Diary of a first-time CMO:
Volume 1

Day 1 as a marketing leader

Hey B2B marketers 👋

Here it is. Four years, $50m+ ARR and 200 pages later… My journey as a first-time CMO.

Covering the key learnings I've gathered in four years of leadership in marketing. This diary reveals the lessons that helped me scale Cognism from $3m to $50m ARR, build a team from 3 to 39, and transform our set-up from a classic lead gen function to a demand gen engine.

It’s my handbook for B2B marketers looking to thrive in leadership.
(especially if you’re as daunted as I was when I started out!)

Did I fear getting fired in the early stages?

Yeah, every day. Even now, I still have a fear of getting fired. That’s something that sits in my stomach every day. But especially in the early days.

Thing is, I knew I could offer energy, relentless hard work and ideas that I could execute. Which I hoped would at least help me become one of the cheapest, most operational CMOs out there, and that had to hold some value.

That was the mentality I had: just continue to work hard, continue to execute, as long as you continue to add value then you’re going to be okay. That value is going to compound over time and it will drive impact incrementally.

So initially, I wasn’t the high-level strategic thinker that I evolved into, I was definitely more hands-on and operational. Trying to execute as much as I could, and that was the mindset I tried to instil in my team as well.

I think if you’re action-biassed then things tend to fall in your favour.

When I reflect on my plans when I joined Cognism, I think I had set out some steps for myself, like:

Look under the hood, what’s working and what’s not?
Understand our personas (specifically the B2B sales persona that I knew much less about)
Start building out some short-term plans - what was going to have the biggest and fastest impact with minimal investment?

I didn’t want to have to go to the CFO asking for £20,000 to do XYZ because I didn’t think that would go down well.

But I was also starting to look at the long-term plays too.

I think it’s really easy to get lost in the easy short-term wins, but if you want to have any chance of scaling, you need long-term compounding plans. You need to do both.

Because I was doing a lot of the hands-on day-to-day work, like setting ads live, creating landing pages, building reports and UTM infrastructure, I found it much easier to find the long and short-term wins because I could see them. I was involved in everything.

Now, something I need to be super-honest about…

I don’t have some secret time machine that meant I could be across all things everywhere, while also making the plans for what’s next.

This time had to come from somewhere, and it often spilled into my evenings and weekends. I don’t want to pretend that there’s some easy other way for this to be done.

It was a lot of grind, and a lot of it was in my own time. For example, I once took 2 days of annual leave just to focus on strategy. I needed out of the day-to-day work, so I ‘took some time off’.

I suppose my fear was that if I’d been in the role for a month or so and hadn’t really delivered any of the day-to-day stuff, and had focused only on strategy, then that wouldn’t have been acceptable.

I had evaluated in my head, ‘what’s the worst outcome?’

I felt I’d be happier if I was told to get less hands-on, and become more strategic after being in the role for a month, versus if I were asked ‘what have you actually achieved within this month?’ and had nothing to show.

I still hold that philosophy today. If someone asks me what I’ve done in the week, I want to be able to list off exactly what I’ve managed to execute. I can show them what I’ve delivered, plus the outcomes of that. Not just fluffy high-level strategic plays.

And to this day, my most common bit of feedback from the CEO is ‘allow yourself to be more strategic, you can be less operational.’ And I work on that gradually, but I still believe the value of my role often still sits in the operational side of things.

At the time when I wrote this post on LinkedIn, I think I was trying to share that there are more ways to be a CMO - and I wish I’d had a resource that taught me how to get started as a marketing leader.

So I suppose I was trying to share my learnings with other potential aspiring future leaders. The glamorous bits, and the not-so-glamorous…

From an outside perspective, some people may think being a CMO just means being in lots of meetings and making a couple of decks but it isn’t, and that’s especially true in an early-stage organisation.

You don’t start out with a big team full of resources and budgets to chuck around. You have to start scrappy and make growth materialise.

You need to have an idea that could move the needle. You need to be able to create an actionable plan for how you’ll get there, and actually be able to follow through on it.

A creative CMO who has amazing ideas is useless unless they can make it come to fruition. Because if you can’t then ultimately you’re not making any impact.

I think it’s actually a massively underrated skill to be able to see an amazing idea out in the world and be able to operationalise it into your business. Taking the parts that fit your organisation, and adapt the bits that don’t.

We can all share a great idea or example on a Slack channel, but it takes a certain type of person to actually deliver that back in value to your organisation by executing against it.

Setting a Content Marketing Strategy for a B2B Company

Recognising the competitive market, Cognism's marketing strategy shifted towards high-quality content.

The team was divided into SEO writers and storytellers to build a media machine with actionable insights. This dual strategy increased engagement and positive feedback, distinguishing Cognism from competitors.

Content became more valuable and relatable, moving from a rigid B2B tone to a human, personable voice. This approach led to superior blog traffic value and positive impacts from Google updates, establishing Cognism as a trusted sales and marketing source.

Content Strategy Transformation Step-by-Step

Firstly, I’d like to reiterate that I’m in a fortunate position where the CEO believes and trusts in marketing.

This was definitely a factor in my being able to change the status quo and the ‘we’ve always done things this way’ kind of attitude. I was able to present ideas for new ways of doing things, and cull some of the old things I didn’t believe were worth our time.

For example, with our content strategy.

We’re in an incredibly competitive market, there’s so much sales and marketing content out there. But I believe content can be a competitive advantage if it’s done well.

One thing I noticed about the sales and marketing content available in the market was that a lot of it was very average. And I do believe that’s changed a little over the last year; with lots of companies focusing more on the quality of their content as they make a move away from lead gen tactics.

But I saw an opportunity for Cognism to make an impact and raise the bar. For us to make our brand known as a source of practical and actionable, forward-thinking sales and marketing content.

This was a low financial investment bet and a long-term approach - and if it worked, then it would continue to scale in a compounding way.

1. Building a Media Machine

It was more recently that I developed the idea of having dedicated story finders and journalists within the content team, separating the SEO writers from the storytellers.

This idea was born out of my desire to build Cognism into a media machine; this was something marketers were talking about doing - but no one shared how to do it. This was just the way I came up with it.

3. Differentiating Writers' Roles

It became apparent that our current writers couldn’t really produce the ‘story finder’ type content, because they had to write for Google. They have keywords they have to go after, and that dictates the kinds of content they need to cover in order to match the search intent behind those keywords.

Which meant they were restricted when it came to producing stories that would resonate with our audience today.

That’s not to say that the SEO stuff was bad, that's also very necessary, but it became obvious to me that we needed to expand the content team to include both types of writers as they’re two very different things with different objectives.

Our journalists are critical to creating demand for Cognism, while our SEO’ers are capturing the demand that already exists.

4. Emphasising Actionable Content

Another philosophy I wanted our writers to live by was that each piece of content our readers consume should allow them to go away with something actionable that can make them better at their jobs. That should always be our benchmark for any content that we publish.

That’s what I mean when I say ‘I don’t want a faceless blog’, I want people to find our content through whichever channel they discover us, and instantly see the value.

5. Getting the Right Results and Recognition

By having two halves to this media machine, our story finders and journalists are freed from Google and can publish value-led content that I believe really drives our brand forwards and delivers a competitive advantage.

We’ve started to see this approach pay off too, which is amazing to see.

Because there’s been an obvious wave of dark social murmurings happening around Cognism.

We can see it in the numbers, but we can also feel it. LinkedIn posts talking about the content we produce, experts in the field reviewing and praising our content strategy, and lots of people sharing how they’ve experienced value from Cognism content.

It’s something as a team that we’re incredibly proud of, and we want to continue building. A brand where we are the port of call for any questions or learning about sales and marketing.

As an example, I looked at our blog traffic value side-by-side with ZoomInfo. If you compare the size of the teams and resources, they’re about 20x. And yet our blog traffic value is higher (true at the time of writing).

Which simply goes to show we’re talking about the right things. We’re focused on the right types of content and we’re delivering a lot of value.

Not only that, but every Google update has benefitted Cognism massively, which I believe is because we’re doing content the right way, with integrity. This trend will only continue.

6. Shifting the Tone of B2B Content Marketing

One other thing I’d like to touch on around the subject of content is tone.

B2B marketing tends to be very strict, rigid and boring. It’s like writers are scared to put in anything entertaining in case they’re viewed as unprofessional. But I believe that’s the wrong approach.

We had a similar vibe and tone back in the day, but I wanted us to be human, more personable and less corporate, friendly and transparent. Ultimately, I wanted our content to be content that people wanted to read.

No BS, just real-life learnings from the front line. And that’s echoed in the way we work, the way we speak, in the organisational culture in general.

Again, that’s something we’ve had to work on developing. It wasn’t this way in the beginning. But step by step, we’ve made our tone of voice a lot more approachable, conversational and easy to consume.

The Importance of Content Marketing for a SaaS CMO

I’ve talked a fair bit about content so far in this diary, but it’s because I genuinely believe it can be such an important lever without having to spend huge amounts of money.

Content marketing is something I know and understand. So as a new CMO who wants to make the biggest impact with the smallest costs, I knew if I could invest a little of my own time to refine the process then it could be built into something long-lasting.

Content is something you can track - for the most part anyway - and you can use the data available to you to deliver high value. For example, targeting high-intent keywords for SEO.

I really recommend anyone who’s a new CMO getting involved in this process because it teaches you so much about who you're targeting. This helps to inform all your other decision-making.

Understanding Buyer Personas

Getting down and dirty in the content strategy gave me the insights I needed as a CMO to understand our buyer personas. For example, at Cognism our buyer personas are the sales persona and the marketing persona.

And I felt like I knew the B2B marketing persona, as a marketer myself (although you should still always do your research - don’t assume you know your audience without evidence! That's a recipe for creating content that doesn’t resonate.)

But I didn’t really know anything about the B2B sales persona. I needed to learn what made them tick before I could really do any of the work of marketing to them.

Refining the Content Creation Process

Developing the content strategy gave me the time to delve into the data around the content they engaged with and the messaging that resonated. This was hugely valuable.

I needed to get into this level of insight and detail to really be confident in my plan moving forwards.

When looking at what was working and what wasn’t, I learned that we had a good process in place where our SDRs would reach out to people who had downloaded e-books.

However, how these e-books were ideated, written, published and promoted all needed a little finessing.

I felt the old process was simply marketing working as a sales function, without having the autonomy to make bold moves as a revenue-generating team in its own right.

So I decided to focus on levelling up our content, making it more expert-led, value-led, practical and tactical.

Scaling SaaS Content Efficiently with a Small Team

I also overhauled our process for how we go about creating new material, such as:

How we decide what to work on next.
What we included in the content.
What tone of voice we used.
What topics we covered.
How we promoted it after it was finished.

I wanted us to be a brain. Using the clues around us to make smart decisions that could drive our marketing function, rather than blindly doing what we were asked to do by sales.

It all started with a deep understanding of our buyer personas and then mapping out content based on intent and its purpose. For example:

Was it a piece for SEO?
If so, was it a pillar page?

If it was then x, y, z would need to happen.

If the content was intended for an e-book for a lead gen campaign, then that sparks another series of activities.

And again, if we were creating a content piece for the blog.

We built out a clear process around each type of content, including:

Goals and objectives depending on the individual use case.
An understanding of what it would mean for each to be successful.

We used a content calendar in the early days too. We were a small team; it helped us to structure and keep track of our workflow, especially when we needed to get work off the ground quickly.

Building a Specialised Content Team

Now that we have a larger team and dedicated content roles based on purpose, we don’t - so we can be more reactive, but it’s something I recommend if you’re in a similar position to how we were then.

Again, because we were a small team initially, with very few content roles in-house, I wanted to find ways to repurpose content to scale.

Rather than spend six weeks writing an e-book only to publish it and find out it’s a flop, I would use insights from blog articles we had written in the past.

I was looking for any trends in the data and which topics we’d get the most engagement on.

We’d then use those insights to build out long-form content, compiled from relevant blog posts around a similar topic.

This meant we could still get the SEO and organic gains, while building out longer-form content that drove the lead gen plays. It meant we weren’t having to reinvent the wheel each time.

Meaning we could scale fast, despite having a small team.

Strategic Content Repurposing for SaaS Growth

Any (first-time) CMO will need to plan for the resources they have. You can be clever, re-package and re-purpose, re-design and re-share. It just takes a little more planning.

For a cornerstone topic - one that we’d established had good commercial intent and interest - we would activate the content in a number of ways:

Blog articles.
Video/s.
Template/s.
Cadences for the sales team.
Email signatures.
Webinar/s.
Paid ads.
Organic social posts.

Balancing Long and Short-Term Gains in Content Strategy

As I’ve said many times before, our budget was small, so we didn’t spend a lot on content in the early days. But we did slowly learn where to invest more time, effort and money based on where we saw results or gaps.

Our focus was on quality and not quantity, so first we invested in subject matter expertise, over just hiring more writers or freelancers.

Today we have content expertise sitting in 3 unique areas, each of which has proven to be vital to our scaling and stacking growth success.

1. SaaS SEO

We have 2 SEO experts who are 100% dedicated to working on our key SEO projects, along with maintenance and defence of our current rankings.

2. Journalists

We have 2 writers who are our ‘story finders’. They spend time hanging out where our buyers hang out, in communities, in Slack groups, talking and listening to subject matter experts.

They’re tasked with finding what's trending and writing about it in the most actionable, helpful way. Our journalists are a crucial part of our media machine approach.

3. Demand generation content executives

These are content execs who sit in a pod with DG marketers. We have 2 pods, each focused on a specific persona (sales or marketing).

Their responsibilities are:

Becoming experts in their persona
Working with subject matter experts
Producing content in all formats that can span and fill all 4 of our paid social ‘create demand’ buckets: Thought Leadership, Content, Product and Social Proof
Briefing in scripts for videos, writing campaign-focused blog posts, or helping out with landing page copy

Transitioning to an Ungated Content Model

As you scale, you have to think about stacking growth almost like a game of poker:

Where are you going to place your bets? How do you balance long and short-term gains?

Publishing quality, expert-led content and being carefully process-driven to ensure delivery and output was my big bet coming into Cognism.

From there it’s been a case of intuitively scaling this engine.

We’ve gone from gating content where we could easily track the source of a deal back to a single downloadable content asset, to running a fully ungated content model, where content is firmly wedded into nearly every play we run.

Improving B2B Paid Advertising Performance

On joining the company, Cognism's CMO faced paused Google Ad spend and tracking issues.

Launching focused campaigns, trust in Google Ads was rebuilt, leading to improved lead quality and lower CPLs. Efficient resource management and strategic keyword targeting were pivotal.

Tips include tight account oversight, prioritising high-intent keywords, and conducting ad experiments. These efforts not only restored confidence in Google Ads but also paved the way for continued success in digital advertising.

When I joined Cognism, our paid ads were a little all over the place…

For example:

All Google Ad spend had been paused due to a previous overspend.

No tracking was in place.

Up until this point, ads had performed badly.

Now this might all sound like bad news, a bleak way to come into my new role, but I saw this as an opportunity.

How can a CMO make a quick impact on business?

This was actually a great example of where I could roll up my sleeves and make an impact straight away. I started by getting our tracking in place.

Then auditing the ad campaigns we had running and identifying the following issues:

Very broad keyword targeting.
Poor account structure, prioritisation and personalisation.

I first focused on launching just 2 key campaigns:

Brand
Competitors

As the only resource working on this project, I wanted to keep the account tight by:

Maximising for high intent.
Doubling down on changes to messaging on the landing pages to improve quality.
Robust tracking and data hygiene.
Producing ad copy that would convert.

Due to bad past experiences at Cognism (before my time), all faith had been lost in Google Ads as a channel.

So it was a very quick win to see that after only a few hours of launching my revised campaigns, we could see leads converting and being attributed correctly in Salesforce.

Later that month these leads were starting to appear on our deals whiteboard in the office, correctly attributed to Google Ads. A big win.

That was the proof I needed to show leadership that things were being properly managed. They could put their faith back in Google Ads!

It proved that Google Ads had a rightful place in our strategy.

How to Scale Google Ads with limited resources?

My advice when it comes to scaling Google Ads with limited resources is to manage things closely.

You can’t just set it and forget it.

You also shouldn’t hand responsibility over to a cheap agency either.

Especially if they don’t have access to your CRM or request access. Otherwise, how can they optimise the spend for revenue? Leaving you with suboptimal optimisations and inefficiencies out your ears.

There are so many philosophies out there on how to run Google Ads, but it’s actually as simple as keeping the account as watertight as possible.

For example, don’t run more than you have the resources to manage.

Focus on the highest intent, lowest hanging fruit first, e.g. brand and competitors.

And from there you can expand out to the highest intent, transactional keywords. Always bearing in mind your resource limitations.

It’s another good idea to be running mini-experiments through your ads too. Such as checking what language your audience responds to and optimising landing page copy accordingly.

Some other experiments I ran were:

Including navigation on landing pages.
Creating multiple landing page variations to test specific messaging.
Gradual keyword expansion.

These changes may sound simple, but they’re often overlooked. There can be some big wins in the simple things.

And we got some big wins!

We were getting CPLs well under our breakeven CPL. We were getting far better quality leads (that were actually converting into customers at speed!)

After Google Ads, I turned to email - but that’s a whole other story in itself, so I will save that for a little later on!

The first 100 days as a CMO: a strategic plan

As a CMO, plan how to balance immediate wins vs. laying down the foundations for longer-term growth.

Something that really helped me was having one very clear goal that the CEO and executives gave me: ‘build a repeatable marketing revenue engine’.

1. Identify initial challenges

So I approached it like I would any engine repair job. I needed to work out what parts were working, what wasn’t and what was causing the most damage.

This highlighted a very early issue: the view of the engine was partially blocked by lack of data due to the way things had been assembled.

So operational set-up and reporting was added to my list of ‘jobs to be done’, but it did not block progress.

2. Execute quick wins

When I joined Cognism, Google Ads were shut off and Pardot was a no go zone.

This wasn’t because there was no demand for Cognism to capture via Google Ads, or because there was no use for Pardot, but both had been misused previously and so had been cast aside.

The caution around Google Ads was actually linked directly to both misuse, but also lack of reporting. I identified this as a quick win area for me to be able to clean up, optimise and start to regain trust.

3. Align content strategy with business goals

Focusing just on brand and competitor campaigns, coupled with dedicated landing pages and forms paired with UTM tracking, I was quickly able to get things live and within a few hours we had leads from big brands entering our CRM and correctly being attributed.

