Hi, you're listening to the, get the podcast about finding

and keeping great marketing

leaders in B2B SaaS.

I'm Erica Seidel, your host.

You know those people who so clearly revel in what they do and are so

knowledgeable on both the big things and

the little things?

Today I

talk with a CMO like that.

Her name is

Kristin Hambelton.

She's the CMO of MineralTree, which is a SaaS company in the Accounts

Payable & Payments automation space.

Kristin spent the

last several months steering marketing through an acquisition.

She was previously CMO of Marketing Evolution and CMO of

eVariant, which ended up selling to

Healthgrades, and before that

she

was VP of Marketing for Neolane, which sold to Adobe.

You'll hear hard-won advice

for embarking on a scale journey.

In particular, you'll hear about

budgeting for marketing

during growth.

How do you communicate to a CEO and CFO that you were investing smartly,

without overspending?

How well

are you connecting the marketing budget to the growth strategy?

You'll hear about sharing with the rest of the company leaders what

marketing is saying yes to and what marketing is saying no to.

And when does it make sense to give budget back to the CFO

versus advocate for more budget?

You'll also learn about hiring for hypergrowth and what to do when you

have multiple marketing functions but can't yet justify hiring one

person for each function.

Let's get

right into this.

Kristin, I am so glad to have you here.

Would love to have you just share some advice for a CMO embarking on a scale

journey.

I know in

this question we're tapping into

some hard-won lessons

from your own experience scaling marketing at many companies.

Can you talk through that?

Sure.

So I think in terms of scaling, there's what you do at a private company

versus what you do at a public company.

But I think some of the same

rules apply.

I've spent,

I would say, the better part of my career more on the private side, although,

obviously, within large companies trying to scale divisions or verticals,

et cetera.

On the private side, one of the things in terms of embarking on the

journey, I first would recommend to

marketers to figure out

the scale of the scale, if you will.

Not all scale is created equal.

As an example,

going from zero to $10 million is very different from going to 10 million to,

say, 30 million, and then even 30 to 50 million, and then 50 to a hundred million.

And the reason that they're

different is you're trying to

figure things out.

If we all had the answers the minute that we launched a company, or that

founders started companies, there would be no process of scaling.

So in the beginning,

if you're really starting in your scale process, and usually that's when you're

at an earlier part of growth, you're doing

the basics.

One of the

most

important things is just figuring

out who you're targeting, what works.

And you could get away with trying a lot of different things at this

part in scale because you just don't

know much yet.

Sure, you're

going to come with whatever experience you have or what people have tried

already, but it's usually not that much.

Compared to, say, 10 to 30 or 10 to 50 million, that scale

is very different because

you will have, at this

point, figured out what your ideal audience is.

You will have figured out what works and

doesn't work.

Now it's really

about focus and refining all of those things.

I would also say that you're adding other elements into the marketing mix.

You might've been very demand focused early on or sales enablement

focused, but now in this range, you have to be all things across

marketing.

Content plays

a huge role at this point because your sales team is probably

scaled at the same level.

So content and thought leadership to give some of that air cover

to the very focused demand

generation that you're doing.

Of course,

it also means at this point that you are religious because

you know what the message is.

You know what your brand promises.

You're being consistent and focused and you're getting

into a groove and you feel it.

You really, I feel it anyway.

I know when we're firing on all cylinders.

Then, at the next stage, 50 million and

above, you're taking all

of the things that you just did in the last phase

and multiplying them.

What's really

important at this point, probably more so than even earlier on,

is what you're not going to do.

Because at this point, people expect you to do everything and try

everything.

I actually

think that's a recipe for disaster.

Even though people would think, okay, you have more budget, you probably

have more people at this point.

Right, but you can't split the baby more ways than you need to.

You got to keep doing

what you know works, and as I

like to say, you have to adopt the superpower of saying no.

And really socializing, I've really learned that lesson early on to socialize

with my peers on the leadership team and usually a layer down of here are the

things we're going to do, but by the way, here are the things we're not going to do.

And I make sure it's in

writing, in a deck, and I remind

people of it.

Sure, we need to be flexible and stuff changes, whether it's within the

business or even macroeconomically, or a pandemic happens, or a

tragedy like 9/11, so you

have to

flex.

