Scalable Acts of Marketing: Building a Repeatable Growth Engine

   

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th in Palo Alto. We're excited to have five flocking awesome founding sponsors: HG Insights, Boomerang, Webless, Firebrick, and Webflow, and an amazing VIP dinner sponsor with Vidoso. Last year, we brought together over 100 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and this year we're doing it again. Same venue, same energy, and same ambition to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. Tickets are now available at CMOHuddles.com. Do yourself a favor—check out some of the speakers and experts we have. It will blow you away. You can also watch a video that I am confident will get you pumped up, and it also shows what Gen AI video can do right now. Grab your ticket before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's gonna be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a Career Huddle where our flocking awesome community of CMO Huddles gets exclusive access to the authors of some of the world's best-selling business books. At this particular huddle, we're joined by author and marketing leader Joshua Leatherman, author of Scalable Acts of Marketing. Josh flips the script on how marketing drives growth, showing what happens when teams move from random acts to repeatable systems that scale. He shares lessons from his 13-year run at Service Express, where discipline, partnerships, data, rigor, and accountability turn marketing into a true revenue engine.

And by the way, if you're a B2B CMO, you can meet Joshua and get a copy of his book and another 100 incredible marketing leaders at the CMO Super Huddle in Palo Alto, California on November 6th and 7th. Visit CMOHuddles.com for more details, but hurry up, because we're almost out of tickets. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello Huddlers, when Joshua Leatherman asked me to write the foreword for Scalable Acts of Marketing, I was flattered and intrigued. I mean, I've authored a couple of marketing books myself, and I've interviewed a lot of CMOs, so I kind of have a sense of what separates truly transformative marketing wisdom from like the endless parade of tactical advice. This book, Scalable Acts of Marketing, is not just another marketing book. It's a comprehensive playbook born from real experience. Joshua, or Josh as I refer to him, has been a longtime member of CMO Huddles, where he's consistently demonstrated the kind of strategic thinking that makes the rest of us lean in and take notes during his 13 years. I'm going to repeat that—13 years—as CMO at Service Express. He helped the company grow from $30 million to $350 million in annual recurring revenue, and is on track to get to a billion. And if that's not enough, Josh recently took on the CMO role at Sideris, because apparently he's not inclined just to take a victory lap. So let's dive in and learn from someone who knows how to make the revenue bell ring consistently. And by the way, if you read the foreword that I wrote, you'll understand that story. So hello, Josh, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Joshua: Hey, Drew. Good to see you. I'm in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I'm home, and it's going to be like 90 degrees. So we're in July in Michigan. So we try and stay close to home during like June, July, August, when we get the warm months.

Drew: Yes, indeed, I know it well. We're expecting the same here in New York City. So let's start with the obvious question. You had what most people would call a flocking awesome 13-year run at Service Express. You could have coasted, but instead you wrote a comprehensive playbook for growth marketing. What possessed you to write this book?

Joshua: First and foremost, I have been the recipient of learning from other great CMOs and other great growth marketing organizations, and in my almost 14 years at Service Express, I kind of learned what some unlocks were for predictable growth marketing. We had a number of private equity firms, great private equity firms. And they started to kind of tap me to kind of advise for other portcos, other of their portfolio companies. And it got to a point where I was an operator, but then I was trying to advise a lot of other of their portcos, and I thought there's only one of me, but if I actually write the script and the playbook, I can help a lot more people if I kind of write it out and share what I've learned over my 13 years. And so over the course of, you know, probably two years, just as a part-time gig, I started writing this book. Here's the playbook that I use to grow the organization organically. And that was really the impetus for writing the book.

Drew: Got it. All right. Well, so yes, rather than saying, "Sure, I'll help you," here, "read this and we'll talk." I love it. So this book opens with a captivating parable with a fictional hero, Andrew Miller, transforming a fictional company, ScaleWorks. Now, why did you choose to take this approach, and are you a Patrick Lencioni fan? Is that what's going on here?

Joshua: I'm a huge fan of like business fable books that have fables. So Patrick Lencioni, big fan of his. I don't know if you've read The Go-Giver, but The Go-Giver is another example of just a great parable. And I think, you know, parables or fables do two things. One is, it helps illustrate the points in a very real-life way. It almost makes it a little more applicable as a reader reads it. It makes them—it helps them understand it in a real-world way. And so I was interested in that. And number two is, I'm not the best writer in the world. Like, I'm not a writer first. And so I thought, instead of just writing kind of like the boring playbook, which is what I wrote first, if you look at chapters 11 through 28, right? It is the playbook. And while it can be a little bit dry, there's a ton of value there. I thought what I would do is put some creative writing at the beginning to help just make it a more interesting book.

