Hello, and welcome to The Get.

I'm your host, Erica Seidel.

This season, the fifth season of The Get, has been focused on the relationship

between CMOs and Board members.

For many CMOs, interacting with the Board is about as much

fun as getting a root canal.

But what if you could make your CMO and Board relationship go from fraught

to functional, and even to fantastic?

If we haven't met yet, a brief intro.

I spend my days recruiting CMOs and VPs of Marketing in B2B SaaS.

So I have this unique perch to explore the trends, tribulations,

and triumphs of the best marketing leaders and their organizations.

I've had a range of guests on my podcast this season - marketing leaders who are

veterans at interacting with Boards, marketing leaders who are Board members

themselves, and a couple of Board members without deep marketing expertise

who have hired marketing leaders and have learned firsthand how valuable

the right CMO can be for the Board.

And speaking as a podcast host for just a moment, it's been great to hear from

so many loyal listeners along the way who have found this podcast useful.

One person actually told me that I was the Terry Gross of the CMO podcast space.

I'm honored.

In this executive summary episode, I'm going to recap some of the most

compelling takeaways from this season.

One.

What do Board members want in a SaaS CMO and how can you ace your

interview with a Board member?

Two.

Board meetings.

How can you land on your feet once you are inside the Boardroom?

Three.

How do you build a strong dialogue with the Board outside of Board meetings?

Finally, four.

Serving on Boards.

How can you become the CMO who gets tapped for Board seats?

Ready?

Here goes.

First, what do Board members want from a CMO and how can you ace the Board

interview when you are up for a CMO role?

Some inside perspective from me before you hear from my guests.

I do a lot of searches for private equity backed companies where

investors are active on the Board.

My searches that go the most smoothly have something in common.

The right Board members are involved in the search process early on.

By contrast, I've seen searches go not so smoothly when Board members only

show up at the end and nix a candidate.

I'd rather have a Board member or investor be like a cook in the kitchen as opposed

to the restaurant critic who only judges what's on their plate without being

involved with how the meal was made.

So I personally have become a fan of Board members engaging throughout

the search, both with the search process and with the candidates.

After all, the way you start a relationship is often indicative

of the way you continue it.

My guests this season all agree that early engagement between the

Board and the CMO makes sense.

So what are Board members looking for?

Chris Fountain, a veteran Board member and operating partner

at private equity firm Frontier Growth, shares what's on his mind.

I like to understand their operating cadence.

The operating cadence just tells you how you run the business of

marketing, and what metrics do you use to run the business of marketing.

I find that to be super insightful.

A marketing leader, I can't recall where she was from, but

she said something very profound.

She said she realized the best use of her marketing dollars were to give part of

her budget to the product team so they could build a key product feature that

she thought was going to drive demand better than any marketing program that

she could invest in, in the timeframe that, in which they were evaluating

that resource allocation question.

And it was a brilliant perspective to me.

So if that marketing leader or any executive is sitting around that

table, if they zoom out far enough to be able to understand the business

holistically, all researchers are scarce.

Whether you're IBM or Wealthbox, you've gotta make trade-offs and trying to get a

feel for that in the interviewing process.

You know, there's not one question that gets to that, but it's

something I'd try to get through the course of the conversations.

Yeah.

As a CEO, my dream was to have every executive

first be a general manager and then be a functional executive.

To the extent they could understand how to build enterprise value, how to think

about the business from a financial perspective, how to think about the

business from a go-to-market perspective.

Cause business is a big balancing act at every level.

And there's big questions about resource allocation that had to

be made at the highest level.

And ideally you have an executive team around the table that appreciates the

fact that there are trade-offs across the entire company that need to be made.

So in a nutshell, Chris's advice is business

first, marketing second.

How can you best prepare for a Board member interview when

you are up for a CMO role?

Have your numbers at the ready.

It's great that you've contributed to increased revenue, market share,

profitability, but by how much?

Quantifying your business impact is where it's at.

But focus on the metrics that mean the most to the overall business.

Don't make the mistake of getting too far into the weeds and avoid marketing jargon.

