Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Growth Activated is a podcast for B2B marketing leaders who want to elevate their marketing strategies, lead confidently, and drive real business results. Each episode offers actionable insights and proven frameworks to help you activate growth for your team, your company, and your career.
Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
C-Suite Series: The CEO’s Perspective on Growth, Profitability and Marketing – with Mark Feldman
#8: Are you seen as a strategic business leader—or just the glorified head of lead gen? In this episode of Growth Activated, I sit down with Mark Feldman, CEO and Founder of RevenueBase, who made the leap from marketing executive to CEO. Mark shares key insights on aligning marketing with the C-suite and stepping up as a true business leader.
We’ll cover:
✅ The mindset shift from B2B marketing leader to CEO
✅ How CEOs and boards view growth, investment, and profitability
✅ Aligning marketing with Sales, Customer Success, and Product
✅ Learnings, failings, and wins from building a GTM strategy and team from scratch
If you’re ready to elevate your influence and gain executive credibility, this episode is a must-listen.
💡 What’s your biggest challenge in partnering with your CEO? DM me on LinkedIn or drop a comment—I’d love to hear your thoughts!
🎧 Hit play now and start thinking like a CEO!
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Let’s Keep the Conversation Going!
Loved this episode? Connect with me for more insights on B2B marketing leadership and strategies to grow your business.
🌐 Visit my website: growthactivated.com
🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn: Mandy Walker
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00:29 – The C-Suite Series: Why Marketing Struggles for a Seat at the Table
Have you ever wondered what your CEO really thinks about marketing or why marketing struggles to have a true seat at the executive table? Well today we're breaking that down with someone who made the leap from marketing executive to CEO, Mark Feldman. And I'm particularly excited because this episode kicks off our special C-suite series where we're going to go beyond marketing strategies what CEOs, CFOs and boards actually prioritize when it comes to growth. And today's guest is someone I know personally. Mark Feldman is a CEO and founder of Revenuebase and he's been a mentor of mine for years. Early in my career, he was my VP of marketing and more recently, I had the opportunity to run the growth strategy and operations at his startup when he became a CEO. So today we're going to cover the biggest shifts in his mindset from transitioning as a marketing executive to a CEO, the importance of aligning marketing with the entire C-suite, and how CEOs and boards actually think about growth, investment, and profitability. So if you're a marketing leader looking to sharpen your executive mindset, this C-suite series is gonna be for you. Now let's dive in. Well, hey Mark, I'm really excited to have you here today. Thanks so much for joining us on the Growth Activated podcast. My pleasure, excited to be here, Mandy.
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really particularly excited for this episode because I had this idea to do a C-suite series a couple of weeks ago when it just dawned on me that there's so many amazing B2B marketing podcasts out there, but a lot of them really talk about strategies and tactics. And we're not talking about what I think is incredibly important, which is the executive relationships and collaboration and really making sure that marketing is elevating itself to be to sort of have a seat at the proverbial table, if you will, and really be locked into the business strategy. And so I'm excited to have you particularly because obviously you're you came from a marketing background before transitioning into the CEO role. And so I think you have a lot a lot of value to share and add to the conversation around what are we missing as marketers from a CEO perspective.
02:51 – Mark’s Journey: From BDR to CEO
Awesome. Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. Awesome. So Mark, let's let's start with your background. Can you walk us through just a high level view of your experience and your transition and what led you to being the CEO of revenue base today? Sure. Yeah, I started my career, b2b marketing at a company called Net Prospects, one of the first email list companies eventually acquired by Dun & Bradstreet. I was employee five at the company and Before that, I was actually like a BDR for a little bit and was just looking for data to make phone calls and pull emails. So that's how I was introduced into the B2B data space. So, and actually the sort of funny story is like, I was a BDR for a company that wanted me to book meetings in the airline industry. And I did not have any way of like, reaching anybody in the airline industry. I didn't have any ins or anything. So I found Net Prospects, it was like 2007. And I literally downloaded emails for the CEOs of all of the major airlines. And there were like 10 of them. Sent them all a cold email. And this was like on a Thursday and like Monday morning, I heard back from the chairman and CEO of American Airlines.
