On aspiring for balance | 6/∞

My toughest marketing conversation happened in December 2022. Our marketing effectiveness at Kora was in the dumps. For every dollar spent, we got absolute dust in pipeline created.

The product team had spent months building a new feature into the product that was meant to improve marketing effectiveness. After all the sleepless nights and a record-time rollout (h/t product!), marketing effectiveness was still dust.

That Wednesday in December, Dixon called me to his office to deliver a devastating message: marketing had to make money, or there was no point in us wasting our time. It was the worst meeting of my career.

Over the next few months, marketing did pick up. We went from burning dollars and hoping for the best to articulating our impact. Pipeline creation grew to $5 per dollar spent, then to 3X that, and continued to climb.

Before I started writing this, I was crunching numbers for our August MPR, and pipeline creation sits at $217 for every dollar. Day 1, still.

That tough conversation cascaded across our GTM machine. My background in advertising for corporates and FMCGs was actually a crippling blocker for business growth in B2B SaaS, it turned out. I needed a blunt force to the head to adjust all that.

But it wasn’t just the hard conversation. It was also what Dixon said as I walked out of his office that December — “Tell me what you need, and I’ll make it happen.”

For the ongoing heavy-lifting, the team deserves all the credit. But it was always the fact that Dixon promised to work through it with us.

Most people see being demanding and being kind as mutually exclusive — like a binary choice. You can either be tough or be nice. But the best leaders don’t choose.

They push you to heights you never thought you’d reach while letting you know they have your back.

I am realizing all the great leaders I have worked with are this way. I aspire to that balance.

Ravi Gupta’s essay on this idea helped me clarify this thought. Thank you, Ravi.