Drew: Yeah, it's so funny that you say that now, because you know the first part, you just breeze through the story and you get it, and then the second part, you're right, it becomes like a textbook, and there's lots of good information in there, and it is two very different ways of communicating the same thing. So, but before we go on, so Andrew Miller, yeah. Is he based on anybody in particular?

Joshua: Yeah, I would say Andrew Miller is actually based on a little bit of the way that I led. But I also have a senior leader on my team who served with me for many years. Her name is Jesse Sprott. If you—I'd encourage you, look her up, connect with her on LinkedIn. She's kind of been my lieutenant, right? And she was at Service Express. She is now at Sideris. And so I would say loosely, it's kind of a character. We've got very different leadership styles, but I would say Andrew Miller is loosely based on kind of how we led at Service Express.

Drew: Interesting. So you created two people, put them into one, and no wonder this guy's so good.

Joshua: Yeah.

Drew: So in this book, in your book, you emphasize that most companies get some pretty important things backwards. They focus on tactics before building the underlying infrastructure. And you talk about five foundational elements. Let's kind of go through those one at a time, and why these are so important to lead to scaling effectively.

Joshua: So first of all, there's a few. One is the revenue partnership. I think what we get wrong a lot of times with marketers is they don't want accountability. This is the tough thing, especially when you're in private equity or even public companies, but particularly private equity—is marketing teams who operate from—oftentimes you hear them, they talk about campaigns, but they don't talk about pipeline or revenue, right? You get marketers who talk about activity, but they don't talk about outcomes. And it's so important if you want to be a scalable marketer and one who produces value and is long-term for the organization, you have to talk about outcomes, not activities. Private equity looks at that and they go, you know, we need people who are creating value and who are not overhead.

Drew: Let's go into that specifically, because this is a conversation that comes up a lot, and it makes sense to just say, I get it. I want to talk about outcomes. When I think of PE firm conversation, the outcomes they want to talk about are revenue and efficiency of acquiring revenue, right? Those are sort of the big things on their mind, and those, to me, are such lagging indicators for a lot of companies. I mean, I don't know what the sales cycle was at Service Express, but it wasn't a week, right? So talk a little bit about this sort of outcomes, short-term, long-term, leading indicators and so forth, and how you actually do that dance, because we know it's not a "I press this button and out comes revenue."

Joshua: Yeah, but what is a great outcome, but also leading indicator of sales qualified opportunities. Too many marketers—I've seen it in other portfolio companies—too many talk about campaigns. And you can tell a random acts of marketing team versus a scalable acts of marketing team based on the language they use. And if they're consistently talking about campaigns, they're random acts of marketing. If they're talking about pipeline creation, sales qualified opportunities, some of those leading indicators that are outcomes of the campaigns, you've got an indication that this is a scalable team. And by the way, we learned this too at Service Express, and the same holds true for many other scalable marketing teams. We learned that any opportunities that came in from marketing versus that were sourced by sales or outbound sales development—anything that came in from marketing—they had 10% higher win rates, two times the revenue. They had half the sales cycle time. So the velocity was half the time when you're able to start measuring, right? And there's a chapter in the book that talks about the importance of revenue operations. And by the way, you can also tell a random acts of marketing team versus a scalable acts of marketing team by whether they have a commercial ops team that they're working with. Too many companies have marketing ops, sales ops—they have their own operational teams. You need that commercial team. But if you have some analyst in a commercial team where you can articulate, "Here's the sales qualified opportunities we're creating. Here's the pipeline that's coming from marketing. And by the way, not all revenue and pipeline is created equal. It's not. Here's our close rates, here's our sales velocity." And marketing is an investment vehicle to better revenue and pipeline because it's got less of a cycle time, higher win rates, more revenue, right? It makes sense. If you can articulate that, private equity owners, shareholders, they're going to go, "How can we invest more in marketing?" And what they're spending on marketing becomes an investment, not overhead.

Drew: I want to go through those numbers a little more carefully, because obviously, if marketing is a higher win rate, marketing-generated leads, if you will, it's a higher or SQLs. That's awesome, because that's much more efficient. And I just want to—why do you think that was the case?

Joshua: It should be, right? Because marketing is the only team who has the technologies and tools to identify digital intent. Like, we can look at the total addressable market. Sales can't do this. We can look at our total addressable market, and if we're using the right tool, we can start to identify who is entering—which of our accounts, highly addressable accounts—are entering a buying cycle at any given time. Drew, five to 7% of the total addressable market, depending on the industry, is actually buying. The difficult thing is for companies to understand who it is buying. If marketing is doing their job, if they're not identifying who those people are, I say they're in dereliction of duty, because nobody else in the company can do it. And the reason that we get better pipeline and revenue is because we're identifying people who are already in the sales process, and we can determine which ones are going to be better revenue, right? We can understand which accounts are highly addressable versus which ones are just kind of addressable.