I was like, holy shit, it's like the dog that chases after the car and catches the car. What do I do now? And also when you think about it, it's like a 10% conversion rate on a cold email. So 2007. Yeah. So had the meeting, did not get the deal, but I thought, wow, this is really incredible. So I cold emailed the CEO of Net Prospects, Gary Howelwell, who had just started the company
And he was actually the president of ZoomInfo before that. And, um, that's a, it's a funny, funny story of B2B data history, but like ZoomInfo was trying to build a people search engine. He thought that building a data company would be much more lucrative. So he disagreed with the board. They fired him. He started Net Prospects. And, um, anyway, I joined the company.
And employee five led product, led marketing. Eventually it became demand gen because we realized really quickly that sending mass outbound at scale was really effective in generating leads. Though I did a lot of just work on the product to make it really usable for downloading lists for marketing and lots of webinars and thought leadership on how to do outbound and generate leads.
That's how I got involved. Company was bought by Dun & Bradstreet. And then I really thought I wanted to do demand gen and be a CMO. So I really pursued that, but I was always like gravitating towards data. And I've always like been analytical and love data. So in all my roles, um, you know, I kind of ignore all the brand stuff and the fun stuff and, uh, focus on data and usually do like a great job with the data and demand gen powered by the data. And that led me to eventually starting a revenue base because I realized that B2B data could be a lot better. So during COVID, started revenue base and here I am. Awesome. And I obviously have known part of your journey because I had the pleasure of working with you directly.
Um, and I know you went into rev ops, right? And so I'd love to hear a little bit about what do you feel like you've learned or took from a rev ops perspective that might've better prepared you for the ultimate role of the CTO that you stepped into. Sure. And rev ops was, if I was not running my own company, I would be in rev ops. So as I'm sure like many marketers know, it's like, um, marketing roles especially senior ones, they don't last long. The turnover is really high. And I was always like gravitating towards the data and the ops side and realizing that, you know, maybe like creative and brand is not my strength. And so that like led me to pivot into revops. And that's really how that came about. So the running a data company is just kind of the
extreme version of rev ops for me really. Yeah. I, there's a lot that I really resonate with on that because as you know, I also left marketing for a time there to come join you at Revenue Base. And there was something really interesting to me about moving into growth operations and getting out of the marketing side, which I later realized it's not that I didn't want to do marketing. It was really that I just felt like marketing was broken, which I think now with the evolution of marketing, there's a place for me to add a lot of value that's maybe not the brand and creative side. Totally. Yeah. So Mark, I'm so curious. How was that transition into the CEO role? So obviously you have a lot of data background, you've got some rev ops background, you've had the heavy marketing and demand gen background. What did that transition look like and feel like to you at the time? It's still ongoing. It's definitely a work in progress.
08:38 – The Challenges of Moving from Marketing Leader to CEO
I never really wanted to be a CEO or an entrepreneur. I'm just kind of accidental. I just love data. I love the product. I love solving problems with it. So starting a company, and you kind of have to be the CEO if you have a vision and you want it to be your vision of what problem you want to solve in the world. You feel really passionate about it. Like a CEO role is really, the way to do it. There's probably some jobs out there, like maybe chief data officer at this or that company that might be similar, but there's not many of those roles. So really like being a CEO, being an entrepreneur is really just me being really passionate about product and the problem in the market. So there's a lot though that you have to learn and a lot of responsibility that comes with it. So you cannot just be a product person.