I could have spent weeks on a planned restructure of the account, on a roadmap for campaign creation and execution, which I could have proposed be handed off to an agency to execute at vast expense, but instead I focused on launching the low-hanging fruit, building trust early in order to secure buy-in longer term for wider sweeping changes.

4. Prioritize short-term execution

Next up I wanted to get under the hood of the role of content marketing at Cognism. Very quickly it was clear that content was being dictated to marketing via sales, and it was not welded in any wider strategy or planning.

The long-term play here was to build out the plan for content and for delivering a competitive advantage through content for Cognism. However, I wanted to spend more time understanding our customers and diving into the data in order to do a good job here.

So I decided in my first month that I would run a Cognism first, a webinar, using external and internal speakers, and we would use Pardot to run the email campaign side of this.

Queue mass panic!

The last time Pardot had been used for mass emailing, the marketer in charge had managed to kill a number of live opps (according to Sales!) by sending the wrong email to everyone in the CRM.

The win here happened because it was a controlled activity, to a focused list. It also happened through introducing a new content format to the business and showing them the kind of value that marketing can bring to content when given ownership. So much so that after the webinar, the CEO and CRO wanted a plan for a webinar a week!

5. Lay the groundwork for future initiatives

I think the point here that I am trying to make is that in the first 100 days at Cognism, my goal was to build a predictable revenue model. I could have got lost in the building of ‘predictable’, and over-indexed on longer-term strategic planning, but I wanted to show what marketing could do when it was executing, and I wanted to prioritise the low-hanging fruit and the baseline.

This builds credibility early on. It meant that plans I produced after this were trusted.

The reality was that I spent my days executing and ticking off the low-hanging fruit, while my evenings and weekends were dedicated to the longer-term items.

When you make the move to demand generation, you can’t take shortcuts to deeply understand your customer and prospects.

The success of your demand generation execution will ultimately rely on this in order to be producing truly valuable content at scale in the places that they want to engage with it.

As part of our media machine and content production process, we’re speaking to our prospects and customers daily.

Whether that be in an interview for a blog, a podcast episode or a live event.

I will always try and take five minutes to ask these people:

What content are they enjoying right now?
What do they wish there was more of?
How they like to do their learning.
In what format?
And on which channels?

The truth is people don’t mind answering these questions and the insights are huge.

So next time you have time with a prospect or customer, make sure you take the opportunity to ask these research questions.

Top tip: have a process for feeding back these insights to the team, otherwise, they may very well exist in silo and therefore the benefit will be lost.

Celebrating a record-breaking quarter

I believe it’s really important to take a moment, once in a while, to reflect on all your hard work as a marketing team.

We can sometimes get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget that we’ve made such huge progress. We’ve actually just had another record-breaking Q3, but even still, we have to be planning ahead for Q4.

So it’s hard to just stop and take stock, but this was a big moment. Another reminder that we were achieving the main goal we had been set - building a predictable revenue model through marketing.

And we couldn’t have done it without each and every one of our team members.

At the end of the day, what makes your company or B2B marketing org successful is the people. And I always want to recognise hard work, dedication and achievements.

Us having a record-breaking quarter at this stage of growth was massive, and I wanted to recognise everyone in the team for their contribution.

Recognising marketing team contributions

Shoutouts in general have been built into the way we work. We have a Slack channel dedicated to doing just that, and we post in it daily.

We also nominate someone from the team to be ‘marketer of the week’ based on nominations from across the team.

Basically, any opportunity we get to celebrate the good work everyone’s doing, we try to do it, especially now that we have a much larger team and we are remote.

I wouldn’t want anyone to feel as though their work is going unnoticed or they don’t know how they’re contributing to our wider company goals.

I think that helps to make Cognism a nice place to be, where people feel valued. I think this is key to having a team who are motivated to perform at their best every day.

And their best helped us to achieve what you can see in the screenshot above.

Is it worth investing in content marketing?

Our sources of revenue were inbound, paid and content. At this time we were still running the lead gen play - and content (by this we mean the gated e-book downloads) was making up a significant section of the pie.

This was a huge success, we had created three predictable channels where we could scale and hit revenue targets. The CFO, CRO and CEO loved it.

I’ve talked a fair bit about our old lead gen process so far in this diary, so I won’t go too into detail again. But here’s a few things I think were the keys to our success:

Our dedicated MDRs.
Focusing on quality content.
Being revenue-focused.
We were incredibly scientific and mathematical.
We tied our destinies closely together with our MDRs.

All of these things helped this to become a very successful motion for us at this scale and stage of growth.

Another thing worth mentioning here is that you can see our inbounds make up for a large proportion of the graph, and I think the reason for this is because we invested really early on in SEO and content in general, outside of just gated ebooks.

The compounding effect of these content investments has been huge. It was one of the best bets we could have made early doors.

It might feel like a hard choice to make when you’re first starting out because you won’t see the full outcome until much further on down the line - but it’s so worth it.

Invest in content.

I am an operational CMO and very proud to be so.

How operational I am ebbs and flows depending on the business priorities at the time and on my capacity. But I will never stop being somewhat operational. And this is a great example of why:

Navigating Acquisition Challenges: The Kaspr Example

Recently we acquired a company called Kaspr. They operated a purely capture demand strategy to marketing, and had great CPLs because they were on relatively low spends, optimising campaigns for high intent only.

Once they had joined the Cognism family, Kaspr’s main goal was to start to scale, double budgets and double outputs.

Now we all know as marketers nothing is ever as simple as this, and especially so if you are only running capture demand tactics.

At this stage I wasn’t much involved in the marketing of Kaspr, but after a couple of months of CPLs increasing, and significantly diminished returns, I was called in to have a look under the hood.

I mapped Kaspr’s B2B marketing sophistication out against that of the Cognism engine, a marketing engine that was successfully running both capture and create demand.

Executing with Precision: Overcoming Resource Constraints

I built a roadmap for how we scale this sophistication from a 1 (just capture, no create demand, limited room to scale) to a 3 (both create and capture programmes running and optimised, with room to scale and stack growth).

But there was a problem.

Who would execute this?

We were hiring but that would take months and we needed to get results fast.

I didn’t want to distract my Cognism org and team with the tasks as they had their own targets to hit. So it fell to me to work alongside their marketer to get ‘MVP create demand’ activated and working.

If I was not operational, this would have been a two-month blocker, the growth would have stalled either with Kaspr or Cognism if I had distracted my team.

I know that would have been a big problem for my CEO and the board. And it would have cost the business revenue.

This is just one example and there have been many others, but this is why it quite literally pays to be an operational CMO.

Optimising Marketing Operations

Another example that springs to mind is this one.

While we were auditing and ungating our content during our move towards demand gen, I felt we hadn’t properly thought through the aim and goal of the process.

What had been done:

Form removed from landing page.
PDF added in its place = ungating completed.

But after thinking about this process more deeply, this is what I came up with.

An interactive content page that could be easily consumed via sticky menus, with helpful read more content and videos added throughout the page. As well as personalised CTAs.

This may seem like a small tweak or adjustment, but the performance of these changes was massive.

Building a Culture of Efficiency

In my post above I mention my philosophy around protecting my team from distractions to allow them to get work done.

This is critical in my view to being an effective CMO.

You need to be able to understand when and how to offload tasks in order to ensure your team can execute against the core strategy that will ultimately drive revenue.

If I am assigned a task that I think will be a distraction from the core revenue-driving activity of the team, I will either:

Pushback.
Take it on myself.
Find it a new home.

In my early days at Cognism, I did a lot of 1 and 2, as I wanted to prove my strategy and get my team executing.

As my time becomes more and more stretched, and with the aim to stay operational still front of mind, I now find that I do a lot more of 3.

The organisation is much more mature and other departments have the capacity and resources for more of these items.

But sometimes, like with the Kaspr example, a task just needs to get done and the best solution is to roll up your sleeves and execute yourself.

Finding this balance is not easy and it will shift as you scale and grow.

By building a team and culture that is focused on critical revenue-generating tasks, you will find this becomes much easier to manage.

This was definitely a highlight of 2021 for me.

It was a real ‘stop and look how far you have come’ moment.

And this wasn’t anything to do with my talk at the B2B Expo, it was seeing all of my amazing team in action - sharing all of their learnings in front of 100s of fellow marketers.

I promise, I’m not just saying this because I’m biased - but they all stood out. They were delivering truly inspiring, actionable content, setting the standard for B2B marketing in the UK.

We were addressing marketing tactics and execution that most people had not been able to start doing yet which was huge!

All the strategy, planning and execution in the world won’t get you very far as a team of one.

You have to build a team that will take the foundations and run with them.

I’ve found much more success hiring people who might be a little less experienced with marketing, but fundamentally understand the shift we are making in our demand gen first philosophy. We can teach them the execution skills much more easily than the mindset.

A CMO’s superpower has to be hiring. It’s so critical.

So this was a great time for me to take stock of my incredible team of demand first marketers.

I watched in awe at how easily they took on the challenge of speaking at this event and sharing all of their knowledge and insights.

5 Tips for hands-on marketing leaders

You can see throughout my posts when I go from ‘strategic mode’ into ‘hands-on mode’.

This is one example of when I’ve decided to get into the nitty gritty - and you can see there were four main areas I wanted to look at.

1. Make impact on pipeline and revenue

Tracking a demand generation strategy is difficult, it’s not always possible to directly attribute what has been successful.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of insights that you lose when you don’t gate content anymore.

Yes, we knew that what we were doing was working as we were hitting targets and generating revenue and pipeline at record rates.

But if we were being held to account on the exact initiative that was having the biggest impact, that would have been quite difficult to say.

So you need other ways to measure the activities you’re doing and the impact on pipeline and revenue.

We went back to the drawing board in terms of how we set up our UTMs.

And this task really was one of those times when I just had to roll up my sleeves, assess how the process would work with our marketing operations team and implement it throughout the org.

2. Review organic LinkedIn posting strategy

For a while, we had fallen into a trap of posting thoughtlessly on LinkedIn. We chose to put out things like case studies or links to new content - without really considering what people would like to see.

I wanted to bring back a lens, looking at LinkedIn as a channel to showcase the value we offer upfront.

So I worked alongside the marketer who was looking after the LinkedIn channel at the time and just set a strict line in the sand - no promotional content. At all. None. Everything has to be value-based.

Going back to basics really helped us to keep true to our mission.

It did take a few weeks for everyone to settle into this idea - for example, the DG team might ask to share a case study on the LinkedIn page. I’d step in and say no, it should be run as part of our paid always on social proof bucket. That’s not for organic LinkedIn marketing.

But after the first two or three weeks, we were back to being completely value-focused, and our LinkedIn has grown from strength to strength since then.

In fact, our follower growth has increased by 84% more between January and November this year in comparison to March to December last year. And our engagement is up 46.7% in the same time period.

3. Bring in specialised talent in-house

Up until not too long ago, we didn’t have any SEO expertise in-house. Myself and the Senior Content Manager just handled it ourselves with the self-taught knowledge we had.

So we have definitely had a technical SEO gap and generally, what we did do was what I was able to do myself. Yes, not the most glamorous tasks but I didn’t want to hand off the responsibility to anyone else in-house when we didn’t yet have the required expertise.

Eventually, it got to a stage when I realised that the amount of work that needed to be done to keep our health score up, alongside all the other SEO-related work we could be doing didn’t scale.

We needed to bring in resources to cover these tasks so I could be freed up in other areas.

4. Continually adapt strategies to reach the customer

This has been one of the biggest reasons for our success in demand generation.

Something I don’t think we truly understood when we pivoted away from lead gen was that we needed to over-index on all of the bottom of funnel content that we created. In addition, we needed to think carefully about how we distributed that.

Because you will fail if all you look at is content and thought leadership.

Yes, you’ll be adding value to your audience - but you also won’t be educating them at all on your product.

We really needed to build out this bucket. We didn’t really have any supporting assets for this, and yes, we could spin up some ads on Cognism’s quality data and blah blah blah.

But where would the ad go to? What would the page look like? How would we make it somewhere that our audience would spend time? Did we have videos explaining how our product operates? What would the workflow be?

Here are examples of over-indexing BOFU content:

Ungated product tour

Landing page: https://info.cognism.com/sales-product-tour
Video ad example:

Product explainers

Competitor page comparisons

Your product in action

Here we filmed our sales development director making cold calls. We wanted to align with our product but also record something that was more human and something that resonated.

Customer feedback from calls

Less a resource than a full video case study.

Tools and Calculators

ROI Calculator

Is there a way to tangibly communicate results?

Note we started this using a spreadsheet then built the calculator after we saw success.

5. Be human

One of our key learnings from testing the above approaches is: 'be human'. Don't shy away from promoting a video just because it has a tiny mistake in it. Done is better than perfect and 9 times out of 10 your audience will prefer the more raw version.

We over-indexed in this area and I think it’s been one of the biggest reasons for our success in the switch. Had we not done this, I don’t think we would have been half as successful.

My advice to anyone in this position would be:

You need diversity.
It needs to be persona-driven.

Paid marketing is so integral to the Cognism demand generation strategy that it’s not something that we can outsource.

That being said, it can be very difficult to find the right sort of paid marketer to run this well, especially at the size of budgets and account complexity we now have at Cognism.

We split out paid into capture demand and create demand.

One of the problems we encountered was that while interviewing candidates for the role, we soon learned that most were only focused on, or only had experience in capture, not create.

To add the cherry on the cake, most of them only look at in-platform metrics as a measure of success.

Very few will be optimising their paid activity for revenue generation, and be as well versed with CRM reporting as they are at in platform reporting.

I found myself having to dig a little further into candidates’ experience with:

Setting up accounts.
How they’d go about structuring data from paid platforms.
How they’d use UTMs for reporting within the CRM.
What reports and dashboards they use.

Generally, most could manage in-platform performance tracking, budget tracking and pacing through a G sheet. They could also talk through in-platform optimisations based on MQL KPIs.

Very few, however, were able to answer the question of how best to track the impact of ungated content campaigns on revenue. Nor how to optimise and develop a playbook for these types of ‘create demand’ plays on paid social.

Even fewer still will have the ability to give budget recommendations around the split between create and capture demand activities, or be able to provide these per platform.

These are the unicorn paid marketers, they are the ones that are worth hiring.

It has taken me 2 years to replace our last one and in that time, we enlisted the help of the only agency I could trust with regard to running our demand playbook, Refine Labs.

If you’re hiring someone externally, you have to be aware of the fact that you’re likely bringing someone on board who has all the skills to execute the role - but almost zero understanding of your customer or business.

And unfortunately, what they’re lacking is what can make them hugely valuable to your organisation, and it can take them a considerable amount of time to get up to speed.

For certain roles, for example a website manager, that’s fine - they don’t need to know much about the ins and outs of who your ICP is.

But for other roles, that’s crucial information.

At the time when we made these hires, we simply didn’t have time at our disposal. We needed to do things quickly. I felt I could teach our internal hires the marketing piece much faster than I could teach all the nuances of our customer and product.

And it presented a great opportunity for us to live and breathe one of our core values which is to promote internally wherever possible.

And I’d 100% make this decision over again.

Our client sequence writer who we promoted to Product Marketer went onto become our Head of Product Marketing.

She’s become invaluable, her deep understanding of the product and our customers would make her a very difficult person to replace, should she ever choose to move on from Cognism.

The SDR who stepped into Performance Marketing stayed with us for the next two years, before then leaving to start his own business utilising the performance marketing skills he had learned, which is amazing.

And our CSM who became an SEO and Content Exec became one of the strongest SEO Execs we’ve ever had.

All three of these hires were hugely successful and each of them have gone on to further develop skills in the areas they were hired into.

The best thing about making the pivot from lead gen to demand gen?

We earned the right to scale. Which means adding to our team.

Cognism's hiring philosophy

I’m always cautious about hiring. My philosophy is that each role should be maxed out in capacity before we look to bring on a new hire.

That being said, it’s been game-changing to be able to prove the repeatable scaling success of the marketing engine and get the buy-in for growing the team.

When your CEO says: ‘this is great, how can we do more and scale faster?’ That is any B2B marketing leader's dream.

And remember the answer will very often not be to chuck more money at capturing demand by increasing spend on Google Ads. It is likely to lie in stacking growth through your create-demand activities, and these will require more people power.

Hiring for proven roles

So why was I hiring for these roles specifically?

Well, we had proved the positive impact that SEO could have on generating revenue more efficiently.

We had built out and scaled our SEO efforts, despite having limited resources or internal dedicated expertise.

It was at this stage that it made sense to invest in an internal SEO expert who could take ownership of continuing to scale our SEO efforts and give it independent focus.

SEO had proven its place in our repeatable marketing revenue engine and capacity had been hit, so it was time to hire.

Onto the Paid Media Marketing Manager. Boy, I have had a journey with this role!

So hopefully I can help stop you from making all the same mistakes that I’ve made.

Firstly, DO NOT outsource this position if you are only going to spend a small amount of money with the agency you outsource it to.

Why?

You will get what you pay for, in short.

An agency is only going to be able to deliver to a limited extent. They will optimise for in-platform metrics, but they will not be optimising for revenue.

They will also not be in a position to pull important levers on landing page messaging and content that can be crucial to how your campaigns perform.

Another important lesson I learned is that you need this role to be critical in your:

Budgeting pacing, tracking and adjusting.
Paid reporting, forecasting and planning.

An agency is very unlikely to be able to do any of this as well as someone who sits in the org.

BUT the cost of hiring a bad paid marketing person is big. So make sure you run a case study interview process.

I would want to be sure that this person can own:

Budget pacing.
Can run a spend forecast.
Look after the re-planning process.
Can optimise campaigns for revenue and not platform metrics.
Finally, I’d want them to understand the difference between creating demand and capturing it, and that they are across the metrics and strategies behind both of these.
Eventually, we found our unicorn in this role. But it took us a year and a half of pain to get there.

A CMO's advice for hiring the right team

Don’t compromise or rush the hire.
It’s much better to fill the gap with a freelancer until you have found your unicorn.
This can be a game-changing role for better or worse depending on your success in hiring the right person.

Finally, we hired our DACH marketer because we had proven the success of our marketing strategy in this new region and we were ready to start to scale revenue there.

Should a CMO be involved in the hiring process?

Hiring. It should be a CMO superpower. Especially in the early days when you’re building out your marketing team. Your hires can make or break your productivity.

