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.

A lot of CEOs and boards, especially in private-equity-backed businesses,

expect marketing to be a sort of dollar-in/dollar-out proposition.

How reasonable is that when you need to build a brand for the long term?

Today, you'll hear from a marketing leader with a lot of advice on

how to articulate the value of a brand investment to CEOs and CFOs.

Khalid El Khatib is the Head of Marketing and Communications for Stack Overflow.

You may think - that's a developer website, not a SaaS company.

Actually, Stack Overflow has enterprise SaaS products for

collaboration and knowledge sharing that are growing like hotcakes.

"If you don't make a brand investment, you can wonder

why competitors are beating you and why demand generation isn't working...

A rising tide lifts, all boats and an investment in brand

awareness is that rising tide."

You'll also hear about how to respond when CEOs say they need a CMO, but you suspect

they really need a demand gen director.

And you'll hear about how to look around the corners when hiring and

staff up ahead of a growth curve.

Let's go.

Khalid, welcome to the show.

I'm really happy to have you here today.

Thanks for joining.

Thank you for having me.

So my first question to you is you're pretty young, right?

You're, like, fifteen years into your career or so, and you are now

running marketing for one of the fifty most popular websites in the world.

And so I'm curious, as a career-oriented person, what is it about you that

made you advance as fast as you have?

Sure.

Yeah.

Well, I appreciate you calling that out.

I think, you know, I think there are a few things, the first of which is right place,

right time, which is true of most folks' careers, people who tend to do well.

And that's been true throughout mine.

So, I started my career working in comms at Teach for America at a time when Teach

for America was very much a media darling.

So I was quite young, helping write op-eds for Wall Street Journal, and doing

60 Minutes, The Today Show, et cetera.

And then from there went to an ad agency that was acquired shortly after I

started and went from about twenty-five people cut 250 by the time that I left.

And so I had the extraordinary opportunity to learn sort of on the job.

And I think in every job that I had, the two or three or four years that I

stayed felt like ten in terms of the fire hose that I was drinking from.

I think the other thing is I've had the good fortune of having really excellent

managers, people who cared about me, who invested in my professional development,

and gave me really, really candid feedback throughout the course of my career.

Something that I've tried to do for others.

And then thirdly, I think one of the things that sort of made me

well-positioned to succeed is that I like to think that I have some

self-awareness around what I'm good at and where I could use a lot of help

and where I need to hire to help me.

And I think the one thing that I'm good at that's really helped me as

a marketing leader is being a strong writer and a strong communicator.

I think that we take for granted how important and how powerful it is to

be a good writer, especially in 2021, when a marketing leader's mandate is

not just positioning and messaging, but also internal communications to

employees who are going through a highly dynamic, very challenging time.

CEO communications, when they're communicating to everyone from employees

to investors, to customers, and then communicating to your own team.

So I think that that's something that's really helped me.

I studied creative writing in college.

I've freelanced for a number of publications over the course of the years.

And so I really credit being a strong writer to being a strong marketer.

Do you find yourself using your writing skills to prepare

for those sensitive conversations that you're going to have?

Absolutely.

You know, I think, and this will probably be a theme throughout the

conversation that we have today, but agility is super important when you're

a marketing leader, especially in 2021.

And being a professional writer or really investing in professional writing

skills means that you're open to edits, constantly writing and rewriting.

You're not so married to a script that you're sort of one and done.

And I think that, you know, being a compelling and a strong writer

or communicator doesn't just mean being able to write something

good and then read it quite well.

But also going back to the drawing board, understanding different and

disparate voices and communicating to different audiences and things like that.

That's interesting.

Yeah, this framework for career success that, you know, this is

like me, like twenty-plus years into my career, and I believe that

career success is three things.

It's good decisions, hard work, and good luck.

And so I'm glad to hear you talk about some of those aspects here.

But I want to get into some of the decision-making.