Like you cannot say, you know, I'm just going to play clarinet and just do that. You have to play all the instruments, whether you're good at them or not. So I think the biggest challenge and personal opportunity is really that, um, you, you have to learn a lot really quickly. Unlike if you just go up the corporate ladder and a traditional function sales, marketing
So you start at the bottom, you work your way up. You're always like learning and adding to what's gonna help you in that top role. There is not that for CEO. Yeah. And there's a lot of pressure. People want the CEO. The perceptions about a CEO that I think are totally wrong and totally counterproductive in lots of ways. But I think that the tremendous responsibility in the CEO you're being watched sometimes more than anybody else. So everything you say, everything you do, but you have to learn a lot. And there's no playbook, there's no webinar or course that you can take on being a CEO. So you have to then reach out, get a lot of mentorship, get a lot of advice and help, your direct reports and ask them, like, how do I be a CEO? Like that just does not, not go over well. So you end up with, um, just a really, really interesting network. And I think what's helped me the most is, is really just relationships with other CEOs. And some of them are, they may be running a fortune 500 company. Um, or they might be the person who runs the HVAC company that fixed my HVAC. Like it's all the same. Yeah. Regardless of what industry, regardless of how big or small the company is, it's, it's really, it's all the same problems. So being able to go and just chat openly, like low ego, that's, that's been like the most helpful thing is just, is really the conversations with other other business leaders. And that's something I've always appreciated about you too, is just how open and vulnerable you are and that you're not afraid to ask for help when you feel like you need it. I'm so curious, Mark, what do you feel like you had to learn or upskill on transitioning from marketing into the CEO role that you think maybe you should have progressed further on as a head of marketing? Like what were sort of the gaps where you felt like.
12:30 – What CMOs Should Learn Before Becoming a CEO
dang, I should have known this or have already learned these lessons as a head of marketing, but now I'm having to learn them as a CEO. It's really the big picture view of the business and it's being part of the vision for the business. So I always thought of myself as a marketer or rev ops. This was my kind of swim lane and I knew what good looked like, but it was, you know, it always fitting right into the vision of the company or what the whole C team was working on together. So it would be like, hey, you know, we doubled our top of funnel leads and why aren't they converting? Why aren't twice as many converting? Well, that's like so and so isn't doing a good job or that's that's Thinking is probably is pretty common in marketing. And I think what I wish I had spent more time thought, it's just been better at being part of like the bigger, the bigger vision of the company, the bigger picture. Totally. You know, I don't think that's specific to marketing either. I think a lot of execs and departmental leaders just think about their own swim lane. I talked about on a few podcasts episodes previously that it just blows my mind that a lot of times a CEO will share the business vision and maybe some company goals and then we all sort of disappear into our own silos and figure out what we can do. It's not really an integrated approach or an integrated strategy. Oftentimes it sort of comes back together and all of our roadmaps or initiatives also weave in and out of each other's. And so I'm curious, like which roles did you find are really locked in and in tuned to the overarching business outside of a CEO?
Are there other roles that marketing could really partner closely with to get a closer view of the wider vision? I think the CEO relationship is critical for every executive. I think the CFO usually has a good perspective. They should have a good perspective because it's not just about the product vision of the company or the market vision the financial vision of how do you marshal the resources, where do you make investments, where do you pull back on investments. So I think a good CFO will have that big picture as well and be a good, probably like the best partner to the CEO, but also can then when the CEO is busy doing whatever CEOs do is just being a more operational.
really just a good partner for all the other executives, especially because the CFO is there for the financial resources, which is, that is what business is about. Absolutely. No, I love that. And I'm really excited to have a CFO as a part of the C-suite series. I think that's a under-prioritized relationship between the CMOs and the CFOs, so. Totally.