Hiring and onboarding can feel like a big distraction at the time, but it is one of the things that you can do which will have the largest impact, negatively or positively. Depending on how successful you are at it.

You can also learn so much about the types of people you’re attracting to the role, meaning you learn about how to write or alter job specs.

I’d never want to give up the chance to filter in or out the right candidates. Although, I’ll admit it does change when you scale. We have made about 15 hires this year and I certainly haven’t been around for all of the first-round interviews.

Sometimes I need to assess how critical the role is against my other time requirements.

But I have put some rules in place:

I will always be present for the final stage interviews, no matter the role.
Everyone involved in the hire agrees on the candidate. If one person on the interview panel says no, then it’s a no.

Using these two foundational principles, we have had great success in our recruitment efforts.

A surprising interview experience

And yes… if you’re wondering, the story about the guy playing PlayStation during his interview is true.

That’s not even the whole story. He had told us he was out of work at the time, so interviewing for a new role was his full-time job. And yet he complained about the time of his interview.

Admittedly, it was 5:30pm on a Friday - so not exactly a prime time slot.

However, we had been really busy that week, and this was a critical role we were hiring for. I was really keen to be involved in the process - so we booked the interview for a time when I could attend.

Unfortunately, it was clear that he had done no research into who each of the people on the interview panel was. And it was a little jarring to hear a candidate be so openly vocal about the interview time, only to waste his shot by playing PlayStation throughout.

That’s one downside to a CMO being so involved in first-stage interviews… Sometimes you come across some time wasters.

But some good news, we finally filled the role we were struggling to fill the most, Head of Paid Performance - with a unicorn marketer!

How do you fill critical marketing roles?

If I were to offer advice to anyone else struggling to fill a role like this is don’t rush it. Don’t let yourself feel the pressure to fill it fast, with the wrong person. Panic hiring is the worst thing you can do.

Instead:

Set yourself standards for what you’re looking for in a marketer and stick to them.
Stay patient.
Find creative ways to fill the role in the interim (for example we used a freelancer to fill the gap before we hired our unicorn!).
Be creative in the ways in which you attract your candidates.

That last point is an important one, as we found a way to attract talent who have a similar mindset and already buy into our way of thinking.

How?

Through our online marketing event series, Demandism.

We’ve essentially built an entire community and following, with around 100 regular listeners based around our shift to demand generation.

And we’ve made three hires, including the recent Head of Paid Performance, who came inbound to us after having listened to Demandism.

In other words, we created and advertised our culture for demand-first B2B marketing, which encouraged others who share the same philosophy to want to come and work for us.

And each of them said during the interview process that they wanted to work for Cognism because they felt they could learn and grow more in this forward-thinking company versus anywhere else.

They were already sold on the job before they got to the interview, which is great for us.

A standout cover letter

We have received some brilliant cover letters, I’ll leave you an example below:

Dear hiring manager,

My name’s Jamie. I’m a B2B marketer based in London, with four years of experience devising and executing integrated marketing campaigns across property, B2B events, sports media and consulting.

I would be thrilled to be considered for the open position at Cognism.

Full disclosure - I’m an avid follower of Refine Labs, Chris Walker, Dave Gerhardt, Full Funnel and others that are speaking the language I believe is the future of B2B marketing. Revenue-focused, demand-driven, buyer-centric marketing.

Cognism instantly stood out to me as a UK-based voice passionate about this shift. I share that passion and believe this, coupled with my track record of impact in previous roles, make me a great fit for the role.

Some achievements from my previous employment include:

Increasing attendance for SportsPro Insider Series brand by 23% from October 2020 – May 2021
Led on email marketing campaigns for SportsPro Insider Series averaging 58% open rate & 5.56% click rate from October 2020 – May 2021
Led on email marketing campaigns for BlackBook Motorsport averaging 50% open rate & 5.46% click rate from October 2020 – May 2021
Responsible for SportsPro’s first ROI-positive Google Ads campaign with 4421% ROAS
Oversaw multiple LinkedIn retargeting campaigns averaging 56% conversion rate
Promoted to Marketing Manager in May 2022

Overall, I would offer proven copywriting skills, extensive experience managing organic and paid social channels, experience driving revenue with email marketing as well as demonstrable experience in PPC, SEO and content marketing.

I also believe I offer a good cultural fit for the role.

What do I believe about marketing and where it’s heading?

Marketing must be led with first-hand customer insights, these qualitative indicators drive strategy
The lead gen model is outdated. Running direct response ads and passing low intent leads to sales isn’t buyer-centric and is based on flawed thinking
The future of marketing lies in shifting focus to activities and channels that drive demand and stimulate word of mouth
B2B marketers must recognise that 95% of potential buyers are not in-market, these prospects need to be educated and nurtured with content in the places where they actually spend time

Outside of that, I also genuinely love what I do – and hope I’ve conveyed that in this letter. I would be delighted to discuss my application further in person and hope to hear back from you.

Kind regards,

Jamie Skeels

In an ideal world, you’d want all your skills and resources in-house. But sometimes that isn’t realistic or feasible and it also may not be what will deliver the best outcomes.

I’ve outsourced skills many times and will continue to utilise some external resources where it makes sense to do so.

However, in these cases, I’ll explain why I wanted these roles to be within Cognism.

1. Content

Just to clarify something first, I think it’s a great idea to use freelance writers to help scale the output of a content marketing plan. Scaling with in-house headcount once you get to a certain stage is not going to be the most efficient means of growing your output.

But one thing I think is important is to have the foundations and expertise sitting in-house. And this is key because content is what drives a successful demand generation approach.

The way we do content at Cognism means there is a required in-depth knowledge and understanding of our persona and of our product.

There is also a requirement to work closely with our subject matter experts and to be close to all of the content output that happens in order to be able to best make decisions on how to curate and reproduce from this content.

2. Demand Generation Team

I don’t believe you can do demand generation - in the way we are trying to do it - successfully without having an intimate knowledge of your target audience and of your product.

And fundamentally for this to work, we need to be tied to a revenue number, which someone external wouldn’t be.

You need to be in your CRM. You need to be laser-focused and obsessed with the activities and tactics that are bringing you revenue.

You need to be intimately connected to all parts of the marketing engine and wider business, from paid to content to sales.

A DG marketer needs to be deeply ingrained in the company, and this just won’t happen if they are external.

3. Product Marketing

100% has to sit internally. There’s no way of having this role sit anywhere else.

They’re your expert on all things relating to your product. Your positioning. Your messaging. Market intelligence. The ins and outs of product launches.

Working between B2B sales, marketing, product and customer success with all of the information flow that’s required to make this role successful.

The hardest part of this role is managing the ever-evolving internal communication loops required to make it a success. There is no way this can be done unless embedded in-house.

4. Customer Marketing

Similarly to product marketing, this role is fundamentally required in-house. If you want to be customer-focused, then you need that resource to sit full-time in your organisation.

They need to understand your customers intimately or they won’t be successful.

5. Marketing Operations

This is an interesting one.

In the early days, the operations really sat with myself and our Global Head of Demand Generation as he and I were both very operationally driven.

We were comfortable working with our core marketing systems and more than happy to set them up. I think you need to be if you’re an early-stage marketer.

It wasn’t until two years into my Cognism journey that we looked to bring in a dedicated marketing operations role - because operations were becoming such a time suck.

We had a demand generation team needing more systems, we had growing reporting needs, and ultimately, it was drawing time away from other critical tasks so there was a real need.

This role absolutely makes sense to have in-house, although they actually sit within our Revenue Operations team rather than marketing.

Agency partner

But having said that, we do also work with an agency who have helped us to scale operationally to the next level.

I really like the combination of an in-house expert coupled with an agency partner who has a wider knowledge base and just more exposure that they can tap into. The agency is working inside multiple MAPs and CRMs at any one time and they can pick and choose from the best of what they see and implement in order to advise on your organisation's requirements.

This has really been a killer combination for us in taking our operational set-up to new heights.

One top tip here would be to choose your agency partner carefully though. It is very easy to get sold by a senior agency employee, only to find your account handed off to a much less experienced person after signing up.

I always want to know that the person who sells me on the partnership is also going to be the person doing the work as well.

Reasons for outsourcing marketing expertise

When deciding which roles to outsource, there’s one message I think it’s important to keep in mind.

When might it be beneficial to have someone with expertise from multiple organisations? Meaning when might this level of exposure and learning from working with multiple orgs help to shortcut your internal learning period.

It’s unlikely that an internal hire would be able to offer the same unless you can afford someone with ALL the years' experience.

This combination really levelled up our set-up and maturity from a marketing operations standpoint, as I touched on in my earlier post.

One note though, I did this work. And I think that’s important. I’m so in the detail that I can think about all the downstream impact of any changes and this is vital. When you work with outsourced talent they will need you to be able to think through all the implications of any changes, as they will not have this experience and knowledge to draw on.

Web development is another great area to outsource.

CMO and CEO's perspectives on finding a good marketing agency

When you find a good agency, stick with them. We have a monthly retainer with ours.

Recently, I was challenged by my CEO, asking why we should work with the same agency for the Kaspr projects we had after we acquired the brand earlier in the year.

He was determined we could find a French equivalent or another agency that would work just as well. I remember him saying ‘in all the world are you saying there is not a better or equivalent agency to yours?’ Of course, that is extreme, but it is also hard to argue against.

So I dutifully went ahead with a search for alternatives, but my warning was: we will go through a lot of pain to get there, and a lot of wasted cost. And I still believe the output will very likely not be as good.

So we chose another agency.

And very swiftly reverted back to our Cognism partner. They just weren’t as good, everything took longer, mistakes were many, and the end result was hugely painful and not very well executed. So when you find a good one, keep them. They have come with me everywhere.

Outsourcing innovation

I actually think this has been one of my biggest hacks to scaling learning and growth quickly in B2B marketing. You could spend a year running various experiments and content processes trying to hit on the right way to do these things for scalable growth.

OR, you could cheat.

You could find those people doing it really well today, hire them on a project or consultancy basis and learn from them. Then instil those processes, skills and ideas into your team.

This is exactly what I have done at Cognism, and it has 100% enabled us to scale 10X faster than waiting to work it all out for ourselves.

Some of the people we have worked with to do this are:

Refine Labs

They were crucial in bringing structure to our paid social campaign set-up. They also gave us some very strong processes around reporting on our demand generation activity.

Refine Labs are learning by working with multiple organisations every day, so their process of iterating and building out playbooks is much faster than ours would be.

Gaetano DiNardi

This is someone who has had huge success scaling multiple marketing organisations, he is the kind of talent we could never afford in-house, but provides us another vital cheat code to scaling our learnings much faster than we would without his advice and expertise.

We don’t need another pair of hands executing, we require another strategic brain who can utilise their past experiences to advise us on a stage of growth we have not yet experienced.

Todd Clouser and Obaid Durrani

Two people who truly get demand generation content creation.

In a world of mediocre content, and very little known process and structure around how to build a truly predictable high-quality content engine, Todd and Obaid are teaching us their methods.

We have a transparent goal of upskilling ourselves to a point of redundancy for them. We actually utilised the budget for a DG content headcount in order to work with them.

Why?

We knew that we could hire someone in the role, and we could spend a year trying to build out a playbook for this function, or we could work with people already doing it successfully today, people we could not normally afford to hire, and learn the playbook before we then hire.

Three content functions in Cognism’s marketing team

We have three different content roles within the Cognism marketing team structure.

This set-up is to maximise our media machine aiming to both capture and create demand with our content.

We’ve built a brand around our content differentia, something I have already spoken a lot about throughout this diary. This was my vision for it on day one.

I knew our advantage was being lean, being able to act quickly and to ship lots of output.

Our processes have evolved with our move from lead generation to demand generation, and with the separation of activities across create demand and capture demand.

These changes meant a need to rethink the content roles we had in the organisation and to look at how we structured ourselves in order to achieve success.

Content Function 1: SEO

Our SEO efforts are focused on capturing demand. This team spends its time working where the commercial intent is greatest.

There is so much continual effort that goes into obtaining, maintaining and expanding your SEO footprint that it has to be separate from your other content functions and roles.

The skillset, the focus and the type of content required are very different to any other parts of the content engine.

Content Function 2: Journalistic Content

Early on in my shift into demand generation, I doubled down on the idea of building a media machine. I felt like a critical part of this was a change in the way we produced and went about writing our content.

Old way: Map out the blog content titles we wanted to cover a quarter in advance.

These titles were based on ad hoc feedback and ideas from the demand gen team and the sales organisation, as well as desk-based research.

New way: Commit to a base level of content delivery per week/per month, but don’t commit to titles.

Have a place for storing title ideas for times when inspiration is low. But otherwise, act like a journalist. Go out and find interesting people and stories to cover that are relevant today. Make connections with subject matter experts and get really good at interviewing them.

This requires a big shift in mindset and also in the profile of the type of person you hire into the role.

Content Function 3: Demand Gen Content

These people sit within the demand gen org. They are the ones who know their persona intimately and are tasked with content in all of its formats: video, scripts, blogs, webinars, podcasts, snippets and more.

They are the ‘create demand experts’.

Their content is powering all the create demand activity the demand generation team executes.

This is without doubt the hardest role to hire for.

So many people assume when they see ‘content’ in a role, that means they’ll be writing blogs or other long-form content only.

They only know how to operate based on a pre-planned calendar and they definitely aren’t comfortable building out processes that will power a create demand content powerhouse.

These people need to be agile, they need to be content creators with a flair for creativity and a very strong bias for action and delivery.

You want someone in this role who is able to help ideate on key content themes, then take those themes, map out the best content format for the core deliverables and then understand how they will take one asset and multiply that into many.

This is a unique and new skill set. It is arguably probably better suited to a DG marketer that would like to focus more on content than it is a traditional content marketer that loves to write blogs and plan content calendars.

I feel incredibly passionate about this one.

I’ve already mentioned that I believe hiring should be a CMO’s superpower.

One of the biggest wins for my team as a result of our shift away from lead generation (and our openness and transparency about this journey) has been that we have built a following of marketers.

Not only do they regularly read and engage with our content, but they also want to work for us!

It has shown that Cognism is an innovative place to work, it’s somewhere that prioritises marketing investment.

It’s a successful example of marketing being a revenue-generating engine.

It’s a marketing team where you know you will be setting the standard for what good B2B marketing looks like and there’s no following well-trodden paths. It’s all about creating our own ‘new way’.

We have managed to build a community that breeds like-minded marketers who buy into our philosophy, and who are forward-thinking and comfortable operating in the unknown.

I’ve never had an easier year of hiring.

The quality of the inbound talent that has been applying to positions has been incredible, with personalised cover letters like the one from diary entry no.50 becoming the norm.

There’s a movement happening and I am incredibly proud that Cognism is building a home for these unicorn B2B marketers.

I was recently talking to a peer about the Demand Gen role in marketing and what skills were required to be good at it. I started reeling off a whole list and I suddenly realised how different this was from the profiles I would have traditionally looked at.

My dream demand generation marketer is completely bought into the mindset of balancing creating demand with capturing demand. They understand that the buying journey is not linear and that buyers move themselves in-market.

If they get this, then it’s likely they understand how to create content for their audience and importantly the mechanisms for delivering that content. Always on, all the time, to everyone.

They would hopefully have a portfolio of work to showcase how they do this and in that work there would be absolutely no e-books or whitepapers!

They would be confident in managing ‘the talent’, producing videos with them, enabling interviews and building repeatable processes around these initiatives to stack growth.

Much like the changing content marketing role, demand generation looks very different today, and the talent pool that can execute on this is small but growing. Most of them work for Cognism!

When I mentioned I was going to be writing this diary, one of the questions I was asked was:

‘Will you talk about how you grew your team from 3 to more than 39+ people?’

And at first, I didn’t really understand why people would find that interesting, but they explained:

‘I wouldn’t know the first thing about when to add which resources at which stages.

How do you decide which roles you need?
How do you decide which departments to build out first?
And how did you justify your decisions to the exec team?’

I feel for me, growing the team felt like a very natural evolution. There were signs and signals along the way that told me when and whom to add to the team.

Starting the marketing department

When I joined Cognism, it was a small group. We had someone working full-time on content marketing, a full-time designer, and a videographer (which yes, was a bit of a luxury at the time. She was initially working on a 3-month project, but she was so brilliant we had to keep her).

From an outsider's perspective, you might think this was a bit of an unusual setup. If you came in fresh and were building out a marketing team, they may not be the first roles you’d hire.

But each of those team members was driven and dedicated. All we needed to do was to build out more resources around them.

The first person I knew I needed to add to this group was another all-rounder. Someone who could help me with:

The paid activity.
Look at things from a campaign perspective.
Understood Pardot.
How to measure, track and report on any marketing activity.
Other light operational activity.

Because at that time, I was spanning a wider range of processes than I am now. I had to be pretty hands-on initially, so I needed another body who could help me cover each of these bases.

So I hired a Campaign Marketing Manager, who filled in that gap for me.

Who do you need in a marketing department?

If I were to have joined Cognism and had to build out the team from scratch and had the same number of hires, I’d hire:

1. A wordsmith or content role

The value of having a dedicated content person is immense. The impact you can make by producing value-led content and building out a strong SEO strategy is huge. I would definitely, 100% have a wordsmith.

2. An operations/mathematical-minded brain

I have quite an operational, mathematical type brain, so between myself and the Campaign Marketing Manager I hired, we managed a lot of the role of Marketing Ops.

We only hired dedicated RevOps/Marketing Ops roles towards the end of last year because, until then, we were able to cover these processes ourselves.

If you don’t have that type of brain yourself - it’s good to have a person who can think this way on board.

3. A creative, hands-on, all-round marketer who is action-biased

Ideally you’d have a marketer who can wear a lot of hats. Someone who understands email, can set up a webinar workflow, can edit landing page copy, is comfortable running paid ads on LinkedIn and more. Multi-disciplined and super hands-on.

Another really important aspect of any person you hire is that they have energy.

Any B2B marketing team is going to run more smoothly when you have people who are eager to roll up their sleeves and get to work. But especially in the early days of a business.

What does a successful team look like?

And what proves that each of our initial marketing team members was the right fit for Cognism? Each of them is still here three years later.

Not only that, but they each have a team of people now working under them. They’ve scaled as the business did.

Our Videographer is now a Video Manager and has a new hire helping her with the vast number of videos being produced.