Your business has doubled this year, Stack Overflow, and you anticipate a

further doubling next year, as I recall.

And we talked about hiring ahead of the scale.

I would love to hear you talk about how you can look around corners for

hiring and what that looks like.

Cause that is actually, not everybody can do that.

Sometimes, you know, marketers are a little hampered and

they're like the last ones to get budget, even during a scale-up.

Sure, happy to.

I think just to level set, just so folks understand, or maybe those

who are not familiar will still know what Stack Overflow does.

StackOverflow.com is one of the most popular websites in

the world, like you shared.

More traffic than the New York Times, for example.

And it's a website where developers and technologists go to troubleshoot

their code or learn to code or solve their technical challenges.

And so our public platform reaches about a hundred million people

all over the world every month.

And it's a two-sided marketplace.

So we have the public platform and then we have two paid products.

We have Stack Overflow for Teams, which is a collaboration and

knowledge management platform.

And then we have what we call Reach and Relevance, which is an advertising

product, whether advertising software or tooling to developers

and technologists, or employer branding, advertising your company as

a great place to work for developers.

And so the paid product side of the company is what's growing so quickly.

We've had a great year and we anticipate further growth next year,

like you said, and we're fortunate to be able to be hiring ahead.

And so as a marketing leader, what I try to do is I try to say, which

resources do we need in-house and where can we bring on board a bench

of freelancers or permalancers to experiment before we scale?

And so to me, what that looks like is a really solid investment in

product marketing, for example.

I believe it's very difficult, though not impossible, to outsource your product

marketing efforts because not only do they need to know the product inside and out,

but that team has to both build really strong relationships with the product

and the sales team, and they effectively have to be the connective tissue that

holds the marketing team together.

And so that's one area where we try to invest ahead of growth.

On the other side of the coin, there's brand and content, for example.

So one thing that we haven't done historically, because we

largely market to developers, is make a big investment in video.

Developers notoriously have an aversion to video.

They're much more likely to read a long piece of technical content, for example.

But it's something that we want to do more around, you know, whether it's

TikTok on one end of the spectrum, or a coding tutorial video on the other.

That said, before bringing on board two or three videographers or an

editor, we want to see if it works.

And so that's an area in which we can bring on a small, scrappy agency or

a permalancer to help us get where we need to go, and where I can free

up an FTE for product marketing.

Right, right.

My feeling is that product marketing is the hardest role to hire for right now.

Are you finding the same or do you have this kind of one role that's

like the bane of your existence?

I find that to be absolutely true.

I think, well, I read your email, your newsletter, and I think I

forwarded it to my product marketing team, which they both appreciated

and sort of probably groaned to see.

So I think that's absolutely true across a couple of dimensions.

One, product marketers are really expensive and the market is highly

competitive right now, as you know.

And then two, in a period when there are so many applications that we're seeing,

such a high volume of applications, the product marketing title can be

something of a misnomer because, as I'm sure you know, so many companies hire

what they call product marketers to effectively only do sales enablement.

Or a product marketer within a smaller SaaS company, for example.

It might be something of a generalist and they might do a lot of field marketing.

So I think a true product marketer, someone who really understands

messaging and positioning and can do a pricing and packaging strategy,

is like finding a needle in a haystack, especially in this market.

Yeah, yeah.

It's almost like all this stuff that a CEO would do or like McKinsey Consultant

would do, and then we're expecting people with very different backgrounds to kind

of coalesce it all, to do all these like super strategic and important things.

Yeah, and I think that it's also, exactly like you said,

a unique combination of having some quants and qualitative skills, too.

So the expectation that they really understand the mechanics

of the business and a lot of metrics and KPIs, but can write the

messaging for the product as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So your business is, it's so interesting because you have a piece

that's the software as a service, and, obviously, a piece that's not.

And your background, again, you started your career at Teach for America.

Totally like the opposite of a SaaS kind of business.

What's your take on bringing people into SaaS that don't have SaaS backgrounds?