15:45 – Fundraising and Growth: Lessons from RevenueBase
Speaking of finances, I'd love to dive into obviously with revenue base. I think one of the most impressive, not one of the most impressive things, there's a lot of impressive things about revenue base. But what I was always in awe of is that you had this amazing idea. Obviously, there was a lot of need for it in the market and you were able to go out and get funding pretty quickly. Your first round was 6 million. And then I know you, you got 4 million closely thereafter from a pretty big VC firm. And so Walk us through, what was that like? Once you received funding and you had the means in which to build the business, what was top of mind for you as the CEO at that point? What did you wanna build first? Sure, and first of all, the goal was never to raise funding. And I think that should never be an entrepreneur's goal is just to raise funding, but it was just, the company was self-funded and was just getting bottlenecked with… customer, too many customers, and you need to make investments to be able to unlock that. And what I did not realize, and this is now 2021, where it was like a really frothy market, is like, I thought I'd raise a few hundred thousand dollars and that would be great. And I didn't realize you cannot really raise like that's considered a small amount of money. You cannot raise a small amount of money. You can raise like a lot of money or like nothing realizing that and it was a really frothy market as well. But the, and I think there's lots of lessons learned, the market has changed considerably, but at the time it was grow at all costs. So the focus was on really top of mind was top of funnel. Oh, sorry, was top line. Top of mind was top line revenue. So It was grow at all costs, like spend whatever you need to spend so that the revenue would go from we're at like 1 million, so it would go to five, um, almost overnight, which in hindsight, that's crazy. And what we, I think what we got wrong is that the product wasn't ready to scale. So as a business, um, you have to make sure your different areas of the business are all, um, are already culturally, financially, however, you measure them to scale or to do to execute the strategy. So there's always times in revenue base where maybe sales was ready to scale, but product wasn't or product was ready, but sales wasn't or marketing had to build I think keeping all of those different parts of the business in sync and making sure that you have really clear milestones and a checklist to say, I'll be ready at this level across the business before you invest, that's really key. But top line at the time was definitely just top line growth. Yeah.
Absolutely. I have a client right now who's launching a new AI product into the market and they are just thinking awareness, awareness, awareness. We just want to get the product out there as fast as possible. And as I started to ask some more questions, sales wasn't prepared to be able to handle the influx of leads. They didn't know how to sell the product. The product hadn't actually been tested or piloted with any customers at that point. There was a lot of learnings that we had at revenue base. Now I sort of see the writing on the wall with, but
I'm curious, Mark, how would you encourage CMOs to be a part of that conversation with their CEO? You know, I think a lot of times marketing has been tasked with building these really large lead gen functions, right? We've almost been subordinated to that, um, as opposed to what marketing is meant to be or has always been. How would you encourage CMOs to have those open conversations with, Hey, we can sort of turn on the faucet, but.
19:59 – When to Scale Marketing, Sales, and Product (And When to Pause)
what's the downstream implications of if the business is actually ready for receiving. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'd go even a further step back and say, and before the CEO says, hey, let's turn on the faucet. Are you ready? Or just assumes that you're ready. It's like, really, what is the business really trying to accomplish? What are the goals of the business if it's to scale?
It's really to not just say as marketing ready, but also to be looking more broadly as the business ready. And that means really taking your marketing hat off and saying, okay, I'm on the C team of the company. So my first and foremost responsibility is to the team I'm on, which is the C team, not marketing. So whether we put dollars into product or marketing or engineering or sales, like put that hat on and look at it as like I'm helping figure those things out. What are we trying to do? What are the trade-offs in the business? We need to make this number. We have lots of different ways we can get there and then there's risks. And I think it's from the marketer can be really clear and say, you know, If we have to, let's say we have to grow at 25%, like, you know, we can build lead gen, but we haven't done that before. We've never had lead gen before. So I'm not confident at this point that we're going to get it scalable or we'll get it repeatable or get it working in some period of time. We can work on that. And here's what I need to test that. But let's look at in three months and six months, does it work or not?
And if it doesn't, do we have a plan B for how we're going to hit the number? It's, it's really more conversations like that. It could be product. Um, if you're expanding into a new market, for example, you might need lead gen, the market is going to act differently. Um, you know, I remember this, like a study in business school where a, an electric razor company based in the U S I think it was Remington launched in Japan. And they just thought thing would sell off the shelves that they didn't realize is the Japanese man's hand is smaller than the Americans. So the handle was way too big and they didn't sell any of them. So they had to completely rebuild that product and lost a few years. So if you think about like its product, its finance, its engineering, sales, customer success, everything has to be ready. Yeah.
