Diary of a first-time CMO - It's not 2010 amymore
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. 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!)
It’s not 2010 anymore
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.