But all things

being

equal, you really have to remind people

of what you're not going to do.

That is the way you scale because you have to be not only effective, you

have to be really efficient in what

you're doing.

Marketers

know this better than anybody, right?

We're asked to do a lot with not a lot often.

So you're not going to get to scale if you are saying yes to everything and

splitting your team and your resources and your time and your budget across too

many things.

You've already

proven the things that work and don't work.

One caveat, make sure you always keep some

percentage of "we've got to try

new things"

in there.

I know that

sounds

a little contradictory

to focus, focus, focus.

I'm more saying there's gotta be 10% or 15% or some amount of

your team and your resources and something where, hey, there's this

cool new thing called podcasts we

need to try.

A few years

ago, right?

You can't not because sometimes trying those things ahead of others will give

you a unique and distinct advantage.

Just be prepared to fail because you just don't know, which is why

I recommend it can't really be more than about 10 or 15% on this

experimentation.

I love your

point about educating about what you're not

doing because somewhat of

a marketing leader's role is about constantly, I call it

the marketing of marketing, but

constantly

sharing with the

organization what's going

on, what you're doing, why you're doing it, what results you're

having from those activities, but also, to your point, what you

don't do.

I'm curious your take on when you do,

as you

do scale, I imagine

your budget

gets bigger.

And say you're actually choosing to planfully

grow your budget.

So how do you communicate out to a CEO and a CFO

that you are investing

without

overspending?

How do you think of the opposite side of it when your budget does grow and

you want to be planful about that?

The way I like to do it is I always like to start with total

addressable market and look at where we are penetrated and what's still

left to go.

Then I tend

to do a real swag on, a real estimate on, depending if it's a demand funnel

versus account-based marketing.

You know, how much we actually need to generate and look at what we

think from a programs perspective is

realistic.

If you have

a baseline or even an estimate and some industry benchmarks to

start with, say you start with fifty or a hundred

dollars at a cost per lead, I'm just totally swagging it.

If you knew nothing else you could start to back into about from a program

perspective you need.

I do that

also combined with my total addressable market in terms of the number of accounts.

As an example, if you have a million accounts you can go after, you know

only 10% of the market is penetrated, that means 90% you can go after

from a demand funnel perspective.

How many people do you need to touch to get to the number of deals

you need to based on the revenue number that you're given to produce?

Now, from an

account-based perspective, those

which you have maybe small total addressable market.

I was in one market where we only had 300 total accounts that

existed.

One third were in the buying

process at a time, and the sales

cycle was eighteen months.

So

you only have

a hundred accounts, really, you could go after.

You need

to look at touches across the buying group, how much you need to engage with

them, how much the touches would cost you you think to engage with those people, to

do the same exercise of how many times, realistically, do I need to touch that

buying center across all of the contacts.

And that comes up with the programs.

Now, let's not forget about

the people.

This is really

a little bit of the art

of budgeting.

In B2B marketing

right now, benchmarks are about 50% program, 50% people.

It actually airs a little more towards program, like 55, 45.

And to be honest with you in

the last twenty years, that

really hasn't moved much.

What I have found is in some years, even in the same role, you will find

you don't even have enough people to spend the money you have, which seems

really odd as a marketer, given we always complain about the budgets.

But you can throw that money away if you want to, or what I've done in the past

is I share that with my CFO and I said, sure, we have this money, I'm actually not

going to spend it because I can't spend it on the things that we know work and

experimentation.

So I share that to say, I'm

being mindful of what works and doesn't work.

You need people to manage

programs and to deliver content

and if you don't have them.

And the reason I actually share that with my CFO is so that I

protect myself a little bit so I don't lose my budget the next year.

This is actually great timing this year.

Here we are 2021.

I'm very fortunate, I had a fabulous year.

My company just got acquired.

All things are great.

We're

hiring.

We have money.

And we're

in budgeting season and I'm very efficient and effective with my budget.

I'm at a point where I know what works.

My team is firing on all cylinders.

What's really interesting is next year events are back, and we all

know that events are the single most

expensive cost-per-lead item.

So I'm actually fighting for more budget than I

normally would.