And there's, and again, there's like lots of different ways to get there. Could be a product led growth motion or it could be a sales led. There's lots of different avenues. So I think as the executive team, you have to be thinking about what are our different paths and looking things from, at just really from a bigger picture perspective and that, and then once you agree on those and you have a, an operating plan, then you check in and say, Hey guys, I'm behind on marketing or guess what, like we just, there's this partnership deal that we're looking at that could speed us up by a few months. But here's what it's gonna take. And you're always looking at, how do I partner with the rest of the C-suite to make those adjustments? And it should be the CEO that's driving that and making sure that all those conversations happen and that everybody is really kind of clear on what the direction is, what's working, what's not.
And there's just, as you were talking, I was thinking, I know you were talking about early on, maybe 2021, it was grow at all costs and now it's, it's different certainly. And so I guess through that evolution of 2021 till now, um, outside of just top line growth, what were some of the key metrics that you really, that you prioritize as a CEO that you think the entire executive team should be keeping top of mind? I mean, are you talking about now or back in 2021?
Now, although the evolution of that could be interesting as well, whatever, whatever comes to mind. Yeah, and we're in a just a really different world where I think, you know, nobody has really cracked the code on exactly what's what's going on in the world and what it's going to look like a year from now. So I think there's a lot of figuring things out. What I do know is really just profitable growth is important, but also the funding environment just you know, for lots of reasons got over-invested, companies got over-invested and that all got pulled back. So today, like as a venture-backed company, like we're aiming to be cashflow positive and we're pretty close, which puts a lot of strain on the people in the company. And it also, you know, you're just working really hard. You're doing lots of things that you can't just hire people to do. You literally watch every penny. So it means the team is just a lot more focused and has to make a lot of just really tough trade-offs. And that's something that you have to do together. It's collaborative. Like I was saying, it's like it should be the management team that is really together looking at running the business together, not just running their
Oh, well, product built this, sales should sell it. Or sales complaining, well, product's not listening. That does not work at all. So really, the thing that matters today for us just now is getting the cash flow break even. So a lot of choices we make in investments or not make investments are based on the goal of getting to cash flow positive. And that means when we're there, we control our destiny. And we can make the investments that we want, we can raise money, if we choose to raise money. But that's so that it's really, it's really basic, really simple to track to that it's not top line revenue growth, it's profitable growth. It's, yeah, it's really, really straightforward.
Straightforward outcome, but maybe not a straightforward approach on how to get there. But I really appreciate your comment about the intensity and of prioritization because I think, especially within marketing where the function is so wide and being asked to do so much. That's one of the key things I see marketing leaders really struggle with is identifying how to prioritize their time and efforts. And I had this.
27:16 – The CEO - CMO Relationship: How to Prioritize Growth Together
nightmare CFO interview a couple of months ago where I was interviewing for a CMO role with the CFO, but the portfolio was big, they had multiple brands, they had really large goals, growth goals within each of them and a very small marketing team. And when I talked to them about prioritization, you know, what are our prioritized goals within the portfolio? Let's talk about, you know, the business goals here. He got very defensive and was like, well, that's, that's on you to figure out, like you need to figure out how to prioritize marketing's time.
And, you know, it was just really interesting to me because absolutely I, I will prioritize marketing's time, but I have to have the prioritize business strategy and goals, you know, to help drive that or at least partner on that conversation. So I guess within prioritization, you've got to be highly prioritized, but you're also, you've also been in startup world where everything is urgent and there's so much to be doing. So how would you encourage marketing leaders to work well with their CEO for prioritization.
I love that story about that CFO interview. And I think about it quite a bit, because I think it totally, having a CFO who's just so not engaged with a potential candidate for CMO, I just think it says a lot about the business. And maybe they have some formula that works, and it's marketing has a very small, not significant contribution to it, and that's fine. But I think it starts with really recognizing the role, the current role of marketing, and what the CEO or the CMO wants in the future for that role of marketing. So there are definitely lots of businesses that have minimal to no investment in marketing that are super successful, and that's great.