Elana Anderson, a multi-time CMO who has led marketing at Veracode and Demandware,

among other places, shares what to expect.

I don't expect to talk deep marketing, you know

shop talk, with a Board member.

I've yet to find many who are deeply interested, you know, in the details.

So I tend to focus on talking about strategy, the company, the market,

the market trends, the competitive trends, the competitive landscape.

I talk about how I've moved the needle, you know, in, in other

companies, how I've aligned teams.

When you are interviewing with a Board,

realize it's a two-way street.

You'll be interviewing them, too.

The best candidates see it as developing a relationship, not just in a kumbaya sense,

but so you are aligned on expectations.

Here's Elana again.

I'm asking about their understanding of the market and

the unique advantage of the company.

Why is this company going to win?

What makes them unique?

What is the outlook for the company?

Why is this company gonna win over competitor X, Y, Z?

If competitor X, Y, Z might be a leader and the company is not a leader, you know,

it gives me a sense of A, how much they believe, and also how strong the messaging

for the company, for the business is.

What if you are not asked to interview with a Board member?

Ask for that meeting.

Seriously.

Don't be afraid to ask since there's so much you can learn.

Like, what are the Board dynamics?

What does the CEO struggle with?

What prospects are ahead for the business?

And when it comes to marketing, does the Board know what they know

and know what they don't know?

If you ask to meet a Board member and you are told no for some reason,

think hard about what this says.

Maybe it's not the right fit and you should look for a company that

believes in open access to the Board.

Let's move on to part two.

We will assume that you've gotten the CMO job and now you are in the CMO seat.

Huzzah!

Now how can you rock it in the Boardroom?

This is important because marketing leaders can succeed or fail based on

their performance during Board meetings.

Actually, a question I ask CEOs when I start a search for a CMO is,

think of your last Board meeting, what marketing related challenges

did you struggle to get answers to?

Their answers tell me a lot about the CEO's view of marketing and also the

core of the job for their next CMO.

Going into this podcast series, one thing I wondered about was how

marketers could spend less time and angst preparing for Board meetings?

Many marketing leaders shudder at the time and second-guessing that goes

into those Board meetings and it can seem like productivity really grinds

to a halt in the run-up to the meeting.

Evan DeCorte from Columbia Capital is a PE investor and Board member.

He had a really useful perspective when I asked how Board

meeting prep could be shorter.

I think Board meeting prep takes time because

it is, I think, for the business, like a moment of self-reflection.

What have we done?

What were the outcomes?

What are we gonna do differently?

How does this impact our view on strategy or the market?

Those are not always easy questions to answer, and if they are really easy,

like I, I might think it's time for a little more self-reflection, right?

Because very rarely are the things that we're doing, even in businesses

that are just really doing well, easy.

Then we face tough questions that take time to grapple with, right?

We are conducting a lot of activities and hiring people and running new

strategies and evaluating them and measuring them against the alternatives.

Like, those are complex questions.

I found Evan's observation really interesting and it underlined what

I've learned from these conversations about how you can be more successful

and less stressed during Board meetings.

It starts with having a plan for how you are looking to interact

with the Board in general.

The Board meeting itself is a sort of capstone, of course, but your interactions

overall should be less about a quarterly performance and more about nurturing

an ongoing symbiotic relationship.

A great example of this comes again from Evan when he joined the podcast alongside

Jen Pockell Dimas, the Chief Marketing and Experience Officer for Telarus.

I collaborated with Evan and the Telarus CEO when I recruited Jen into her role.

It was awesome to have both Evan and Jen talk, not just about each other,

but with each other on the podcast.

Here's a perspective that came to light.

I think what we don't want is hand waiving, a lot of vagaries

and big talk about what could be, or the things that are in motion and

what things maybe should look like in the future but it's hard to know.

Erica, you, you sort of pointed out, I say this all the time, but like

we have very simple reptile brains.

We are investors, right?

And our, our goal is to invest money in the company and then to

sell or to recapitalize a business some way and get money back out.

A lot of what we are focused on is what is the result of the actions

that you're taking as a CMO, how do they intersect with the strategy

of the overall business, and how do they correlate with value creation?