Drew: Yeah. I mean, I could push this to the extreme and say, of course, these people come into the website. They're showing intent. They're doing other things that make their behavior such that they're ready to buy, whereas sales is just banging on doors. And so one could argue, "Well, geez, then just keep spending until you've reached every single person who's potentially in market, and wait for everything else. Just make it all inbound." At what point do you say, "Nah, we probably can't do that"? Is there a—and do you really get to a point of diminishing returns with marketing? Have you found that yet?

Joshua: I've not found it. It literally becomes, how much do you want to invest in a year? Because there's an EBITDA typically investment, or you have to make some trade-offs from other areas of the organization. And if you can prove that marketing is an investment that will return revenue growth, and for us, it was typically within about six to nine months, you have to work with private equity to go, "How much EBITDA do you want to give away this year in order to get the revenue next year?" So you're kind of hemmed in by a four- to five-year private equity cycle, where you invest heavily in years one through three, and then you start to pull back and recognize the profits in year four and five. It's a good cycle. I like private equity. I like that process. You're going to hear very few CMOs, probably, who say that it's a good process. But if you can prove that marketing is an investment, then you can put as much money into it as the diminishing returns, or as much as private equity wants to give away in EBITDA or profit.

Drew: Right. And it's sort of this moment in time where, like, at some point in time in the year, you're no longer going to be generating revenue that year, but you're spending those dollars. And so this is where this sort of artificial annual basis is. I want to just understand—I get the win rate because people are in market. The two times revenue is a real surprising number for me. Why do you think that's the case?

Joshua: Because with outbound cold calling, with sales dev or sales, it's kind of spray and pray. Like, they're looking at all of the addressable accounts out there, and they're going, "Where can I find somebody who will take a call?" Right? And so they're kind of—it's spray and pray. They're looking at everybody. With marketing, we have a subset of what I call highly addressable accounts. And we can—you know, if we've got a pot of dollars with which we're going to spend, we can put a majority of that towards what we would consider to be our highly addressable accounts. TAM, the TRM—what does AIM stand for, Alan?

Alan: Hi. It's what you're talking about, Joshua. It's accounts in market. So you've got TAM, total addressable, and then total relevant, your ICP within your TAM, which are the ones you should be targeting, and then the five to 7% of accounts you mentioned that are actually in market. How to identify them? Yeah, in marketing you need to be more productive along the way.

Joshua: Yeah, marketing can be uber-specific about the accounts that we are directing our dollars toward.

Drew: Alan, thank you for joining in. For those folks who are listening later on, Alan works with PE firms and CMOs all the time, so perfect that he joined in that conversation. So I want to—there's something that you talked about. There's a transformation where a CEO goes from seeing marketing as a necessary evil into a genuine growth driver. And I'm wondering if this happened to you specifically at Service Express, and then, because you talk about—I mean, in the book, obviously that happens—but I know that what we just talked about is probably what led to that. But talk a little bit more about that transformation when suddenly the CEO, probably the CFO as well, get it.

Joshua: Yeah, I think, first of all, it is rare that a CMO can partner with just a CEO and get that buy-in. It starts with a CMO's ability—there's two relationships in particular that a CMO has to be uber-close to. And I see too many CMOs that stray away from these relationships. It is a CFO and a CRO. If a CMO does not have a consistent and regular meeting cadence with them, and if a CMO isn't looking for validation from them, then they're going to get themselves in a place of trouble, because there's two things that the CRO or CSO, chief sales officer, chief revenue officer—marketing cannot be successful if we're not running plays across the entire go-to-market organization. And the sales leader has to be actively involved in those plays, because his sales team has a part to play in that success. So the CEO has to be hearing consistently from the CRO, "Marketing's kicking ass over here, right? Like, we've got the plays they're driving pipeline." The CEO has to be hearing that from the CRO. And then secondly, the CFO has to be validating that the spend is producing ROI. Marketing likes to kind of build out our own attribution models, right? We like to be able to build our own ROI models, but that's kind of like the fox in the henhouse. Yeah, I hate to say it, but marketers love to kind of do that. It is not until we partner with the CFO, the finance team, and oftentimes, I liked—if you've got an operating partner with a private equity firm, I always like to get buy-in from them as well. But when the CEO is hearing that the head of my sales team is bought in, my CFO is bought in, and potentially even the private equity operating partners are bought in, the CEO is going to be absolutely on fire. The problem is a CEO is not the person—like, they are too busy. They're not the person to be able to hear about, "Hey, here's my attribution model." They're never going to understand your attribution model. They just want to know that their head of finance buys into it.