Our wordsmith is now a Senior Content Manager and has a whole team of content writers - from SEO experts to journalistic writers.

And our designer is now a Graphic Design Manager. He has his own team of designers working on all the creative briefs coming from the wider marketing team.

Plus of course my first hire, our Campaign Marketing Manager is now our Global Head of Demand Generation who is leading our demand generation function.

I think this just goes to show that we built things the right way to scale when we needed to.

Another reason I know we built the team the right way was because we were able to achieve the objective I was hired for within 4 months.

I was asked to create a marketing function that brought in 50% of the revenue target - and granted, our targets were much lower back then. But we did it. In 4 months! A proud moment for me and the powerhouse team. Such an amazing milestone.

This was also a crucial moment for building out the rest of the team moving forwards, because it was when the exec team really bought into my process and put their trust in my decision-making. This made justifying my hiring choices much easier.

But where should you go from there?

When to scale a marketing team again?

It all comes down to what’s working and where the positive signals are coming from. It should be obvious from your numbers where your opportunities are - equally, it’s likely pretty obvious when you’re maxed out at capacity.

For example, on the content side of things - we were using our single wordsmith along with various freelancers for quite a while, and that worked for us because we had a great workflow.

But when it came to content for paid, or campaigns, we were being slowed down by the fact that we didn’t have enough people to work on them.

So it was very clear to me that this was an area we needed to add to. There was so much potential, we just needed more hands on deck.

What's one key role to hire?

If there was one area I wish I’d added to sooner, it would be product marketing.

There’s so much value from someone who is living and breathing:

The product.
Your positioning and messaging.
Your value proposition.
Delivering amazing assets across the bottom of the funnel.
As well as having eyes on the website, optimising copy.

All these things can have a massive impact, and we didn’t have this for a long time.

How to lead a marketing team?

Unfortunately, there’s no secret formula for building a team. You will need to make decisions based on your gut feeling, but you can use the signals around you to lead the way.

Scaling marketing teams is more complicated than sales teams. With sales teams, if you double the number of people, you can likely double the revenue. But with marketing teams, it’s not so linear.

At one stage, I was asked to double our budget, and double our revenue target. We still had a team of 4 people.

I had to come up with a method for deciding how we would scale this spend.

I realised that without allocating some of this budget to new heads in marketing, rather than spending it all on paid, we would end up being inefficient and unable to scale further.

So I put in a proposal for new hires, positioning it to the other execs as the way to manage that spend correctly.

But no matter what your journey through scaling is, I think as long as you are getting down and dirty, being hands-on and involved in all the processes - you’ll see the gaps. You’ll know where to build first.

In summary:

Make sure you have the core skills you need.
Use the data to inform where your biggest opportunities are.
When you reach capacity and can no longer make the best of those opportunities, fill the gaps with new hires. Look for people with energy and biased to action.
Continue to review over time as your strategy, goals and skills evolve.

E-Book strategy success

There’s a part of me that believes anything done well can work. And we definitely got good at the e-book game.

We used subject matter experts to create genuinely valuable content. We always made sure there were loads of actionable tactics/takeaways and we led with them upfront.

We wanted to make sure that people knew the quality they would get when they signed up, minimising any trickery and showing the value off the bat.

We were able to get downloads of our e-books for about $10 which was unheard of on LinkedIn.

We also got really good at converting those leads. I’ve mentioned this in this diary before, but we carved out the role of the MDR.

The MDR role focused solely on converting marketing-generated demand. Because they were solely focused on these content leads, they became brilliant at getting them over the line.

Plus the feedback loop between them, our prospects and then back to us, was super-valuable. We knew which content resonated and which didn’t. We started to understand what assets made conversations and pitching easier for our MDRs and which didn’t.

We took our conversion rate from lead to SQO from 5% to 15%.

So that was really what helped to make this model so predictable and effective for us.

However, there are limitations… we did get to a point of diminishing returns.

Yes, we had this predictable engine where we were generating:

MQLs for 10 dollars each.
Converting at a rate of 15% from content lead to SQO.
Those would close at a rate of 12%.
And we knew that 1 MDR needed 400 MQLs a month to keep them at capacity.

This gave us a really simple model; it was easy to demonstrate to finance what our spend might look like from content and the revenue we could expect.

But we ran into a problem…

E-book strategy limitations that hinder growth

It only worked for the certain stage of growth we were at. Once we became more aggressive, this model was no longer viable.

Another problem we ran into was more of a team/people issue:

Salespeople get a lot of kudos/gratification from booking a meeting from a cold call. But for whatever reason, there’s a perception that a lead coming from a content download was an ‘easier sell’.

As we know from my first diary entry, that is certainly not the case.

However, that was the perception and so somehow there was less satisfaction coming from those deals.

One way we got around this was to make the MDR role a promotion from SDR before becoming an AE. Not only did it help the branding of the role, it also lent itself well as part of the experience and training in the sales team’s progression.

But as we came to terms with the fact that we were no longer getting the same results as we scaled, it became clear I needed to rethink this process as part of our overall strategy.

I still hold the belief that if we were at that same stage in growth as before, we could still be successful using this method. As I said at the beginning of this entry, anything done well can work.

Moving away from e-books to demand gen

However, I do feel like today’s buyers are no longer interested in downloading an e-book.

That’s not how they want to engage with content anymore. They don’t want to give up their details for a 20-page PDF, and I believe there are better ways to engage with your audience.

Personally, if I were starting day 1 at Cognism all over again… I wouldn’t roll out the e-book play.

I would go with the demand generation approach that we have now.

That being said, I think if you applied all the learnings that we did back then, there’s no reason you couldn’t still find success using it, if you felt it had to be a part of your overall strategy.

I know it sounds like I’m very evangelical about demand generation, and I am - now. But I wasn’t always.

It’s kinda a funny story…

I’m sure you’ll have heard of Chris Walker if you’ve looked into demand generation before. He’s extremely passionate about it. He was all over LinkedIn being… let’s say, negative, about the e-book.

At this time, I was still finding a lot of success with the e-book model. So I felt a little defensive. I thought I’d go head-to-head with him and debate it out.

I got him onto the Cognism podcast, where we discussed the e-book and its place in the marketing function. We had a really interesting conversation, which you can listen to here:

I remember he said to me:

‘I want to do this again in a year's time, and you tell me where you are then.’

I was pretty adamant that I wouldn’t change my mind. But after seeing the scalability issues with our method, and being exposed to more of his content…

Well, I did start to change my mind. He was right after all.

And we did redo the podcast - by then, we had become customers of Refine Labs. We were fully bought into the demand generation approach.

I think it’s funny to reflect on how all this stemmed from Chris Walker’s posts on LinkedIn, and how my opinions changed over time.

Advice to any other first-time CMOs out there

Don’t let a philosophical viewpoint or an ‘I’ve always done this’ mindset prevent you from trying things a new way.

I could not have been a bigger advocate of lead generation when I started my journey, and now I am known for my demand generation content and both have enabled me to scale the Cognism marketing machine to where it is today. Both have had a critical role to play.

Setting revenue targets as a CMO

I think historically, marketers leaders - myself included - have tried to avoid tying themselves to a revenue target. Or anything we feel we can’t directly influence, for that matter.

I guess because if we feel we don’t have complete control over it, then why would we sign up to be responsible for it?

However, when I did take the leap and started setting goals and KPIs against revenue, everything else became a lot easier. Weirdly, the fear of missing target reduced.

Increase freedom to experiment with tactics

I felt like suddenly I had more freedom to test out the tactics I’d been dying to try that weren’t directly measurable - because as long as they drive the end result, i.e. revenue generation, then that’s all that matters.

I think you only get that freedom by signing up to a revenue target.

And thankfully, we’ve been able to hit target for the past 3+ years, proving that all the compounding activities have made a difference. And during that time our confidence has grown too.

But even if you did miss a month - as long as there’s an upward trend across a six-month period, you can see it’s having a positive effect.

So if any marketers out there reading this haven’t committed to a revenue target - yeah, there’s pressure, but it gives you so much more flexibility in the long run. Take it as an opportunity to experiment!

Gain credibility with the executive team

Another benefit is you’re taken so much more seriously when speaking to the exec team. You get your seat at the table because they care about revenue. And when you’re driving revenue, they’re going to pay attention. Especially if you’re framing all your conversations around how your work will impact revenue.

CMOs are far more likely to get the budget and resources they’re asking for if they’re able to tie it back to dollar amounts which ultimately is what drives the business.

One of the main messages I’d like to get across here is not to allow yourself to be persuaded away from a revenue target because of fear or outdated beliefs on what B2B marketing should be measured on.

There are so many more doors that it can open for you as a marketing leader, and they really do outweigh the negatives.

How to experiment with SaaS marketing budget allocation?

This is where things get juicy.

33 entries into this diary, and we are finally making the move towards demand generation.

I remember a while ago, I was doing a podcast and my guest was talking about how they had an experimental budget that didn’t need to be tied back to revenue. It was simply a budget to test ideas with.

And I thought that was a brilliant idea. I had so many ideas for how I wanted to experiment with demand generation to get the ball rolling, so why not ask for an experimental line?

Turns out it wasn’t much of a fight to get it either.

Test ideas without immediate revenue constraints

Because we had just proven our predictable B2B marketing engine, hitting all of our revenue targets. The CFO and CEO had no problems giving me a budget of 5k to play with.

And I’d highly recommend any CMO ask for the same. As it was this budget that gave me the freedom to explore ideas, and find what DG tactics worked for us, and meant I had data to back up my decisions.

I was pretty bought into the whole demand generation idea by now, I just needed the time and budget to scale out how it would look at Cognism.

How could we create and deliver valuable, ungated, always-on content to our ideal customer persona? And would I continue to see an uplift in inbounds as a result? Would this increase bridge the gap that would be left by no longer running the content playbook?

I think the reason I found this budget so revolutionary was that I felt we had so many options. So many ideas. So many opportunities. How did we narrow down what we did next?

Well, this offered us a way to prioritise.

Transforming content strategy into a media machine

I love getting the whole team together to do some brainstorming; we come up with such great ideas when we have everyone bouncing off one another.

This was an H2 planning workshop where we made some choices for how we were going to work moving forwards.

One decision was to give our writers more creative freedom.

This was all a part of the switch away from traditional lead generation and moving to a demand generation-first approach for our marketing.

You might wonder how these two things are related; the content writers aren’t in the DG pods.

But what you have to remember is that the change from lead gen to demand gen doesn’t just impact the DG team. It impacts all parts of the B2B marketing function.

I knew that if we were to be successful in the switch, we needed to be creating game-changingly good content in an already crowded space.

This is really difficult to do if you are planning out a content calendar months in advance.

You end up tied to titles and topics that have been assigned to you because months before, someone decided they’d be a good fit.

I wanted to turn it all on its head and create our own process.

Reactive content creation

If our content writers were able to be reactive to the trends and topics then we could take advantage of subjects getting traction in dark social. In other words, be talking about things our audience cares about, while they’re still relevant.

The BBC or Reuters don’t plan what they write months in advance. My hypothesis was that if we applied the same logic to B2B, our sales and marketing content could truly resonate and stand out.

Newsroom mindset

If we wanted to be a true media machine and THE place where these professionals come to get their content insights, then we needed to act like journalists. So it was time to wave goodbye to the content calendar.

As someone who loves the output, I was worried about ensuring that we still stay efficient from a content production standpoint.

Here you can look to set a ‘story’ number target and KPIs around traffic value or visitor growth that will hold the team accountable without the requirement for a content calendar.

Integrated content distribution

One problem we have faced in the past is content distribution, so it’s an area we have done a fair amount of experimentation in.

In the early days of our switch from lead gen to demand gen, we had split out a content distributor as its own dedicated role sitting in the content team.

This got us some of the way there as it ensured that distribution had a focus, which helped in shifting the mindset.

But we found there was a big disconnect from the activities occurring in the demand generation team and that was an issue.

So we came up with an idea. To have dedicated DG Content Execs sitting in each of our DG pods.

It’s important to note here that these content execs aren’t just there to write blogs. They are content producers in all possible formats of content.

By sitting them in the demand gen pods, the distribution takes care of itself, as it is actioned via the DG activities and tactics.

So far this has been our unlock for building content distribution that can scale across channels and formats.

We have seen a huge growth in our traffic numbers to our blog, the time spent on these blogs and ultimately the number of high-intent demand demo requests that they drive.

The outcomes

We’ve also seen positive results such as:

High engagement within our always-on-paid social campaigns.
Positive comments and shares of this content in dark social.

I fully believe this has been the key to building out a media machine of truly valuable content for our target audience. And that content can cut through the noise of a saturated market and ultimately plays a critical role in the whole demand generation strategy.

We earned the right to change direction.

But what happens after you’ve made the decision to make the switch?

Understand the task by getting your reporting in shape.

By splitting out my reporting into three clear funnels:

Direct intent demand demo requests.
MQLs (content leads).
And blended.

I was able to clearly see the difference in efficiency between the direct declared intent and ebook MQLs.

I needed 25 demo requests to CW 1 deal vs 500 MQLs and MDR support to CW 1 MQL deal.

When you see this, the path forward becomes pretty clear. How can I fill my marketing funnel with more demo requests? And if I do, I can cover the CW gap from MQLs quite easily.

I started to think:

How much would I pay to have my audience actually engage with and consume my content all the time, friction-free, in the places they are already hanging out?

And would this consumption of our content ultimately result in a corresponding uplift in the number of people coming to the website and requesting to talk to us because they actually have intent to buy and have educated themselves?

At this stage we had cracked the code on generating MQLs; we could get an MQL for $10.

So I figured I could reduce our MQL campaigns down to just our highest performers, meaning those campaigns that could generate the most MQLs at the lowest cost.

Then, with the rest of the money, I redeployed it into ungated, engagement-first campaigns that were aimed at educating our prospects in feed, friction-free.

With this switch I wanted to see early indicators of success, e.g. an increase in our direct demo requests month over month as we gradually ramped our create demand spend and reduced our MQL spend.

This is exactly what happened. Inbounds increased 47%.

After three months of this approach, I was able to see the increase in direct inbounds producing the increased revenue needed to bridge the MQL gap.

Not only this, we were closing them faster, at a much better conversion rate and for higher ACVs.

If I was starting over today, I would start with this approach. I wouldn’t go back to the lead gen model.

That is because I believe the way people want to buy and engage with B2B brands has changed and so the MQL playbook is unlikely to be effective for much longer.

The buying journey is not a linear one. Buyers do a lot more of their own research before reaching a purchase decision.

They go between review sites, to social media, emails, blogs, peer recommendations and can be generally pretty unpredictable and untrackable.

This means they want information that allows them to make decisions on demand. Full access and instant gratification. So we ungated all of our content.

They want content to be consumable in channel, zero click content - so we want to offer them value up front on channels like LinkedIn.

They want the option to engage with content in multiple formats, like written, audio and video - so we make sure our content covers these three content types.

The standard buyer’s expectations have increased. Clickbait, high-level, written by a marketer with no subject matter expertise doesn’t cut it anymore.

So we make sure each and every piece of content we produce is value-led, with actionable takeaways and inputted into by a subject matter expert.

This was a big moment.

It was the point at which it was clear to me that we had successfully made the switch from lead generation to demand generation.

Some of the key changes we made at this stage:

Content that added real value to our audience

We delivered this by utilising and investing in subject matter experts to contribute to our content. We also ditched the pre-planned content calendar and shifted our focus to topics that were trending at the time.

Content optimised for consumption in the channel it was delivered

We shifted our focus away from trying to force actions on our audience and instead doubled down on producing content that could be consumed natively, with minimum friction, optimising for consumption rather than clicks and conversions.

Balancing delivery of thought leadership content with content about our product

It can be tempting when you pivot away from lead generation to over-index on thought leadership content and forget about building out and delivering your product content in the same ways.

We spent a lot of time focusing on building out persona-focused product content. This included things like workflow product tours, specific case study use cases talked to and shown by our customer success reps, FAQ objection handling videos and more.

We thoughtfully ungated our content

Creating long-form assets from the best of our gated content, and building out resources and website journeys that drove engagement and consumption of this content.

We found the channels on which our target audience spent time

We paid to distribute this content to them, optimising for in-feed consumption and engagement.

These are just some of the notable changes we made at this stage that had started to compound and drive these impressive results.

It’s so interesting to look back at this and see how far we have come with the three points I mention in this post. It’s a little mind-boggling how much the industry as a whole has changed in this time as well.

My take today (October 2022), all three of these are happening, but only in organisations with forward-thinking marketers.

I believe there’s still an opportunity for other marketers to embrace these ideas. In fact, I feel that soon, they’ll become as normal as gated e-books were two years ago.

For us at Cognism specifically, we have fully embraced all three of these and it has enabled us to deliver record revenue and pipeline quarters throughout the year.

We don’t run any lead generation plays anymore. We focus only on capturing existing high-intent demand and creating demand in order to drive more high-intent demo requests.

The results?

Our high-intent demo requests have increased month on month, proving the success of the shift away from MQLs.

We can now confidently say we don’t miss MQLs in our B2B marketing mix.

We now use all the time and spend from MQLs and direct it towards creating demand initiatives. That has proven to be game-changing for us. It’s far more scalable.

The second prediction - the rise of subject matter experts. This has been a huge part of how we have shifted time and spend in new ways since departing from running lead generation.

So let’s take a look at what we have done here at Cognism.

We’ve now taken on multiple subject matter experts (SMEs) across our two core personas (sales and marketing) and have been working with them consistently across 2022.

Sales SMEs

David Bentham, Dave is Director, Sales Development @ Cognism.
Morgan Ingram, Morgan is a renowned Sales Development expert.
Ryan Reisert, Ryan is another renowned Cold Calling expert and also founder of Phone Ready Leads.

Marketing SMEs

Myself, Alice de Courcy, CMO @ Cognism.
Liam Bartholomew, Global Head of Demand Generation @ Cognism.
Fran Langham, Head of Demand Generation @ Cognism.
Gaetano DiNardi, Growth Advisor and fractional VP.

So what have we been doing with these SMEs?

We have been committing to consistent high-quality content output week in week out, in multiple formats:

Live cold calling training.
Short top tip videos for SDRs.
Weekly interviews for new topics for our blog and sales newsletter.
TikToks.
Development of their own personal LinkedIn organic channel through consistent posting (Dave Bentham).

So what sort of results has this work been driving?

