How does a 4-person marketing team get mistaken for a 100-person team?
Do more with less.
I sat down with Dan Slagen, CMO at Tomorrow.io, to chat about how his small team continues to punch above its weight, flying through Series A to Series E funding in only 4 years.
This also isn’t some blitz-scaling nonsense, either.
We discuss Tomorrow’s big ambitions, how they compete with billion-dollar companies like IBM and Accuweather, and how understanding the mind of a CEO can make you a better CMO.
What you’ll read here are words. Some Dan’s. Some Lindsay’s. Some mine.
— Brendan
Below, we’ll explore:
- How Dan’s tight-knit relationship with Tomorrow.io’s CEO fuels company growth
- How everything works backward from one goal on the marketing team
- Thinking about company moments as marketing moments
- What a great marketing leader looks like
1. How far out do you plan your marketing in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?
2023 was the first year we were able to plan where we need to be in December 2024.
As a small team, it took us 4 years to get to planning out the full year, but the advantage is exactly that – the CEO hasn’t fired me, and I haven’t quit.
While both sides have had moments of elation and moments of extreme frustration over the four years, we’ve stuck together and made the partnership work in a really positive way. I can’t credit my CEO enough here.
The company hasn’t had to hit the reset button within 12-18 months or bring in a new leader with a new approach.
While that stuff is often good, it can kill momentum. Each time, you’re starting from ground zero, and it’s difficult to learn, apply, and grow from there.
That pure longevity makes Tomorrow smarter as a company.
The state of the product is not the same now as it was four years ago and we’ve experienced that growth together without interruption.
It gives us better institutional, market, and customer knowledge.
AND it makes us more confident in the industries they target and gives us a better understanding of our top use cases.
What do you think is unique about you and your CEO that makes it work?
We had a very honest interview four years ago.
I was at the end of writing a book called, Understanding Start-Up CEOs: And the Mindset You Need to Successfully Work For One, and I basically gave him the transcript saying we could go through a lengthy interview process, or you could sit and read this in two hours.
I put my heart and soul into it, talking about what it’s like going through the mindset of a CEO and what the executives are thinking about, and we just vibed really well.
I also think about my role well beyond marketing, almost like a CEO.
If there’s an open headcount, my first thought isn’t marketing headcount but where the company’s biggest need is.
Ultimately, our CEO is strategically patient. He can see where we’re going, and we’ve just been on the same page about where marketing can go from day one.
We had a “fun” project to change the company name two years ago. He even brought this up during my interview, asking if I would be willing to take on that sort of project.
We both agreed the only way we could change the name was if we came up with something both of us couldn’t stop thinking about. We had a ton of second and third-place names, but Tomorrow was the first one that made us both say, “that’s it.”
Thus, ClimaCell became Tomorrow.
It feels like companies that are rapidly moving through funding rounds say things like, “Oh, we have money to spend, let’s hire XYZ agency to do this” (like a name change).
We made a different choice.
What made you decide to do it in-house?
So, I have had $50M/yr budgets before, but not here, which shifts how we think about things.
We don’t focus as much on any middle ground stuff. For example, when it comes to Tomorrow.io, I might not always be able to care about Twitter (X), TikTok, Meta… and I have to live with it and find a way forward, I don’t care.
It’s not like I don’t wish to have more funding or people to work on those channels, but I have a small team, so we only work on 10X stuff (in this case, it’s LinkedIn).
And that’s not to say all the 10X stuff works. They don’t. But that’s where we iterate.
Say we put 20 things live in Q1, and only 5 worked. Now I can take the 15 that didn’t work and put that money into the 5 that are working or into 5 new things we’ve been thinking about.
For example, we’ve done great with brand, storytelling, and PR, so we thought we could trickle those ideas into specific industries, and they would perform the same.
They did not. We put way too much time and resources into this strategy, and it didn’t perform any more efficiently than anything else we were doing.
I’m paying for it now with budget constraints, but it didn’t put any strain on our relationship or plan because we are prepared for things to not work sometimes.
We are almost maniacal about contingency planning.
I joined three weeks before COVID happened, so my entire time with the company was just global disaster after global disaster.
That’s not any different than anyone else over the past few years, but I’ve never had to spend so much time contingency planning and having to have backup plan after backup plan.
So, how do you go about contingency planning?
First, I think about company OKRs, and figure out what are the ones that marketing must hit or contribute directly to.
For example, we have multiple sales divisions at the company. One is enterprise with a team focused on Fortune 500 companies and the like. We have PLG stuff, but when you’re thinking about those larger 7-8 figure-type deals, you’re going to have to talk on the phone or meet in person.
As we think about contingency planning for that, we have to diversify the channels we think about in order to drive leads →
- Online
- Offline
- Paid
- Organic
- Direct response
- Brand
- Channel partnerships
- Strategic partnerships
- SDRs
- Etc.
