When you're repeatedly successful as a marketer, luck and circumstances can be eliminated as the cause. Such is the case with Eric Eden, who has been a marketing leader at three companies that have gone public: Network Solutions, Verio and Cvent. He has also worked for a number of growth companies backed by private equity, including in his current role...

When I asked Sarah Kennedy, the relatively new CMO at marketing automation firm Marketo, what's the best advice she'd ever been given, her answer set the tone for our discussion: "Jump out of the plane and find your parachute on the way down." It is little wonder that Kennedy, who jumped into her role eight months ago, felt compelled to not...

As an English major at Stanford, Rich Kylberg challenged himself to read the sacred scriptures of over 90% of the world's population—including the Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, the Quran, Dhammapada, Tao and the Gospels. In addition to gaining an "empathy and understanding for others," he believes these foundational texts are a prerequisite for becoming a good brand storyteller. Now in...

As one of the founders of Marketo, Jon Miller helped make marketing automation a mainstream approach for b-to-b companies. And in his role as chief marketing officer back in 2011, few were better at creating content to drive inbound leads. In our interview back then, Miller noted that "our marketing team generates 80% of the sales pipeline" and that Marketo was...

Despite all the advancements in lead generation, lead scoring and automated lead nurturing, the age-old tension between marketing and sales is alive and well. CMOs still complain that sales can't keep to the script and close the deal, while sales directors still complain that many of the leads they get from marketing are useless garbage because the targeting and messaging...

"I really believe that marketing won't help you grow your business," says Jon Ferrara. A dangerous lead given the audience of this column. But suspend your disbelief just for a moment. As the founder of Nimble, a relationship management app for those of us with thousands of contacts and no time to nurture them, Ferrara gathered 100,000 Nimble users and converted...

If there's one lesson Alex Reed could share with his fellow business-to-business marketers it would be "just stand out." It's a lesson he's taken to heart during his 10 years at the immodestly named Big Ass Fans, the industrial-strength fans that you'll find in gyms, warehouses, atriums, and other giant rooms around the globe. Having taken over the global marketing...

No chief marketing officer understands how to scale a marketing program quite like Denise Broady. After getting her start consulting at small shops, then becoming the global chief operating officer at SAP's industry cloud organization, she's returned to another small company called WorkForce, which specializes in making timesheets, as she puts it, "sexy again." Its headquarters in Livonia, Michigan, belies the...