Because, as a recruiter, I often go and start a search and people

are like, well, we absolutely need somebody who's a strong SaaS marketer.

And sometimes I challenge people and say, do we really?

I mean, it's kind of an obvious thing to say you need, but I'm curious to

hear you talk about, do you think that we will see more non-SaaS marketers,

whether B2B or B2C, pivoting into B2B SaaS, and how do you think through

that when you do your own hiring?

That's a great question.

I think the thing that's benefited me throughout my career is I have a lot of

experience around two-sided marketplaces.

So Teach for America certainly was not SaaS.

And then while I was at WPP, I worked a lot with TED, both the

conference and video talk platform.

And then, most recently before Stack, I was at GLG, insight and

knowledge platform, which has a robust bench of experts and end clients.

And so I think what I've learned through working with two-sided marketplaces

is how to prioritize and how to market to two disparate groups while

finding the connectivity between them, and then some efficiency in that.

But to answer your question, a little more on the nose, I think

it largely depends on the role.

And so I think there are some roles if you're a SaaS company looking to

build out your marketing team where you can bring someone in and it's fine,

like an events person, for example.

I think events folks, as long as they're data-driven and super agile,

can come from B2C or any sort of field or sector and do well in SaaS.

I don't know that that's necessarily true among a lot of demand

generation roles, for example.

So the ABM, the account-based marketing motion for SaaS, is quite

different than it would be for, you know, a non-technical B2B business.

And so I think that's one area where you really benefit

from having a SaaS background.

When it comes to a brand role, again, it depends on the role, but I do think that

there's some benefit in hiring a designer who knows the B2C space really well and

can bring some elements of it into SaaS.

Is there an aspect of the SaaS business model that has

been hard for people to grok that are new to SaaS, like on your teams?

That's a great question.

I think, sure, there's not one that jumps out to me.

The one thing that I will say about SaaS is because it's incredibly buzzy

and because it's seen such tremendous growth over the past few years in

particular, there are no shortage of resources that exist in the world

to help people get up to speed.

And so an example of that is some folks in our product marketing team and our

product marketing leader, who's excellent, didn't have a ton of analyst relations

experience working in the SaaS space.

And that was a core focus for us this year.

And so what we did is we brought on a firm called The Skills Connection who

is comprised primarily of former Gartner analysts to help us put together our

pitch, to help us decide which analysts we should engage with and what our strategy

should be for Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.

And so that's an example of where we made a relatively small investment, monetary

investment, a big investment in time, and said, okay, here's what we don't know,

how can you help us get up to speed?

And we did really, really quickly.

And we didn't necessarily need to hire a bunch of folks to do it.

That's great.

So you do a ton of hiring.

You have a big team.

What's your favorite interview question that you ask that

is surprisingly revealing?

That's a great question.

I manage five sort of functional teams - brand, content, communications, product

marketing, and demand generation.

And the questions differ for each role.

I think one that's particularly telling for most of them, you know, demand

generation, content, comms, and brands, in particular, is what is a favorite

campaign that you've seen of late?

And it sounds pretty simple and straightforward, but it can be

relatively telling because I love when I get a really creative answer.

An advertisement, whether it's on TV or that they saw on Instagram recently,

that has nothing to do with the field in which we're interviewing them for, but

sort of gives me a sense of what their interests are, two, what they find to

be powerful, and then three, how often they consume content and the news.

And something that I really look for in a lot of the critical hires on our

team is someone who has their finger on the pulse of what's happening, not

only in our space, but in the world.

Why is that so important?

I mean, it sounds obvious, but...

One, at the highest level, intellectual curiosity, I think,

makes someone much more successful in a job than someone who is looking to check

a bunch of boxes on a job description or follow their OKRs for the quarter.

So I think that that's really important.

And then the other is that I think external perspective and

outside expertise is so powerful.

And maybe that's my bias from both TED and from GLG where the business

model is essentially focused on bringing in outside thought.

