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
My Journey to the C-Suite: Scaling Big, Burning Out, and Building Something Better
#14: In this special episode of Growth Activated, I’m sharing a conversation I had on the Tech Success Stories podcast, where I dove into my journey from scaling a B2B services company from $50M to $750M to launching Growth Activated.
This episode is packed with actionable insights for B2B marketing leaders ready to elevate their marketing strategy, achieve executive alignment, and prove marketing ROI.
We cover:
✅ Overcoming burnout and finding clarity: What I learned when I shifted from marketing leadership to revenue leadership.
✅ Lessons learned from scaling a B2B company from $50M to $750M—and how to apply them to your business.
✅ Building a business-minded approach to marketing that drives revenue and enterprise value.
✅ The critical differences between scaling and building B2B companies—and how to excel at each.
If you’re a B2B marketing leader who wants to drive real results, gain executive buy-in, and accelerate your career, this episode is for you.
🎧 Hit play and get ready to elevate your marketing game!
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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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Don’t forget to subscribe to Growth Activated and share this episode with fellow marketing leaders. Let’s activate growth—together!
00:00 - Introduction to Growth Activated
Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Walker, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today, I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence and build careers they love.
00:27 - Purpose of Growth Activated Podcast (B2B Marketing Leaders)
If you're ready to drive impact and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hey everyone. Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Walker, and today I have something special for you. Recently, I was featured as a guest on the Tech Success Stories podcast, where I got to share my journey. What inspired me to create Growth Activated?
00:51 - Scaling a B2B Company: From $50M to $750M
how my experience scaling a B2B services company from 50 million to 750 million shaped my approach to marketing leadership and the lessons I've learned along the way. We also touch on topics I know many of you are working through, whether it's reshaping marketing's role to drive business-wide impact, achieving alignment with executive leadership, or navigating the challenges of scaling B2B companies of all sizes. I loved the conversation and I think you will too.
I wanted to rerun it here on Growth Activated because there are some powerful takeaways that I believe will resonate with all of you. I hope you enjoy this special episode. Let's dive in. Hi, Mandy. Thank you very much for accepting our invitation to be our guest on this podcast episode. Could you please share some insights into your business and the role you play within it?
01:39 - Building Growth Activated: Marketing Leadership Tips
Hey, Agil. Well, it's so great to be here. Thanks for asking me to join. I'm Mandy Walker. I am the CEO and founder of Growth Activated, which is a marketing agency specifically specializing in fractional CMO work and marketing strategy work. And excited to be here today. Thank you. Thank you very much. Pleasure is mine. Thanks for accepting the invitation again, once again. So what is the origin story behind your company? Like what inspired its creation? Yeah.
Absolutely. Well, I spent 10 years working for a B2B professional services company. And during that time, we scaled from 50 million to 750 million through both organic growth and through acquisitions. And I was running sort of the full end-to-end marketing. I had a team of about 25. And I hit a point, to be honest, where I just got incredibly burnt out. And I felt like I was really burnt out on marketing and burnt out on the industry.
The company was an amazing company, but I ended up deciding, you know what, I need something new. And so I jumped into a B2B SaaS startup. So I went from a $750 million company to a 1 million ARR company that had just received 10 million in funding. And I joined them as their head of growth strategy and operations. And so I left marketing, sort of went in the broader go-to-market realm. And during that time, I realized
03:03 - Breaking Through Burnout & Redefining B2B Marketing
that it wasn't actually that I was burnt out on marketing. It was that I was burnt out on how marketing was being done for most companies today. And the experience within growth strategy and operations really opened up my mind to thinking in a much bigger picture, like thinking about the broader company and the broader business and how marketing fits into the broader company. And so when the startup
03:27
Unfortunately, the two founders decided to go their own ways and do their own thing. And so we all, the employees left the startup at that time. And I decided to, you know what, I really am passionate about helping B2B marketing leaders elevate what they're doing for the businesses and increasing enterprise value. And I really felt passionate about teaching other marketing leaders how to achieve that. I feel like we are so
focused as marketing leaders, we're so focused on our craft and our area of specialty and being really great at whether it's content marketing or SEO, anything. Like we hone in on those things and we, yet it's, we rarely ever think about how to be a marketing executive and how to step into that role. And so that's what I'm really excited about with Growth Activated is helping teach and coach and advise other leaders to do that.