In the past,

I usually come to some happy medium, but I know everything is going to

ramp significantly like we've never

seen before with trade shows.

So those are the combinations of things.

Back to the people part, I'm also making the case of more shows,

you need resources to manage

those shows.

Sometimes

you have to make choices on people versus programs.

Sometimes you have too many people and not enough

dollars.

That's where

the art comes in.

I usually find, pretty consistently, it is 55 program to 45

people.

It really doesn't vary much.

I

tend to be a little weird and I would trade dollars to get people

versus programs because I know if you have really talented, committed

people, you can do amazingly creative

things without money.

Not everybody

feels that way.

That's just what I have found consistently.

But again, I'm sure people have different approaches.

I just know that if you can get a fantastic marketer in who can do an

amazing program, piece of content, whatever it is, it more than pays

for itself in terms of some programs.

Now, of course, there could be exceptions.

You

could be in a market where it's trade shows

only, and that's just the way it is.

And I get that.

But to be honest with you, I've

marketed to just about every

industry and every functional group, and I've pretty much just

found it that I err a little

bit more on people, which, by

the way, isn't always possible because there's often headcount restrictions.

People think you're trying to build a kingdom, but as it is, marketers

do usually three jobs a piece anyway.

So again, that's just my personal choice.

Sometimes, when it comes down to it, like in my budget for next year, I feel

like I'm a little light on people and if I had to trade a little bit, I would

trade a little more on the people's side

right now.

You remind

me of this person I

talked to who said, "Oh, I'm a CMO who thinks

like a CFO."

I forget if it was you, but

if it was I like that.

I'm just picturing you talking with

your CFO.

I guess people might wonder if you're going to give back budget or recommend

that it go to sales or whatever.

In one cycle, do you ever have a hard time asking for

- what you're

doing right now is asking for more budget for a valid reason for the next cycle.

Does that ever shoot yourself in the foot to give money

back?

So, I've shot myself

in the foot when I haven't been really crystal clear with my boss,

which was usually

the CEO

and the CFO, why I'm doing

what I'm doing.

In the past,

I've just been like, oh,

I'm going to be a good doobie and I'm going to come in

under budget.

Then, everybody's

happy you're under budget, and then you get

less budget.

It usually

happens around Q3 where

you figure this out.

That's my experience.

I usually don't find it before that.

But usually around Q3,

I'm like, ooh, I'm going to run under budget

and if I don't end up hiring X, Y, and Z, I can't even spend the money.

And I start giving hints that I'm going to come under budget.

And it's not like they take some pot of money and they go give it

to somebody else.

What it does

is it gives it the business breathing room and it allows the CFO to

know that if they have to make a decision someplace else, they're

going to have a little bit of room.

So it's not like I'm like here's $200,000 or 300 - you have it.

It's more, this is where I'm thinking I'm

going to come in, and they're

like, okay, that's helpful to know.

And again, I

explain it, essentially

rationalizing and, I hate to say this, doing CYA so it doesn't

come back to bite me next year.

This also

goes to a really

good point about your CFO,

which is, I just can't even imagine a better relationship that I need

to have, in terms of trust, to be able to spend and manage the money

and have their backs as much as

they have mine.

So, I

have had the good fortune, but I've also made it a priority to

engage as much as possible with the CFO and the finance team, to

over-communicate, which takes time

and effort

in addition to all of the things you're trying to do.

But it helps them do

their job better.

Then, god forbid,

I ever make a mistake or get in a jam, I have found it usually pays for itself

in terms of they get it, you're human.

They know you're trying to do the right thing, every once in

a while things get screwed up.

But for the most part, they know that you're trying to manage the

money effectively and efficiently.

Can you talk about tying extra budget to growth strategy a little bit more?

If a company

is expanding,

it might want

to go into new markets or maybe you acquire a

business and now you have

five products and not one product.

So how

should a CMO think about

expanding

their budget

in that kind of

situation?

Is it like, oh,

we're buying a company that's going to double our size,

so my budget should double?

Or, I don't know if that's the right way to think about it.,

Oh, I can dream, Erica, we can all dream.