But one thing that we try to do at Stack, and on the marketing team in particular,

is have speakers come and talk to us, employ consultants wherever it makes sense

to do so, or advisors, so that weren't looking beyond what we're doing in the

day to day to make ourselves better.

Right, right.

That's great.

I talked to somebody else for this podcast whose favorite interview question was,

I'll just share it because you might find this interesting, it was tell me about

a product that is well-marketed and why.

And the guy's really listening to the why and does somebody have a

structure for what good marketing is?

And I think yours is suggestive of that as well.

It's like, okay, does somebody actually know what a good campaign is?

And what are the aspects that they think are really important in a campaign?

Is it just, you know, oh, that it's pretty colors or whatever, or is it

like, oh, they've thought through their audience, they've thought through how

they're going to measure, et cetera.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

So, can you talk a little bit more about how you

organize your marketing team to support the two different products?

So you have the public platform versus the P SaaS aspects?

One, it's so important to be highly cross-functional in your

approach to everything that you do.

And so I work super closely with our CPO, our chief product officer, and our

chief revenue officer on everything.

We even have a weekly check-in that we do for thirty minutes every week, just

to see what's going on and try to see around corners to the best of our ability.

And so the benefit in doing that, and in addition to that check-in our teams do

monthly business reviews around the public platform and around each of our products.

So the point of doing that, and what that sort of unlocks, is our ability

to find synergies wherever they exist.

So if the public platform team is working on something that we can

help or augment in some way, we can deputize a small amount of product

marketing resources or demand generation resources to promote it and vice versa.

So I think that's one piece that's really important.

The second, which is related, is uncovering synergies wherever they exist.

And so our Stack Overflow for Teams product is effectively a private

version of the public platform.

There are, of course, several differences to the approach, but sometimes when

something really resonates with the public platform or the paid product, we can make

them interchangeable or we can build a roadmap that works in the other direction.

And so I think it's all about finding those efficiencies and those synergies

and empowering everyone on your team to think about it in that way as well.

And so you have these monthly business reviews, so you're

saying you have product and marketing and sales altogether at those

monthly kind of NBR, so to speak?

That's right, and we also have the full

leadership team there as well.

So there's representation from the legal team, from the finance team, and the CEO,

so that cross-functionally, everyone knows what's happened and what's happening,

and they have the opportunity to ask questions about all of those things.

Right, right.

That's cool.

And it gets your marketing team to kind of have that what I

call business first, marketing second kind of view of the world.

100%.

I mean, I think that the great thing about Stack Overflow, and you can call

it transparency or what have you, but there are I don't think any surprises.

We tend to be pretty good about cascading information to the company

and to the team around performance.

We share quarterly financials data and then do AMAs every single month around it.

And the marketing team, as well, has a pretty good view into who we're

hiring for one or two quarters ahead and what our priorities are as well.

So, can you share an organizational choice that you've

made that you think might be a little bit unique, that some other marketing

leaders haven't done or wouldn't do?

And that organization choice could have worked well or poorly.

One thing, and, you know, this is cheating, but one thing

that I did do, so I'd been at Stack for three and a half years, and three years

ago or so the company itself, Stack Overflow, was 40% remote at the time.

And our technical teams were much more remote than that, about 80%.

But I elected, because there were so many challenges around hiring great

marketing talent in New York, where we're based in London, where we have

another office, around product marketing in particular, to hire a much more

remote-first, remote-focused team.

And so the marketing team is highly distributed, even before the pandemic.

Now, obviously things are quite different.

But I'm really, really glad that I took that approach because I've found some

really excellent talent by doing it.

And the team has sort of a remote-first DNA and muscle

memory around how to interact on a remote-first basis from day one.

So I think that sometimes marketing leaders are inclined to say, okay,

you know, sales teams, I think more than anyone else, and especially

BDRs and SDRs tend to be in person or gravitate towards office work.