That pairs nicely with Jen Pockell Dimas's thoughts.

We have understandings about how we want this company

to be understood and valued and what new markets we want to open.

We'll be able to see that we're having success there because we will begin

to create revenue in new directions.

We will see consistency in bookings creation in directions we haven't

seen historically, maybe into a new geo, maybe in a new product offering,

maybe in a new revenue source that we hadn't considered historically.

Those kinds of things would increase our value.

The squishy ways that this would show up, and every marketer hates this,

is our own customers saying to us, "Oh, I didn't know you did that."

Another way you can be more successful and less stressed during Board

meetings is by getting alignment with the Board on what they're interested in

seeing before you walk into the Boardroom.

Befriend the Board member who has the deepest background in marketing.

You can preview your Board meeting content in advance with that person to

get help in anticipating the reactions.

If it's your first meeting with the Board, make it count.

Share why you have joined the company and your thesis for the impact you'll make.

Kelly Ford Buckley has great advice here.

She's a marketing leader who pivoted to the investment side and is now general

partner and COO at Edison Partners.

I think the Board will always wanna know what are you

doing for the next 30, 60, 90, right?

Or what do you think of the current plan?

So I think it's a real opportunity for a dialogue.

I've always walked into those first meetings with an existing

Board with my rookie observations.

And it's a great way to get a dialogue going.

Here are the slides, and this is what went on last quarter and I was here for

part of it, but maybe not even all of it.

Those are in the appendix.

I want my 20 minutes sharing my rookie observations, why I took the job, what

I'm observing, here are the opportunities.

What do you guys think?

Am I missing?

Am I off base?

What a great way to start a dialogue.

And now you've set the tone for a dialogue that can continue to take

place in every other Board interaction.

As you settle in and as the business evolves with its

investment partners, your Board meeting content will evolve, too.

Chris Fountain, who's a veteran Board member and a former CEO, discusses this.

It should be very clear what marketing's role

is in driving bookings growth.

Lead flow's great, but if you can't translate that into won deals, people

are gonna be scratching their head.

What are we getting for our marketing spend?

So in my view, every Board meeting, once you've got the instrumentation of flying

the plane and that's gaining altitude, is important, and the really critical

instrumentation is demand, lead flow, and conversions to closed/won deals.

Along with that, I think, is ROI.

Good marketers, I think, understand how investments pay off from intangible waste.

Early in investment, for us, we wanna know that we have a very clear

picture of the voice of the customer.

Be able to understand that we know who our ICP is, our Ideal Customer

Profile, we know the buyer personas.

We know how we position ourselves relative to our competitors.

That has a time and a place, but you don't need to revisit

that at every Board meeting.

Also, get over the impulse to talk about all the work you did and

how you've been spending your time.

You're in the job as CMO because the Board thought you could do the job.

They trust you on the details.

The Board may only be interested in about one of the ten things that you're doing.

As Elana Anderson says-

Regardless of the scale of the company, the CMO

needs to focus on objectives, on outcomes, on critical metrics.

You know, sometimes marketers are over enamored, you know, about what they do

rather than the outcomes that they drive, you know, and I think particularly with

the Board, it's about the destination.

It's not about the journey.

The journey really only matters when there's something that, significantly new

lessons that you learned along the way.

Whether those lessons were good lessons, lessons that you wanna

repeat, or lessons that, you know, you tried something and it didn't work.

Next, realize that your Board meeting is a great

vehicle for improving the sales and marketing interlock, and for

communicating that interlock.

Madeline O'Phelan is VP of Marketing for fintech company Verity.

She discusses the importance of Board posture.

I think in a Board meeting, it's also

really important to convey your collaboration amongst the teams.

And there are a couple key ways I think you do that really well.

One is reemphasizing points, right?

Each function has its fifteen minutes of fame in the Board meeting

and restating points over and over again across all teams I think

is a great way to do that, right?

Or kudos between the teams and Board meetings, I think

is also really important.

Being able to show that you have a good relationship with sales.

It might be a nuance, but it's an important nuance to be able to

show in front of the Board that you work well together, that you give

each other praise when it's due.

