If you’re on a small, scrappy team looking to break the status quo in B2B marketing, you’ll want to read this.
I recently sat down with Kacie Jenkins, SVP of Marketing at Sendoso to learn more about how they get customers.
We dove into the wearing of many hats for a small marketing team, how to properly look at attribution, and the effectiveness of working cross-functionally across the business.
I can’t wait for you to apply these insights to your own company.
What you’ll read here are words. Some Kacie’s. Some Lindsay’s. Some mine.
— Brendan
Below, we’ll also explore:
- How Sendoso’s 6-person marketing team turned an entire ship around from crappy lead gen that’s not converting to brand investments that pay dividends
- How Kacie thinks about attribution, multi-touch point attribution, and eliminating the push-pull battle between sales and marketing
- Why OKRs should be tackled cross-functionally
1. How far out do you plan your marketing in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?
Things move really quickly at Sendoso. We map our annual GTM plans to the business plan and OKRs.
We look a year ahead when thinking about the big rocks, like events that we want to double down on, big pieces of content we want to invest in, etc.
But in terms of detail planning, we’re looking a quarter out. A couple quarters max, because again, things move really quickly.
“I think it’s really hard to plan and set a year ahead in marketing. It will always shift on you.”
2. How many marketers do you have? How has that team changed over time?
We have a six person marketing team, and marketing is accountable for 100% of qualified pipeline generation at Sendoso
Katie Penner is our Head of Sender Relations, which is an interesting role we handcrafted. She handles community, social media, and our outbound motion since they are all very closely tied together. Our three BDR/SDRs report into Katie.
Austin Sandmeyer is our Head of Growth and Customer Marketing, which is very systems and data based — he is always pondering how to thoughtfully automate workflows across the full customer journey and help us target and engage with our buyers and customers more effectively so MOps sits with him.
Mary Matton is our Marketing Manager, helping us craft thoughtful webinar programs and content to feed our demand gen channels and improve our web experience, among many other things.
You mention three BDRs under Marketing. This question comes up a lot with our community of SaaS Marketers – do you think BDRs should live on marketing?
I think BDRs should live under marketing because in today’s world, a lot of what we’re doing outbound wise is so closely tied in with data maintenance, marketing automation, marketing campaigns and marketing content. Our outbound strategy is a mix of semi-automated, hyper-personalized outbound and traditional cold calling — all heavily dependent on high quality data.
I think it’s better to have that team sit with and be very integrated into all of the things that marketing is doing. It allows us to be laser focused on our targeting, outreach and followup (we use fit and intent signals to create a dynamic target account list) and our BDR team is a critical touchpoint in the deal cycle before an opportunity is vetted and qualified by sales.
3. For marketing strategy, who comes to these meetings, who runs the meeting, and how often do you meet?
You may have heard this concept of curating a personal board of directors, and it’s similar at Sendoso for the marketing team.
We’ve got an internal board of directors that collaborates on GTM strategy, including a very strong finance partner who is sort of an extension of our team. He has taken a lot of time and effort to understand what we’re trying to achieve through our marketing and he is core to our strategy planning and forecasting.
We also work very closely with our Sales, Product and CX leaders.. We’re talking on a weekly, if not daily, basis. We’re very cross-functional and collaborative when it comes to pipeline forecasting and coverage.
Part of that collaborative effort is a quarterly process where we all share our OKRs. We walk through them and discuss what we need from each other to provide cross-functional support, then document the dependencies.
“The healthiest experience I’ve had of OKRs is everyone is sort of looking at each other’s and going, ‘okay, yes, we can support all these things together (or we can’t, and we need to adjust), and we know what we need from each other.’
4. How do you think we got into the sales and marketing battles and bad lead gen stuff?
I think we really got into this trap of marketing leaders taking a role and quickly being pushed to try and fix larger business problems with marketing.
The tenure of a marketing leader is often short because all of a sudden there’s this massive pressure to generate near-term pipeline and/or fix issues like product market fit, lack of top-level focus, a broken or bad product. And that pressure starts to compete with the things that we know to be true about good marketing.
Like how we should be dedicating time to brand building and streamlining deal cycles, and knowing that we can only generate so much high quality pipeline from buyers who are in-market within one quarter. Or knowing that certain marketing tactics and sales tactics actually don’t resonate well and will erode trust.
“But you get to a point sometimes where you’re backed into a corner and you’re like, gosh, I don’t know how to get out of this corner. I’m just going to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall. I’m going to try all of these things just so they see how hard I’m trying.”
How did you avoid this and pivot Sendoso’s marketing toward those things you know work?
I’ve done this enough times that I now dedicate a lot of my time in the beginning to educating my leadership team, my CFO, my finance team on what to expect from me if I take a role, so there is no surprise when I come in and say, ‘I can’t deliver to those expectations.’
Instead of false promises, I tell them what the team and I can reasonably deliver based on the data we have available and why, how, and what we should all expect. And maybe most importantly, what we’re going to do together.
At Sendoso, I’m trying something new: I own 100% of qualified pipeline generation so we have one clear owner. We don’t track Sales vs. Marketing credit; we’re all working toward the same goal, and we think that pitting the teams against each other for credit is a distraction. It’s saving us a lot of time.
I’m currently fortunate to work with a leadership team that’s very respectful and has given me space to rebuild, create a stronger foundation, and prove the power of balancing long-term strategy with short-term business goals..
That said, even when you’re performing well, the spotlight on Marketing always seems to get hotter when something in the business isn’t going quite right. We have to be open and curious to exploring the business problems, then hold the line on what we know is right.
5. What were the best performing channels for you? Did that change over time?
The way that we measure the performance of marketing tactics and marketing programs has changed over the last year.
