Diary of a first-time CMO - Recognition and rewards

Recognition and rewards

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.

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.

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.