That's, that's very inspiring and very interesting. This is going to be one of the best podcast episodes. I'm really excited about it as marketing and sales, which is the most interesting part of the every business, every industry for me, specifically in B2B SaaS. So what makes your approach unique in, in, terms of marketing and growth activities? Yeah, you know, and I honestly, it's sad that it's unique because it's not special, but I think that the
The biggest thing that I do and always have prided myself on is that business-minded approach. And I think so often we as marketing leaders don't think enough about the broader business. I actually was just speaking at a conference a couple days ago and I asked everyone in the room full of marketing leaders, I asked everyone in the room to raise their hand if they could tell me what their business goals are. Like what are their CEOs and CFOs? Oh, look at you. You know your business goals. Good.
05:17 - Business-Minded Marketing: Understanding the CMO Perspective
What are the CEOs and CFOs really reporting to the board on? What are the numbers that they're really trying to move the needle on? We all know revenue, but beyond that is what are we looking at for customer churn and customer retention and profitability metrics? And so many marketers and marketing leaders, we don't get into that with our CEOs and our CFOs. And as a result,
We're not aligned with the business and you may know this, Ajeel, but the marketing CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite. And I truly think it's because we aren't locked into the business. We're just sort of thinking about everything from a marketing perspective as opposed to the business perspective. So again, not special. It's sad that that's the unique thing that I do, but that's, I am a hugely business-minded person. It's, I'm really passionate about learning about the ins and outs of business. And so any company I work with or am an employee of,
That's my number one priority. And honestly, marketing becomes really easy when you know your business and your customer and your market really, really well. Definitely. mean, revenue is the one of the most important metric in every business, but rather than that, there are a lot, tons of other KPIs which makes the revenue to be successful. So I definitely agree on that. And yeah, this stays at marketing easier if you know
specifically the, if you have done your market research successfully and your competitor analyzes, which is the backbone of the ever marketing. And if you can truly do collaborate with the sales department, sales team, because as you're aware of it, it's like marketing and sales is like wife and husband. If something goes wrong, no one's want to take the blame. Right. That's why there must be a collaboration. Yeah. So who for your, for your own company, who do you guys serve the best? Like.
What is your ideal client profile? Yeah. So I have learned. I, again, working with large B2B companies or midsize B2B companies, guess it determines how you, depends how you define large and then going to start up with 1 million ARR. My favorite thing to do and my favorite company stage is scaling. You know, I went from a scaling company and then I went back down to a building company and those are very, very different stages. And I think require very different.
07:40 - Ideal Client Profile for Growth Activated
sets of expertise and skill sets. And while I can do both and I've learned both, my favorite is scaling. where that means today is my sweet spot is really B2B companies, either in services or SaaS, that have a strong foundation in place. So they're typically at, you know, at least 20 million ARR or 20 million in revenue, anywhere up to 500 million in revenue. That's really my sweet spot is once they've figured out
product market fit and they figured out at least like their product marketing and messaging and some demand gen channels that are working. I love to come in and be able to really scale and help them do that in an operationally efficient way. Thank you very much for sharing that. Now let's talk about more your responsibilities within your company. As a CEO and founder, how does your day-to-day responsibilities look like?
Great question, and I'm still figuring it out because I, you know, it's interesting. I think when I flipped to doing fractional work, so I left full-time about a year ago and started my own company at that time, it's been a really interesting learning experience to figure out my delivery time, if you will, like how much am I actually doing the work for my clients as a fractional CMO or project-based work doing
project-based work doing marketing strategies versus working on my own business and working to grow the business and do business development and do my own marketing, right? And I have my own podcast that I recently just launched. And that's been a really hard thing to balance and figure out. And I'm still figuring it out, but I would say 80 % of the time, my time right now and any given week is really spent in terms of actually producing for my clients. And then about 20 % of my time is
working on the business and predominantly marketing and business development. But I, I, I'm still learning. And if you have any tips on how you do it, I'd love to hear them. definitely. I mean, as as a, as a founder and CEO, need to wear different hats to be able to truly find out what is, the most important part for the business, which is marketing and sales. And I'm pretty sure you're already doing good. I would love to actually get more tips from you.