And we think about them differently over the course of a quarter.
For instance, we like our reps to book X number of discovery calls on their own each week. Since I know what to expect each week, I also know that discovery call volume goes down at the end of the quarter because they’re closing.
So we look at it from six weeks out and assume it goes to zero in the last four weeks of the quarter. Now we ask ourselves, “Where are we going to get those from?”
Can we crank up short-term channels like ads? Or can we be more sustainable and start a new organic campaign or strategic partnership?
So to summarize, your contingency planning is understanding quarterly and annual trends and knowing that certain things are going to happen at certain times, being early at evaluating them, and then having a backup plan laid out so if they don’t work, you are more prepared to move onto goal X.
The way I can stay sane is we have a very simple goal: Everything works backward from one goal on the marketing team.
Creating that goal is “the work,” and it definitely changes over time.
When I started at Tomorrow (ClimaCell at the time), the goal was to get this company on the map.
So you run that playbook starting with whether to build out a category or not. We decided to build the weather intelligence category.
And then you build a brand around that, so we did a ton of PR, and storytelling, and we were at events.
Then you think about how to add credibility, so we added customer stories on the site, held an annual conference (ClimaCon) with industry experts, etc.
For us, it was an evolution through brand, product marketing, and demand gen (in that order).
Brand first because it takes the longest to build. It took three years for Forrester to adopt weather intelligence, and I can’t do anything about that.
Once we felt like brand was in a good spot, we focused on getting the product to a place where it wouldn’t drastically change in 12 months.
Then, it’s like, ok, we have the brand in a good spot, the product is in a good spot, and now the funnel isn’t leaky anymore. People know who we are and are ready to talk to us. We have a good sales cycle built, so it’s time to speed it up.
2. Do you use OKRs (e.g. objectives, key results, 70% goals, etc.) in some form?
Good timing because we were actually debating them this morning.
Ultimately, we decided on three, which I think is great, but there’s plenty I hate about them.
What I do like is that it gives us focus.
It was important to keep it to three. One more might not seem like a lot, but it actually is. Adding a fourth can drastically change your attention to each one.
So we have three objectives, and now we think about how to keep them consistent across each department at the KR level.
For example, every team should be thinking about how they’re using AI. Is that an objective? Probably not. But it has to be thought about at the KR level.
Also, where does culture sit, and how does it work itself into it?
3. Who does marketing ultimately report to, and has this changed over the years?
Marketing reports to the CEO, and that is how it has always been since I joined.
Here is how the Tomorrow executive team breaks down:
- 3 founders. One is the CEO, one heads the Customer/Sales team, and one is the Chief Strategy/Space officer
- Chief Product Officer
- Chief Marketing Officer
- Chief People Officer
- Chief Weather/Science Officer
Ultimately, we are a SaaS Company and have been very deliberate about it, but there are some distinct things that most people aren’t as familiar with, like having a Chief Weather Officer.
We also launched our first 2 satellites this year with Space X, and launching another 20-30 in the next 18-24 months.
Do you think about those big company events as marketing moments?
Yeah, definitely. I like to think of them as company moments as much as possible. One thing we were really proud of was creating a documentary called “6 Years to Launch,” which went live the week after our first satellite launch.
We recreated the founders’ first meeting, and then we fast-forwarded 6 years later to when we thought about building satellites, getting them to SpaceX, and watching the rockets launch – I have chills telling you about it now.
The first thing I have new employees watch is the 2-minute trailer for this documentary, but every marketer should watch the whole thing and study it. 👇
4. For marketing strategy, who comes to these meetings, who runs the meeting, and how often do you meet?
I don’t know if it’s this company or the way things have evolved over the past couple of years, but there is really this notion that go-to-market is a thing now.
Our Chief Customer Officer and Chief Strategy Officer (on the space side doing sales to govt agencies) wouldn’t think about a sales idea without talking to me and vice versa.
I’m not thinking about marketing anymore. I’m thinking about GTM.
If we want to improve a metric, how can the entire GTM team contribute?
We now have a weekly GTM meeting with marketing, sales, and customer experience and it’s been a really beneficial meeting.
The first few weeks we ran it, it was numbers, graphs, and slides, but once we got better at reporting and trusted ourselves in the data, it became a discussion.
There wasn’t really a specific moment where the team felt they understood the data enough to turn this into a “get shit done” type meeting but uncomplicating their sales process to something as simple as getting a discovery call and noting if it’s moving forward or not, reporting becomes easier.
I’m hesitant to say we rely on the data because everyone says that, but we’ve had big debates, agreed on it, and moved on.
5. How many marketers do you have? How has that team changed over time?
Tomorrow currently has 4 marketers who have followed suit with the company’s playbook of brand, to product marketing, to demand gen.
