>> Erica Seidel: Hello and welcome to the get. I'm your host,

Erica Seidel. This season we

focus on the race to reduce risk when it comes to a

match between a company and a cmo.

How can you find out what you need to find out before

saying yes so that you make a match that

sticks? So far this season, we've heard from

several CMOs about how they reduce risk before

saying yes to a role. What's most critical for them to

find out? We've talked about the fears that

companies have, uh, as they embark on a CMO search.

And we've seen a model for how companies and CMO

candidates can collaboratively de risk before

joining forces. We've heard from current CMOs

as well as former CMOs who have gone on

to roles like CEO or Chief Commercial

officer or chief Revenue officer.

Today we'll hear from a former CMO who has been

immersed in hiring, uh, CMOs and enabling

them for more than eight years as an operating

partner at a top investment shop.

I'm happy to have Gary Service join me on the

show. Gary is an operating partner with Insight

Partners. He works across many different

portfolio companies, helping them with hiring marketing

leaders and with getting their go to market engines humming

and bringing in AI to drive impact

not just within marketing, but across the business.

He's in a great spot to recognize patterns across

marketing leaders and across SaaS companies.

He's also former CMO at Syncsort.

I first saw Gary speak at a pavilion event and thought,

ooh, I would love to have him as a guest on the

get.

Gary, welcome.

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

>> Erica Seidel: I'd like to talk with you about before

marketing leaders are hired and then once they are in

the seat, you know, first I will say that listeners on

this show, they either want to have a job like yours, so

many people want to be an operating partner in marketing,

or they want to get hired for a job

where you're involved in the recruiting

process and then you would be a coach for them. So I think your

perspectives are going to be great. You are there

to de risk a hire, and that's the whole theme

of this season, is de risking the CMO

recruiting process. So in your view, how

do recruiting processes for marketing leaders go

wrong in your experience?

>> Gary Service: Well, I think the issue

for many of our portfolio

company leaders, I'm going to call

that the founder, CEO

leader, is

they will go into every

search with a very clear

idea of what they believe the

organization's deficiency is.

Now, sometimes that deficiency in

marketing is based on

a bias of who was ever in that

role previously. I often say

you can't hire your new

person with just a focus on what the

other person didn't do. Well, my example is

you had someone, they were always late to meetings and

that really bothered you. They're always late for meetings. So

gosh, we're going to make sure we hire

someone who absolutely

will not be late. And guess what? They are not late. But you know

what? They don't know how to spell you

so focused on that one thing that they didn't

do that you over rotate

in what the job requirement is.

That's where we can come in and have a

business level discussion based on experience, based on

what we're seeing, based on where that company is in

their growth arc and help right

size, what the requirements are, the

competencies are to help them put that in a good

rank order that not just reflects whatever the

CEO founder sees, but

also what we believe the business needs.

>> Erica Seidel: Got it? Yeah. So this overcorrecting, do you find that the

overcorrecting is often for something interpersonal

or something like. That example you brought up was a little bit more

interpersonal. Has nothing to do with what's on somebody's

resume.

>> Gary Service: It's a solid. It depends on that.

Sometimes a leader is just

annoyed about an interpersonal thing and

it overtakes them. But most

have a good EQ and understand

that they're looking for outcomes.

And most likely the issue

is the organization is not

delivering on particular outcomes

that they feel a change in marketing could

drive.

>> Erica Seidel: Yeah, let me ask you this too. Sometimes

I found with my recruiting of CMOs that you have

a company where they're. To your

point, their previous marketing leader was not performing,

so the bar for them is almost laughably

low. Oh, we need events to be working better

or we just need leads, leads, lead.

When actually marketing could be providing a

lot more value to them. How do

you navigate that? Like uh, do you try to broaden their view

of what marketing can do? And I'm wondering like what you say to get them

to do that.

>> Gary Service: Yeah, I think that's one of our highest value

adds as we engage with

these organizations. I

am lucky to work

in an organization with over 500

portfolio companies. My data

points, signal recognition and

really just understanding of the different combinations

and permutations of organizations

is my value add. And I am,

um, empowered to push back

where others may not against what a

CEO wants. If I've seen

this story before. So my job

is to use examples, you know,

anonymized of organizations that

may have been similar and what they chose to do, the

kind of leader they may have chosen for the

marketing function. Also, I think

there's a general

acceptance that marketing

definitely morphs as organizations grow

and what the need was when an organization was say,

sub $10 million is going to be different from

the journey from 10 to 20 and 20 to

50, et cetera. Again, bringing the

perspective of have you thought about what you might

need at this particular point in the

journey is another way to have the conversation.