10:00 - Business Goals & Marketing ROI (Next 6 Months)
doing as rather than me giving it to you. So anyways, what are the goals for you in next six months? Yeah, great question. So over the next six months, I think I've got one is consistent business development, keep the pipeline full and really, uh, you know, I've got obviously my own revenue goals. I, you know, would love to hit 300 K this year, just in terms of delivery. And then on the other side, I'm really looking to build.
the mentorship and advisory part of my company, rather than selling to B2B CEOs who need a strong marketing leader to come in. I'm really excited about the opportunity of mentoring and coaching and sort of the advisory part of my business and helping to elevate B2B marketing leaders into the executive level mindset. So that's one of my biggest growth goals is to launch that part of the business. And certainly starting that with thought leadership and
launching the podcast and going to speaking at events and things like that. Thank you. I'm excited about it. So as a CEO and founder, how easy do you think to attract and retain top tier marketing talents? Gosh, you know, I think when I was a VP of marketing at this really large company, I had a team of about 25.
And so a large part of my role was hiring, attracting, retaining, making sure that people are set up for success because at the end of the day, they are the smartest ones in the team around their area of function and their area of focus. Fast forward to today, talent is incredibly important and I get the opportunity to work with great marketing talent at all of the clients that I serve. I think, really, I think one of the biggest areas, again, that
that I see that's unfortunate is that businesses are relegating marketing to being or subordinating marketing to being a lead generation function. Like that's really what marketing is sort of becoming and evolving into. And my biggest concern from a talent perspective is that we are going to be losing the other areas of marketing that are incredibly important. know, I think product marketing is so often overlooked at the early stage. It's one of the most important.
hires, let alone marketing hires you could be making. And yet the market and CEOs seem to be demanding demand gen and lead generation. And so I think it's just really interesting. I don't know if that answers your question, but it's something that's sort of top of mind for me of how do we make sure that we are cultivating all of the areas of marketing? not losing ownership with the way that sort of the market is trending and we keep
empowering marketing leaders to be closer to the business so that they can make a bigger impact outside of the traditional marketing KPIs that we've been measured to in the past. Great, great, great point. But how do you make sure when you're looking for marketing talents, how do you make sure that they don't only care about the lead generation, but truly know what they're doing in terms of to be able to even let's say if it's only the lead generation, which is only
small part of the marketing. How do you make sure that the person, the talent that you're looking for truly knows what they are looking for and their top tier talents? Yeah, I mean, a lot of people can learn the business side. So it's not necessarily a requirement for me. I think more than anything, people have to have growth mindsets. They have to be wanting to learn. They have to be ambitious enough to learn and be open to change and open to agility. And so I think that it's more about
the like hire them for the great skill set that they have within marketing that you're hiring them for, regardless of what area that is, but make sure from a soft skill perspective that they are open and strategic enough to think about the bigger picture. frankly, it starts with us as CMOs. The CMO has to be really connected into the business and do a really great job communicating down as well, down across to make sure that everyone on the team is rallied around the greater business goals.
14:14 - Attracting & Retaining Top Marketing Talent
So yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. Great answer. Thank you very much for sharing that. How about the sales team? Do you think it's also easy to attract and retain them when we're looking for top tier sales team members? Yeah. Gosh, sales is hard. It's part of why I don't do it. know, someone, a CMO told me recently, like we as marketers, we don't go into sales because we don't like to hear the answer. No. If you like tiering, no, you'd go into sales. But.
You know, I think when I was at the B2B SaaS company and I was running the entire growth team, including sales, what I found was that it was actually, wasn't that it was hard to hire great salespeople. I think one of the biggest mistakes we made that I would share as a tip for other people is we didn't think about the stage that we were at. And what I mean by that is we hired great salespeople, but they weren't great for the stage that we were at.