Drew: Interesting. And I want to—there's so many different parts of this that I want to get into. I'm assuming then you work with sales and the CFO to develop an attribution model, recognizing that we're doing attribution, not necessarily in the same time frame as a year, right? But so talk a little bit about—what does that model look like in the best-case scenario?

Joshua: Yeah, it's different for different companies, different for different sales cycles. I like custom attribution models. And if you work with like Bizible—I think Marketo, Marketo, and then Adobe bought them, and they call them something else now—but you work with a tool like Bizible that does attribution, you can get—you have to figure it out yourself. You can get a partner with them coming in and providing expertise on, "Hey, you should give this much percentage to first touch, this much percentage to opportunity creation, this much percentage to the channel that was used when the deal closed." They can start to kind of build that out for you. They can give you a six-month window or a 12-month window, and they can build that out. And then what I like to do is take that to our private equity operating partners and kind of walk them through it and say, "Hey, do you agree with this? What tweaks can we make?" and get alignment with them, sales, and the finance team.

Drew: So that everybody believes that this model is as accurate as one model like this can be, recognizing that they're all problematic.

Joshua: We've all agreed, and marketing is not showing up. The CMO is not showing up into an executive meeting or a board meeting claiming, "This is the ROI of marketing." This is the trouble a lot of CMOs get in. But they've not had the pregame with others to help them understand what attribution is, because it's hard, it's confusing, and to get buy-in on that.

Drew: So I want to go back to something we talked about: the relationship between the CMO and the head of sales. And we know that a lot of those get fraught, if you will, often when numbers aren't getting hit and it's like pointing fingers and all of that. You talk about revenue partnerships. What does this look like, and you know, what kinds of things need to happen for that partnership to work and the finger-pointing not to happen?

Joshua: Here's the most critical thing: you have to have a central kind of go-to-market operations team—revenue operations. You can call it revenue operations. Some people call it commercial operations. But you have to have a central GTM operations team, and it should be a team that does a few things. They're uber-focused on data. They understand and are certified in the technologies that the teams use. That's so important. I've seen so many rev ops teams where we kind of move people from different parts of the business. They're not certified. In the book, Andrew Miller talks about how technology is either an enabler or disabler. There's no in-between, and that is so true with technology. If it is not enabling every GTM team, it is disabling. It's friction. It's getting in the way. And so you've got to have a team of technologists. I call revenue operations "Switzerland," right? Because you do often get marketing and sales teams going, "Hey, I'm sending over these leads. We have these service level agreements. Sales isn't following up." Sales is saying, just like James in the book, you know, he's going, "Hey, I'm getting a bunch of tire kickers, people who aren't interested." You've got to have a revenue operations team who is objective. They're into data and technology, and they're truth-tellers, right? And they kind of bridge the gap. That is such a critical team for any organization, and I mentioned it earlier. I see organizations that get in trouble because they build out marketing ops, sales ops, customer ops, right? And these teams operate differently, and they don't build technologies that work. Buyers don't work that way. From the time they come into the buying funnel to the time they are customers, they want a seamless and smooth buying journey, right? And too often, we create disparate and siloed ones because we have siloed teams. That revenue operations or commercial operations team is foundational to building that.

Drew: Yeah, I mean, single source of truth just becomes really, really important, and that does mean that both the CRO and the CMO have to trust those folks, which isn't always the case. There's some conversation in the CMO community about, "Well, I own pipeline" or "I don't own pipeline. I'm not sure." And I'm curious for you, what does pipeline mean to you? Do you own it, and where does that fit in your framework?

Joshua: Yeah, I'm a big believer marketing has got to own pipeline or revenue. Otherwise, what are we doing, right? As a marketing organization, that is just our remit. We have the ability to understand what the total addressable market looks like, what the highly addressable market looks like, and bring them into the buying funnel in a way that sales can't do it because they don't have these mass tools that we have to identify where these accounts are at scale, right? So marketing has to do it. I'm a big believer that marketing should start with pipeline, right? Like, we're bringing in these—and it's not qualified opportunities. It's got to be sales-qualified opportunities. We are not qualifying the accounts that we're bringing in. This is a partnership with sales, and so I'm a big believer that we bring the leads in. I love sales development. You've got a great inbound sales development team. I found that with my sales dev reps, when a good lead comes in—call it a marketing-qualified lead or whatever you want—when that comes in, they've got to be calling within five minutes. I know if we're calling within five minutes, my sales dev reps are 865% more likely to get the person on the phone and schedule the meeting. After five minutes, it drops off significantly, the likelihood, right? We know this because we have data scientists on the revenue operations team. You know, we are tracking it from beginning to end. How many sales-qualified, or how many qualified meetings are we getting in? But the kind of holy grail for me is how many sales-qualified opportunities? We brought this lead in. Sales dev scheduled the meeting. Sales has held the meeting, and now it's on them. Their obligation is to qualify whether we brought in a good account or an account, a good account that's ready to buy, by creating that opportunity. And again, that's why that partnership with sales is so important, because if you don't have those service level agreements in place, sales teams have a proclivity not to create pipeline and opportunities because they're going to be held accountable for it once they put it in the system. So you've got to have those written service level agreements in place for sales.