I'll tell you what I don't do. What I don't

do is say this kind of person.

Our job is to have a conversation. Our

job is to give information. And by

the way, if the CEO founder says,

hey, I hear what you're saying, but I really want

this, I have to respect that. I

don't work at the company, I advise,

I give data points. I want you to make your

decisions with full information. And so there is

where my role lies.

>> Erica Seidel: Do you find that founder led

companies take a longer or a shorter time

to hire a CMO than non

founder led companies?

>> Gary Service: It depends. I think that

the more experienced the founder is and

you didn't say first time founder

versus multiple

company. I think there's a huge difference between the

first time founder knowing what they

want versus someone who's gone through this before

and seen what was successful for them. I think that's the

bigger determinant. Less so

about founder led versus professional

CEO. I also think there's

plenty of professional CEOs that bring in

baggage from um, previous

interactions that may not be

relevant for the company they're at. Um, the

easiest example of that is you work for a

Fortune 500 company at a certain scale

as a CEO now you're working at a mid sized company

with different resources, different challenges and you may

not fully transferred

your knowledge and therefore you're looking for someone in the

role which ultimately won't be successful because they won't have

the resources or they won't have the, the kind

of ecosystem that you were coming from.

>> Erica Seidel: Yeah, this is so interesting, the whole, you

know, scale thing, but yet I've

also found that not every company's scale journey from say

50 million to a hundred million is the same, right?

>> Gary Service: Absolutely not.

>> Erica Seidel: It's all of this. It depends.

So any other thoughts on what risks

that leadership, uh, teams face when they recruit

CMOs? Are there other risks that come to mind that need to

be addressed?

>> Gary Service: Yeah, I think there's always the risk

of

misinterpreting

what the organization should be

Focusing on. Let me give you an example. There's

always, as you know, this great

philosophical discussion of do I need

a uh, leader that came from product marketing or did I need a leader

who came from demand gen? And why would you choose

that person? Part of that is

what I like to simplify there. And I tell

every CMO I hire,

I'm not saying this is a threat, I'm saying this as

a reality. Deliver on your demand gen

goals or lose your job. Also we can

have a discussion about the beauty and majesty

of all the things that marketing needs to do to

deliver. But in

reality that sausage making

that the CEO and the board probably won't pay

attention to, all they will pay attention

to is what you deliver. I know

the equation is brand plus demand equals

growth. You need to build your brand, you need to

build a efficient, repeatable demand gen

engine and that drives growth.

The issue for many organizations is

over rotating one way or the other. We need a demand

genetic CMO and I'll say

maybe, but I prefer a

CMO who is more of a player

coach. In demand gen. They shouldn't be the

ones doing demand gen. They should be able to know what

questions to ask, to see around corners, to have

experience to get their demand gen team

do what they should do. Equally important

though they need to have good sense

of uh, what the M message and positioning

us to be from a strategic level. So you

need a strategic brain and a tactical

brain and I don't like to compromise on that.

>> Erica Seidel: Yeah, it's interesting because so many companies say oh, what we really need

is leads, leads, leads or ideally they'll say qualified

demand or revenue. Ideally. But then sometimes there's a

conversation of well do you just need a director of demand

gen?

>> Gary Service: Yep.

>> Erica Seidel: Um, just is too strong of a word but you know what I mean

versus that strategery

that you get with somebody who can be that player coach. I

think that's really important.

Can you talk about a really strong B2B

SaaS marketing leadership candidate that interviewed with

you and a particular example of

that person. You don't have to say their name but what did that person do

to stand out?

>> Gary Service: Yeah, so because similar to you,

you do a lot of interviews and

you have a

group of areas uh, of

inquiry that deliver

bits of knowledge along the way.

What I found in the candidates

that have stood out to me, there

are three things that

resonate. The first is

I always want someone

to speak in terms

of strategy and

example. I identified this

opportunity to build out product

marketing because we weren't onboarding our

customers well, that they needed more information about

our product. It's technical, awesome. But

then translate that into numbers and

examples after that. After we did that

and partnered with our CS team,

we saw uh, a 20% increase on

retention around that. I want to see the

connection between what you did and

the impact. Otherwise it

seems like you could be making it up for all I know. I want

to understand how it really works. That's credibility.