Dark social engagement

We have daily and weekly examples of SDRs posting or messaging our SMEs to thank them for their content and its helpfulness.

This same content has been able to be repurposed for the Cognism company page which has seen a record year for growth in followers and engagement.

Finally, we have seen our SMEs being listed on our human attribution form on our demo thank you page as the reason for requesting a demo of Cognism.

Paid social performance

We now run a fully ungated and engagement-focused paid social strategy; our priority is quality and truly valuable content.

We have to consistently produce this type of content in a repeatable and sustainable manner. Having SMEs to drive this has been the key for being able to do so.

Blog engagement

The posts we write based on our SME content and insights are nearly always those that deliver benchmark-beating stats in terms of time on page (5-6 mins) and views.

We are building a media machine that will see Cognism as THE go-to resource for content that will actually help you if you are a B2B sales or marketing professional. SME content and insights are a critical part of enabling us to deliver that.

Owned channel growth

Whether it’s:

Website traffic.
YouTube subscribers.
LinkedIn followers.
Podcast listeners.
Or newsletter subscribers.

Our SMEs have enabled us to build our own owned audience of loyal listeners and readers.

Lead gen to demand gen: Making the switch

By this point in the diary you are probably very aware that I have become a fully-fledged demand gen advocate.

But one of the questions I get asked most is always about how you actually, very practically, make the switch.

My advice when it comes to moving from lead gen to demand gen is to break it into manageable parts.

Things you can do right away that don’t involve changing from an MQL model, such as:

Utilising a subject matter expert for your content.
Optimising the content you share on your LinkedIn organic channel - move from promotional to value-led.
Upping your game on ‘product’, ‘BOFU content’.
Building your own media machine and subscription channels: podcast, newsletter, YouTube channel - pick what makes most sense for your audience.
Changing the way you think about your blog: Not a place where content goes to die and is shared once on LI organic. It becomes the hub of searchable content for the media machine you are building. It is subject matter expert-led, it’s timely, it’s journalistic and it’s written by experts that are finding the trends from dark social.
Diversifying your content output formats.

By doing all of this, you will actually set yourself up much better for success in point 2.

Changes that will alter the MQL model. How we approached this:

We didn’t go cold turkey and I wouldn’t recommend that you do either.

Step 1: requires a net new budget, a timeline and a hypothesis

No different to how you should approach any new and untested activity.

I requested a 5K/per month ‘CMO testing budget’, then created a proposal detailing how I’d use this budget for 4 months to run ungated, demand gen plays using our top-performing content.

This involved optimising for consumption and not for conversions.

My hypothesis was that I would start to see an increase in inbound demo leads in line with this additional spend on demand gen.

Thankfully, I was right.

Over 3 months, we saw a 47% increase in these high-intent demo requests on our website.

Step 2: Split the funnel reporting

Understand the conversion rates from direct demos vs MQLs.

For us, we realised we needed 25 high-intent website demo requests for 1 deal, vs 500 MQLs from a content download for 1 deal. The ACV was generally lower on that content deal too.

Once you are tracking this data, you can start to report on it in executive meetings, showing key stakeholders like RevOps, VP Sales and the CFO.

Step 3: Take your reporting a step further

Split out your MQL campaigns, don’t look at them blended.

Benchmark the performance against your breakeven CPL. This breakeven CPL is calculated by:

Average deal size X Lead:CW conversion rate

You’ll likely be able to see some underperforming. If you do, then stop them. Reallocate budget into demand gen activities instead and keep the top-performing campaigns on.

Soon your ‘experimental’ budget will nearly double without any material impact on your total MQL output. You have just consolidated and optimised.

We ran things like this for a further 2 months.

Then we had all the data we needed to start making a more dramatic shift.

Step 4: Change the split of our activities more dramatically

The split we went for was 90% demand gen 10% MQL/lead gen. But you can slowly build towards this over time.

Your sales leaders aren’t likely to push back on getting more time for their team to focus on outbound. It makes their performance easier to manage, makes them more accountable and gives them less excuses.

If you own a revenue goal and you are saying to the CFO/CEO:

‘I can still hit this goal with this change, I can fill the content deal gap with the increased inbounds that convert faster and at a much higher clip - I have got this.’

They can’t really push back either.

Keep hitting this number, month after month and you earn the right to build this out further and further.

The best thing is that all the work you do in Step 1, fuels Step 2. And Step 1 requires no dramatic moves away from MQLs.

I think this is a very important part of the lead gen to demand gen shift discussion.

We’re all told it’s what we should be doing, but very rarely is it framed in the lens of ‘marketing today is not the same as marketing in 2010’.

Technology and tools now exist that mean we don’t need to run e-books or gated forms to collect contact data.

We can actually use these data tools to generate much higher quality, validated contact data, in an always-on fashion and often at a fraction of the cost.

The best bit?

The intent is no different from an e-book download and a contact you get from one of these contact data providers.

We know because we’ve tested it.

Just think about how you consume content.

If you actually did download an e-book on a topic that interests you - which let’s be real, a lot of us don’t bother to even download now, do you actually read it?

Or does it sit on your desktop only to collect dust and take up that precious RAM space!

Even if you did read some of the content, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that this implies you are looking for the company's solution or tool as a result.

So what’s the great news?

There are tools that can actually help you identify contacts that are in the market today, intent data providers.

Using intent data + contact data, you now have some level of ‘real intent’ insights on which to run some outbound plays that might actually convert at a profitable rate.

And the even greater news?

This means that it’s no longer marketing's job to provide sales reps with contact data in order to keep them dialling.

Marketing can now completely focus on the job of bringing in actual high intent, declared demand through the website.

Forget the funnel. Forget all you’ve learned in B2B marketing school. And forget anything you’ve been told by big analysts and tech firms.

Once you can leave this mindset behind, you unlock the keys to starting to truly stack growth.

The old way of building an email nurture:

Map out the buying funnel.
Serve content across a time series of emails that cover each stage of the buying funnel.
Expect that you will convert at the end of the nurture because you have taken the buyer across each funnel stage.

Top tip:

No one opens an email and thinks, yes great, I am in the MOFU stage and this content really aligns to that. I’ll keep my eye open for my BOFU email in one week, when I am certain I’ll then be ready to buy!

Instead, there’s a new way to do things:

Send sequenced emails, but aligned with reality.

Most people will miss most of the emails in the sequence, or only one email actually piques their interest that day to engage and click.

Therefore every email should be a delivery mechanism for an always-on resource that can be consumed by the reader whenever it suits them.

You want to give your audience the freedom to decide which content they consume.

Here is an example of an on-demand email nurture landing page that we run at Cognism.

Okay, so now what about campaigns?

These used to be gated content initiatives, usually containing an e-book that ran for six weeks after months of planning.

Why?

Because that is how we had been taught to do marketing. You don’t see jobs for ‘always on marketers’, you see jobs for ‘campaign marketers’.

BUT...

What if you served your best content all the time? Ungated, friction-free. Activated in multiple channels and continually adapted and refreshed as the frequency and data dictated…

Who is to say that during the six weeks you run your ‘campaign’, that your prospect is going to be in the market?

It’s much better not to leave this up to chance, trying to catch them at the right time.

Instead, continually be adding value so the moment they move in the market (yes that’s right, they move themselves), you are top of mind.

The final one I included in my post was the idea of always on events.

I haven’t seen this done yet in B2B and it’s still on my radar as something I would like to try out at Cognism, one for the next book and for 2023!

We’ve always had our LinkedIn page sit with the content marketing team. After all, if we want to provide our audience with quality content, then who better to provide them with that?

I think what’s been key for us has been to have a dedicated member of the team really focused on the details of what’s working, and what’s not - taking a very data-driven mentality.

While I think we’ve found our groove with our LinkedIn page now, we did find it difficult to transition towards a value-led approach initially because we were still taking requests from other areas of the business. For example, sharing promos on an upcoming partnership webinar.

But once we had drawn up a clear strategy document for our company’s LinkedIn page and firmly established road rules around what could be posted, and what couldn’t - it was much easier.

Our rule of thumb on our LinkedIn page is:

Anything that doesn’t provide direct value in the post doesn’t get on the page.

Because before, when someone would ask if we could just pop this on LinkedIn, we’d just do it. We didn’t have a reason to say no.

But now, we have clear guidelines. We can say:

‘This wouldn’t benefit the overall strategy of our company page, nor would it impact any of the KPIs set, so no, we won’t post this’.

Or we can suggest an alternative. For example, maybe it’s something better suited to be targeted towards a specific audience on paid social.

One thing to add here is that I’ve mentioned we use memes in this post. But we don’t anymore. We found that memes left too much to the imagination. Memes that we felt were funny and innocent were interpreted differently by other people so we decided it was best to avoid them in most cases so we didn’t inadvertently negatively impact our brand.

We could maintain our growth trajectory without them. The main thing is to focus on value each and every time.

Another helpful thing I can’t recommend enough is repurposing content. But not just any content. Use the data you have access to.

Look at your top-performing blogs and repurpose those into a relevant content format, such as a carousel.

Look at your comments - what are the most common things people ask questions about? Use that to build your posts around.

And don’t forget once your posts are live, use the data at your fingertips to learn more about what people respond to.

While we were still in our lead gen phase when I wrote this post, you can see this was really the beginning of our demand gen thinking.

We wanted to create an audience of our own so we didn’t have to be so reliant on other people. We’d seen Gong create this strong channel for themselves, and we knew we wanted the same.

We wanted to get into the media machine mind frame. Which we’ve only continued to build out since.

Subject matter experts. I touched on this earlier on, but what I didn’t talk about is how to go about hiring or finding people to work with.

On the marketing side, this was relatively easy for us, because we could lean on our internal expertise.

When it came to sales it was more difficult.

At the start, there was a certain level of scepticism internally, especially within the sales org in relation to how valuable this could really be. Was it really worth any internal B2B sales experts giving up time for this type of activity?

This led me to look externally for someone I could work with to prove the impact of the role.

Now it is very important when looking for an SME, that you find someone who is still doing the work they talk about.

Why?

Because it means they are still learning and they will have a consistent flow of learnings to bring to the content they produce with you.

You’re also likely to be budget constrained; you’re not going to be able to work with one of the top 10 influencers in your space straight away for example.

The sweet spot is finding someone who is regularly engaging in your audience's community and channels already, but who has not hit the heights of full influencer status yet.

We found our perfect match with Ryan Reisert here.

Ryan loved cold calling, he still does. And he is doing the job daily, making his insights so valuable.

He was equally bought into the idea of being an SME and the business impact this could have. So he was very committed. This is very important as consistency is what will truly drive success.

Top tip:

Set clear KPIs for what you want to achieve with your SME. Here are the KPIs that I set with Ryan:

Goal/KPI

Scale LinkedIn followers to over 24K by the end of June 22. Adding 1K a month.
Contributing to an uplift in organic unique blog views of 25% every quarter.
Become the voice of the sales newsletter, with subscribers increased by 50% every quarter.
Become the host of the Revenue Champions Podcast, sourcing influential and interesting speakers on a weekly basis and helping to scale regular active listeners to 150, from 35. Host an episode every week.
Produce regular video content to help drive YouTube subscribers up and to keep our always-on sales content paid social buckets performing above benchmarks.
Run regular live events. Minimum of 1 every other week.

Ever felt decision paralysis when faced with a big question, with no immediate clear answer?

I think it's pretty common. In my experience, lots of marketers find themselves frozen by fear by the age-old question:

‘How will we scale this?’

Just because there’s no one single right answer.

I firmly believe that our competitive advantage at Cognism has been the ability to move quickly, and be one of the first in our industry to make bold moves.

I consider myself to be an action-biassed CMO and believe that an idea is only as good as its execution. I live and breathe this philosophy every day and it’s instilled within my team.

Right now we are recreating the way B2B marketing implements demand generation and - as with anything involving stepping out into new territory - there’s no instruction manual.

We don’t always have all the answers. But we can’t let that stop us from making progress.

We continue to test and experiment with new ways of creating demand and running campaigns, even if we don’t yet have the perfect formula for measuring all of its impacts.

We look for trends, we look for correlations and we collect all the B2B data we have to make informed decisions.

It is not perfect by any means, but it’s transformed our business. Moving us off the MQL hamster wheel and delivering record-breaking revenue and pipeline months.

If we were still waiting for the perfect way to measure the impact, we wouldn’t be as far along as we are today.

Of course, when there’s so much going on, it helps to have something to manage our workflows.

We run bi-weekly sprints using Asana as our project management tool. We have boards for projects that each team is responsible for and we set milestones and KPIs against them.

By tracking projects in this way and by ensuring a regular cadence for reporting on the outcomes, it’s very clear where the priorities need to be.

That’s the purpose of the sprint. It’s a dedicated time for us as marketing leaders to scrutinise the team's workload and focus within the context of the big-picture reporting.

These insights help us to decide which activities to continue, divert or stop, depending on where our focus needs to be directed.

One of the signals we look for is increased output - it’s very easy to track this if you use a project management tool like Asana and this certainly was the outcome for us when we started to work in the sprint methodology.

It’s helped us to evaluate those ‘because we have always done them’ tasks too. This method is one of the key ways in which we were able to shine a light on these types of activities and re-evaluate their utility in relation to the results.

Another benefit is the overall transparency of the team's workload and activities. You can clearly identify any ‘busy work’ from value-adding work that should be prioritised.

In the early days, you don’t know what is going to work. Even if you are a very experienced CMO, you don’t know what will work for this unique ‘coming together’ of ICP, product, market fit, stage, team and more.

So you need to start to work this out fast. This is one way I’ve found to help me do that.

Your experience will give you a good steer on where to start out experimenting and how to do it well, but building and getting things live quickly in the early days can definitely be your competitive advantage.

In my time as a marketer, I’ve noticed there tend to be three categories of person:

The ideas person.
The execution person.
The all-rounders.

Unfortunately, there really aren’t that many in the third group who combine ideas and execution. Because these people really make magic happen.

For example, when we were listening to a lot of the content from Chris Walker and Refine Labs on demand generation, we could have just taken those ideas, shared them on Slack and continued to listen thinking ‘wow, this would be great to do’, but never really following through. Getting stuck in the unknown of how to execute on it.

Because there was no clear pathway on how to go from lead gen to demand gen - it's a daunting thing to execute. We could have just continued to do the same things.

But that would have added zero value and we wouldn’t be where we are today.

You must be able to take something you see - a good idea or a movement - and be able to see how it can be applied and implemented within your unique business circumstances.

And what’s even better is to be able to show the results at the back end too. Whether they’re positive or negative, neither should block you from trying.

There tends to be a bias on people being either one way or the other, and it’s less common for people to be able to marry up the two.

The way we were able to make sure we executed our demand generation plans was to dedicate a specific workshop to it. We locked ourselves in a room for two days and worked on what we (very aptly I must say) called ‘Project Find Out What Refine Labs Are Doing and Do it Better’.

I’d set everyone homework to go away and listen to all of the podcasts and read various articles and blogs, giving them a full week to do their demand gen research so we could all come into the workshop with the same knowledge and understanding.

We all came together and tried to reverse-engineer what we could gather from the information we had heard.

And then we started a new project. Again, not sure how we came up with such a fabulous name… ‘Project Shift How We Do B2B marketing’.

But we came out of the workshop with a clear set of actions, and we just went away and executed all of it and it’s massively evolved as we’ve learned more along the way.

But I believe a lot of people would never have tried what we did because they couldn’t see the exact steps to take.

Refine Labs offer the mindset and some gems of insights on how to run things. For example, setting up the conversion window on LinkedIn so you can still report on whether people convert in a 30-day window of seeing your ungated ads, even though you’re not pushing people to a form to convert anymore. But they don’t give you the play-by-play steps of what to do and how to structure it.

It really does take initiative and your own creativity to come up with a model that’s going to fit into your ecosystem.

We’ve built it in a way that makes the most sense for us and our ICP. And we’ve continued to iterate on it as time goes on.

When there’s no written playbook for how something should be done, just make one for yourself. Because being able to marry ideas and execution is a huge competitive advantage.

Give yourself problems

We didn’t offer a free trial at Cognism, we only offered demo requests.

But we wanted to diversify our offers and let people experience our product hands-on so they could see the value upfront.

So we came up with this idea of ‘25 free leads’, where we could offer people 25 leads in their ICP for free.

They would get a sample of the types of contacts we had to offer in their ICP and be able to understand the quality of our B2B data without having to commit yet.

I got this idea approved by our CRO with the only stipulation being we couldn’t run this as a mass offer to everyone, it had to be a super tight audience initially.

But at this stage, I just wanted to validate that this idea would even work and was an offer our audience cared about.

So we kept the audience size really small at first. It was purely retargeting people who had already engaged with us and knew a bit about Cognism.

We put it live and saw amazing results. Not only were people converting on the offer but they were converting into revenue further down the sales funnel.

It became our top-performing campaign by a mile.

At that stage, we knew it worked. So we had an argument for scaling it. We then just had to figure out how.

And I believe it’s a much better position to be in than having never started it at all because we were worried about how it would scale later on.

I feel that all too often we block ourselves from trying ideas because we can’t imagine how it would scale. For example, we could have said:

‘There’s no way we can deal with 200 requests for 25 free leads a month, how would we resource it.’

And not go ahead with it. But that would have been the wrong decision.

I think it was great that we tested it before we knew how we could scale it. Because we proved that it worked.

It was really easy to then get buy-in to build more robust processes around it, because it was generating revenue. You could see it in the numbers.

This can be a mindset shift for some people, because what happens if we can’t fulfil what we set out to? Rightly, people want to do things to a high standard, and that’s a good thing most of the time.

But in order to make the right decisions quickly, you need to be creating minimal viable tests and minimal viable products to find out if it’s the right direction to push in.

It’s just a new way of thinking about things. Don’t worry about a problem that doesn’t yet exist.

Cognism DNA

In marketing kick-offs, I like to highlight certain characteristics that have helped us to be successful so far, that I’d like new members of the team to inherit as we scale, and older members of the team to remember.

I want these to be a part of our DNA and philosophy as a B2B marketing department as we move forward and scale.

At this point in time, we had just added new members to the team - and I realised I really needed to invest some more of my time to defining processes that would drive these critical principles within the team.

We had to get out of the startup mentality where we would get things done by hacking things together through a small number of very hands-on people, laser-focused on shipping value.

Instead, moving towards a more process-driven approach so we could continue to scale.