Drew: Yeah. I mean, your point about speed is just—I want to just put a little punctuation point on it. It's not enough to just bring it in. You've got to monitor and make sure that that opportunity is being taken care of. And just think of yourself when you're on the phone, ready to book, and nobody's picking it up. Yeah, I'm not going to—I'm going to go somewhere else. So speed does matter.

Joshua: And by the way, by the way, when you do bring that opportunity in, the way you can tell a "random acts of marketing" team versus a "scalable acts of marketing" team is whether they stay on the field or not. Too many marketing teams come off the field after that opportunity has come in. The reality is we know that we have to be multi-threaded. You rarely have one person at an account who's buying, and so the marketing team is now providing ground cover for the sales team by identifying other people who are on the buying committee, serving them up content and other things, and identifying that for the sales team.

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Drew: Question from the audience about where does rev ops report to?

Joshua: You know, there's two kind of age-old dilemmas going on right now, or questions going on right now. Where does rev ops report into, and where does sales development report into? There's no right answer. You know, I'm a big believer that sales should have them own the quota-carrying people. And if you have a good marketing leader who understands the entire buyer's journey and wants to be involved in the entire—from soup to nuts—the whole go-to-market process, send it to marketing, right? I mean, the reality is marketing owns way more technologies than the sales team ever will, and so a big part of that revenue operations function is going to be working on and making the technologies that marketing is using work for the organization. So, you know, I have revenue operations and sales development. They both report into me because these are either pipeline-generating teams or they're helping my marketing team with the technologies they need. But there's no right answer. Listen, if you've got a forward-thinking, process-driven CRO, have it report to them. I've seen it report to finance before. The critical thing is you've got to have the person who is most interested in being progressive, forward-thinking, technology-driven, AI-curious, right? If that's your CMO, have it report to them. If that's your CRO, have it report to them.

Drew: And so if rev ops reports to marketing, is there a marketing ops?

Joshua: So under rev ops, you've got marketing ops people, you've got sales ops people, but they're all working together under the same team. They're huddled together on a weekly basis. They're talking about, "Hey, I'm architecting this marketing tool. We got to talk about how it works with the CRM, right?" They're huddled. They're working together consistently.

Drew: And we also had a question about whether you were high-volume transactional with lower ACV, and I feel like you were lower-volume, high-value customers.

Joshua: Yep, yeah. Typically, when you're building a growth marketing team, you're going to go through different stages of maturity. And I would say the first stage many marketing teams kind of go through is high-volume, lower ACV, you know, looking at the total addressable market, not the highly addressable market, and they're doing everything they can do to drive volume over quality of pipeline. But as a team matures, it starts to focus more on "less is more," right? I'm a big believer in the Pareto Principle. Most organizations can look and 20% of their customers drive 80% of the revenue. And so marketing learns pretty quickly: we go after the 20% that are going to drive the 80% of the value. And so that would be a higher-maturity marketing organization typically.

Drew: Moving to a slightly different area, content marketing gets a lot of attention in your book. Obviously, it is one of the ways that discovery used to happen. You'd show up, your content would be discovered. Google would say, "Oh, look, these guys are an authority in these areas." Well, now we have AI. How do you see content creation and strategy evolving?

Joshua: Yeah, I think there's no question with AI right now. It's kind of a gray area. People are going, "Hey, where do the different LLMs go to find their information?" Certainly, some of it is search in the website. Some people are saying Reddit. Others are saying, right. But the reality is, AI, in the same way that Google scrapes the web for authoritative content, AI is headed in that direction as well. And so content creation is important, as it was for SEO and search engine optimization. Content is going to be authoritative. Content is going to be even more important for AI, because AI is going to look at the Gartners, or, you know, the G2s, and a lot of the content that we're putting out—authoritative backlinks. It's going to look at that, and it's going to leverage that for the answers that it gives. So content is critical, and I'd be, you know, if you're not, if you haven't doubled down on that yet, I'd be tripling down on that right now.

Drew: And so a sidebar on AI. Do you expect marketing teams to get smaller because of AI?