When I started, we were a lead gen machine, and the team was goaled on quantity vs quality. Nothing was converting. We immediately changed that and made sales qualified pipeline our number one goal — but we were still looking at every channel we put dollars into and expecting each of those channels to generate a certain amount of last-touch pipeline.
For example, we’re going to put X dollars into LinkedIn organic efforts. We’re going to get our whole team posting regularly. We’re going to help create content we can all share. We’re going to partner with other companies and people who are operators and influencers.
We’re going to check all these boxes and then expect that channel to spit out exactly 12 S1s, right?
What ended up happening is we proved ourselves wrong.
The impact of investing in organic brand efforts on LinkedIn (where our audience spends a lot of their time), and also investing in paid social, SEO, and events, is that our outbound motion is more successful now, and most of what comes inbound (this keeps growing) is attributed to direct web traffic.
Over the last year I’ve been at Sendoso, direct traffic that converts to qualified pipeline has grown to the point that it’s eclipsed all of our other channels. So we’ve started to look into the touch points that are driving those people to come directly to us.
“Obviously they’re not just waking up one morning and going, ‘I think I will go directly to Sendoso’s website and sign up for a demo.’”
There are other things happening before that, right? As Sam Kuehnle would say, it’s a non-linear ecosystem. So we’re measuring those touch points, which include: they received a gift, they engaged with us via email or in person at an event, they found us via organic search, saw a LinkedIn postor joined a webinar, heard a partner talking about us, or they saw/heard an ad.
Those are the core places that we invest.But over time, less and less of the last touch attribution is showing any of those things. If I wasn’t looking at multi-touch and causal analytics, I would just think we should stop doing everything that we’re doing.
That’s been a really nice lesson to go through with our finance team and our sales team.We discover that a deal accelerated because of all these different touch points with multiple stakeholders in an account. And nothing was very visibleuntil one day they went directly to the website and requested a demo. And now we’re tracking that last touch, in addition to looking at everything (channels and programs) beforehand that influenced it.
6. What is the difference between average marketing leaders and those who are able to attract, hire and retain top talent?
That’s such a hard question. I think I was really lucky to come in and inherit some people who were in roles that weren’t taking full advantage of their brilliance.
“And so I kind of immediately moved some people around to give them room to expand into and to grow. And they have just absolutely blown me away by how much they’ve grown and how brilliant they are.”
So maybe that answers the question. I think one of the skill sets as a leader is looking at someone and identifying what their superpower is and how you get everything out of the way for them and let them grow into it.
When hiring, regardless of whether you’re more of a start-up environment like Sendoso, or a public company with thousands of employees, I look for people who are radical owners where you can identify that they actually get a lot of satisfaction out of owning something end-to-end and working with others to push it to completion.
I look for people who are not afraid to change things, to speak up, make suggestions, and ask questions.
I actually care a lot less about your sort of “classical skillset” as a marketer, and more about your potential.
Sometimes people who have not done classical marketing are best at it because they’re not bringing preconceived notions and they may have hidden skill sets.
“I’ve worked with scientists who are really good marketers. Katie Penner did not have a traditional marketing background but had strong experience in sales and an unmatched understanding of our product. And our Head of Product is one of our most valuable marketing team contributors because he builds for and deeply understands marketers.”
As far as how you keep people, to be honest, I don’t think you can keep people. They stay because they choose to stay.
You don’t get to control that, per se, you just respect them, treat them well, give them autonomy and trust, make them feel valued, and show up for them.
You get in the trenches with your team and then if they want to leave eventually and you know what their aspirations are, you help them do that.
You’re there to help along that journey, and I think that works a lot better than trying to fit people into weird boxes or micromanage or often throw money at them when they don’t want to be there anymore, or they’ve outgrown a situation.
“I’m really fortunate that I work with folks who really deeply care about and love each other and also love what we do.”
7. Is there something unique or philosophically core to how the marketing team and leaders think about acquiring customers?
Sendoso successfully uses gifting and direct mail in our GTM strategy, which some in our B2B space seem to shy away from.
But when we’re talking about how to actually get someone to pay attention to your message, the data backs up that sending something special to someone’s doorstep — which they will bring into their home to open and experience — works.
Connecting on a more personal level and showing someone you care about them works to book meetings and accelerate deals. It’s also a really effective multi-threading tactic for larger accounts.
We have customers who print magazine-level zines where they feature their customers, articles from experts, and data from their own reports and they send those out to their ICP.
It arrives in a really nice heavy envelope and it has heavy weight paper and a lot of the recipients see themselves featured inside, so they put it on their coffee table where they want to highlight it. And that’s really cool.
I think where marketers sometimes struggle is they forget to tie the message all together.
What is this?
How do you use this?
Why does this matter to you?
And so you’re just getting a really nice pair of shoes, but you’re not going to connect it to your need (or the company who sent it) when you’re in market.
As marketers, you have to make sure you’re wrapping the whole gift and the whole story together.
How to use this info:
1. Send a DM to your teammate: “Lindsay — I read about how Kacie from Sendoso ditched “bad” marketing to achieve real results. I thought there were X things in there that might really help our team. Mind if I send them over?” Then send her this link.
2. Meeting with your boss: “We’ve toyed around with the idea of eliminating the push-pull battle between sales and marketing, but I think I have something even better. I just got a behind-the-scenes look at how Sendoso’s small team works super cross-functionally to achieve this. Think we can do the same? This might be worth bookmarking.
3. Linkedin Post: Why every B2B company should become a Content Brand (make sure you connect with & tag Kacie!)
Thanks for reading!
This is the 14th CMO playbook and part of a long series.
If you have a tip or feedback, I’d love to hear it.
Leave a Reply