1. Efficiency

We had reached a point where we had more people in the team, but we were less efficient with those people. So that really had to be a key focus but the responsibility really came down to myself and the other managers to work out, rather than the individuals.

More than anything it was just a reflection of the stage of growth we were at, but it was something I felt was important to pay attention to throughout the year.

There will be a point of scale where you have to set time aside to build out processes and infrastructure that will enable the team to be more effective and efficient with scale. The short-term hit on output while you build these out can be painful, but ultimately this is the only way to build for sustainable growth.

2. Transparency

During this time, we had been working from home for a while because of the pandemic. And even now, a lot of our marketing team is remote.

While I have my direct reports keeping me updated with progress, these people also have their own teams, so I can end up being quite far removed from a lot of the work being done in the day-to-day.

I’m sure it feels a bit arduous for those who are in the details, working hard to then have to add an update to their to-do list. But it’s really important, not only for me, but the whole team to keep up to date with projects because I believe that’s where creative ideas are born.

We have so many smart people - you just never know what creative ideas could come out of sharing what the team is up to.

We had become a little siloed and a bit too focused on our own work.

This was my push to try to bring back a level of transparency within the team.

I ran incentives about sharing and I told my team ‘this is the easiest money you will ever win because all you have to do is share your work’. Sometimes you just have to incentivise the behaviour you want until it becomes a part of the way you operate.

3. Innovation, ownership and execution

This comes back to one of my favourite phrases:

‘Ideas are only as good as their execution’

What I was really trying to get at here is that I want people to come up with solutions to problems, not just problems that need solutions. And I want us to be able to execute on that.

I think it comes down to empowering the team to take ownership of certain projects and say: ‘please come to me with a fully formed plan of action around how you think we could do something better’.

Because I would love to help my team get an action live, whatever that test looks like.

Ideally, I want those ideas and plans to come from everyone in my team, not just managers.

I really feel like that was the secret sauce for our success in the early days, we came up with some really great ideas and I really didn’t want that to get lost as we grew the team.

It is easy to get into the trap of team members looking to their managers for direction and ideation and that is the death of innovation.

4. Revenue Marketing

I feel it's super important for everyone in my team to know what the key metrics are.

Whether they’re in SEO, whether they’re in content, whether they’re in demand gen - we all drive towards revenue.

That’s the no.1 goal of our marketing team.

It’s important for everyone to be working on something that can positively influence the growth of the company and ultimately results in increased revenue.

That means we all have to be very involved in the data and this is an area where I really want the team to maintain focus.

These principles really came from me observing the team, looking ahead at our growth plans and prioritising past competitive advantages that led us to success so far. They were the key elements of our team's DNA that I wanted to solidify.

Another thing I just want to touch on here before I move on - as I mention it in this post, but haven’t really spoken about it in this diary so far - working from home.

Marketing is lucky as a discipline in the sense that it can be done from anywhere, and a lot of our team continues to work remotely or on a flexible basis.

I do feel that the team can benefit from being in the same room, even just to discuss options for the subject line of an email easily and quickly - so we do get together when we can.

We also did suffer initially from issues discussed in my previous points (efficiency and transparency) which is why I made those two areas a focus.

But I feel it’s the role of a leader to do all they can to remove silos and create processes that make it possible to be productive in whatever environment is required.

We’ve now found our flow with processes and developed our mindset and philosophy around working from home which offers the team a lot more flexibility and work-life balance, without any negative cost to productivity.

We’ve also experienced massive benefits from being able to hire talent from further afield which I feel has outweighed the negatives we experienced in the beginning.

Becoming a subject matter expert

You may have noticed I’ve started filming a lot more videos and using the content for my LinkedIn posts.

I realised there was an added benefit from turning myself into a subject matter expert for our marketing audience, and I could repurpose the video I was making.

That’s advice I’d give anyone in my position, don’t be afraid to use content more than once.

Many people won’t see it the first time - and assuming it still holds true and is valuable, re-using that content is making it work harder for you. It also increases the chances of it being consumed by more of your target audience.

I was already filming video as part of my subject matter expert work within the Cognism media machine - a key part of our create demand strategy.

So because I could repurpose this video, it wasn’t any more effort for me versus my written posts.

It actually made posting much easier as I had a springboard for post ideas. No more starting with a blank piece of paper.

I could pick parts of conversations I had already had in webinars that I knew had been of interest to the live attendees and build on these.

I didn’t notice any crazy changes in engagement on LinkedIn but I know myself as a user on LinkedIn that it just diversifies how people can consume the content.

Many people will watch a video and not comment or like. And by supporting a text post with video, I was able to get more people to consume the content which is exactly what we are after at the end of the day.

Touching back on the post above itself, I wanted to go into more detail on what I mean by the 80/20 rule.

Marketing, arguably more than any other department, needs some strict guardrails when it comes to how it supports the rest of the organisation. In addition, guardrails are helpful for how marketing prioritises its own work.

You could spend 100% of your time on ‘busy work’ that won’t actually move the needle in terms of achieving your core business goals or driving B2B marketing revenue.

When I joined Cognism, marketing was 100% ‘busy work’ and sales enablement. It was not proactive in any way. Ultimately this led to unpredictable and limited revenue contributions and effectiveness.

In order to create real impact and change, you need to show leadership and executives a roadmap for hitting the business objectives and get this signed off upfront.

This then becomes your key mechanism for pushing back on tasks that don’t impact directly on your end goal.

You should still leave yourself and your team with some capacity around 20%. That can be used for unplanned but critical items that will inevitably crop up.

I also find that working in bi-weekly sprints helps to keep focus. It ensures that the majority of your team's time and effort is going into the activities and initiatives that will truly make an impact on your agreed business objectives.

As your org grows you may find it harder to minimise the distractions from outside of marketing, but coming together for these bi-weekly sprints will provide visibility and enable the correct re-prioritisation and focus.

Random acts of marketing

Execution.

I’ve touched on this quite a lot throughout this diary and my LinkedIn posts. But I think it’s fair to say it’s a critical part of what is required to be successful.

Refine Labs introduced me to the term ‘random acts of marketing’ and I think that summarises what I was trying to hit on in this post. More importantly, what I wanted to avoid in 2022.

I think this becomes even more important as your team grows; more people does not always mean more output if you don’t have the right focus and processes in place.

So how do you create an environment where people execute, and importantly execute meaningfully, rather than randomly?

I think the starting point as a leader is being very clear on what marketing metrics matter and where you are placing your bets in terms of driving forward those metrics.

You need to think about this like a campaign. This message needs to be repeated over and over again and you need to have regular cadences for stopping, reviewing and ensuring the focus is where it needs to be.

For us that looks like bi-weekly sprint cycles and running all of our tasks through a project management tool - Asana.

If it’s not on Asana - it didn’t happen.

Sprints enable us to be reactive to shifting priorities based on insights and how we are tracking towards our core metrics. Many marketing campaigns and ideas have met an early demise through this methodology and it’s really helped us to keep scaling output with headcount effectively.

When I interview I always set a practical case study. This is because I value execution so much. I have worked with ‘ideas’ people before, and ultimately their impact is very limited because they are unable to transition from ideation to action.

In every role I have held, my bias to action has always been the thing that gets highlighted above all else as being my critical strength.

This coupled with a mindset of done is better than perfect are core traits that I believe you need if you are going to be effective in B2B marketing. Start practising these traits daily, and the incremental impact will be surprising.

Art and science

Cognism didn’t run webinars before I joined the company, so I knew this was somewhere we could get ourselves a quick win.

Although because we didn’t have a process for webinars beforehand, we had to learn what webinars meant at Cognism.

What do we want them to be?
What was the process for running them?
What did we want to get out of them?
How did they fit into our wider marketing strategy?

In the early days, I just wanted to build muscle memory. Find our feet in terms of how we went about the process because it was totally foreign to the company. We didn’t have the tech or the infrastructure, so that had to be our starting point.

Once we had managed to get a regular series of webinars going, we discovered we could very easily scale our content by recycling and reusing webinar content. We’d alter it slightly for other purposes, such as in blogs or video.

This was so important for us in this early stage of our journey as a small marketing team and it proved to be a winning tactic.

Once we found our way through the whole webinar process I came to the sudden realisation:

Somehow we had managed to end up running the same old playbook. We were running the webinars in the same way we ran everything else, because that had been the way we had always done it.

We had a process, a cadence for webinar frequency and a clear activation checklist, all of which was being followed. But I couldn’t help but think we had fallen into the trap of webinars becoming an activity we did ‘just because we had always done it that way’.

Creativity and thought had gone from the process and I was left questioning the impact and role in the overall strategy.

So I wanted to change things up.

We used to care about sign-ups and attendees, that was what all the energy and effort went into.

I wanted to flip this on its head. I wanted us instead to put as much thought and concern into the quality of the content and the format of the webinars as we had been doing to drive sign-ups.

Success would now be measured on how many great quality snippets we could create from the webinar to use on paid and organic socials.

How many organic LinkedIn posts could be taken from the webinar?
How engaging were the chat and questions during the live event?

It’s amazing how when I changed the KPIs for the team, how much better in quality the webinars became. With that, the attendees and sign-ups followed naturally.

It was a great learning for me as a B2B marketing leader to always take a step back and evaluate the ‘work as normal’ activities.

If you feel something can be done better then you should rethink it. Adjust your strategy in order to maximise value.

No one will prompt you to do this; it has to come from you as the marketing leader. Be honest with yourself and continue to second guess the approaches and actions you’ve put in place, as well as the KPIs attached.

What is measured gets improved!

I mentioned a video in the LinkedIn post above. We created it to try to convey the value of the content that would be available in the webinar up-front.

And I feel we still have some improvements to make in this regard, although I’m not sure any B2B organisations really do it well. But what this experiment did show us is that it can work.

The issue is it takes a lot more time and creativity.

I believe there are still great opportunities in B2B to change the way that webinars are run. Such as:

Reward attendees

We run cold calling live sessions where we let people test out their scripts and cold calls live, while our subject matter expert coaches them on how to improve.

If they don’t turn up live, they miss out on this opportunity to benefit from 1-2-1 live coaching.

Refine Labs run the playbook. They only release the audio of their sessions, so live attendees get to exclusively benefit from the screen-sharing content.

Showcasing value

There’s still so much space to rethink how you can show people the value they can get out of attending live events.

We’re collecting testimonials as we get such great dark social engagement and feedback; this is worth using for promotional purposes.

Another area of opportunity could be promotional trailers with snippets of the insights people can expect.

This is largely unexplored in the B2B world but we all know that nowadays, video is how a lot of people consume content. (include our promotional video)

Let’s get it live

WIP = no value added, ties very closely to my other favourite mantra of ‘done is better than perfect’.

As marketers, we are notoriously good at ‘busy work’. As an action biassed marketer, it has been one of the biggest challenges to build the mechanisms and processes for my team, enabling them to output and consistently be adding value.

We started using Trello and weekly sprints and we have scaled this up to Asana and weekly sprints.

The ‘how’ is not the most important part of this; Google sheets and Slack could work just as well. The main thing is creating an environment where output is valued over anything else.

During our weekly sprint meetings, we’ll look at our core metrics and KPIs we’re driving towards. Also looking at results from various campaigns and how our new ideas could influence or fit into all of the above.

Generally, it’s pretty obvious to us where our next steps should be. As an example…

We recently launched what we’ve called ‘influencer ads’ on LinkedIn paid social.

Basically, we’re taking screenshots of a post I might have put out on my organic LinkedIn profile, creating an ad from it - and then promoting it.

And we’ve seen amazing results from this in terms of CTR and number of visitors to the website. Compared to our other ads, they skyrocketed.

We decided to test out this approach because we want to engage as much as we can with people in-feed, and our organic posts were performing much better than our ads. We also felt this would be a great way to get more information in front of our target audience.

From this, we decided our next best step would be to test a bespoke retargeting funnel for those people who have seen our influencer ad, in an attempt to create an aligned, personalised journey.

If we don’t see an uplift in results after testing this method in the coming couple of weeks, then we wouldn’t continue it and we’d choose something else to test instead.

We’re not going to worry about the problems around scaling it until we know it’s something that works. Because getting it live and executing something is better than doing nothing.

We also have an ideas board where we add in all the things we want to test out. If we don’t have an experiment on the horizon that’s come out of something we’re working on, like in the example above, we’ll take something out of the ideas board.

Choosing from these is a bet, you have to follow your gut a bit and choose one you think is going to have the biggest impact and prioritise based on that. A bit more of an art than a science.

We’d ask ourselves questions like:

Would it impact revenue if it worked?
How much effort is involved?
How long would it take?
What possible outcome/impact could it have?

Another thing to keep in mind is that when you set your plan at the beginning of the quarter, you need to factor in the flexibility, time and resources to work on these experiments.

There will always be ways in which you can change, improve and expand the things you’re working on.

If you stick to the plan and only the plan, you miss out on so much of the vital learning that can really generate revenue.

Some of the best stuff we’ve ever done has come out of experiments and remaining agile.

Minimal viable product

While I wish I could say I’d come up with this philosophy myself, this was one I’d learned in a previous role working in an early-stage startup.

The product team operated a very lean, MVP-first approach and I had very minimal resources to work with. So I’d adopted this way of thinking and found it to be a useful approach to getting things done and start learning quickly.

So when it came to experimenting at Cognism, I followed this same philosophy.

For example, in the old lead gen days, before creating a long-form content asset I would often launch an early bird sign-up landing page to see how much traction and demand there was for the asset.

It was a great way to validate the topic and idea before investing weeks in writing and creating it.

Otherwise, you could end up wasting a whole lot of time and effort working on something that no one was interested in to start with.

Another example that springs to mind was when we were creating a tool for our ROI calculator.

We started with a simple Excel doc.

Once we knew people were using it, we could validate the use case. Plus, we then had some UX feedback we could work with to make it a tool people would find valuable.

That was our signal to invest in building a more robust tool to serve the need.

As I’ve said before in this diary, it’s better to create problems for yourself than to never try.

So just think about what your MVP could look like. What’s the minimal test you can run to prove your theory? Then worry about scaling that later.

I used this same logic when producing this diary. As you can see in the LinkedIn post below, I asked how people would most enjoy consuming a piece of content like this - as you can see, it’s pretty long..!

The reception was really encouraging and served as validation for our ideas on how we would activate the asset when we launched it.

It gave us a lot of confidence to continue to invest time and resources in creating a robust plan for the diary’s distribution.

B2B marketing doesn’t have to be boring

If you want to stand out in the marketing game, you need to be doing things differently.

Giving your team the space and freedom to be creative is so important for this reason. It could be the difference between a new best-performing campaign and, well… the same old humdrum you always do.

But at the same time, you need to have guardrails in place that ensure people know where the boundaries are - which might sound like the opposite of creative freedom, but it’s more about maintaining your brand and output. This isn’t marketers gone wild after all.

In that vein, I like to think of my guidelines as a bit of a brand book, filled with examples to spark ideas and provide more understanding.

As a marketing organisation, we are trying to change the way B2B marketers do marketing.

We live and breathe the motto that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be boring!

This means it has to become a part of the team's DNA and is ingrained in everything we do.

We challenge ourselves by asking ‘is there a better way to do this?’

Or are we just doing it because ‘it has always been done that way’?

We reward creative ideas. We reward those who can execute those creative ideas. We showcase the amazing work that is produced. And we operate with a very flat hierarchy.

I feel it’s been our competitive advantage. We’ve been able to stand out from the crowd of B2B companies because we don’t do the ‘same old same old’. We want to be the opposite of a boring B2B business.

One of the signs I’ve noticed that tells me it’s working is we’re always being tagged in posts - it's almost daily now - that call us a B2B brand doing things differently.

You certainly get the first mover advantage if you are brave and bold, trying to do things differently.

Whether that be making the jump from an MQL model, running e-books and content downloads, to rethinking the way traditional email nurtures function (think Netflix but for email nurture!)

Or taking a leaf out of Bumble’s advertising playbook and leaning into positively advertising your competition.

The amazing thing about marketing is that your work is never done and there is always a new idea out there that you can test, you just need to be able to deliver it.

Value customer loyalty

If you spend a lot of money on a gorgeous exotic plant, but then don’t take the time to give it water and sunlight, the plant won’t last very long.

Not a great investment… I’m sure we can all agree.

But if you do provide it with the light and nutrients it needs to thrive, it grows and looks beautiful for years to come.

In a roundabout way, that's why customer marketing is so important.

It’s about continuing to educate, excite and nurture the people who have invested in your business, so they want to stick around - and hopefully expand and renew.

You can see that customer marketing is growing in popularity in the B2B marketing world, but it’s still something I think can be massively undervalued.

I’ve definitely been guilty of this too - focusing too highly on acquiring customers and not enough on keeping our current customers really engaged.

But it’s important to keep this process alive, to continue to give consistent value all of the time.

We put so much time, money and effort into nurturing people into becoming customers, it seems such a waste to throw it all out the window after they commit.

Because our job isn’t done.

If you do customer marketing well, you then have a powerhouse brand with hundreds or thousands of brand advocates who can then feed into the content you put out on the demand generation side.

If you think I’m wrong about how many companies do customer marketing, just have a quick search on LinkedIn to see how many people have dedicated customer marketing roles… it’s not that many. And it’s nowhere close to the number of demand gen roles.

We hired a Global Head of Customer Marketing and a Senior Customer Marketing Exec. They work together to enable our customers, while also ensuring our demand generation messaging reaches them.

This post on LinkedIn was simply an appreciation post for the positive experience and treatment I had at Reachdesk (who we’re still a customer of today).

Customer marketing is still a relatively new and emerging focus area for marketing so there’s no set blueprint for how it’s done right now and we’re still finding our feet at Cognism.

But we’ve split it out into four main categories:

Advocacy
Expansion
Retention
Community

And within each of those categories, there is a whole variety of activities that can be done.

Of those four, I believe that retention is one of the most important levers you can pull, especially in a B2B SaaS company where you want to scale your growth.

Acquiring new customers is expensive, so it’s unrealistic to be growing at an optimal rate if you’re losing customers through a leaky bucket on the back end.

Retaining them, increasing their LTV and ultimately making your money back from the cost of acquiring them is going to be a lot more successful.

So we want to put as much effort into our customer marketing as we do into our demand generation. That means investing in it accordingly moving forwards.

Rebranding Cognism

It took me three years before I decided to rebrand Cognism. I’m a firm believer in if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But it was broken. We were in a state of brand limbo.