Joshua: I think we're seeing it. I think, you know, you see many organizations. Marc Benioff at Salesforce and others have talked about within the sales and the software and even the marketing teams. In fact, Microsoft just did a big layoff, and part of that was marketing teams. And while they say it wasn't AI driven, I think there are indications that it probably was. And so you're going to see fewer marketers using AI tools really well. One example would be writers, right? Like we're never going to get rid of, I don't think, writers or editors, but you're going to have fewer of them who really understand how to create custom GPTs, that understand what the brand guidelines are, what the tone of voice is, how to write. They're going to understand the products and services. Because custom GPTs are a game changer. If you're not using them, you should be. Smart marketers who are using AI to work for the business and in a way that understands the business better than just a human. I think that's going to cause marketing teams to kind of contract, but potentially increase the impact in their capabilities.

Drew: Interesting, yeah, I could see that happening. I could see another scenario in my dreamland where, because suddenly, because it's not like most marketing departments were overstaffed yesterday. Yeah, I could see suddenly the teams being able to produce what they wanted to produce, but couldn't because of the lack of staff, and suddenly are achieving more. And I hope that that's an option as things go forward, but that, you know, that's me with a little bit of a Pollyanna lens, I suspect. Let's talk about team structure a little bit. How do you see the teams evolving? We've already talked about rev ops, but in terms of if a CMO could only implement, let's just talk first team structure in your mind, and what's really important for CMOs right now, in terms of their direct reports?

Joshua: Yeah, first of all, talent is the tip of the spear right now. I learned this in my growth journey early on—having the right person. So first of all, I'm a big believer that one A player will run circles around four to five B players, and one A player will outdo 100 C players, right? And so you've got to have the right person on the team. I think one of the most critical skills for any marketer now is learning velocity. And I write about this in the book. With the new tools that are out there, automation. You've got Clay. You know, tools like Clay. You've got these AI agents, right? n8n is something every marketer should be looking into, because it's a creation of agentic AI within marketing. You have to have people on the team who aren't order takers. They're not just kind of sitting back doing it the old way. Sabrina, in the book, says it like, "Yesterday's playbook isn't going to get us tomorrow's results." You've got to have marketers who have this desire not just to learn but they learn fast, right? Like, learning velocity should be one of the most important things that we're looking for in marketers. And marketers have to be curious, right? Like they have to be learners and curious about new products. And too many marketers that I've seen just for whatever reason are not. And so, you know, it may be one out of 10 marketers. Your success as a marketing leader is wholly dependent on your ability to bring somebody in who's got that learning velocity. So I just start there, and then the number two attribute is accountability. Too many marketers don't want to be accountable. "I don't want a quota. Don't hold me accountable to MQLs or to pipeline or to building relationships with sales development or sales." But, man, you get that one out of 10 marketers who go, "I've got to be in that sales meeting. I've got to listen to these calls on Gong and understand what the buyers are saying." You get that one out of 10, you know, marketer who does that—game changer. Absolute game changer.

Drew: Yeah, I love it. As simple as you're only as good as your best players, which is so important. I'm wondering, in your mind, as there's a lot of talk about this, you know, there's some fear that junior people aren't going to get opportunities because of generative AI. And I feel like there may be the opposite point, because if you could find curious generalists with good judgment, even at 22 that are fast learners, they might be able to do a lot more than say that one person who was just focused on Marketo, for example. I'm wondering where do you see this spectrum right now, in terms of curious generalists who are quick learners, versus highly specialized individuals? And as we move forward, it feels like there's an opportunity one way or another.

Joshua: Yeah, I think there is. I think, you know, you look at kind of the highly specialized people, and they're still going to have to be learners, curious, are going to have to master the new, you know, AI, some of the new technologies, n8n, and Clay, and some of the things that are coming out. But I think there's room kind of at the bottom where CMOs and other growth leaders, private equity firms go. There's probably going to be some new teams, new roles that we don't even know about, that will be created in the next 12 to 18, 24 months, and we don't really know what that looks like. So we need to bring in somebody who at least knows the tools right. And so you can bring in people who understand n8n and Clay and others, and not have—we've done it recently at Cyderes. They don't have a specific—we didn't hire them for a specific role, but we hired them more for their ability to bring in some of the tools and help us understand how it makes sense within the organization, and then you start to kind of build roles around them.

Drew: You and I have talked about this notion. So in the book, Andrew's philosophy is R&D. I've heard you use that term before, and I love it. Could you just explain Andrew's philosophy?