They were great for that scaling stage, right? Like the people we hired were really great salespeople. They had amazing success at their previous B2B SaaS companies, but those were established companies that had already identified product market fit and had very clear sales enablement and very clear messaging and a strong sales playbook. And as a company that was at 1 million ARR, we're figuring stuff out every single day. And we don't have the structure and the playbook and the framework and the processes in place.
we're learning constantly. And so that's, that takes a unique breed of a salesperson to be able to constantly be learning. I mean, we were changing the personas we were changing, you know, or selling to based on what we were learning. We were changing the markets we were selling into based on what we were learning. The product was changing and evolving like almost weekly or biweekly. And so I think it, it wasn't, so I guess what I would share is it wasn't, while it wasn't hard to retain or attract really great salespeople.
we had a mismatch in terms of the hiring profile that we hired for and therefore they weren't successful in the role that we put them in. And so that was one of the big learnings that I had that I will take to every company that I either consult for or work for in the future. Definitely. And what would be your advice for the founders or for the HR department that when they are looking to hire sales team members, how they need to make sure that it's a perfect match so they don't do their
mismatching. Um, I mean, certainly prior experience, like don't be afraid of reference checks, you know, doing those. I know sometimes as startups, we don't think to do those. We just get excited. We need talent in and we just move quickly, but take the time. mean, these, it, it will cost you a lot more in the long run. Sometimes we, it's like, sometimes we think as leaders and I've been guilty of this myself that we think like, Oh, if they're not the right fit, no problem. We'll just.
swap them out and go hire more later. But it's almost like we're creating this, like the idea of technical debt for ourselves, except it's like team member debt, right? We're creating this debt that then builds where we're hiring all of these people, we're investing all this time and we're on their onboarding and their training and they weren't the right fit from the beginning. And so I know your question was, how do you make sure they're the right fit? I guess my biggest piece of advice is do your due diligence. Take the time. If it's multiple interviews that need to happen with the
candidate to really dig in, take that time. From a marketing perspective, used to have my all, everyone on my marketing team, from a marketing coordinator to an executive director, do a marketing presentation for me with their area, right? I wanted to see them in action. I wanted to see their level of strategy. wanted to, there's nothing like, quite like seeing them actually do the job before you hire them. Now I would balance that with.
Be kind to the candidates. If you do have a long interview process and you're going to do a lot of due diligence, be upfront with them about that. In that first phone screen you're doing, tell them what to expect because otherwise you're going to end up with a lot of candidate frustration and probably a poor employer brand if you're just stringing candidates along or if that's how they feel. Do your due diligence, but also be kind to the candidate and be clear and transparent as to why you're doing that. And it's really, again, at the end of the day, it's a mutual
mutually beneficial because candidates on the flip side, candidates also take jobs just to take jobs because they need a job and don't often think strategically about if it's the right fit for them. Definitely. Definitely. Once again, great answer and great advice. Thank you very much for sharing that. One of the last questions will be purely about the challenges. So our audience learn from the mistakes that you have done personally. If you had a magic wand that you could wave.
and solve one problem right now in your business? What would that be? A good question. That's a fun question. Everyone who doesn't want a magic wand, right? I'll answer this in two ways because I'll answer it for what I wish my clients had and then I'll answer it for what I wish I had. that's okay. Awesome. So I think for me in terms of where I'm at and growing the business, one of the biggest challenges I see out there right now is the level of saturation that exists.
19:32 - Marketing ROI Model & Industry Challenges
So from a marketing and awareness perspective, it is hard to break through the noise right now for all companies, right? When you say, gosh, just open up your LinkedIn and look at the hundreds and thousands of comments that are constantly happening. Every channel is incredibly saturated right now. Every market is saturated.