And then there's businesses that they feel they need marketing to be the lead gen engine. Um, I think there's a big difference between a CEO like me, who's a founder and a, uh, professional CEO, whatever that means, but somebody who's not a founder, who's been a CEO and that's their career. I think there's a really, really big difference when you work with one or the other. So as a founder, there's this thing called founder mode, where the founder, like Elon Musk, still operates in founder mode, where you're involved in lots of things, usually product, technical things, and solving problems. And I think that is something that, as a marketer, you have to recognize what kind of a CEO am I working with.
if it's somebody in in Founder mode, you're going to have a lot of disorganization, especially in the early stage. It's going to be the type of company that you say, man, this is such a shit show. But that's what a startup is. It's just like a different shit show every day. Nothing works properly, you're just taking a lot of shortcuts, you're letting a lot of fires burn, you have to figure out what to let burn and the founder is probably involved in like everything. Yeah. Like that does not scale, you know, when you're at two, three million in revenue, like that every day doesn't work, but you'll still have a founder will be involved in certain things. So a professional CEO is probably a lot less hands-on.
Um, and they are, they are somebody who should be looking more at like metrics and numbers and just collaborating on just really big picture, but not really just not involved at all in anything day to day. Um, so I think that's the, the most important thing is just really recognizing like what, what you're dealing with. And then, and then, then you can figure out the rest. Yeah.
And I think as marketing leaders, we could be taking a more critical eye in terms of the roles we're accepting, doing that digging beforehand and seeing if it's going to be the right environment for what we're, what we're looking for. So, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, Mark, I'd love to transition a little bit and talk about go-to-market strategy and some of the go-to-market learnings you've had. So I'd love to hear when you did invest. And I know some of this obviously from being on the team and I'm happy to chime in with my own learnings and takeaways. But once you secured funding, I know you, you talked about really investing in the product and engineering and things like that. But talk to us about how you approached your go to market strategy and how you looked to build the go to market team and what were, what were your priorities at the time? What did you start with first? And then maybe what were some of your learnings along the way that you do differently next time? Sure. Yeah. Maybe we'll start with the learnings and the
definitely please chime in. So I think like the way I look at it today is much more methodical and just making sure that the whole business before you scale and before you double down on scaling is to make sure that the things you need to be successful at scaling are repeatable, they're working well, they're efficient or at least pretty close to it. We have a checklist for each area of the business, like what needs to be repeatable.
We have a definition for what is repeatable look like. Every time we have a board meeting and usually in between board meetings, we look at really like traffic lights, red, yellow, green for each of those and make adjustments. But at the time, like again, 2021, it was growth at all costs. So I think what I missed was like… going from a company that sort of brute forced its way to a million in revenue very quickly that we could just take that success and scale it up. And unfortunately, it was like founder sales. It was all founder led sales, which is, I did not realize how important it is to make a really good, clear, like clean transition and break from founder led sales to having a sales team.
But then there was myself and my co-founder on product and we were really selling a service. So there's a lot of human work behind the scenes. So I think the learning of the product was not scalable, let alone repeatable. So we hired a sales team. The sales team started, there was one quarter where we just really had the best quarter. We sold more in that quarter than we probably did in the previous year.
And, but the product wasn't, wasn't ready to deliver that many customers so quickly. Um, so the, the customer onboarding was really bumpy and most of the time it failed after that great quarter. Um, and that was nobody's, nobody's fault, but mine. But I think the key learning was like, you have to go from early stage, successful startup.
You really need to get some key pieces of your business repeatable. Your top of funnel, your sales motions without a founder, you have to have your customer onboarding, customer retention, renewal as the customer getting the product. Are they getting onboarded? Are they going live in production? Are they using your product in production? Is it achieving the results that were promised? And if it's not, you've got to slow down, back up the bus and say, okay, what's not working? And it's never going to work great. I thought we could fix all those things kind of in flight. But we were just so busy growing and just adding new customers. And then DemandGen, which was one of your… areas who are running just started to really expand. So now, instead of blowing down product, we were trying to deliver more customers or onboard more customers before sort of pausing and saying, you know what, maybe we should stop growth and fix some of the rough edges on the product before we really hit the gas on sales and marketing.