Joshua: Yeah, I love R&D, and so most people, when they hear R&D, they think of research and development. For me, it means rip off and duplicate. And I attribute so much of my success to my ability to get in front of other CMOs who are ahead of me. Right? When I was a $150 million CMO, I was getting in front of $500 million CMOs, company, you know, who ran $500 million companies and learning from them. I didn't have to create the wheel, right? If I wanted to do account-based marketing, I didn't have to, kind of, like read books and figure out and test and fail and try again. I didn't have to go through that process. I had to get in front of the Heidi Bullocks of the world. Heidi was somebody who I got in front of, and Heidi is a huddler here. I literally took my team. We traveled to San Francisco, got with Heidi and her team, and we learned about account-based marketing, and then we were able to rip off and duplicate that, bring it back to our company and build what she had built there, right? We knew the technologies, we knew some of the processes. We knew their playbooks. And so the neat thing about CMO Huddles is you can do R&D. You have access to this network. And you can get in front of other CMOs or marketing leaders who are already at where you need to be, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months from now. And so you have the benefit of being able to get yourself or your team. I think one of the most effective things a marketing leader can do is open up their network for their team and make introductions so they understand what great looks like. That is such a critical thing, and Andrew did this in the book, right? Such a critical thing for a marketing leader to do is just to get their teams in front of other teams who are ahead of them. So that's what rip off and duplicate means, and it's been a huge part of my success.

Drew: Just in case for other listeners, I did not pay Josh to say any of that about CMO Huddles, but it does warm my heart that he did. Let's talk about—you made the move to Cyderes, a bold move. I mean, you've been 13 years at Service Express. You could see from the 30 million to 350. You saw a billion was within grasp. What attracted you to this new opportunity?

Joshua: Yeah, if you look at ScaleWorks in, you know, in the book, in the fable of the book, Andrew also, he got to a place where he had built within one company, a strong growth marketing machine, right? And he had lost the ability to build at the speed and velocity that he wanted to, and I was kind of there. Like we had built a great organization, a great machine. I wasn't necessarily looking to leave, but we had gone through a couple of different very successful private equity turns. We had just been purchased by Warburg Pincus and so many executives. When they're purchased by a new firm, they go, "Hey, I'm either going another four to five years with this firm, or I'm going to check something else out and see if there's something else." And so I took my first headhunter call ever. I had not taken any prior to that. I was so into Service Express, and it just happened to be Cyderes, and Robert Herjavec, who's one of the sharks on Shark Tank, had founded Cyderes. He still sits on our board of directors, great organization. And they're kind of growing despite themselves, right? There's a—it's kind of brute force, like you talk about in your introduction, Drew, to my book, brute force, a lot of like the sales reps, cold calling, dialing, trying to get. And they were growing despite that, but they've reached this level of maturity where they need to build a more predictable pipeline engine. So I met with the team, great executive team, great CRO who started with me, great private equity team in APEX Partners, and it, frankly, is like I wrote the book, right? It's my ability to now take this playbook and go back to another company and rebuild what I built at Service Express.

Drew: Okay, you got there and use it. First of all, you probably give this to every one of your teammates. Talk about applying the principles where, you know, are you making some adjustments given the company, the category, the time to it? So what comes to mind in terms of principles that you're absolutely putting through the most?

Joshua: Number one principle for me is talent. I mentioned it earlier—tip of the spear, making sure we have the right people on the bus and in the right seat. And so we've made a number of moves. I'm hiring fast. I brought over a VP of Marketing who I mentioned earlier, Jesse Sprout, who's fantastic. Brought in a senior leader who understands sales development and that partnership to marketing that's so critical. And so talent is number one for me. We are looking at a lot of the programs that Sideris was doing that were kind of random acts of marketing, campaign-driven type things, and we're starting to build campaigns that are more sustainable and focused on our highly addressable market. And then the other thing is we're working on the data within the CRM. Any market, any go-to-market team—sales, sales development, customer success, marketing—is only as successful as the data, how we have the data structured in the CRM. And so we're working on the data side of things, building out a revenue operations function, and so we're working on that right now.

Drew: I love it. You know, it's funny. I wrote about this in the recap that'll go out this Friday, but both my wife and I got this direct mail piece, this really expensive package, and we open it up and were excited about opening up this box. And it turns out it's for a new stadium that's coming—a soccer-only stadium that's coming in two years—and they're looking to sell executive suites. And I thought, "Not a soccer fan, not going to be buying a thing." This was bad data. Somebody did not clean up the list, and you just know that so much of the data that is in your CRMs is out of date. You just can't do good marketing without it.

Joshua: Yeah, and the other thing is engineering the team so that the data consistently improves. Too many marketing teams and just go-to-market teams—they kind of bring the data in, they get it right, but they forget that you have a number of people—sales development, sales, and others—who are interacting with the buyer. And based on what they're learning, there should be feedback loops, right? We should be putting information back into the CRM. Marketing should be driving that because that information feeds the content and the campaigns that we are now putting out to the company based on what we're learning. So another critical thing for data is sales teams. You know, they should be putting in information that helps us market better.

Drew: Yeah, and they don't. And so the good news is there are generative AI solutions out there that will go and look at their emails and get this. Because one of the places where this really falls apart is with your champions who move on. You don't have those records. Your customers, and you're trying to upsell and cross-sell—it doesn't work because your data isn't very good.