Everyone's building their brand. You know, we're all getting smarter. AI is making things even more convoluted and more saturated. And it's hard to figure out where to really lean into to invest in the breakthrough where, you know, and so I think being a startup myself right now, figuring out which channels have the most opportunity that don't feel like I'm just speaking into the void is. So if I had a magic wand, I'd figure that out very quickly. How do I not feel like I'm?
marketing into the void. the client side though, because I do work with a lot of really large companies that have very large marketing teams, and from a marketing perspective, if I had a magic wand, it would be for us to have a consistent marketing ROI model, operating model, that everyone in the industry used. And that's not to say it shouldn't be catered by company, but what's crazy, Ajeel, is no matter what company I go into, the CEO and the CFO say,
We want marketing to produce ROI. But the second you ask them what that means, people don't know how to define it. They're like, I don't know, I just want to get a return on marketing. And unfortunately, we've had this sort of over sales of vacation, if you will, of metrics to where we can tie revenue to lead generation activities. And so everything is about lead generation, right? And that's where I think, again, there is so much ROI, whether it's short term or long term in
marketing activities that are broader than just lead generation with mark product market, strong product marketing, strong branding, right? Strong thought leadership. mean, all of these things that are incredibly important. I wish we had a consistent operating model that everyone thought about the overarching impact that marketing could make and how to measure it. And we just, it blows my mind. We haven't figured this out as, as an industry yet. It's crazy, but I'm excited. I will definitely invest in a company that does.
I think we're not too far from that. With that, as you mentioned with the AI, I think the industry will be changed completely. Completely will be changed specifically for the marketing, also sales as well. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Last but not least, what are the biggest, three biggest lessons you have learned so far in your entire career? Oh, goodness gracious. That's a great question. One of...
Well, I suppose I would say one of the things that I've seen companies struggle with and has been a great lesson for me to, I think, and differentiator for me as I go into companies is while a lot of times companies may have their overarching company goal, they don't, they aren't necessarily, they're rarely aligned, I would say rarely aligned on how they're going to get there. What's the growth strategy? What's the roadmap?
around how we achieve that vision or achieve those goals. And what often happens, unfortunately, is that a lot of department leaders, right, so your CTO, your CMO, your CRO, will all sort of go off and create our own roadmaps to achieve the company goals. And we rarely come back together and make sure, and it's funny because a lot of our roadmaps involve each other. Yes.
All right. So like marketing, we rely on product doing certain things and product relies on marketing, getting it out there and sales of course needs marketing for a lot of things and needs product for a lot of things. that disconnect around executive communication and alignment with the business, I think is been something I just see over and over and over again that I've learned. If I can really, that's, that's a superpower for me to.
push for those answers, push for that clarification, and push for the alignment and collaboration. And I think that has led to really great results in my career that a lot of my peers don't really prioritize. So, and I think, you know, again, at the startup I was at, a great example of this was the two co-founders, the CEO and the CTO, had very, they were aligned on their vision.
but they weren't aligned on how they were gonna get there. The CTO wanted to do product led growth and the CEO wanted to do sales led growth and we couldn't get aligned and we ran out of money while we were trying to figure out how we were gonna get there. And so again, just a really great lesson about I think the importance of alignment. That's been one of my big, another big thing I think is just figuring out the art of agility.
things are changing fast. I think this is so important even for today, right? Again, AI is changing daily. It's changing how much, and I think from a marketing perspective, that can be hard because we, in order to be strategic marketing, a lot of times, again, we should be long-term thinkers. That's how we differ than sales in a lot of ways. Sales is short-term transactional, marketing's long-term strategic, and it can be hard to remain agile and take advantage of the activities today that are happening.
while balancing that with our long-term vision. And so I often see marketers just throw out the long-term vision and then become very activity-based. they're just in this sort of hamster wheel of, need to execute, I need to execute. And we often forget why we're doing the things we're doing and if they're actually making a business impact. And so for me, those are two hugely important things. I'm always thinking about the art of agility, how do I balance that? And then the executive alignment and collaboration.
I think are two really big things that I have learned the importance of that unfortunately a lot of people don't prioritize. Yeah, exactly. That was a great advice and lessons that you have learned. Thank you very much for sharing that. Thanks for sharing the insights. And as I see you as a founder, I know how things get busy. So I appreciate for spending this half an hour with us. So today we were with Mandy Walker. You can check her LinkedIn account below.
from the description. Thank you very much, Mandy, for being our guest on this podcast episode. really appreciate looking for the better podcast episodes in the future. Awesome. Thanks, Ajil. Appreciate being on for today. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I would love for you to pass it along to a friend or a colleague in B2B marketing.
The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