By the way,

usually when you buy companies, even though there's different

strategies for M&A, mergers and acquisitions, I don't think

that they're mutually exclusive.

Often you do an acquisition for

growth, so it's what they

call a growth acquisition.

Or you do one for efficiencies.

Now, what's interesting is I always find, even with the growth ones, they

want efficiencies.

You could say you're buying

revenue, but they're always

looking for

efficiencies.

In

terms of what is critically important, and

even at this point in my career I'm still learning.

I am doing a

better job now with

what I would call the triumvirate of my partners, which is sales

and product and marketing.

I was always joined at the hip with my

sales leader.

With my product

leader, I've always joked that I'm not smart enough to market

a product I don't understand, so I've always been close to product.

But I've done a much better job more

recently with my triumvirate.

The

three of us would decide where we're going to tie budget because last year

we actually acquired two companies

and it was two new platforms

we had to adopt.

And unless I know in the product roadmap, as an example, where they are

planning on parity or not,

that's going to warrant a discussion on do I need another product marketing manager?

Do I need new collateral?

Are we going to put it under

one brand?

Ugh, naming!

Don't forget

naming.

What's that going to?

Also with sales then, does sales need

to change how they're organized?

Do they need to

change their go-to-market?

So it's very much not a conversation

I can do in isolation.

I don't think it's one I can even do

with just sales.

It's one where

the three of you need to sit down and say, okay, this is what we have.

I very

much see it as this is what

we have to work with in terms of assets.

This is the products we have.

This is what the roadmap

looks like.

This is what

the selling team looks like.

This is what the marketing team looks like and where we are in our

maturity.

Then, it's

okay, here's the target - I'm making this up - for next year that we need to get to.

How are we going to get there

from a go-to-market?

Are we going

to expand our verticals?

There's only a handful of ways you can grow, right?

You grow through acquisition, as we mentioned.

You go to new vertical

markets.

You go to new buyers within the same vertical.

Somehow, if you have a different offering

that you can, if you're

selling to finance, then maybe you can sell to HR.

I'm making that up, but that's possible

in human capital

management.

Actually, when I was at Kronos, we were the time clock people.

Then all of a sudden we expanded to do more HR.

Or you can expand

geographies.

So you

have to pick.

You can't - by the way, a lot of times it

starts off, we're going

to do all of

those things.

I'm usually one that says, that's great,

but let's talk about if you had to pick and choose, what would be the priority?

Often those conversations are one of sizing

and timing.

We want to

do all those things.

Let's the three of us talk about it.

Which one can we go

the fastest at, which

one do we think we have the most success, and which one helps us get us

to our goals both fast, but also in a

doable way?

Not to be

forgotten right now, as we run into other times, depending on

what the economy is doing, if it's right now, a strategy that requires

hiring fifty people really

fast, good luck

with that.

You just can't

hire people right now, just because of the unemployment rate and people's

availability and the competition.

So that's

why it's important

to have those three groups, the three leaders, together and say, what is

the go-to-market strategy?

Then, from

there I

can decide, given that,

where do I put the

budget?

Now, that was a long-winded conversation,

but

I'm going through

it right now.

I'm living and breathing it, so, I thought it was

- just to say it's still

something I'm

learning.

You know, old dogs can

still learn

new tricks.

You brought

up hiring, Kristin.

Would love to hear your take on hiring during hypergrowth.

Like you said, everybody's struggling with it on the recruiting side.

I'm

struggling with it.

It used

to be that if I wrote to a

hundred people, eighty would get back to me right away.

I'm sure it's the same thing across the board.

So how do you think of covering multiple functions with fewer people

where one person might do double duty?

Can you talk through that and your take on hiring during hypergrowth

and how to make the best use out of a

smaller team?

I have found in B2B marketing

in general, and I don't know if this is true in other functions because

I've lived and breathed

marketing my whole career, but it feels like we have a hundred different

disparate jobs that we need to do that

probably require fifty different skillsets.

That's why I love what I do, by the way, because I

don't like doing the same thing.

I get bored.

So it's a good thing.

But

it's also, if maybe

you're a small startup

and you're 5, 10 million

in revenue, you're not going to

have a team more than 10, 20 people, depending

on your

investment model.

