Ten things I learned about marketing being Zappi's CMO for ten months

I consider myself a marketer first, always have. In fact, I have managed a marketing department for several years now. But given the focus of our business and where my domain expertise is more natural (customers) I have always really managed the person who managed marketing and work on the brand. Working on the brand as a market facing skip manager means you get to give input but you aren’t part of the team making the sausage. So this last ten months has been my first deep exposure to the craft of the day to day workings of a marketing organization.

Here’s the back story: 

This time last year we had some major shifts in our marketing team and realized that the time had come to plot a new course. As we transitioned from what I refer to as Zappi marketing 2.0, to Zappi marketing 2.5 I did some deep discovery across our business, our customer base and of course our marketing team. 

I learned that we had a strong team that needed some help organizing optimally and also had a major internal PR problem. The decision netted me at not doing anything drastic and also not going out and recruiting an outside CMO for three reasons; 

1.) I have always managed marketing but never got to do the job, and I genuinely was interested in learning the hands on approach 

2.) We were on the tail end of some major organizational transformation and I knew that the problems in marketing we needed to solve were solvable fastest w context of our business at the center

3.) Our sales and CS teams were in a really good place across the board so I have time to really dive in

So off I went, and I have to say it was one of the best experiences I have had professionally.

We also did so much marketing, I can’t thank our amazing marketing team enough for embracing me 

• We evolved our brand completely to align with where our best customers and Zappi are going from a vision perspective
• We recruited and integrated some incredible new leaders and organized ourselves in a way that maximized everyone's super powers
• We launched 3 major products
• Were again voted the top tech brand according to GRIT
• We shipped our new website, re-built our funnel, integrated significantly better across our business
• We experimented like crazy to determine how, where, when our customers wanted to hear from us but also how we can integrate best with our teams
• Improved the satisfaction of our team
• Held one of the best events I have ever been to, on Zoom with another marketing organization; on the fly.

This week, I am officially ending my stint as Zappi’s ‘CMO’. I believe the best is ahead of our marketing team and am so very pleased to promote Emma Van Pelt to our VP of marketing aka EVP. 

EVP is not a traditional marketer. She is smart. Thoughtful. Creative. Cares, genuinely about customers. And because she is a former consultant, she understands how businesses work. And did I mention she used to consume tools like Zappi in her former life? 

More on EVP’s era as time passes I am sure, but I am excited about the promise of Zappi marketing 3.0. The best is yet to come. 

My new focus within Zappi will evolve and be announced soon, but for today I wanted to share the key learnings I gained from leading our marketing organization day to day in the past several months. 

Here are my top ten learnings from my stint as Zappi’s CMO.

1. Context is KING: Bringing marketers close to consumers, close to sales, and really getting them close to product allows them to be creative as hell, innovate and do so in a way that works for the business. It is too easy for CMOs to try to shield and protect their teams, the day our marketing team got context was the exact day we started to really pick up the pace. We have always bet hard on brand, but as we are laser focused on building our community, product marketing and dare I say... ABM capabilities the context is just essential to building the alignment needed across the company 
2. If you know your personas, inside and out and talk to them on their terms, you will achieve great results in marketing. Easy to say, hard to do, but people don’t care about anything other than themselves, their jobs, their companies. This constant when applied in marcomms, is just a beautiful thing. Just have to swallow YOUR ego and worry more about your customers success than your board's metric dashboard :) 
3. Building (and evolving) a distinctive brand needs to be a priority: You can’t buy a template for this, you have to integrate your culture, your talent, your board and your management team and truly get buy in. And then be real about it. But the juice is worth the squeeze! I am so thankful to have Emma Vazquez, Katie Sweet and the team shepherding our brand into the future, they just get it and are insanely talented.
4. ABM is a massive buzzword. I work in B2B. We have a target list of prospects and customers. We sell and market to them! However the discipline of integrating your campaigns, programs, and priorities around your customer plans and GTM are critical to fueling growth. Reason I have come to learn that they are buzzwords, is that the practice of aligning content and programs around customer plans reads to me as smart B2B marketing.
5. Managing change within a marketing department is SO much easier than within sales and product teams. There is so much nuance in the adjacent functions whether it be the risk of tech debt, budgeting/cash bets, customer nuance, etc that change mgmt is incredibly hard. Not as much in marketing. The people are incredibly smart, and adaptive and recognize quite easily that their job is to fuel growth around the customer journey and that does not mean sacrificing brand, creativity and having fun! I also noticed marketers operate with a bit more zen then their brethren in sales :) 
6. Keep metrics simple. People waste way too much time in attribution. We live in a multi-touch world. The day we simplified the shit out of our funnel and got to the root of people who want to talk to us being a lead being the main KPI and then shifted to what sorts of tactics drive engagement was the day we saw our performance and engagement from around the business shoot up. We have a simple funnel; does someone want to talk to us, did they sign up for an account? If not, they aren’t a lead. 
7. In enterprise B2B, your integration with sales, customer success and products is critical. Sales/CS are your best channel for anything other than creating awareness in my opinion. Getting sales and CS bought into your marketing plan and having them drive messaging into customers through their existing touch points is 4x as effective, but you have to make sure you catch them in stride! For product; If you don’t understand the product or how the product works you will never be able to integrate a GTM plan into the agile build process. 
8. Marketing is a very diverse industry. I look at our firmographics a lot (more on what we are doing to tackle D&I later). We have work to do to drive diversity in our engineering and sales teams and in my opinion there is a systemic problem that starts in education. Who doesn’t?!?! But in marketing there seems to be such a natural draw of all walks of life into the craft, which given its such a creative field is amazing.
9. Just because everyone else is doing something doesn’t mean you can’t do it better. Events in B2B are gold. Losing them threw our main H1 channel for top of the funnel and customer engagement opportunities. So we threw a virtual summit. Yawn. Unless you were there on May 5th and 6th, then you know what I mean. If you curate the vibe, focus the agenda on what the audience wants, not what you want to sell and get people talking you can still, today nail a digital experience. 
10. Marketing Ops is so important. One of the biggest unlocks we had was just getting tighter on how we kick off, curate ideas, and execute campaigns. It sounds simple, right? Yup, but getting teams behind an idea, getting the thinking from across the room, being clear on who does what and then having a system to do it is the difference between a good idea and something that makes a business impact. The trick is simple, just make sure you have a framework for clarifying who does what that can bend with the wind as needed to remain agile. Charlie, Silvia, Claire, Chris, John Hunt, appreciate y’all so much 

To all of Zappi's marketing team--Charlie, Silvia, Chris, Claire, Mupela, Javy, Emma, Katie, Kelsey, Ariel, John, Yvonne, Barbara, Lucy, Maria and EVP--Thank you for letting me play and lead marketing 2.5. It was SO amazing.

The biggest learning of all is that I love marketing. When the Zappi ride ends, who knows. Maybe I will be a CMO when I grow up after all. 

For now, back to scaling Zappi and we’re just getting started.