S2. Ep13. Stephen Croome. CMO at Deeper Insights.

What's the one thing you could recommend to a CEO or Founder
- Hire the right people
- Control you ego
How to know when a startup comes to a scaleup
- Far later than most people expect
- Proven results where money can be allocated
- You know if you're going to put in X more money you know what return you're going to get
KPIs and Metrics
- When a business moves from a "Product focused business" to a "business focused business"
- But a lot of metrics stay the same as the company grows - still live or die by revenue
Product
- Am I building the right thing?
- Am I communicating the message in the right way?
Team and Culture
- Example of when the CEO is head down and focused too much on the detail
- The team around him were trying to push him on
- Need to work with people with the right attitude and that everyone is aligned
- You don't have to be right every time, But you have to work hard all the time in order to make it
Culture and teams
- Culture is what the CEO does when things go wrong
- Everything flows down from this
- Best CEOs have low ego are reflective, with a data led approach the ones that succeed
- Worst are the ones with high Egos and spend their time arguing about things that don't matter
- People are open, want to learn things everything and see things through the eyes of the customer
Hiring
- People often make lots of mistakes when they're hiring
You're growing in all directions there are things on fire all over the place
- You're feeling pains in all different ways - the want is just make the pain go away and hire
- But the right thing to do is wait until you've found the right person
- Job descriptions need to be carefully written - which attracts the right applicants
Very specific around your company and your customers - Not generic around everything else
- Ability to learn is very important - Not showing you have done it before
- As is Tenacity - If things haven't worked out - Keep trying again in order to improve
Structure of the marketing team
- The right time of team
- Creative person - Videos, blogs etc
- Details number and analysis bit
- Once you have the bases covered you can scale very quickly
Agencies vs. In-house
- Prefers in-house people
- There are two types of people in CMO roles
- The Marketer - who can act on things themselves
- The Manager - who manages large teams or manages agencies
- Need to have the people in the team that can interpret the results of what the agency is providing
Channel choice
- How long is your sales cycle?
- What is your lifetime value of your customer?
- How quickly can you learn
- Using startup agile to find angles
- E.g. through PPC - finding keywords that are very specific to your offering
- What terms and phrases are coming up
- Do 10 of everything and then reflect and see if it doesn't work
- If a channel doesn't work - need to be able to explain why
- You need to experiment with everything
The importance of Brand
- A brand is what other people will talk about you and your product
- You are therefore just a whole load of different conversations
- As a startup it's difficult to change those conversations
- You therefore change things based on the way you achieve things
- How do you react when things go wrong and how do you resolve the situation
- Finding the maturity in the messaging before you start to scale up
Marketing's role in b2b
- Get more leads
- Make sure people think good things about the company
Pricing
- Have someone in the business that is responsible for pricing
- How to value what your product is actually worth
- What is the actual value you're providing to people and how can you justify that price?
- What is the customer pegging your value to in the rest of the market