on how good existing messaging is. You have some early-stage companies where you have a founder who is naturally a great storyteller and naturally really good at positioning, or you have a product leader who fits that world. Most companies aren’t that lucky. And then you bring in the product marketer who’s like, “Thank you for this. You have given me some great features to work with.” And then they’ll build the bigger picture.

Audience: Which are the sales tech companies you mentioned? Some names which are doing great work. Would  love to know.

Pieter: Relevance dot AI.

Lauren: Relevance dot AI. There’s another company called Relovo. R-e-l-o-v-o. Super early stage. Love what they’re building. It’s really interesting. And that’s the one that overlays persona based on top. There’s a company Regie AI that does… they’re not in the full BDR (business development representative)-replace, but I think they can be, you should totally talk to them, because they can be interesting, like Salesloft outreach replacement one day. 

There’s another one called Tofu. It’s a marketing tech company where you give them a bunch of your content and they’ll spit out personalizations and customizations on it that I’m just like…. and it’s a local Bay Area company, female founder. I think they’re going to do really great stuff.

How to hire well: The project interview [34:38]

Audience: Thank you for that. Pieter was highlighting that even for early growth stage companies, the product marketing function gets developed later because we partly don’t have a pool of talent in our part of the world. And also the challenge that we face is we don’t know how to interview those folks and figure out who is good, who is not. So maybe how to figure that out and maybe in your experience, which are some of the companies in this part of the world  that we should hire that talent from?

Lauren: Great question. I love the project interview. I don’t know if you do it where you do the regular rounds of interviews, but then at some point, you do a group panel interview where it’s a project and it’s like here’s the prompt and you make them work. 

One of the companies I advise, I also help them hire, I joined the interview panel and it was fascinating seeing the breath of what the candidates were doing and it was like, “What do you think we’re doing well? Evaluate what we have right now and then give us your 30-, 60-, 90-day plan.”

And this one woman in the interview came in and she’s like, “Well, in the first 30 days I did this. I wrote some basic messaging. Here’s the messaging that I wrote for you. Here’s the target audience. Here’s my content plan for all of this. And that was for the first 30 days.” And then she built it out for the next 30 and the next 30. And I was like, “This is an interview. This is actually not a bad plan.” Her messaging is pretty solid. I was like, “You know what? She’s going to get a lot done.” 

And there were other candidates who came in that were stronger in the earlier part, but in their project, everything they walked through was super generic. And I was like, “You know what? This just switched who the leading candidate was.” So do the project interview. It may be ‘give me your first 90-day plan’; it may be based on what you know, ‘give me a high level messaging strategy’ and just know it’s not going to be a 100% correct, just get the directional information.

And then for go-to-market professions, I don’t know where people’s hiring strategy is, just be open to hiring in different locations. Figuring out the time, like the hours you work together is always going to be the hardest part. Trying to think of who has really good messaging right now, it depends on the industry…

Good product marketers, and actually good demand people, don’t need to be experts in an industry. Eventually, as you build out your marketing team, you’ll want a couple of people that are industry experts, and then some people that aren’t. But one of the areas I think people get hung up in is, they have to be an expert in this industry, they have to have a high ceiling, they have to be able to learn quickly. If you think they can learn quickly and they’re technical enough for your product offering, I’m okay with hiring outside of industry.

How to achieve monumental goals [37:47]

Audience: You talked about how Marc gave you a goal that you believed couldn’t achieve and then you did it, right? What does it take? What’s the process and what’s the culture, what’s the switch that allows a team to be able to achieve a goal that seemingly at the beginning is impossible.

Lauren: Great question. So I’ll tell you the example that I always think of. So years ago,  one of the things that I ran was like demand for Dreamforce and how many people had to register. And we had normal targets at one point in time. And we went from 30,000 to 40,000, so that’s a 30% increase. So we finished with 40,000 registrants. And the next year Marc goes on earnings and says, “We’re going to get 100,000 people at Dreamforce.” 

And every single one of us went, “No. No. We don’t have the budget to do this. We don’t have a place to put these people. We can’t do this. That is ridiculous. No.” And then we went to George (Hu) who was the COO at the time, who eventually was a COO at Twilio, and we’re like, “George please, please, please, reason with this man. We cannot do that. I don’t have the budget. We can’t feed these people. They don’t have space. Please, please, please go reason with this man. You’re the only person he’ll listen to.” 

And George goes and he talks to Marc and he comes back to us and he’s like, “All right, I talked to Marc. He’s willing to reduce it to 90,000.” And you know what we all did? We’re like, “Oh, thank God!” So we all were like, “Okay, that’s a lot better! We can do that.” 

We went in thinking we were going to go from 40,000 to 60,000, which would have been a 50% increase and that would have been a stretch. And because he set it at 100 and backed it to 90, we were like, “Thank you, Marc! Thank you so much. Thank you so much.”

Pieter: Okay, so simple tactics like that, apparently.