You're going

to have a

handful of people.

You

have to think,

just off the

top of my head, in no

particular order.

Somebody

has got to build sales collateral.

Somebody has got to do a website.

Somebody has got to do email campaigns.

Oh, somebody has got to do

trade shows.

Really quickly,

all of a sudden,

you're at twenty different

tasks and those skillsets just naturally

don't come in together

because people usually specialize when they're starting off in

their career.

What I try

to do when I

go into an existing organization

is I try to see what's there and try to blend roles that might fit together.

Even if the person's not doing additional functions, try to add

them, see if that's an area for growth that they're interested in.

Because if you try to make them unnatural, then what will happen

is when you try to hire for the other roles, it just won't work.

So I really try to think about what's

natural.

I'll give

you an example.

I often have to have some flavor of partner marketing.

Earlier on in

maturity in companies,

I don't always have the luxury of having a partner

marketing person.

And different

than channel.

So they may be referral

partners, but they're not hardcore

channel where it's, obviously then that's like the first

person you hired if

you're all through

channel.

I'm talking maybe they

refer 15, 20% of your revenue, you need someone to support them.

I

have found, though, I can't give

a whole head count to it because think about it, the other 80% of

my business is direct, and I've got to support

a team of salespeople.

What I have found is that because product marketing knows

the product really well, and I

think happen to be Swiss

Army Knives of the organization, I tend

to marry that

into a product marketing role in the short term until

I can get coverage.

They could

talk the talk, they can walk the walk, they know what the partners need.

If there's

some kind of co-marketing execution things, it can be punted off to a demand

person or someone else doing execution.

But there's somebody at least there that's managing the partner if we need to.

I also find that with

content.

If you can't

dedicate a

content person, which is criminal,

but if you can't, sometimes you can marry it into a PR role.

I have it now,

actually.

I just happened

to have an

outstanding person, he manages

partner contents and product marketing.

Obviously, he has people under him, but a lot of it is about the content.

So he's managing overall content strategy for the different audiences

that those serve with kind of one view.

So that's how I try to get creative, but at some point, you get to a breaking

point where this is not

tenable anymore.

But you can prove that through growth.

If the partners are growing, obviously you need somebody who can manage that.

The other way around things, of course, people can use contractors,

agencies,

vendors, whatever.

You know which marketers use on a regular basis anyway.

You could certainly do that, either as a stop gap or as your overall strategy.

Some people just like to outsource certain things.

I tend to outsource my PR, but I make sure that either myself or somebody

else manages it.

That's just

a particular thing that I like to do that's a preference and it does save

on head count, precious head count.

And usually there's some flexibility based on the PR agency or person that you use

where you can flex on budget, if needed.

In terms of hiring, I'm in the boat with everybody else.

In terms of secret sauce and attracting people, we try to go hard on our

networks because we do know that people who are referred usually have a

better track record.

We also

make it a priority meeting with our

recruiter and/or HR person,

depending on who's doing the

recruiting.

We're meeting

2, 3, 4, 5 times a week

with them.

We're also giving them like profiles, which is incredibly valuable.

In recruiting

sometimes they call them

calibration resumes, which

are here are the exact three resumes of people that would be perfect for

our job.

Share it with

your HR, your recruiter, and tell

them why.

By the way,

those three people may not be available.

Often I'll do it as LinkedIn

profiles.

I'll just

go in and look people up and I'll say, oh, this person's

perfect because they have this

and this.

What that does is it just allows

us to go a little

more focused on the search and

hope that we find like people.

But like everybody else we're

struggling with the same

thing.

We do hope that we do it through our team and through our network

and attracting people with

our overall value proposition

as a company, in terms of high growth and benefits and team and all that good stuff.

But again, we're in it with everybody else.

I love your idea of giving the recruiters the

calibration profiles.

It makes

me remember this one conversation

I had with, it shall

remain nameless, but a large company that was hiring their first marketing

technology VP.

They tried

on their own, and then they

came to me.

The HR person

was like, yeah, I've been working on this for a while, but actually I have

no clue what a MarTech person is.

So she had been actually wasting time because

she hadn't - I think she

felt like, oh, I should know this,

I didn't want to ask

the stupid questions.