Everything we did meant re-inventing the wheel. There was a lot of precious time and resources wasted and we were being slowed down a lot!

So I decided to push for a rebrand, but underneath the project scope was a whole lot more, it was about:

Defining our messaging, mission and positioning. More importantly, getting all the executives to align around one vision.
Re-writing all the copy on our website. Introducing new pages and removing redundant pages.
Re-creating website experiences and journeys. We had moved to a fully ungated model, but our website still required work to reflect this.
Consolidating our operational set-up from a forms and landing pages perspective. We went from 400+ forms down to 20.
Migrating our CMS code base to a truly scalable, self-serve drag-and-drop solution.

When thinking about doing a rebrand, you have to fully scope the project.

It will touch so many elements and you need to ensure that you can maximise the outcome by planning it properly to include as many of those critical items as possible.

One thing I’d recommend is keeping a laser focus on output during the process.

I kept my team very sheltered from distractions until the very end. I didn’t want any loss of output or any ‘we’ll wait until the rebrand’ rhetoric.

It’s precisely those things that give these types of projects such a bad rep.

Arguably I may have kept them too sheltered as when the time came for the final push, requiring a big team lift, there was some initial pushback.

I think that could have been avoided with a little more transparency during the process.

But I was determined that we’d never stop delivering. Nothing ever got blocked by the rebrand and as far as the company was concerned, one day the website was purple with lines and the next it wasn’t!

We also built a mini brand hub which enabled our organisation to easily access all the newly branded assets on the morning of the switch.

Tools like Seismic and Mailtastic enabled our email signatures and collateral to be centrally managed and updated, so the lift on individuals was very minimal and it was made as easy as possible to roll out.

A huge win for a seamless transition!

Marketing and sales alignment lessons

Okay, this might be a long one - I have some bits and bobs to add to each of my points here.

Lesson 1

Rewinding back to when I first started at Cognism, I was hired by the CRO at the time. She was a phenomenal leader, and she really set the tone I wanted to follow in terms of marketing and sales alignment.

She asked me to join her in a meeting with the Sales Director and UK Head of SDRs and we all decided on one key goal and one core metric. Revenue.

She also made sure to refer to us as a team. A revenue team. And with a CRO leading the way, looking after both marketing and sales, that structure lends itself well to alignment between the two teams.

Now that’s no longer our setup today, but that’s not really what matters. What does matter, is that we still drive towards that shared goal.

We meet consistently to have sessions where we…

Review our goals.
Work out where we are in relation to meeting these goals.
Decide what else we can do to reach where we want to be.

A recent example:

We’ve seen our lead to meetings booked conversation rate on inbounds decrease consistently for the last few months.

Our inbound reps who qualify any of our inbound demand sit within the Sales Director's team. He is also tied to the revenue goal, and he knows that over 50% of that revenue is generated by marketing.

So he knows for him to do well, that these reps do well.

So we are all aligned that we need this ‘lead to meeting booked’ metric to improve in order to reach our revenue goals and ultimately positively impact the business.

And we now have a plan in place to tackle this problem.

That might sound like a small thing - however, the number of people who we need buy-in from, especially at the stage of growth we are at, at Cognism...this is huge.

This simply wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have this alignment between the two departments.

I really feel it’s this shared goal that allows us to really care about coming together to solve problems as a wider team.

Lesson 2

I feel like I’ve touched on some of this within Lesson 1, but something I’d like to add here is about having a shared destiny.

Our monthly revenue operations meeting is completely impartial and only focuses on the facts and figures. It’s chaired by the RevOps team. And if I went in there and said: ‘great, the marketing team is delivering our MQL number’.

But on the other side of the table, sales are telling us their reps aren’t meeting quota. It can become a difficult discussion where teams can feel pitted against each other.

But we have found that we can use these meetings to work together to find the gap.

For example, is it because we need to hire more SDRs? Or do we need to spend more on marketing? Is there a problem with the conversation rate?

We use this time to find solutions together. And that comes back to us tying our destinies together.

Lesson 3

I spoke a lot about MDRs at the beginning of my role at Cognism. That’s because while we were still running the MQL playbook, MDRs for us were the best way of optimising this.

These reps were solely responsible for qualifying the demand created by marketing. Whether that was through content downloads or other inbounds.

Through this dedicated role, we managed to make a big improvement in our conversion rate. We increased lead to meeting booked on content downloads from 5% to 15%.

So if you were going to go down this MQL route, then definitely consider having a dedicated role like this. Instead of sending inbounds to your SDRs.

This role also acts as another link into outbound sales which helped to keep us on track and aligned. They can provide feedback on the quality of the leads (or the lack of quality). As well as what types of content converted well in conversations.

But if you didn’t already know, we’ve changed up our strategy quite a bit since then. This approach did work for us, for a time. But as we grew, it didn’t seem workable to scale to the level we needed.

Lesson 4

I’d highly recommend a quarterly session where you get your marketing team involved in cold calling. Get them into the sales team's shoes.

Find out things like:

Questions prospects ask.

The common objections they get.
How the process works for your sales team.

This can help you to create a better list of resources for both your prospects and sales team to bridge the knowledge gaps.

This allows your sales team to do their jobs better and find ways in which the process in general could be improved.

And this doesn’t have to just be you joining in on the cold calling. You could also:

Join in on a scheduled meeting or demo.
Listen to previous call recordings.
Be on the sales floor when the sales team are making calls.

Lesson 5

And vice versa. It would be great to get the sales team involved in the B2B marketing organisation - show them it’s not just colouring in or pushing some buttons…!

I don’t mean only getting a sales rep to shadow a marketer for a day.

We’re very lucky that our sales reps are actually our ICP, so we’re keen to get them involved in a lot of the content we produce.

Because of this, they’re much closer to the process, they can see the output and the time it takes to execute. As a result, they also tend to have a much higher interest to see how it performs.

They see themselves in videos promoted on LinkedIn and the response they get from viewers who want to connect with them after.

This is a really powerful way to align these two organisations.

Lesson 6

Overcommunication is so key, especially when you’re new to an organisation.

When I joined Cognism, marketing existed solely to serve sales. Any requests they had, we would do. We weren’t yet tied to a revenue target. We acted by reacting to what sales wanted from us.

So going from this state to the state we are in today was a big jump.

We didn’t want to alienate anyone by completely flipping the way of working overnight without a good explanation. I can’t imagine that would have won me any popularity awards.

This was more of an iterative process over time, and each step of the way, I’d over-communicate what I was doing.

By over-communication, I mean sharing:

The plan you’re creating.
The reasons behind the plan.
Using simple language without jargon.
What you’re trying to achieve and how.
How this new plan will benefit them.
Continuing to communicate the results of this over time.

You can’t communicate enough, especially when changing the way things are done. Focus just as much on your internal marketing as you do your external.

Aligning teams with feedback loops in startups

Alright - I know I’ve said this a couple times already… but obviously we moved away from a lead gen approach towards demand generation.

However, I do think when we were using lead gen, we had the best possible playbook.

So if you are in a smaller company or startup, and want to run the lead gen playbook then here are some tips.

100% have dedicated sales reps who know and understand:

The content you’re producing.
The different types of calls you need to make on the back of that content.
Focused solely on dealing with these types of leads.

I wrote this post originally because, at the time, we were really focused on getting quality content leads into the funnel for our MDRs to work.

And I believe the main reason that we were so successful with our MDRs was that our destinies were so closely aligned.

For both sales and marketing to succeed, we had to be driving towards the same outcomes.

So one of our KPIs was around the conversion rate between the content lead to sales qualified opportunity, and we were working to increase that.

It had been hanging around the 5% mark and we wanted to push it up to 10%.

By having MDRs in place who specialised in content and by having really close feedback loops i.e. listening to the types of conversations our MDRs were able to have off the back of various pieces of content. We were able to push that information back into the content engine.

Using this process, we pushed our conversion rate up to between 11% and 15%. I believe we made it about as efficient as you can for what I’ll call ‘cold lead gen’. I feel that we nailed that process.

And the key things for us in finding scalable and repeatable success were definitely:

Having a dedicated MDR role.
Having them work really closely with the B2B marketing function (especially with feedback on content).
Having aligned KPIs and working towards the same goals.
Feeling as though you’re responsible for the other's success e.g. the marketing team had a responsibility to the MDRs and vice versa.

Because we found feedback to be so crucial in this process, we had weekly calls with the MDRs and the MDR manager.

We’d run through all of the key stats like:

Conversion rates.
The length of time between lead download and follow-up (we found a strong correlation between a shorter gap between downloads and contacting prospects and higher quality conversations!) Within 48 hours was the sweet spot.
Qualitative feedback based on what’s learned during calls (for example, we learned our MDRs found pitching off the back of a cold calling handbook download was easier versus our content marketing playbook).
The number of actionable leads per MDR. We signed up to 400 per MDR per month, as this gave them the capacity they needed to hit their MB targets based on current conversion rates.

These meetings were also a great opportunity to flag when MDRs felt low on leads or another part of the process was broken.

Luckily, that meant we never went a month without realising that one of our processes wasn’t working properly, causing a chaotic run around to fix or catch up.

Put yourself in their shoes

Alright, starting us off here with some behind-the-scenes info that provides a bit of context to this post.

At this time, we were still running e-book downloads as a huge part of our strategy; we were very much still on the MQL hamster wheel.

We had dedicated MDRs following up on content downloads and we were running extensive cold calling blitzes on a regular basis.

At this stage, our marketing team was only about 3 people and the company was maybe only 40 people in total. I was keen to drive alignment between each of the small pods, so I suggested that we join sales and made some cold calls ourselves.

We decided we’d call the content leads that we’d ordinarily send to sales - after all, we should put our money where our mouth is and see what quality we were driving. Plus we knew we could hold our own in those conversations.

Now don’t get me wrong, I certainly didn’t take to it like a duck to water… but it was such a valuable experience. It was eye-opening, to say the least.

Here are a few of the responses we got:

“Did I download something? I don’t remember.”

“Cognism… Who’s that? What content are you talking about?”

“Oh yeah, I’ve got that open on my desktop but I haven’t actually read it.”

And they weren’t terribly warm conversations either, which was a misconception we had I think.

We had expected a more friendly reception because we had thought, ‘well, they’ve downloaded some of our content, they know who we are and must have some level of interest’.

But in reality, the reception was pretty cold. And in some cases, they may even have been more antagonistic because they didn’t remember taking the action to download content that you’re telling them they did.

They therefore didn’t understand why you’d be calling which made it near impossible to pitch to them afterwards.

So that was a massive learning opportunity for us, and it really was the moment that sparked that ‘there must be a better way’.

We could, fortunately, still get some really valuable data from this exercise. Once we were able to get people talking.

Less about selling Cognism, but more about what our prospects cared about. What problems were they facing? What content did they find interesting?

And this really helped us shape what we did next by:

Learning what language they use.
What their views and opinions on various subjects were.
Getting to grips with our core personas.
Validating any messaging we wanted to test out.

We used this information to lead the way when creating website copy, building our messaging and positioning and ultimately putting together the content plan that allowed us to scale.

Because of the size of the B2B marketing team at this time, I was pretty hands-on with each of these processes, so feeling like I had that insight into our prospects was super valuable.

2 key takeaways I gained from this experience

1: Don’t be afraid of getting involved, get your hands dirty and get on the phone with your target personas.

It’s really not as scary or hard as it might seem. They don’t need to be customers either, prospects can give really great insights. You just need to block out time in your calendar to do it.

2: Some of the best things you can do as a CMO to move the needle, you can do for free.

For example, using the insights you’ve learned on the phones to rework website copy or redesign high-intent pages. These things can make a massive difference to numbers versus spending more on ads with messaging that doesn’t resonate.

Honestly? I wish I’d spent more time calling prospects. It can lead to such quick wins and costs no money.

Any first-time CMO who comes in saying I think I can improve xyz figures and do it without spending any money… just using your own time, well, that’s a massive win.

Again, I won’t lie to you. When I started as a CMO, I felt like I was blagging it. So I decided I’m just going to try to be the cheapest, hardest working CMO out there and bring the best value I can offer.

So that was my mentality. And as you can imagine, that went down well with finance and the CEO. If you’re able to make an impact without spending anything… of course they’re going to be happy!

This is one area where you can definitely do that.

Providing value

You hopefully (!!!) have noticed throughout this diary so far that I’ve always been quite keen to provide value in my LinkedIn posts.

And this wasn’t necessarily a strict strategy at first, in fact, it wasn’t a strategy at all - I just wanted to share my experiences with people on LinkedIn in case it helped them.

But after learning more about how we could leverage subject matter experts and I saw the value in using LinkedIn as an organic channel for distribution I did make the decision to create more of a content strategy around my posts. I realised I was becoming a channel that I could use to Cognism’s benefit.

I started off by emulating some of the content formats I enjoyed from other LinkedIn creators, and then kept an eye on what seemed to go down with my audience.

Over the past year or so, I’ve over doubled my follower count and massively boosted the engagement on my posts which is great.

One thing I’d really urge people to do if they want to build their own personal brand to help boost their company’s reach is to not worry too much about it being perfect.

Some of my old posts would have typos (that my husband would take great satisfaction in pointing out to me!) but honestly, I don’t care about that.

I wanted my posts to be honest and authentic. And I don’t want to be held back by the fear of mistyping or having perfect graphics.

If I have a thought about something I want to share, I just share it. That might mean I’m typing it out while on a train, during my lunchtime dog walk, or in a five-minute gap between meetings.

As long as the content you’re posting is valuable, no one cares about the typos. You might get the odd snide comment about spelling - although I never have - but who cares. You can go back and edit your post if you want to.

So don’t overthink it.

The other big piece of advice I give to my team is that everyone has something to share that is valuable to an audience out there. It doesn’t matter how senior you are, or how long you have been in a role.

You will be learning every day and this learning can be a cheat code for others, so share it.

View from a distance

You might be wondering why it felt so daunting for me to come back after a short break away from work. After all, I’m the CMO. A leader… I should be confident and unwavering, right?

Truth is because Cognism is at such a high growth stage, everything changes at a rapid rate. Re-entering after a period of time off can feel like you don’t know where to start.

You need to throw yourself back in and get up to speed, especially as a hands-on leader who is used to being very operational.

BUT this was actually just what I needed.

Sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees, and it's only by taking a step back and looking at your organisation as a whole that you can identify opportunity areas and also have space to be creative and form new ideas.

Ultimately you will have got to this role because you are very good at B2B marketing, not because of your people or org management ability. You need the space to think proactively about this from time to time to ensure you are still having the required impact.

I’m not saying it’s easy either, I personally find it really hard to take breaks. Even on my honeymoon, much to my new husband's dismay!

I feel incredibly invested in everything that I’ve built during my nearly four years here. From my team of three, now approaching 40. Delivering consistent month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter marketing revenue growth. And Cognism expansion, now being three brands.

But it’s really important to give others the chance to step up and lead.

One of the main things I had time to mull over during my time off was the growing pains we’d started to experience due to our quick growth.

I had the space to look at how I could operationalise our processes and find ways of working to enable us to move faster and build and scale for the future.

This can get lost when you move fast and grow quickly, but if you are going to hit the next level of growth, they become vitally important.

It also gave me a chance to think about the bigger picture of how we foundationally operated.

To start to look and ideate on how I could potentially switch Cognism from a lead generation model into a demand generation one.

I started to map out what I would need to begin this process, for example:

An experimentation budget
Buy in internally

And I did a huge amount of listening and learning, something I don’t usually get the time for. I was beginning to work out how this could play out in real life.

I often wonder if I had not had this head space and time, if I would have been able to make the switch when we did and as successfully as we did. I guess we’ll never know.

CMO stands for 'Change Means Opportunities'

Even before this conversation with Chris Walker, we never really measured the success of any long-form content based on the number of MQLs it generated.

Instead, we’d focus on the number of MQLs that converted into SQOs.

We found that measuring this helped us to understand how easy it was for our SDRs to have conversations with people who had downloaded content.

We always wanted to focus on the quality of the content. I guess that’s why it wasn’t that big of a jump in mindset to consider demand generation.

But at this stage, while I was definitely thinking about it, we hadn’t made the switch over to a demand generation model yet.

That’s what I’m referring to when I mention ‘moving chips towards brand’, as it was us really starting to look at how we could experiment with how demand generation could work for us.

One of the first things I did in this process was to ask our CEO for a 5k budget that I could use to experiment activating a DG playbook with.

For example, we ungated some of our best-performing content and ran it in an ungated way on paid social. And at the same time, I was looking to see if I could find a correlation between the spend on ungated content ads and direct inbounds increasing month over month.

We ran this experiment for about four months, and every month, the number of inbounds we had were increasing in line with our DG activity. I knew there was something in this.

I think one important thing to remember when you’re a CMO is you have to be open to change. I would never have made the move to what’s become a really successful mindset shift if I weren’t open to the idea of change.

In all honesty, I don’t think anyone could work at Cognism unless you were open to the idea of change because things move so quickly around here.

And to go wider still, if you’re going to be good at marketing - then you need to accept that the world of marketing is ever-evolving.

To be successful, you have to be willing to experiment and consider making changes. Quickly too - if you want to have a first-mover advantage rather than copying what everyone else is doing.

I love ideas. I love experiments. I embrace change. And I really hope that’s something I’ve built into the DNA of my team.

Humans marketing to humans

I’m super passionate about this. In fact, I used to get teased a bit because I’d say it so much. But I really do believe that B2B is still B2C. You’re still marketing to people.

B2B marketing so often falls into the trap of formal language, boring narratives and lifeless ads. But just because you’re targeting a business, doesn’t mean you have to be rigid. It’s the people in those businesses making decisions - so target them.

Those people are still individuals. Getting the train, reading magazines, putting their kids to bed, popping to the pub for a drink. They’re still people, with personalities, interests and goals.

There’s no reason why we have to put ourselves into these formal confines in terms of the way we communicate with our customers.

I felt we wanted to be different from a lot of the B2B companies I’d encountered before. I wanted us to be bold and fresh. I wanted to take some ideas that had been proven in B2C and try them in B2B.

Again, I want us to always be questioning ‘are we doing things because we’ve always done them that way?’ and ‘is there a better way we could be doing things?’.

So remember that we’re all humans. And we’re just marketing to humans. So treat your B2B prospects like humans! And learn from B2C.

Critical thinking

This post for me was all about the importance of being open to change.

Continuous learning is so important because the environment in which you operate is always changing.