And sometimes a marketing leader will say, because it's so important to

build relationships with sales teams, the marketing team should be in person

too, but I think that's a mistake because I think it's really possible

to build relationships remotely.

And two, I think, especially with regard to strong demand generation teams

and product marketing teams, we're no longer going to be able to find the

folks that we need just looking at New York or Chicago or San Francisco.

Right.

Right.

I've been thinking that this kind of remote hiring, obviously a lot of people

are doing remote hiring now, you had some expertise with it ahead of COVID.

Do you think it makes you have more of like an optimizing mindset versus

a satisficing mindset with hiring?

Because there's a difference between, oh, we want to hire the best person in

New York, versus, oh, we can look far and wide across, not just the U.S., but

maybe also, across Europe, we're going to find the absolute, very best person.

And do you ever see that it makes it like you're trying to have the absolute

perfect hire and so it can take longer?

That's a good question.

And that's certainly a risk, one that I haven't spent too much thinking about.

I mean, I try to take the approach, maybe less with hiring than

everything else, but " don't let perfect get in the way of very good."

And I think that's true of hiring and I think every position is different.

And so, you know, one question you have to ask yourself when you bring someone

on board is do you want someone who can do the job at a hundred percent

or 110% on day one, or do you want someone who will do it at 90%, invest

in their professional development, and hopefully will stay two or three years?

And so I think that that's one key consideration, maybe one that we've

lost in a market that's this crazy.

But sometimes, you know, you want someone who can grow into the role to some extent.

Or, and I think this is a specialty to run marketing teams, you bring someone in

at the manager or the director level, and you don't have any anticipated VP recs for

two or three years and where do they go?

They're likely to leave.

Right.

So we've talked about hiring an organization.

Let's take a broader lens.

Can you share some mistakes for a SaaS marketing leader to avoid when scaling up?

This one is an easy one to articulate.

It's a difficult one to fix.

And I think that that's not enough SaaS marketing leaders

invest in brand marketing.

And that's especially true, as I'm sure you've seen, in private-equity-backed

companies where it's sort of this dollar-in/dollar-out mentality because

as every marketing leader knows, it's really difficult to prove ROI

for dollars that are spent on brand.

And so I think that we were fortunate to have this support of our CEO and

our CFO over time to make an investment in brand awareness, and we've also run

longitudinal studies twice a year, brand tracking surveys, which have proven

out the value of investing in that.

We've seen awareness of Stack Overflow for Teams and evangelism for

it go up double digit percentages.

And so I think, you know, a couple of mistakes that are made is one,

not making any investment at all, and then figuring out why competitors are

beating them and why your demand gen teams aren't working because a rising

tide lifts all boats and investment in brand awareness is that rising tide.

And then the other is making an investment and talking to partners and peers

about how you can articulate the value of an investment in brand awareness.

Every CEO and every CFO is different, as we all know.

A brand tracking survey once or twice a year doesn't always work.

And so there are lots of other tricks and things that you can do.

Not necessarily tricks, but social listening, for example, qualitative

feedback at conferences and events, anecdotal feedback from employees in

terms of the campaigns that their friends and family are seeing, and that all

sort of coalesces, in my opinion, to be a very, very powerful tool and brand

awareness and investment in brand is not something that should ever be neglected.

It's so true and it is a hard conversation to have.

I like your point about the dollar-in/dollar-out expectation.

And I think the best marketers are the ones that can go into a meeting

where somebody has that viewpoint and pivot that viewpoint and have

them realize that - you know, like a former boss of mine says, I love this,

"Today's brand is tomorrow's demand."

it's just a great way to put it.

Any other thoughts on key mistakes to avoid when scaling up?

I think a related point is, you know, an investment in

brand doesn't mean that you need to take out an ad in the Superbowl or a

billboard in Times Square, which is sometimes the misconception that a

board or a CFO or a CRO or a CEO will have when people ask for brand dollars.