Lauren: And then we ended up launching this contest. Oh my gosh! And it was working so well that we were at 92,000 registered and I was like, “Shut everything off! No one talks about Dreamforce, nobody stops because if we hit 100,000, we’re going to have to do 150,000 next year.” 

So we actually ended all of our marketing for Dreamforce like a week early because we were like, “No, we’re not going to hit 100,000. We begged not to do it!” But it was just this culture of we’re all in this together. We can all do this. No one is going to let anybody fail. And then when we had these logical reasons not to do it, and [when the number] was slightly less, we were so grateful. 

So yeah, set goals that are really ridiculous and then be willing to make it slightly less ridiculous. But that’s always…I was like, “We did a lot more than we ever thought we could have done.”

Be bold: The key to memorable brand building [40:44]

Audience: Thanks, Lauren. Some of the Salesforce stories are the stuff of legend with the protests and the taxis and everything. How much of that do you think is productive and the brand building creates results? Like from a startup [perspective], it seems very attractive because you’re not paying for eyeballs. Wondering if you’ve seen like that work and if you’ve carried that through elsewhere.

Lauren: Great question. I worked on the protest campaign. It was so much fun. Honestly, one of the most fun moments of my career was when Marc was supposed to keynote Oracle OpenWorld and I sh*t you not. The night before at four o’clock, whoever ran events for Oracle called us and it was like, “Hey, we’re going to move your keynote until after the conference is over.” 

And, but also culturally as a company, we were the David in the David and Goliath story. And we all believed we were David in David and Goliath. We had a bigger mission and vision and path, and we would not let anybody say no to us and stop us. So when we got that phone call, that’s like, “Hey, we said it got canceled. It moved after it.” A normal company’s response would be like, “I’m going to get my money back.” And our response was like, “That’s not what we’re going to do!” And we all were like, “We have been wronged.” 

So, the design team created posters. We went to the overnight Kinko’s and had all of the posters printed. We got every single person in marketing to go out and protest. We had a supply closet filled with cloud umbrellas and it happened to be raining. So we show up with these umbrellas with our protest signs. We went to the swag closet, threw t-shirts on everybody and every single person in marketing felt empowered to do something. I was running the digital at the time. 

And I was like what are we going to do here? And I had no approval for this. So the other thing is no one had any approval for any of this. No one said, “Hi, excuse me, do you have… can I have a budget for this?” There was no question about any of this. We had no budget, no approvals. And we just went and executed. 

On the digital side I did basically a mobile… I surrounded the entire Moscone Center with digital ads. So if you were within a mile of Moscone on your phone, all you saw were Salesforce ads. And we had that on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Google AdWords. Anytime someone was talking about Oracle OpenWorld, I made sure all they saw was Salesforce. And then we decided to live stream his keynote somewhere else. And he went on the internet and said, “Tomorrow I will be live streaming my keynote at the exact same time.” None of this existed. We all were like, “Now we gotta go figure this out.”

So we called every single restaurant and we’re like, “Can we rent your place out at 10 o’clock in the morning?” until somebody said “yes”. And then we figured out cameras, and we literally did this in, what was it, 16 hours of pulling this off. I had no budget. I literally printed out the ads that I wrote myself, walked over to someone on the PR (public relations) team and I was like, “Can I say this?” And they were like, “Sure.” And I was like, “Could you sign your name on this so I don’t get fired later!” And then I had no money. And then afterwards I went to the CMO and I was like, “I just spent $15,000 on that. Is that okay?” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine.” 

So the thing and the reason I tell that story other than it was just the most fun I’ve had was every single employee felt completely empowered to do this. No one asked permission. No one was like do I have the budget to rent this out? It was like, “We have a mission, we have a singular purpose, and we will align so fast on it.” 

And then the other part of the question, which is as a small company, should you do this? My answer is 100% yes. Not maybe that exact thing. If you’re Box right now, if you are Salesforce right now, if you are Microsoft, you have too much brand equity to lose. There’s too much risk. It’s why people become more conservative the older they get. It’s because they have too much to lose. When you are a startup, what do you have to lose?

Pieter: Be irreverent. 

Lauren: Be irreverent. Make a stand. Have a perspective. Have a perspective – you will get more credibility and weight with a perspective, right. Never say anything offensive. Never be like… don’t say anything illegal. Don’t say anything offensive. Don’t be a bad person. But you have a chance and an opportunity to stand out. And there’s a company in the analytics space that I’m advising that has a totally different perspective on analytics. They’re like, “The way people are doing analytics is wrong. Here’re the things. This is what I think.” And I was like, “That’s great!” And you’re telling this one on one. I was like, “My advice for you is: You think the way everyone is doing this is wrong. Go out and say that. Be big with that. Be bold with that. Tell everybody that they’re wrong because you have nothing to lose right now.” And that’s my advice for everybody here. It’s like now is the time to do it and to make waves and to upset people because one day you will have to partner with the companies you’re fighting against. So fight against them when you still can.

Pieter: Cool. With that, thank you so much. We’re out of time. 

Lauren: Thanks!

This transcript has been edited for clarity.