I ended up saying no, I'm not

going to

do this, or I didn't

have time or whatever.

But I said, well, why don't you just

sit down - it's the

same thing that you do.

Sit down, very granularly look at your calibration

profiles so that you

can

do your lookalike modeling, from there.

Well, it helps

because

we can't expect recruiters,

as good as you are, Erica, to know everything that's in our head about what

we want and need and, in this market, what we might be able to overlook.

And I'm not saying

compromise.

I'll give you

an example.

We are hiring a marketing specialist right now.

Every other role, I think, on our website right now is remote because

you can work from anywhere, except our marketing specialist role.

And it's very

conscious.

The reason

that we can't overlook

that is, that is the

person that's going to be managing all our trade show assets and shipping that stuff

out and doing logistics, and it matters

because you can't have

all your trade show assets all over the country.

So it seems like such a simple little thing, but having managed

that remotely on multiple occasions and knowing the challenge of that.

Now, doesn't mean this person needs to be in

the office.

But,

having it remote, even just knowing what you have in inventory.

You know us marketers, we don't even

know what we have in the

marketing closet.

That's the

joke, the big joke, the marketing

closet, right?

I actually

have a habit of taking

pictures of everything so that if

you are remote, you can at least make decisions.

But again, it's a tiny little thing, and if we run into a jam and need

be, and we need to do a storage unit near them, and that's the

approach that we take, that's what

we'll do.

To your point,

it's just helping your recruiter, or whoever it is that's doing your

hiring, so they're as smart as possible.

Also, it's up to the team.

We put a lot

of pressure on ourselves, on our team because it's the person we're going

to work with every day, and I would not trivialize or minimize that.

Your team should be reaching out every single day to try to find somebody.

That's an expectation of mine, but I haven't seen anybody on my teams not do

it because it behooves them to do it.

But you can't just mail it in and think it's all going to

happen through the recruiter.

Hey, you see a cool brand,

or you see another company doing a really

cool thing, you know what?

Let us know, go check them out.

Maybe they do have some marketing people that could be

a fit for us.

That makes

me think of one company that gives people, like, Starbucks gift cards with the

idea that, and this is pre-pandemic, but everybody

gets a Starbucks gift card so they can take potential new employees out

for coffee.

And when you

have depleted your card, you just go in and you say, oh, I need another card,

and you get another

one

for $20, $50, whatever.

This idea

that everybody should

always be

in

that mode.

If talent is your most important thing, your calendar should reflect it, you know?

That's just

the thing.

I very much

believe in looking at things differently.

I think that's also why I'm in marketing.

There's not just one

playbook.

So if you

can, let's say it

again, my 10-15% rule.

Let me try something different.

Let's look at a completely different profile, and maybe that's what we need.

I love that idea of taking that same idea of

20% of your

budget is spent on wild and crazy things that might or might not work,

but think about that in terms of a team.

If

you hire ten people, one or two

can be really like the squint profiles, I like to say, where you

turn your

head to the side.

Maybe it works great.

Maybe it doesn't,

but you know it's somebody

really

different.

One of the things too, I need to

do the plug here for the interns.

I tend to, and I've done this for

the past fifteen years, I

tend to hire interns that are sophomores or juniors in college, and then we

ask them to stay through the summer.

So they'll work full-time over

the summer, then we ask for about fifteen hours a week

during the school year.

We're totally flexible on their hours and their days.

I even move my staff meeting based on their schedule.

Once they get their schedule each semester, we'll move

it so we can accommodate it.

We always tell them, you know you need to study for exams, take the week off.

Spring break, whatever.

But by keeping them, you get this continuity and then you have

these rockstar people that are completely trained and ready to go

right out of school.

So that's

another thing

with hiring.

There's hiring right out of school, and then there's hiring right out

of school somebody who's just spent

the last eighteen months with

you.

Very funny story.

My head of demand generation right now who works for me, was

my intern ten years ago.

Oh yeah,

I love that.

It's like, yeah,

we have this talent pipeline problem, so

fix it by training up

people now, being the

trainer, and

then the person that catches them

as they come out of

school.

They do

also

self-select.