Especially in B2B SaaS, when I as for brand dollars, I'm not saying that we

need to do a takeover of the subway system in New York City because I know

that it's not going to lead anywhere.

And so a related point is always start small, scale and iterate from there.

So, I think, one approach that we try to take when it comes to developer

awareness is looking at our key 1000 accounts, where are they headquartered?

You know, increasingly a lot of them are headquartered in Austin, for example.

A lot of developer-oriented companies have moved to Texas

over the past couple of years.

And so, if we're going to do something out of home or some big display,

why don't we start it in Austin?

Why don't we take over their public transportation?

Or billboards in their downtown area where they're much more likely to be

working from the office than in New York, for example, or San Francisco?

So starting in a hyper-local market and scaling if it makes sense to do so, is

how I would approach brand awareness, as opposed to some people who get a capital

injection and then right away will take out these massive, massive buys.

Exactly.

Any other advice that you would give to a CEO who is looking to hire a

marketing leader for a scale journey?

I have two pieces of advice for CEOs and sort of across

the spectrum, whether they're seed or series A or B or C or a public company.

Think long and hard and consult with your advisors in terms of the

profile of person you're looking for.

And so occasionally, someone will reach out to me and say, whether it's

a friend or a peer or someone I went to college with, and they'll say we

really need, you know, I have a series B company, we're doing incredibly,

we've had this massive raise, we have a great valuation, and we're close

to, or we have product market fit.

We're ready for a CMO.

We need a CMO.

And I'll say, okay, what do you want them to do?

And they'll bullet out ten things and I'm like, you need a VP of demand generation.

You need someone who understands marketing automation and can get you off of HubSpot

and onto a platform like Marquetto.

You need someone who can build out a field practice and ABM practice.

You do not need a CMO.

And so I think, you know, sometimes there's this inclination to hire as

senior as possible, when in reality, you don't need someone that strategic.

You need someone who can execute and build out a team who is in the weeds.

So there's that piece of it.

The other, which is related, is what type of marketing leader do you need?

Do you need a brand CMO?

Do you need a demand CMO?

Do you need someone with robust product marketing experience, more

of a communications oriented CMO?

And I think that, you know this quite well, I'm sure, and provide a lot of

counsel on this topic, but often times a CEO or, you know, the board will

have a very, very either nebulous idea of the type of CMO that they want,

or they'll point to a specific person at a specific company, when, as you

know, CMOs often - you know, one CMO's very, very different from the next.

Yeah, the challenge I see is they want it all, right?

They want the person who can, as I like to say, parachute

between strategy and tactics.

It's like, oh yeah, I want the person who's going to drive leads, but then also

they have to be a great communicator.

They have to be very analytical and they have to be this and that.

I think the challenging thing in recruiting is that focus.

And I think it comes down to saying okay, who do we need

for the next couple of years?

Because in a couple of years, the whole world will be different

and we can hire somebody else or somebody in addition, at that point.

But I don't know.

Do you have any other tips on how to make that conversation more productive

so that you're not just having the CEO say, oh, I want one of everything please?

One, I would just say to push back and say, it's impossible.

Right?

Like I think if you look at the sort of C-suite, the CMO is the least likely

to stay at a company beyond two years.

And I think that's largely because the expectations when they were

hired are entirely unrealistic.

Point two, and I think something that's sort of makes all of this a little more

tangible to someone to say, okay, we'll do our best to find you the most strategic

leader possible who's also comfortable executing, but who is the number one and

most critical hire you see after the CMO?

And that will often be clarifying to someone.

So for example, for me, demand generation has been part of my mandate and several

roles that I've had, but I do not, you know, I'm under no delusion that I am

an excellent demand generation leader.

And so, there's a VP of demand generation and it's really his bread and butter.

I defer to him on most things that he does and that he brings on board.

And he's excellent at that.

And I recognize my own limitations in the space.