The second thing is, uh,

how they function in the

larger org. They will be part of a leadership

team. As I'm sure you know. It's

sometimes the things you don't say as much as the

things you do say. In this particular case,

the people that stand out are the ones that

are talking about their collaboration with their

sales partner or their

product partner in a way that isn't sort

of bolted on but is authentic to how

they collaborate. If I said to you I'm super

collaborative, well, that doesn't mean anything to

me unless you've been giving me examples all

throughout about how you are collaborating and

how you are working with the different folks. And so

first was credibility. Second is

collaboration. The third piece is

a bit harder. How curious you

are, how likely are to

explore you and I could have an existential

discussion about whether or not I need to

hire a cybersecurity marker for a

cybersecurity marketing job. My

thinking is I care about you as a

marketer, less so about your subject

matter expertise as a cybersecurity

marketer. Because if you've proven to

me, and this is to my third point,

curiosity. If you've proven to

me that you're curious, you're

capable of learning businesses and your track

record shows this. I've done this in this industry, this

industry and this industry. You're more valuable

to me than someone who just does cybersecurity

marketing. The organization has plenty of knowledge

in product teams, the CEO, all these

folks that can give you the knowledge of this

business, what to say to CISOs, what not to

say to CISOs. Listen to customers. If you're that

person, that is a differentiator to

me.

>> Erica Seidel: That's great. So you have your three C's. And it's funny, the one about

collaboration and listening to see if

somebody has been talking along the way about a

collaboration with sales or product. Maybe you found this

too. I find that listening to the parentheses

helps a lot. In an interview, what somebody says

parenthetically really matters a lot. I

once interviewed this guy and he had talked

about doing a lot of ghost Writing for

the CEO. And I thought, God, how does that influence

your ego to put somebody else's name on it? And so I asked

him and he was like, no, it's fine. If I was in a band, I'd

be the bassist in the back, just thumping out the beat.

And that was the whole pillar of

him getting the job. Because in that moment that I, uh,

needed somebody who was going to be like that because the CEO was a

strong personality in the world and that was it. And it's

just so funny that it's like this parenthetical thing or to

your point, something that's not there.

>> Gary Service: Parenthetically, I agree. And

again, I think there are many

people that are just incredible interviewers.

They're really strong interviewers. And you need to

be able to have other

tools to break through a solid

interviewer to understand the substance,

the reality of how they

work. I can't say just because someone

doesn't mention collaboration in their

responses that they're not collaborative, but they're more

likely not to be collaborative if they

don't.

>> Erica Seidel: By contrast, is there somebody that flamed out

recently quite spectacularly that

sticks in your head?

>> Gary Service: I'm sure you've heard the analogy. Hiring someone's

like dating. You know, the first date may be great,

second date may be good, but then on the third date

you understand something about them that's, ah, unexpected.

And you're like, nah, I'm not really sure. I think we're

constantly testing our

hypotheses and this is where back channel comes

in. The flame out isn't as much what

they did. It's us

leveraging our back channel. And our back channel is not

who the candidate gives to us. Obviously our back

channel is who we know, who knows

them. You can't do anything about that. That's

just part of the process.

>> Erica Seidel: Fair.

And how about your favorite interview question?

Do you have one that you ask of people?

>> Gary Service: My favorite interview question is actually

around the curiosity thing. I like to

ask people, tell me about something

either in your personal or

professional life that you've recently taught yourself.

If the answer is nothing, or

they haven't really invested in teaching themselves

anything, then, uh, it really

brings me to an idea of how curious you really are if

you're not teaching yourselves new skills all the time.

>> Erica Seidel: Okay, I like that with that. I know that you

have this focus on AI within

marketing and across a business for efficiency and other

purposes. What are you looking for, if anything, with respect

to AI in a CMO candidate at this phase

of the AI Surge.

>> Gary Service: So first of all, one thing I'm not looking for is someone who's done it

before because no one's done it before. It's hard to have experts

in this space because it's a very

muscle. They should have a

perspective. I insist on having a

perspective. That perspective could be,

I'm going to go slow for these

reasons. I'm going to focus in these

areas because I know that's where likely the impact

is. But sometimes I speak to people and they're

like, yeah, I haven't really got around to experimenting much with

AI thing. I know it's going to be important. They're

not probably the best candidate.

>> Erica Seidel: Okay, I like that. So having like a strategic

perspective on it, but

being curious, it goes back to your three

C's a little bit too, right? Curious and collaborative.

Incredible.

>> Gary Service: I think today the best

way to view AI in

marketing is be

ready for iteration.

Lots of going through and inventing and

reinventing because the

technology is leaping in

discontinuous jumps. So with

each new capability comes new

implications for marketing. You can also

be in a position that says, hey, I got

this ChatGPT thing, I'm set.