It’s less of a Series A team, Series D team, etc., and more about finding people who are focused on each thing.
6. Do you structure your team around channels, products, user types, user journey, outcomes, or something in between? Has this changed over the years?
It’s still structured under brand, product, and demand ultimately because that’s easy.
But things we feel good about, we’ve used more automated tools, AI, and outsourced.
Not that we want to put it on autopilot, but since demand is a newer focus for us, we want more human eyes on it.
7. What is the difference between average marketing leaders and those who are able to attract, hire and retain top talent?
I think my team would say what they like is they are going to get a chance to own things that, if they’re successful, the entire company will notice.
I very much want to put people in a position to win.
I heard this quote that I don’t entirely agree with that said, “The way that we’ll know we’re a great company is by how many other great companies poach our employees.”
While I understand what the author was trying to say, I also think I have 3 other CMOs on the team. But all happen to specialize in different areas right now.
They could easily go off and be a CMO for another company (or be poached), and what I’m trying to do for them is to make them better, but also open up to being more of a full-stack marketer.
I want them to collaborate with other parts of the organization as much as possible, so if I left them alone with another executive, I would be confident in the conversation.
I give a lot of trust.
I give a lot of autonomy.
But I’m also big on teaching, and I do push people.
For people who say there’s no work-life balance in startups – there is – but maybe it’s an imbalance.
Being a good leader in startups is helping them figure that out. Not necessarily helping them with their personal life but how to make all of it work.
If at any point you just think, “I’m done,” come talk about it. I know it’s very uncomfortable, but I view it as a measurement of how much trust we have in our relationship.
I had someone come up to me a few years ago who was just like, “I don’t know if this is working for me anymore. I just don’t know if I want to be in tech or startups or if I want to go here or there.”
And I responded with, “Cool, how long do we have? Do I have two weeks, months, the rest of the year? And how can I best help you? Do you want me to introduce you to people? How do we figure this out together?”
I was sad about losing the person, but I was very proud of the process, and I was so happy for them and they’re in an awesome spot now.
8. What’s your primary tool for tracking tasks and campaigns? And for production?
We have the Tomorrow companies – Tomorrow.io and tomorrownow.org. The .org is bringing much better weather forecasting and recommendations to farmers in Africa.
I was just talking to someone over there and they asked this exact question around project management.
I swear we’ve tried every system out there, and honestly, we landed on Excel. AI seems like it will be the thing that finally changes this for us
We use Monday.com. I won’t say we don’t have it, or call it a bad product, it’s just Excel is so damn helpful.
9. Is there something unique or philosophically core to how the marketing team and leaders think about acquiring customers?
In the disruptor space, you often have to do old game vs. new game
I was bored of that movie.
It’s not that people were doing things the wrong way in the weather space, it’s that the technology didn’t really exist to allow them to do things the way we do it now.
Say you’re a railroad operator, and you’re worried about your train being derailed, safety risks, and ETAs.
If you look at the weather forecast from Boston to New York today, it would say something like 20% chance of rain and wind. Then you call someone who knows a little bit about weather and ask, “how fast is the wind blowing, should we be worried,” and the best they can do is give you a human response to what that weather forecast means.
What we did was take that information and translate it into what exactly could derail a train – a certain weight at a certain speed in a certain direction, and a wind gust comes out of left field and derails you.
We take that info and can tell the conductor how far they are from this pocket of wind and whether they should speed up or slow down to avoid it.
That’s a simplified version of what we do, but it explains that we don’t alert on the weather. We alert people on what to do.
And that’s how we acquire customers.
This deep understanding of our customers across industries is a prime example of what being a CMO at one company for 4 years will do.
We are crazy about making sure everybody is tied into the business, not just marketing.
10. What other questions do executives ask each other that often aren’t shared publicly?
What do you think about working from home?
Work culture, efficiency, and engagement are also big topics.
We can have the best tech in the world, but the people matter more than ever.
AI is also not a buzzword at all, so we talk a lot about where it’s going.
How to use this info:
1. Send a DM to your teammate: “Lindsay — I read about how Dan from Tomorrow gets customers and how they’ve kept ging all the way through their Series E with a small team. There’s 3 things in there that might really help our team. Mind if I send them over?”
Then send her this link.
2. In your next 1-1 meeting with your boss: “Read this recently and this quote blew me away – ‘We don’t alert on the weather. We alert people on what to do.’ Tomorrow doesn’t just give people data. It tells them what to do with it. Think we can do the same? If so, this might be worth bookmarking.”
3. Write Linkedin Post: Every CMO should be in lockstep with their CEO. Here’s how Tomorrow’s CMO, Dan Slagen, does it… (make sure you connect with & tag Dan!)
Thanks for reading!
This is the ninth part of a long series.
If you have a tip or feedback, I’d love to hear it.
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