Absolutely. That was actually one of my big learnings as well from the marketing side and end from sales, since I was working really closely with the CROs as his chief of staff early on was it changed my perspective on the funnel and how all the functions work together. And I, I think my perspective evolved into thinking of it as like a manufacturing line and there were, you know, top of funnels at the top of the line and then sales is maybe a midway and then you've got customer success.
36:46 – The Funnel as a Production Line: Avoiding Bottlenecks
Really, if you think about the prospect at turning into the customer and the journey that they're having as this production line and looking back through those lens, I realized we staffed heavy on some parts of the production line without looking at the full production line. And that's one of the things from a marketing perspective, I look back and think, you know, we had myself and then we had a team of five salespeople.
And I wish I would have known better at the time to say, hey, hold up. We should be creating more awareness, more demand before we really staff the sales team, because then ultimately they ended up doing a lot of prospecting because the marketing engine wasn't ready. And then certainly you have great point about the product and the customer success and onboarding element of that as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I break it down even like further, or I think.
Ready if there's two steps. One is just repeatable. Like, do you have something that just works that you can do maybe super inefficiently, but over and over? So like, can you generate leads? Do you know if you put money in here, will it generate XML leads? But then is it scalable? Which means like, all right, we've got, now we're going to make investments, hire a sales team. Like can the scale.
Like can the volume actually get to where it needs to be to scale the business? So it's like, you, you kind of need both of those things. Um, like across the whole company. I love thinking about those as two separate things, especially from a marketing perspective, as we're launching new programs and strategies to think about the first goal of being just get this repeatable and then build it to be scalable.
Do you feel that efficiency falls within the scalable or is that a V3 version of the process? It could be scalable, I think, or it could be in the repeatable part. I think you, at least it definitely, when today's world for most companies, I think you need to be efficient from day one, even before it's scalable, even if it's one-off. So… probably the earlier the better. Like no matter what, you have to have a really solid strategy of how you're gonna get there. I think it'd be really dangerous in today's like fundraising environment to spend money on something that's not efficient and then hope it gets there because you could run out of money before you can either raise more or make that efficient. Great point. Did you have any key learnings that you would share from the CMO perspective of how you saw, obviously all of these different lines within the journey are really important of how we bring customers through. But did you have any learnings or key gaps around how marketing, sales, product, customer success all work together or maybe didn't work together that you think are really important that we keep top of mind from a CMO perspective? Yeah, yeah. I think again, it's really what's the most important is the team you're on, not the team you lead.
Like I would definitely like say that's that is a good mantra. So think about yourself, like put your, try to, try to think like a CEO. Um, like learn how to do that. Um, and I think that that will serve you really well. So see the big picture of the business, be able to collaborate with the rest of the executive team. So, and on that, I think one of the most important, if not the most important skill of the CMO to be successful is just really the soft skill of the relationships you have with your peers. That is by far, when I look at CMOs out there who I know in my network, the ones that remain in the job the longest, they're just nice people that have really good relationships. And some of them may not be the marketers are the best, most efficient MQL generators in the world, but being able to collaborate and work with other people, I think is the most important thing to do. Yeah, absolutely.
41:26 – The Future of Data & AI: Who Owns Customer Data?
All right, Mark. Well, I want to pivot just a little bit because I'd be remiss not to talk to you about data and the future of data and what you're seeing in companies right now. So you talked about early on, data was always a key part of marketing and a lot of our outbound and demand gen efforts. Obviously you sell a data product today and customer data specifically, where marketing, I imagine very much cares about that as does rev ops, as does sales. So talk to us a little bit about how are the companies you're selling to and working with viewing their customer data strategy right now? What is sort of the hot thing? Yeah.