Reiterating key points that your peers are making, kudos when they're

deserved, I think is super important.

And Kelly Ford Buckley discusses the benefits of marketing and

sales co-presenting at a Board meeting and having a combined growth readout.

I don't want the marketing department

readout and the sales readout.

I want the growth plan readout, the growth initiatives.

Listen, the Board deck goes out two, three days before the Board meeting.

The slides don't need to be read to us.

Like, we're reading, we're preparing, we're coming with questions.

We want data and we want insights.

We wanna know what you think is working based on the data and what's not working.

What are you doing differently next quarter to improve upon what

the data's telling you right now?

And there's one more common thread when it comes to

avoiding anxiety and nailing your presence in Board meetings as CMO.

Contrary to what you may think, there is a place for qualitative

data, competitive insights, customer insights, and brand stuff.

Yes, even brand stuff.

Consider making it impactful by being interactive.

Elana Anderson discussed this.

You know that numbers are gonna engage the Board, but if you

have a topic that's short on numbers, like a, a rebrand topic, how do you

make that interesting and impactful?

I chose to make it interactive and use brands that I knew they had opinions

on or would be aware of to make a case for why we had to do something,

you know, about our own brand.

I mean, and recognize this isn't like an hour session.

This is probably

- Erica Seidel: Right.

-twenty minutes, you know, twenty-five minutes

at, at most that you have.

So it has to be im- impactful and quick.

And so I put up little brand elements, so a color or part of a tagline,

about a particular brand and had them, well, who is this brand?

And when you can immediately identify who that brand is, that tells you something.

And, and then, and if I show you, well, who's this brand?

And you have no idea who that is and it's us [laughs], um, you know, that,

that starts to unveil, well, we have some opportunity or some work to do.

I see.

And then if you can compare and contrast, well,

here's how we're doing it today, whether it's a color change.

I mean, what is less interesting to a Board member than, hey, we're changing

our colors from teal to purple?

But sometimes that does make a difference, and so to make it impactful, you get to

the opportunity and the whys behind that.

Okay.

Here's part three of our four-part recap of insights

learned this season on The Get.

How do you make sure you have a great ongoing dialogue with your Board, not just

inside the Boardroom, but outside of it so that both you and the business succeed?

When companies engage me for new CMO searches, one thing is so clear, their

previous CMOs have not failed for lack of effort or even lack of talent.

They have failed for lack of alignment and lack of shared expectations around

responsibilities, timing, and resources.

A good example of this alignment and action comes from Jen Pockell Dimas

and Evan DeCorte, the CMO and Board member pair we heard from earlier.

Jen and I sat down and went through our deck, like,

how do we think value gets created?

How do we think that intersects with marketing?

And here's some example numbers.

I do think it is important for me to be able to

speak to the value that I'm driving in the business in a way that

our investors would care about.

One of the ways that Evan and I sometimes talk about this is

Big V Value and Little V Value.

And I think the Little V Value that helps to drive pipeline and like

the things that I'm measuring on the daily, weekly, monthly to say I am

doing these activities and they're creating value in the business.

What Evan cares about is Big V Value.

I put some money in and three to five years from now, I want it to

be more money that I'm getting out.

It has been hard in B2B marketing, historically, to draw a direct line

from the activities that you're making to the outcomes that they're driving.

But now we're actually talking about Big V Value, the value of

this company, not just the value of these marketing activities that I'm

driving, this, this, my contribution to pipeline, whatever those things are.

This is about how am I increasing the value of this company in market?

And that is not a conversation that is necessarily one that many

are comfortable or fluent in.

That's the code switching that needs to happen between the operational

plan and how I'm executing today.

Chris Fountain offers a useful analogy for what

he and other Board members are looking for once a CMO is in place.

The marketing domain should be able to give a heads up to

the business around future growth.

So the finance team does a rearview mirror view of the business, right?

Marketing ideally can paint a picture of trial activity or demo activity

or MQL activity - we can expect our bookings to trend as follows.

If you can create a heads up display that allows you to predict

with greater accuracy of the future, that's nirvana in my view.

Another thing to navigate is how to respond when

your Board member proposes something that you think is outlandish.

