Diary of a first-time CMO - Know your audience
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!)
Know your audience
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.