I think the other part,

and I forgot to mention this as well,

it's critical for me to see that someone

recognizes that AI is

as much a technical thing as a change

management thing. And if they're not signing up for

the change management to help

their teams through this,

then that is either you don't really understand

the implications or you're not a mature enough

manager to really drive, drive the kind

of impact that you should be by leveraging these

tools.

>> Erica Seidel: Think about, okay, so now you've hired a cmo, they're in their new

role. What are the early things that

you think a new CMO should do

within your portfolio to get off on the right foot,

to limit risk right out of the gate?

>> Gary Service: There are several places they can focus

that are important. The first

one is being honest

about the time they need

to form their

hypothesis or beliefs. We

default to 30, 60, 90 day

plans, which is fine, but that is not a

recipe for success. I'd rather you

tell me. I need 60 days

to talk to enough customers, do enough

internal work, travel around the world to understand

the differences so that you are making an

informed decision. I think this is the only

time in a new

CMO's tenure that they will

be afforded the luxury of

time. So if you say you need 60

days, take the 60 days.

That's number one. Number two, the org,

I expect that

the marketing leader that comes into place

is good at evaluating people,

understands how to structure an org

and whether they have the right people in the right

roles. The right people in the wrong roles

are just the wrong people. And

I expect a, uh, plan to move

quickly to do that

because a slow drip of this is bad.

Pull the band aid off, make the changes. Know what you

need to do. I, uh, say this to every

cmo, that

in the end, if you're not

successful because the people below you are not

strong, you have no one to blame but

yourself for not making the changes you know you need to

make. Take your time,

but make decisions pretty quickly

about what you need to do. I will add a little

AI bonus point on this. I'm

encouraging CMOs

today to think about whether

they want to create a BG or an AG

organization before generative or

after generative organization. If you

choose to do the BG organization, recognize

that the responsibilities are going to change, the roles

are going to change. Or are you going to try to

start moving your organization to the

way technology is going to change the

structure? For that reason, I encourage

them to do a little more forward thinking about

what people's roles are really going to be, where you're going to need.

Do you need five creative people? Do

you need as many writers? Do you

need more editors? What do you need? Based on

how this technology is moving, you should have a point of view.

The last thing I want to talk about

is goals. It is

critical for marketers to be

successful that they

put a stake in the sand of what they're going to

accomplish. They show progress against

it and then, God willing, actually

deliver on it. That is what

creates trust and confidence in the organization

about your leadership. If you don't feel

comfortable enough giving the goals and the numbers

and the specifics and showing progress regularly

against that, the board,

and in some cases co, but more likely the board, in the

absence of information, assumes nothing

is happening. So I'm, uh, making this

up. If you have an issue with the

pipeline, show me

how you're making progress on that. Show

me that you put a plan in place. This is where I

expected to be by Q4. Here's where we

are in Q3 and I believe we're going to hit it.

Or be honest and say, I'm not going to hit it. And here's

why. If you delude

people into thinking you got it and then surprise them,

um, that is the surest way to lose trust

and confidence.

>> Erica Seidel: I like that. We'll call that diagnose.

Don't Delude. Because you're looking for somebody to diagnose

the issues and come up with the perspective of

how to fix them. That's great.

>> Gary Service: Part about it is commit. That's the

piece that I would add to it is

diagnose, don't delude,

commit. It's that commit that gives

people confidence that you're willing to put your

name behind it, put your org behind it.

>> Erica Seidel: And then it creates this kind of flywheel of credibility as

you do that.

>> Gary Service: Yeah, that, uh, would be the goal.

>> Erica Seidel: You offer coaching to various CMOs

across all the different companies. Is

there a piece of coaching that's hardest for people to put

into action? Where you said to yourself, I wish

I could get this

coaching into their brains and their actions

more easily.

>> Gary Service: I'll start off by saying in that regard

that among people who want to be

operating partners, the hardest

transition if you're an

operator, is the fact that you aren't working in the

business, that you can't just go in there and do

it. Your job is influencing. Your

job is advising, but it's not

doing. And that's why some people

aspirationally want to be an operating

partner. But maybe that's just not

right for them. It becomes too frustrating. If

every portfolio company took all my advice,

that would be amazing. Never happens.

And there are a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's

skill, sometimes it's will, sometimes

it's that they're just having

a hard time driving impact. I'll, uh,

give an example. There are many examples of this, but

one that is common is

the organizations that were traditionally

doing volume velocity, kind of demand gen,

and then saying, I think we want to move up market, I

think we want to do more account based.

Account based is a says, easy does, hard

thing. It is, oh, yeah, I have a

list of accounts. We've had lists of accounts for eons.