I talked about this with Kelly Ford Buckley, whose advice is to

try to understand the input and not just dismiss it out of hand.

You really do need to think about the Board

like a member of your team.

There's brilliance that lives inside the four walls of your business and certainly

brilliance that sits in your Board.

And frankly, a lot of these investors are domain experts.

They know your market really well.

And even if they've invested in companies that don't compete with

yours, they're in adjacent spaces.

So it's like getting a market perspective and a customer perspective.

So why not take that in?

I think the Board needs to be viewed as just another audience, but an

audience that's actually on your team.

And I think marketing leaders can often be stronger internally than externally,

and more exposure externally with customers, partners, investor helps

build the knowledge, the confidence, the credibility that they also

need to be building with the Board.

So I think sometimes if you're too internally focused, relying on sales

for your outside perspective, or not getting enough direct customer or

outside perspective, you might not be as comfortable or as confident.

I think it's some of those things that remove the intimidation.

So, you'll wanna communicate well with your Board and

provide that heads up display for the business and focus on Big V Value.

To do all that, you will also have to master the subtle art of

navigating a Board that may not know what good marketing looks like.

After all, the number of Board members and investors with marketing

backgrounds approaches zero, or their marketing experience may

be from five or ten years ago.

So you will do best if you understand, educate, and translate.

You can offer an offline session to educate Board members on

a particular marketing topic.

It won't just benefit their understanding of what you're doing,

but it will also help them in their Board service for other companies.

There was general agreement amongst my guests that it is the job of the

CMO to translate the language of marketing into vocabulary that the

CEO and CFO and Board can get behind.

As you translate and educate, beware that some marketing terms

will fly and some terms will flop.

Allison Dancy, a veteran CMO, who was most recently CMO at Kibo Commerce,

talks about the marketing trigger words that are likely to fly with Boards.

Sometimes it's around ICPs or sometimes it's calibrating

around personas or sometimes it's, we need to go to ABM, cuz that's

what everybody's talking about.

And if you start to talk about brand, it really is the four letter word

sometimes to Boards because to them it means spend that they can't track

and therefore they don't wanna do it.

But you know, your brand is what ultimately gets people to make

the decision to buy from you, to stay with you, to buy more from

you, to have confidence in you to be able to build a business case

that they're gonna buy from you.

So brand is, it is actually the secret weapon behind the scenes, but to a

Board member, it just means cost.

And so you have to be really careful.

Often they'll even see the website as a brand thing and

they don't wanna invest in that.

I've had some Boards where I can call that awareness.

It won't raise as many red flags.

I can talk about awareness or I can talk about website technology, but sometimes

you have to be a little bit careful about just using even the word brand I've found.

While we're talking about marketing terms that fly and

marketing terms that flop, I wanna underscore the elephant in the room

Brand.

As she said, brand can be a four letter word.

Boards wonder why a marketing leader is investing in brand since it feels

like something that is untrackable?

Sandra Lopez had a great perspective here.

She has been in marketing leadership and general manager roles in many

of the world's biggest and most influential tech companies like

Adobe and Intel and Microsoft.

And she's a Board member herself for Junior Achievement USA and PureRed.

She shared how she models out brand initiatives in financial terms to

get buy-in from her Board members.

Oftentimes when you are looking at brand architecture

strategies, what will that impact look like in terms of lesser choice?

Is it gonna cannibalize one or the other products?

That's yet another opportunity to bring the CFO into the journey and talk

about, let's do some modeling together.

Oftentimes what I had seen is brand architecture strategies that

talk about the business rationale.

But there's no financial numbers.

They'll talk to you about what it's gonna cost, what it's gonna cost to

overhaul the entire thing, and all the collateral that needs to get

updated, both analog and digital.

Yet I never see, if we were to simplify the brand, what could this

look like from a financial standpoint?

Or if we're gonna do a massive brand transition and reposition

the brand in its totality from one point to another point, will it

alienate your existing customer base?

And if so, how?

Well, what, what could that be from a sales perspective?

So you can model all this.

If there's one thing to remember when it comes to the

CMO and Board relationship, it is to move from broadcasting to the

Board to collaborating with them.