Joshua: Gong is a great tool. If you get Gong out there, all of your sales dev and sales conversations are not only being recorded, you're getting transcripts of those. And so if you are not leveraging those transcripts with buyers and putting them back into an AI—Claude or ChatGPT—where you've got some integrations with marketing tools... And it's totally true, Drew. Like those tools, if you're leveraging those conversations, can feed information back into the CRM so we know what the priorities are or the objections are or the blocks are for the buyer.

Drew: Yeah, I mean, I think that's just such a ripe opportunity for so many things. I mean, we're talking about the ability—if certain reps aren't closing, if certain reps aren't on the story, if a new story is being put out there and it's working—there's an opportunity. So there are so many different things that happen by having this data. You know, some of it is workflow management, and I think that's a big opportunity for CMOs to think about: Okay, yeah, we're recording those, but what happens now? Right? And there are workflows, and we're going to be getting to that in another huddle in a couple months because there are a lot of different ways of using AI to get at this. Well, Josh, this has been amazing. And let's sort of wrap up with some final thoughts for marketing leaders who've been frantically taking notes and wonder how they can steal—I mean, adapt—your methods. Any sort of thoughts for them?

Joshua: Yeah, well, first of all, I would say in the book too, just so that, you know, everybody's aware: After every chapter in the playbook, there are anywhere from four to six or seven reflection questions, and I would encourage you to go through—like, read through those and rate kind of your readiness, but then also go through them and talk with your team. It will talk through the effectiveness of your tech stack, your partnerships with sales and others. Do you have certain roles on the team? And so I'd encourage you to spend time with your team reflecting on the health of the organization, the marketing organization. Too often, marketing teams get into the execution phase and we're constantly doing, doing, doing, and this is where marketers get burnt out because we haven't spent time. We don't give enough time to reflect—reflect on what's working and what's not working. Andrew Miller, in the book, in the fable, was great at pulling the team back, asking the right questions. A great way to reflect is not a leader coming in and saying, "Here are the answers." It's simply asking questions, right? And that is a great way to kind of build the strategy going forward. So I would just say giving time for reflection and learning is so critical for marketing leaders. And then constant assessment: Do we have the right people on the team? You know, I think that's important. I would just say a few signs of having a random acts of marketing team versus a scalable acts of marketing team is look at pipeline. Is it famine and feast, but usually famine? Probably an indication of a random acts of marketing team. What are marketing's primary key performance indicators? If I were to ask your CEO, "How do you measure marketing?" are they going to say sales-qualified opportunities and pipeline generation? I would say another indication that a marketing team is a random acts of marketing team—I mentioned it earlier—there's not a commercial operations team. It's like, you know, we may have a marketing operations person who's not trained or certified in the tools. We don't have a data person. That's another indication that, you know, you've got a random acts of marketing team. No systematic feedback loops, right? If I went to your CRO or others and said, "Is sales providing information that is informing the campaigns that marketing is sending out?" and the CRO says no, chances are you've got a random acts of marketing team. And then the biggest one for me is marketing talks more about activity than outcomes. We talked about that earlier, right? "We're sending this campaign. We're doing this event." But they're not talking about the sales-qualified opportunities or the pipeline that comes from it.

Drew: So I get to ask two more questions even though we're out of time. One is, where does brand fit in in all of this?

Joshua: Brand is critical. You know, I talk a lot about growth marketing, but let's be clear: A well-established brand doesn't just support performance marketing; it amplifies it, right? It drives better engagement. It reduces customer acquisition cost. It improves retention. Brand is fundamental. Like, you've got to get that right to build trust within the market. If not, demand generation is giving you kind of quick wins but not long-term wins. Brand building is so critical to all of this, and there's a chapter or two in the book that talks about the importance of brand building.

Drew: Okay, then the next—sort of last question from me—is you start at Sideris. How long does it take before you can sort of get to this point where you can have a conversation about SQOs and pipeline? Because it takes time to build this up. What's a reasonable period of time to get to a scalable acts of marketing program?

Joshua: Yeah, I think it depends on the—you know, for me, it may be different than others who walk into organizations because if you have good data initially and sales is creating qualified opportunities and pipeline, you know, it may take three months. If you don't have some of that muscle built, it may take six to nine months. And so I'm walking into a team where it's probably going to be six to nine months would be my guess.

Drew: Got it. Got it. All right. Well, Josh, first of all, it was an honor to be able to write the foreword.

Joshua: It was an honor for me to have you write that foreword, Drew.

Drew: So, just folks, this book is available. I highly recommend it. It's truly earned a place—what I believe will become a definitive playbook for scaling business through growth marketing. So thank you, Josh, and thank you all for joining us. 

 

If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!