That's not what makes account based. The

hard part of account based is

how you get marketing and sales working together, making sure

you have the right KPIs, figuring out which are the

tactics, planning it out in a longer form.

There's a lot of things that go into making account

based successful. I can do

sessions, we can do workshops, I can give you

frameworks, I can show you how to do it. I can give examples of

companies that have done it. I just can't do it. And some people

know how to take that information and action on

it, and others struggle.

>> Erica Seidel: Well said. Right. A lot of people want to be operating

partners. They like the idea. They fancy themselves

showing the way and telling others what to do. But you have

to stand back a little bit. And, uh, that must be hard.

I feel like that's like an emotional maturity piece. That

must be a piece of it.

Two other questions for you. Can you think about back when

you were leading marketing in an

operating role like that sync sort, for

instance, what coaching now would you give

yourself before you took that job? Is there a

regret that you have looking back like, oh, okay, if

I had only known X or if I had only done Y,

I'd feel better about myself.

>> Gary Service: What I like about that question is part of what

I tell people all the time, that if I were to go back

and be a cmo, I would be such a better CMO than

I was back then. That is partially

because if I said to

any candidate, how many companies have you worked

for? They'll say, I've worked for seven or eight or whatever

it might be. And I've learned these different things.

I meet with seven or eight companies every few days.

I am getting different

combinations of problems

and different issues and things

that you would think would go one way, go a different way.

And my reference base is just so

much bigger than it was when I was

there. I think what that, uh, would allow

me to do is be

much more realistic

about how I plan out

what we are doing. I'll tell you this awful

story. I remember we used serious

decisions back in the day before Forrester bought them

and used their benchmarks.

Not having any better benchmarks.

I committed to one of the serious decision

benchmarks that was there.

And the Gary of today would never do that. I

understand too well how benchmarks are put

together. I understand how I would

apply it or what I would do. It was just a

massive mistake doing it the way I did

it. And that's just one of many because I've made so many

mistakes in retrospect that I now

know so much more about that I would approach

it completely different.

>> Erica Seidel: Fabulous. I appreciate that.

Last question for you. This is a little bit of a non sequitur,

but since I have you thoughts on marketing under the CRO,

there's a bit of this, I hate to say a trend. Some companies

are nestling marketing under the Chief Revenue Officer

and separating marketing out into its different component

parts. The product marketing goes under product. Others are

keeping it as a function under the

CEO. Thoughts on

when and where this is working and whether you

think this would be temporary? Any thoughts to

share?

>> Gary Service: I think first you need to ask

the question, why is that

happening? The reason that is happening

is because marketing has lost the

confidence of the organization. The

leadership may or may not still be there and they

are, uh, saying, okay, we want to change this

because we weren't getting what we needed out

of marketing. Where are we seeing

when any of those combination of strategies

done work for more than a year or

two before they come back

to a more true it creates a whole new set of

problems. Going back to my

original comment, I have a bias against solving for the

problem that I had before and then I create a whole

set of new problems by what I've done. This is a

perfect example of that too.

Now messaging, uh, becomes fragmented

because product marketing is doing one thing

that is under product management now, but

that's not really helping your demand gen team. But sitting over

in another place and you

may have a CRO that is really only a

sales leader but now has marketing reporting to them so

they can't be the player coach. Every choice

has repercussions and implications

and if you are doing it, I would step

back and say, why are you doing

this and what are the issues there and

how could we solve it? And uh,

again, I know plenty of leaders have made

the choice to do that, but I've not seen it

work.

>> Erica Seidel: Okay, yeah, I know it's a controversial

topic these days and I think the proof will be in the

pudding. One, two, three years down the pike here.

Awesome. I know that's a bit of a downer to end us

on, but I did want to get your take on that.

Thank you so much. We have covered so much ground. I feel like there's

so much good insight here and people are going to love

listening to this. So thank you. Thank you so much, Gary.

>> Gary Service: Thank you for having me. This is fun. This is the easiest part of

my day.

>> Erica Seidel: Wonderful. Okay. And yeah, you could just point people

to this podcast and say, oh, you don't have to meet with me, just listen

to this.

That was Gary, Service Marketing operating partner

at Insight Partners.

Stay tuned for the next episode of the get, coming in a

couple of weeks. Thanks for listening to the get.

I'm your host, Erica Seidel. The GET is here to

drive smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in

B2B SaaS marketing. We explore the trends,

tribulations and triumphs of today's top marketing

leaders in B2B SaaS. If you liked this

episode, please share it. For more about the get, visit

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