And with collaboration, there's both a give and a get.

Marketing leaders can be so focused on what they are giving

to the Board that they miss the opportunity to get stuff in return.

Realize the Board is there to be helpful.

Interacting with them, it's an opportunity for free advice.

They will likely be flattered to be asked, so don't be

reluctant to make an ask of them.

Elana Anderson discussed in detail how she has incorporated the Board

into her marketing initiatives.

I found that Board members are happy to participate and they've

been actually flattered to be asked.

At Demandware, uh, we had a Board member by the name of Len Schlesinger.

Len is a Harvard Business School professor.

He was formerly the COO of Limited Brands, which in his day

owned, um, Victoria's Secret.

We had a customer conference that was a very successful event, but one

of the things that we were trying to do was get more attendance from

an exec level audience, the true business buyer, the business sponsor.

So I asked Len if he would co-chair or be the guest chair of an invite

only executive track, and then host a half day workshop for me.

And maybe that was a little gutsy, but he was thrilled.

So we were then marketing an executive track with a well-known business professor

to retail, you know, commerce executives.

It sold out easily.

We had our ideal profile customer at this event, and the

actual event was incredible.

The fourth and final part of our recap of season five of

The Get, how can you become the CMO who gets tapped for Board seats?

Many of the CMOs I interview wanna be on a Board someday.

And the ones that are on Boards tend to love the experience.

Not surprisingly, the supply of CMOs eager to serve on Boards

exceeds the current demand.

That means the competition is tough.

How can you be prepared to step up into Board service?

There are a few ways you can prepare.

First, get P&L experience and general management experience under

your belt, even if this is outside your obvious marketing swim lane.

And, in a marketing leadership role, approach your work and the

way you communicate your work with a business first, marketing second

mindset, like we talked about before.

Also, plan ahead and try to find a boss who will embrace Board service as a

part of your professional development and help you manifest a Board seat.

Next, clarify what your unique value prop is to a Board.

What skill sets will you offer, and which types of companies are most

likely to benefit from your knowledge?

That way, when you get a call to interview with a Board, you can

vet the opportunity correctly.

This is true also for CMO roles, by the way.

One of the best questions I've seen CMOs ask in interviews is, what's

the value you see in my skillset?

Here's Sandra Lopez with some additional perspective.

People reached out to me for various Board positions, and I

remember one, it was all about supply chain and it was about transportation.

And I was so honored that they considered me and they were considering me from a

digital transformation, but I was looking at the Board requirements and the skill

sets that they were looking for, the top three, and I'm like, I have none of that.

And I said to the, uh, individual that was recruiting for him,

I'm like, you know what?

Super honored, yet it's not gonna be the right fit because I will not

add value for what they're looking for from a talent perspective.

Consider serving on nonprofit Boards as a practice

ground, but prioritize the ones that are run like for-profit Boards.

Also, advisory Boards, which can be quirky, can also be decent

stepping stones to Board service.

As you feel reasonably ready, ask people who are Boarded up, meaning

at capacity with their Board service, to refer Board opportunities to you.

Here's Sandra Lopez's advice.

Listen, I've had amazing mentors helping me, guide me through

the path to Board of directors.

And I started, I would, three years before I landed my first Board.

You wanna land a Board seat so then you're recommended by somebody

else for yet another Board seat.

And that's how the flywheel of that.

And so when you're looking for Board seats, you also, like, try

to find somebody, it's called, you know, over Boarded where

somebody has way too many Boards.

Look for those individuals that are Boarded up, that are

passing on opportunities cuz they have too many Boards.

That's a great way just to start to open up the doors.

That's it.

Your guide for how CMOs and Boards can promote their relationship from

fraught to functional to fantastic.

A huge thanks to all the guests from this season.

And, of course, if you wanna talk with me about hiring a CMO or VP

of Marketing for your SaaS company or your open Board seat, ping me.

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.

To stay in the know for our next season, please keep following the show in

your preferred podcast listening app.

If you liked this episode, please share it.

For more about The Get, visit thegetpodcast.com.

And 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 of Simpler Media Productions.