We were having a really interesting conversation about this a couple of weeks ago. And I think I've seen like a tale of two cities. So on the one hand, let's say, you know, marketing has historically owned the budget for data. And the market has changed so much. There's a lot of pressure to grow and sell. And I think that where the data is good and it's serving the business well, I think the data
The team is becoming more sophisticated. Companies are investing in data teams, data strategies. The business is getting closer to data. That's really exciting and really good. Where that's not happening, the other side is where the data is not good. It's a mess, and it's not going to be fixed. That's where everybody has a free for all, and they go out, and the BDRs go get their own data, marketing or events, get their own data. Everybody kind of goes, gets their own data. So I'm seeing like those two directions. At RevenueBase, we're focused on the first one where there's a sophisticated data team. They're sophisticated around data. There's a lot of solutions coming into the market that are for the companies that are not sophisticated around data. And… individuals are just going out and kind of buying their own solution like Apollo or something or even clay. They're great, really great products, but they are for the individual who uses, who has to sell or market to go kind of get their own little slice of data. And for the companies that you feel like are forward-thinking or cutting-edge in terms of how they're dealing with data,
Who are you seeing owning the data strategy? Like, is that still something that in best of class go to market organizations, marketing owns? Has that moved to engineering? Has it moved to rev ops? Where does the strategy of customer data sit? I think it's too, it's too early to tell. I think marketing is more and more, I see as like losing ownership of data. And that's definitely happening. Where is it ending up? So I think, I mean, there's this big thing that we haven't mentioned on this call is probably the first podcast where nobody said AI in the first like two minutes or two seconds. But I think we're really early trying to figure out AI. I think most companies today are trying to adopt AI. They're doing a great job using AI to help you make nicer emails. So I use it most of the time. But everybody's trying to figure out how to actually use it. And you need a centralized, really strong data strategy, centralized governance of data and where is that going to end up? I see it, you know, just where it is marketing sometimes, sometimes sales or rev ops, sometimes in IT or under the CIO. But I think it's just really, really way too early to figure out where that's going. But What I do now, just to underscore the point about elaboration is like, that's somewhere where a CMO or any executive should be spending a lot of time is getting closer to data and thinking about what's the strategy we need. Like how can we use data and AI on top of it to figure out how to drive our business better, faster, different directions, new opportunities. That's like the, that's the most exciting thing. So. Yeah. One of my best business partners at my old company was our VP of engineering and data for a lot of those reasons that you mentioned because marketing, we probably cared the most about having the best customer data out of, out of the team at that time. Now, certainly I think other departments are emerging and realizing the importance of strong data. So exciting times.
Yeah, marketing has always been at the forefront of everything digital. But maybe there's some more competition now for the digital thought leadership within the company than there's ever been before. Yeah. And the AI strategy in terms of who owns the AI strategy, that is… something that's fascinating that I think we'll, we'll talk about on upcoming podcasts because it seems very decentralized right now and every department is just using it in their own way. And I think similar to data, like what you were talking about in terms of how you see data being leveraged, that's almost how AI is being leveraged to very decentralized model. Everyone's just doing what they need. And at some point it's going to bubble up and I imagine CTOs and CIOs are going to get their arms around it. So I think so.
47:36 – Final Advice for Marketing Leaders
Awesome, Mark. It was so wonderful to have you today. I learned so much. I always enjoy talking to you. You're a longstanding mentor of mine. You know, I just ask you, like, what's one piece of advice you'd give senior marketing leaders and executives right now based on what you're seeing in the current market? Yeah, I think, you know, this might sound a little meta, but I would say, you know, don't take advice as really to just take ownership, like be like the CEO of your career your department. I think nobody's going to tell you what to do. Nobody knows how to tell you what to do or to save you. Just figure that out. Trust your gut. Just really be your own CEO. Awesome. I love that. And if people want to learn more about RevenueBase and where to find you, Mark, how can they get in touch? Sure. You can find me LinkedIn. So I'm pretty easy to find and also revenuebased.ai on our website. But I really enjoyed our conversation. I've learned a lot too. And thank you so much for having me, Mandy. Thanks, Mark. All right, friends, that was such a valuable conversation with Mark. I always appreciate his honesty and transparency. And I hope this episode gave you a deeper look into how CEOs are thinking about marketing, growth and business strategy.
If you got value from today's episode, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network, especially with marketing leaders who are looking to elevate their strategic impact. And in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