And so I often think if someone's like, okay, we really need a new

CMO, you say, okay, but then do you need a great VP of demand?

Do you need a great VP of product marketing?

Do you need a great VP of comms?

Who is this person's deputy and right hand?

Yeah.

And then sometimes maybe that deputy that they're envisioning is all

they need, or all they need for the next, you know, year or two.

Yeah.

That's very helpful.

So personally, thank you.

That'll be helpful to me when I talk to people.

Let's talk about trends.

So 2022 is, you know, next up here.

Any trends that you foresee for B2B SaaS marketers that

are in scale-up mode for 2022?

I think one is embrace agility.

You know, I've been saying this for twenty months now, but it used to be

that you would set a marketing budget at the beginning of the year, you

would maybe check in on budget versus actuals on a monthly or quarterly

basis, but you wouldn't really reforecast for at least six months,

most likely until the end of the year.

And that can no longer be true.

I think we're still figuring out what our cadence looks like, but the leadership

team needs to at least talk quarterly about whether or not the budget as

it currently stands makes sense, the headcount and org chart that you've put

together at the beginning of the year still makes sense relative to the needs.

And so the very tangible example of that is our events budget for 2022.

Our events budget for 2022 looks very different today than it did ten days

ago, just because of everything that's happening in the news right now.

And, you know, we're no longer bullish on the fact that we'll be

at events in February or March.

So I think that's one thing that people really need to focus on, the other, and

I think a trend that's going to not go away for a while is, we spend a lot of

time talking about how SaaS marketing meters need to better partner with sales

and product organizations, and I think that they've been laser-focused on that

alignment for the past couple of years.

Where the B2C space has been focused for quite some time is the synergies

that exist between the people or human resources team and marketing.

And there's been a lot of focus on employer branding.

So like the Facebooks of the world, the Instagrams, the Twitters, and

then all sorts of consumer brands have really made an investment in

recruiting and employer branding.

And I think that marketing leaders and people team leaders

have worked lockstep together.

I think that's one area where the SaaS space has really fallen behind.

And so I think a big focus in 2022 and beyond is going to be okay, how

can marketing teams, whether it's the brand team or the content team or the

comms team, partner with people teams to help win in this hyper-competitive

environment today and tomorrow?

Totally agree with you on that one.

I'll be excited to see that kind of greater synergy.

I mean, you think about HR, like everything that happened in

marketing, I dunno, five or ten years ago, and it's still happening

is now starting to happen in HR.

Like greater reliance on technology, greater reliance on data.

The years, like this year, last year, you know, it was like the years for HR

folks to kind of come into their own.

I think that's absolutely true.

And I think that's true from a resourcing perspective as well.

So if you think about like development resources, for example,

or engineering resources, they were always deputized to revenue.

And this is not, I'm not speaking to Stack Overflow, I'm speaking very generally.

But those development resources tend to be allocated towards revenue

focused initiatives or product.

And then, to your point, at this sort of bottom of the pile is people

initiatives or the HR system API.

And it's sort of people get to it when they get around to it.

And so job descriptions are hard coded, it's glitchy, it doesn't

sync with LinkedIn, for example.

And now it's an imperative for the business to be able to

hire, to be able to compete.

And I think that companies have to start resourcing HR teams differently

from a technical perspective and from a marketing perspective.

Yeah.

So those are great trends.

Thank you so much for being on the show, Khalid.

This was great to hear all of your perspectives.

Thank you for having me again.

That was Khalid El Khatib, who runs marketing and

communications for Stack Overflow.

Now that you've listened, ask yourself: how can you have a

more productive conversation with your CEO and CFO and Board about

the balance of brand and demand?

Next time on The Get, you'll hear from Sydney Sloan, telling us about

her CMO scale journey for Salesloft.

You'll learn about how to think about your market and your marketing, the

bets you're making on each, and the team structure and goal setting as you scale.

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

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We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today's top

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This season's theme is Solving for the Scale Journey.

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