I also think it’s important not to get too comfortable relying solely on others to determine the right approach for you and your business.

You have to think critically and challenge the decisions you think aren’t right just as much as the ones you think are.

This is a vital skill you need as a B2B marketing CMO.

Copying is easy. Knowing when to copy, what to evolve and what to stick with is a little harder.

Listen and absorb, but still think for yourself.

That’s why I don’t feel protective about sharing my learnings with others. Because that’s only half the story.

There’s still an immense amount of work that needs to happen after taking onboard lessons and learning from others.

That’s what will set you apart as a truly successful CMO and marketer.

Can you take what you learn, apply it to your business and actually start executing against it?

Imposter syndrome

This was my first ‘viral’ post!

It is crazy to look back sometimes, thinking about how much has changed, how we have managed to scale and at the speed in which we have grown.

I mentioned in the post that I didn’t think I could do this job before I took it on. And believe it or not, that imposter syndrome still lives in me today. I have to fight daily to have the confidence to make the decisions I need to in my role.

Since I wrote this post, we are now approaching 40M+, with 100% growth this year. And an important point to note is that marketing has predictably driven the majority of this new business revenue month over month.

But I still doubt myself.

And every day I will have a decision to make where I feel uncomfortable.

But the biggest difference from three years ago to now is that I’m starting to trust myself more and more. I embrace being uncomfortable. I actually thrive on it now.

I get excited by new challenges. No two days are the same.

10% mindset

The compounding effect of consistently going above and beyond what is expected, asked or required cannot be underestimated.

I believe the key to the 10% mindset is that it’s sustainable. It doesn’t result in burnout or short bursts of over-productivity followed by an inevitable dip.

I feel it’s had a huge amount to do with any success I’ve had throughout my B2B marketing career and earlier life. I’ve always striven to be the hardest working person, even if I can’t be the brightest.

It comes back to what is in your control. You can control how much effort and time you put into something. You can control the consistent execution.

Applying this basic principle can have huge benefits over time.

If I could summarise the type of CMO I am in three words I would say:

Action-driven
Obedient
Hardworking

It may not sound the most exciting, but it means I am reliable.

I’m consistent and I have a 10% edge over many others as a result. And importantly, this 10% manifests in action. This can be enough to put you ahead of your peers and to land you that CMO job.

Test your boundaries

Yes, now I’ll moderate or host a webinar or speak directly to the camera without much thought, but don’t be fooled, I’m an introvert.

I remember the first time I introduced using webinars at Cognism - which was an amazing quick win, they’d never done them before so it was a great opportunity.

We had plenty of in-house expertise to utilise and it would cost next to nothing to implement. However, I knew I was going to have to be the one to moderate the call.

While I’d sat outside of brilliant webinars in the past, I’d never moderated one myself. But there were no alternatives, it had to be me. So how do you bridge the gap?

I’m afraid I don’t have any magic recipe to fix this problem, my only advice is to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. The more you practice, the better you get.

In the early days of running webinars, I was so scared. I’d have a script, and if anything, I’d say I would over-prepare.

That just meant I was stunted and awkward. I couldn’t respond in a way that felt natural ‘cause I was so restricted by my script.

But with experience and time, that fear started to dissipate.

Once I realised that I was able to answer questions, and that I did actually know what I was talking about, my confidence grew.

If I were to give someone in this position advice, I’d say stick to topics you’re comfortable talking about - just initially - while you find your feet. Because once you get going on a topic you enjoy talking about, the rest fades away.

I had a similar experience when I first started posting to LinkedIn. I thought nothing I was saying was valuable and I would have no engagement on my posts.

(A quick nod to the full circle moment here, talking about how I was scared to post to LinkedIn, now I’m sharing all my posts again and going into more detail. Funny how the world works sometimes, eh?)

Anyway, I was sitting at my desk, spending ages pouring over my post, trying to make sure it was perfect. And I struggled to press go on it.

And of course, eventually - I did, because we wouldn’t be here doing this. But one thing I’d love to tell anyone struggling like I was is that we can all learn from one another.

You don’t need to know everything right now, and the people around you can learn with you as you go.

No matter what your experience, your seniority, if you have a story to tell, there are people who will want to listen and learn from you.

I can now spend 4 or 5 minutes writing up a post, and I’ll publish it without much thought. But that didn’t happen overnight. You have to commit to doing it regularly. Repetition is key.

We are in an age now where your personal brand is important. It can help propel you in your career, and it can help the businesses you work for as well.

So getting comfortable with putting yourself into the public eye is a great lesson to learn.

CMO of a startup

We were definitely punching above our weight, and I think that goes to show even at this relatively early stage into my tenure as CMO, we were making the right bets and starting to get noticed.

When you envision a B2B marketing career, you might think becoming a Head of Marketing is where that journey ends, but that just isn’t true.

Even when you become a CMO, it doesn’t end. Because then you can become a Global CMO, or if you acquire multiple businesses, then you become a CMO of multiple business units.

It’s a continuously evolving role that has the potential to expand. I had never thought about that before becoming one myself.

So a piece of advice I’d give to any aspiring or first-time marketing leader is to put yourself in the best position for opportunities.

For example:

There’s always the chance that a company will hire above you when marketing requirements expand. But you can limit that chance by doing everything in your power to do the best you can in the role you’re in today, and thinking about how that role could evolve moving forwards.

That was a big lesson for me, and luckily I had the benefit of watching some of my mentors go through this process ahead of me - so I had an idea of what to expect.

I could learn from them, prepare myself and think about the opportunities before they presented themselves. And ultimately I put myself in a strong position when the company required a global CMO, and a CMO spanning multiple business units.

The key difference in this for me was developing an ability to strategise:

What’s the Cognism marketing strategy?
How does this change when we acquire a new brand, how do they come together or not come together?
What are the road rules, how do we scale these two brands together or separately?

Then present all of these ideas and strategies to the CEO and the board in a way that can showcase you have covered all of your bases and you are capable of thinking outside of your current remit.

As of a few months ago, Cognism and Mailtastic added a third brand into the group mix - Kaspr. Which is all very exciting, and I’m sure I’ll get a little more into that later on in this diary.

Taking things back a little first:

To when Cognism first ‘met’ Mailtastic, and how that acquisition all came about.

(insert twinkling storytelling music here…)

Once upon a time, in my early days at Cognism, James (CEO) asked me to find him an email signature management tool.

I didn’t have a lot of budget, so I went out and did my due diligence, researching the market to find what we needed.

Mailtastic was a German company, it was relatively young and hadn’t yet really started translating into English, but they had a brilliant product. In my opinion, it was years ahead of some of its competitors but for a fraction of the price - so it was an easy choice.

And we were super-happy with our experience using it once we’d been onboarded. It was really easy to use and did everything we needed it to.

So when it came to discussing possible acquisitions, James already knew we were happy customers. It fit into the marketing side of our product offering and it felt like it made a lot of sense as an acquisition play.

So Mailtastic became part of the Cognism family, and that was my first chance at stepping into that CMO role at such a strategic level.

I had to:

Decide whether we would integrate the brands or keep them separate.
Build a whole go-to-market function for Mailtastic (which was a very interesting part of the journey).
All at the same time as continuing to scale Cognism (because the targets there don’t stop either!).

But that’s what I’ve loved about this role. Rapid growth, constant new challenges and opportunities, plus I’m learning new things all of the time.

And I feel very grateful for the opportunity to do this. We’re very lucky to have an amazing CEO who:

Understands marketing and is willing to invest in it.
Willing to invest in talent internally before looking externally.

If he can see you working hard, believes you have potential and you have a track record of getting results, then you will get invested in.

There’s really no end to that journey either, and I suppose I’m living proof of that. I feel you can see that throughout the marketing team, in the sales org and throughout the whole company.

For example, some people might feel like the people at Cognism are quite young for the roles they hold, but actually that’s the unique vision from our CEO.

He wanted to build a team with a lot of energy.

I believe it’s beneficial to give people who have never done a role like this before a chance because as long as they have the skills and willingness to do it, they’ll work harder to prove that they can.

Also… just because you’ve held that role before, doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it. Experience doesn’t always = better.

Anyway, back to my LinkedIn post.

We won a place on this list in 2020, and 2021.

This is huge kudos to the marketing team, how we have gone about building a brand and sharing what it’s like working at Cognism.

Meaning it’s not just about how we look to our prospects, but also how we’re perceived as an employer. How we foster our talent and how that talent grows.

So being included in LinkedIn’s top startup list is great recognition for all the hard work we put in! Especially as when we were first named on that list, we were much smaller than the majority of the other brands.

Don’t backslide

Having operated in a pandemic and now a looming recession, I do feel I can speak from a point of experience here.

There’s no doubt that B2B marketing budgets will be tightened and you’ll be tasked to do more with less.

But this shouldn’t mean retreating back to purely capture demand activities.

At Cognism our general rule regarding budget split is 30% demand capture and 70% demand creation.

As budgets are squeezed, we’ll maintain this ratio.

Typically when you first get started running a create demand play, you’ll need to wait 2X your sales cycle length to start to see the benefits in terms of pipeline and revenue.

The compounding impact of its continued execution is how you really start to stack growth.

Retreating back to Google Ads and capture demand only activities will make life incredibly difficult when you get asked to do more again.

It’ll also make life much harder while you operate in an already difficult economic environment.

So my advice would be to hold your nerve.

Maintain your splits, but optimise. Optimise for CRM metrics and revenue. Reduce down any capture demand campaign that is not delivering in your CRM.

This will give you money back to continue to invest in creating demand.

I’d also use this time as an opportunity to focus on activities that are time heavy, not $ heavy.

How good are you at creating content in all of its formats?

Have you built a repeatable process around a live content event and the post-content production afterwards?

Are you maximising every content opportunity for the greatest output and gain?

Have you spent time on your website and landing page experiences?

Could you be creating better self-discovery journeys?

Is there room to improve your key funnel conversion metrics like demo:MA rate?

Could you launch a direct to AE routing experiment to increase this?

Audit all the possible areas of focus that don’t involve more $, but just more time.

Map them out in relation to effort versus impact and then start to work through them one item at a time.

You didn’t always have the budget you have today and you were still successful.

Chances are you have more resources in other ways available today. So make these work for you.

Quality over quantity

Sometimes, it’s not always the best decision to do what your competition is doing. Of course, the opposite can also be true - you can learn from your competition.

But there was a tactic that most of our competitors were using that I was getting a lot of internal pressure to implement at Cognism. But I just didn’t feel it aligned with goals.

What was this tactic?

Well, essentially they’d index their databases and get SEO rankings for pages that showcased their contact and company data. Meaning they’d have individual profile pages generated online via their data engine.

It meant they had thousands of visitors per month, and lots of SEO rankings.

But I never pursued that project. Why?

Because every time I took a deep dive into the traffic health and value, I could not align the data with our Cognism strategy. I mean, we’re talking about their top ranking being for McDonald’s phone number or something similar.

And that to me just doesn’t align with what I consider Cognism to be. We’re a premium sales intelligence solution, with premium data. Compliance and quality are our core values. That’s what we are about.

I didn’t feel that tactic would ever result in traffic that would be serious about buying Cognism.

Remember, we were also limited on resources at this point. We had one content writer. I didn’t want to waste time on a tactic that wasn't laser-focused on building quality high-intent demand.

The most important being ranking for high commercial intent keywords. The type of keywords where we know they’re in the market for a product like Cognism when they search. These people have a far higher likelihood of being a better fit for us.

And I believe that tactic and approach has paid off for us. We’ve seen $250,000 value in traffic that comes to our website organically which is a massive win. We also don’t get as much of the junk to filter out, which means we have great conversion rates.

And I believe that stems from focusing on quality, not quantity.

Going back to the competitors’ tactic and my decision to drop it…

It wasn’t an easy decision to make when there was so much pressure to give it a go. But I really believed it wasn’t the right move, so I backed myself and I’m really glad I did.

Interested in some quick wins for high intent, quality traffic? Here are a few things I’ve learned:

Make sure you cover your bases with your competitors, e.g. SEO ranking pages detailing you vs. your competitors. Plus your competitor vs another competitor. People searching for that kind of information are likely in the market to buy right now and are evaluating their options.
Do your research. Find every possible keyword you can rank for and bucket them into the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. What’s their ease for ranking? What do you believe their commercial intent is? Remember, some of this is more of an art than a science.
Analyse your Google ads. What are the keywords that are driving conversions here? More importantly, conversions that result in revenue? For example, for us, terms like ‘B2B contact data’, or ‘top B2B contact provider’ are key revenue generating terms.
Use this information to inform which keywords you want to target for organic traffic.
Track the success of each of your pages. Which are driving the most demo requests? This helps you to decide which pages to focus on building out, and updating, and which maybe don’t have the high intent traffic you initially thought.

Data is everything

My first day at Cognism, I wanted to see all the data. Show me the data!!

But there really wasn’t very much to see.

Nothing was really tracked in-platform and nothing really tracked through to the CRM. We didn’t have any UTMs or a process around how to use them and no hidden fields on our forms.

So even the stuff that was working, wasn’t really being tracked. So it was hard to say where to go at that point.

So my first port of call was to put in foundational tracking - an easy win.

We’re going to make decisions that are both art and science, but in order to make these decisions, we need the foundational understanding of our B2B data to guide us.

So what did I do?

I implemented UTMs.
Added hidden fields onto forms.
I made sure Pardot and our CRM were updated with the fields needed to receive this data.
And applied consistency across our marketing activity so we could actually track our results.

The first time I could see the UTMs come through on Salesforce and I could start populating reports was exhilarating. Such a small win, but so important to everything that came next.

I was able to see which of our channels were working and what content people were engaging with. It put us in a much better position for deciding what to do next.

Data is the foundation of everything you want to build. Really don’t underestimate how crucial it is.

I think that was one thing the exec team really liked about what I brought to the table - that I measured as much as I could.

For example:

We had no way of measuring the success of the events we were holding, so I worked out a model for tracking the full cost and ROI for these events - and that ended up being really impactful.

We realised that events weren’t profitable for us anymore, so we pivoted away from the event strategy into something that would be more predictable and scalable. Without that data, we wouldn’t have been able to make that decision.

Having said that, I’ve had to get very comfortable with the idea that I can’t measure everything. Especially now we’re executing a demand generation strategy. You simply cannot track every metric.

So I’ve learned to look for trends or correlations in data versus exact numbers and direct attribution.

The main thing is that you don’t just have data for data’s sake. It has to have a use, there has to be some kind of commentary, analysis or discussion around it.

Without those things, data is just a busy task that sits and does nothing.

The evolution of content marketing

I’m going to put it down in writing:

I predict content marketing will experience a big shift over the coming years.

The expectations from this role will be a big departure from what they have been traditionally.

The old enterprise content strategy

Old way: be a good writer that can conduct desk research and produce multiple articles (of varying lengths and formats) with some SEO optimisations.

New trends in enterprise content marketing

New way:

Understand your audience deeply.
Be capable of interviewing and working with subject matter experts consistently in order to provide your work with authority.
Be as confident briefing in a storyboard for a video as you are writing an interactive pillar page.
This new breed of content marketer understands the requirement for different content types and formats. They are across all the content being produced and briefed for their audience and they are capable of building scalable and repeatable processes around all of this to enable their content engine to scale.
They operate like journalists, like producers, like content curators and top-class interviewers.

Finding this type of content profile in B2B marketing today is very hard. If you are a content marketer or a demand gen marketer that would like to specialise in content and can adopt this approach, you’re going to be in high demand!

Get "In The Loop"

B2B marketing

The Demand Gen Playbook Course

B2B marketing

Fix Your Funnel Hub

B2B marketing

The Loop Podcast

View all Resources

Volume 1

Diary of a first-time CMO:Volume 1

Day 1 as a marketing leader

Setting a Content Marketing Strategy for a B2B Company

Content Strategy Transformation Step-by-Step

1. Building a Media Machine

3. Differentiating Writers' Roles

4. Emphasising Actionable Content

5. Getting the Right Results and Recognition

6. Shifting the Tone of B2B Content Marketing

Developing a winning SaaS content strategy

The Importance of Content Marketing for a SaaS CMO

Understanding Buyer Personas

Refining the Content Creation Process

Scaling SaaS Content Efficiently with a Small Team

Building a Specialised Content Team

Strategic Content Repurposing for SaaS Growth

Balancing Long and Short-Term Gains in Content Strategy

1. SaaS SEO

2. Journalists

3. Demand generation content executives

Transitioning to an Ungated Content Model

Improving B2B Paid Advertising Performance

How can a CMO make a quick impact on business?

How to Scale Google Ads with limited resources?

CMO Marketing Plan: The First 100 Days

The first 100 days as a CMO: a strategic plan

1. Identify initial challenges

2. Execute quick wins

3. Align content strategy with business goals

4. Prioritize short-term execution

5. Lay the groundwork for future initiatives

Know your audience

Recognising And Rewarding Marketing Team's Hard Work

Celebrating a record-breaking quarter

Recognising marketing team contributions

Is it worth investing in content marketing?

The Role of an Operational-Minded CMO

Navigating Acquisition Challenges: The Kaspr Example

Executing with Precision: Overcoming Resource Constraints

Optimising Marketing Operations

Building a Culture of Efficiency

A proud CMO moment

How to Be a Hands-On Marketing Leader?

5 Tips for hands-on marketing leaders

1. Make impact on pipeline and revenue

2. Review organic LinkedIn posting strategy

3. Bring in specialised talent in-house

4. Continually adapt strategies to reach the customer

Ungated product tour

Product explainers

Competitor page comparisons

Your product in action

Customer feedback from calls

Tools and Calculators

5. Be human

Dream team

Switching gears

Looking for Marketing Unicorns

Cognism's hiring philosophy

Hiring for proven roles

A CMO's advice for hiring the right team

Alice de Courcy's Advice on Hiring B2B SaaS Marketers

Should a CMO be involved in the hiring process?

A surprising interview experience

How do you fill critical marketing roles?

A standout cover letter

Building In-House B2B SaaS Marketing Team

1. Content

2. Demand Generation Team

3. Product Marketing

4. Customer Marketing

5. Marketing Operations

Agency partner

Tips on Outsourcing Marketing Roles

Reasons for outsourcing marketing expertise

CMO and CEO's perspectives on finding a good marketing agency

Outsourcing innovation

Refine Labs

Gaetano DiNardi

Diary of a first-time CMO:
Volume 1