If they really

love it, they stay.

Some of them sometimes will say, no, I want to go try another company.

But the idea of having an intern for one semester I

think is personal.

It's training somebody

up for three months or even six months, and then they're gone

versus if we can hang on to them and they want to stay with us.

We tend to

invest a lot in them and

it usually pays

off.

Final question for you, Kristin, do you

have a favorite interview question that you ask that you find really revealing?

I don't know if it's revealing, and I feel bad when I ask it, by

the way, but I ask it for

clarity of

thought.

I ask them

if you were me,

why should I hire you?

So

at the end of the

interview, they're through it, they're like,

okay, we're just about done, and then you hit them with that one.

But I think it, to me, it is not as much what they say, but can they

articulate very succinctly

in about what I'll call three bullet points what their

differentiators are?

The reason

I ask it is also, it shows me if they've got the

marketing gene.

Because a marketing person

will think about that question in terms of their value

proposition and what makes them

different.

So if they

can communicate it in that way, I know that they live and breathe marketing.

It's not as much actually what they say, the three or four or five things.

But if they're all over the map and

they say twenty-seven things, or

if they don't distinguish as differentiators or strengths, or

if the things they say are things

that are very copyable

or

not benefits-driven, it

just helps me distinguish that in

one answer.

Again, I feel bad

asking, but it's not a Pass/Fail question

because I also know if I've just had a wonderful interview with them

and for some reason that question, maybe they struggle a little bit.

Also, you

just don't know what kind of day somebody had.

You don't know if they're distracted, you don't

know.

So it's not a Pass/Fail thing,

but it is something as part of the interview that I think is

an important question to ask and

have them answer.

That's

a really interesting one because I feel like so many marketers are really

crappy at marketing themselves, even

plenty of CMOs, myself.

I was gonna say, myself included!

Hahaha, right?

And maybe that's

- talk about

interview questions.

I just think one of the hardest questions is "Tell me about

yourself."

Especially

people earlier in their

careers.

I know I even

struggle

with it.

One interview, actually

in the last few years even, it wasn't that

long ago.

I started

off with the professional summary.

They're like, "No, tell me about where were you born!"

I was like, okay...

So I think that one's hard when you don't have a rapport, you don't know

somebody.

If I do ask

that question, I'm more specific and I qualify with, "Tell me about yourself.

Are you from the area?

What do you want to do

professionally?"

I try to lead

it a

little bit.

And I'm

terrible at that question too, but I have learned that it is important to

have your value proposition cold as a CMO and why you're better than others.

That's really your

goal.

And if I'm not asked

a

question like that, I make sure

that at the end of a meeting, an interview, that I take a moment

and I summarize and I convey that proactively because that's the last thing

they hear.

One of the

best

questions CMOs have asked

me in

interviews is hey, looking at

your scorecard, because there's always a scorecard, where do you see me

being strong and what questions

do you think would come up?

Or where do you see me being on the

weaker side?

It's great

because then I can play back to them what I've heard and then it's an opportunity

for them to correct any misperceptions that have come up during the

previous hour or whatever

it is.

Yeah,

it's very interesting.

Well, thank

you.

This has been great to chat with you about all aspects of scale.

And I love it, every

time I talk with you

there's always all

these little tactical

things as well that come up that are really so revealing of the

fact that you've done this for a long time in all these different

settings and you really love

marketing.

I always learned

from talking

with you, big things, small things, so it's great..

So thank you very much, Kristin.

Likewise, Erica.

Thank you, it's been a pleasure.

That was

Kristin Hambelton, who

has steered marketing

at several SaaS companies

through growth and acquisitions, sharing some

of her hard-won learnings

for how to solve for scale.

Next time on The Get, I'll

speak with SaaS marketing expert Guy Weismantel.

We'll talk

about how to get to alignment with the Board on the role of

marketing and when to go fast versus when to go slow when scaling.

Don't miss it.

Thanks for listening to The Get.

I'm your

host, Erica Seidel.

Hiring great

marketing leaders is not easy.

The Get is designed to inspire 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.

This season's

theme is Solving for the Scale Journey.

If you liked this episode, please share it.

For other insights on recruiting great marketing leaders, what I

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