What’s now and what’s next for SaaS marketing orgs? My recent conversation with Jay Roxe, CMO of Inriver, was a great crash course in this topic. Jay is one of my favorite CMOs and I someone I go to for unexpected and well-articulated perspectives on what’s going on in the world of SaaS CMOs today:
You’ll learn about:
- Advice to CEOs on how to identify the CMOs who are the best problem solvers
- “Firing your tech stack” in order to re-imagine the marketing org and how marketing gets done
- Leveraging AI for everything from last-mile content customization to product marketing to building authority in situations where prospects say, ‘ChatGPT told me I should talk to you’
- The evolving structure of marketing ops
- Why content is no longer king, but context is king: “Customers have done 80% of their research by the time they reach you. That number is actually going up. It’s so easy for people to understand your organization.”
- What a full-stack customer marketing org looks like
- Advice for rising CMOs: You have to love the process, not just want to HAVE DONE the CMO role. Intellectual curiosity about the job is not enough.
- Building a culture of gratitude on the marketing team
- Hiring marketing leaders, and how to find people who are “curious, smart, and unexpected”
Some quotes that stuck with me:
- “You’re AI first or you’re unemployed.”
- “Adoption is the new MQL… As you put more stuff into the product, are people actually adopting and using it?”
- “ From an org design point of view, you want to think of where you need person-to-person face-off. Your partners don’t want to talk to your AI chatbot. They want to talk to a person who can help them, brainstorm with them, and give them context.”
- “One of the things I like talking about with candidates: what have they changed over the past year? How have they changed how they work based on everything that’s going on?”