 Kia ora kato. Nau mai, hari mai. So, welcome to you all and welcome to this month's EHF Live session. Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a collective of entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives, investor change makers who want to make an impact globally from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Now, this session is part of a series where you'll hear from Scott Kabat, an EHF fellow who is an experienced operating executive and entrepreneur with a track record of building customer-friendly mainstream brands to compete in historically unfriendly categories. His experience includes subscription businesses, marketplaces, healthcare, internet of things and consumer package goods. So, in this session, we're going to be focusing on building a marketing team where Scott shares his insights on the when, who, how and where things can go wrong. And last month, we were looking at brand positioning where Scott shares his insights on why it matters, how to approach it and best practices. And you can see all of his sessions in the recordings on our website. And there's going to be plenty of time for Q&A with Scott during this 60-minute session. So, note these are informal sessions. They are planned in a way that you leave here after 60 minutes that you know the fellows on a sort of personal level so that you can understand what their intentions are here and you can connect with them directly. Now, stay unmuted unless you're going to ask a question. You can either put the questions in the Q&A, but as we're a nice small team, you can actually raise your hands and ask those questions. Over to you, Scott. Thanks, Michelle. By the way, it's Cabot, but it's commonly mispronounced. So, it's quite, quite all right. Nice to meet everyone. Why don't we have a small group that will make for good discussion. Thank you everyone for joining. Let me, let me share my screen real quick. Of course, I lost that. Why are the heck are you? There we go. Everybody able to see that? Great. So, hey, look, I have a few pages here. What I was telling Michelle before we start that these questions about building a marketing team and start-ups are, there's never one right answer. You'll probably come out of today with more questions than answers. So, my goal is not to tell you the one definitive right way to do it is more just to empathize with the fact that it's difficult and also to give some general principles and guidelines to think about as you navigate this process. So, I have a few pages to share based on my past experience as a CMO and now as a consultant and advisor to many early stage companies. And then we've got a lot of time for Q and I feel free to interrupt me along the way if you have questions. So, Michelle, so just raise your hand or throw it in the chat and then we should also have plenty of time at the end. Okay, so just quick flow of this. I'll do just a very brief introduction into my background. Talk about the challenges of building a marketing org and then I'll break down a little bit of why is it important? When should you do it? How do you think about going about it? So, just very quickly in my background, this is the third of these workshops but I think most of the folks we have today are first timers, which is wonderful. Early in my career, I was management consultant and cut my teeth in consumer package goods where I learned the fundamentals of marketing. A lot of time in consumer tech with some B2B2C also across a range of categories. Always this dual focus of likeable brand and unlikable category as well as very focused on building scalable revenue engines. I have worked in various stages from co-founding companies to coming in to start-ups when they're going into growth mode to working at very large companies like Cisco. So, I've seen these marketing org questions manifest themselves at various different stages of growth. And then, yeah, finally today. So, I live in the US in the Bay Area. Founded 621 five years ago, which is a marketing consultancy where a community of fractional marketers who we plug into start-ups and private equity back businesses, whether they're fractional CMOs or boots on the grand help and demand gen brand content, et cetera, to help companies build the pieces to scale their go-to-market engines. So, just setting the stage for diving into these questions about when and how to build a marketing org. I wanted to go from the 50,000-foot level down to 10,000. And so, I just wanted to hit, first of all, highlight what are some of the big challenges in getting marketing right because you see a lot of companies struggle with it. Early on, one of the common issues is around focusing too narrowly on the go-to-market engine. Actually, like going narrowcast for picking a market segment, but what often happens with early-stage companies, and we talked about this in one of the prior sessions, is you get kind of addicted to the drug of paid marketing and Facebook, Google alone. And those are wonderful, efficient channels. I like them a lot for converting the mid-funnel. I like them as environments for testing, messaging and audience. They aren't great for building organic momentum and you will hit a point of diminishing returns on them. So, it's really important to look beyond those alone and also to think about retention and loyalty and long-term value of your customer base. So, that's one. Another is, whoops, it went too fast, brand confusion. Super important to make sure you're really clear on target market. How do we consistently message and position ourselves to that crowd? How do we make sure our customers understand what we're about and why we're here? So, consistency becomes really important there and the risk in trying to go too broad here is you end up trying to be all things to all people, which even for startups that aspire for world domination as most do, you have to start narrow early on. So, I think that developing the discipline about being really tight on who we are, why we're here and what we want our brand to be is really important. And then finally is this question of the team and look, you see this a lot where CMOs are cycling in and out of marketing roles. You see a lot of misfires and marketing hiring or a lot of consternation like, hey, we're paying for this marketing team, they're a cost center, is that really working? And so, there's a lot underneath that, right? Sometimes you just got the wrong team for this stage of growth or there's this mix between digital and analog doesn't work or we've got people who are too senior too junior. Finally, and we'll talk more about this, it's super important to build a marketing work that's agile just like in best practices and product management thinking about that in marketing and how you design both your talent and your supporting technology stack to enable experimentation and iteration becomes really important. So, these are common issues we see across a wide range of startups. So, talking about the or question specifically, look, it's super challenging, right? One thing that's happened in marketing kind of on hyper drive over the last decade is that marketers are specializing more and more. You could put out a job profile for a marketing role and have a thousand candidates and they literally could have a thousand different specialties, right? So, understanding how to navigate that and this is something we see very common in early stage startups particularly with founders who are very product and engineering driven that not having that rosetta stone for how to translate all these different marketing specialties becomes really challenging. Now, in other cases, like you can get it right and the business changes in six months later, it's like, hey, we've got this marketing team but we don't have the right team for the next stage of growth. And the last one is kind of an amalgamation of a few ideas which is particularly for startups. It's not at all and come and look at marketing as a cost center like, hey, these heads and their budget are cutting into our profitability. Marketing is ambiguous by nature. There's rarely one right answer. So, combine those two it can create a really complex situation that's tough to navigate. So, I've talked about why it's a big problem. Let's talk about why it's important. First of all, I think that this is, I want to talk just to contextualize this. This isn't so much why marketing at all. I want to think about it in the context of marketing in the early stages of a startup and how you ought to be thinking about starting to build that muscle. First is look, one thing we see a lot with a lot of tech startups is it's very tempting to have kind of a product out mentality. Here's what we're able to build. Now let's go sell it. And I feel pretty strongly that that's a risky and not very successful to build a business. One of the benefits to building some marketing muscles early on are that it sort of forces a customer centricity around defining who the core customer is and how every element of the product or service experience whether it's B2B, B2C whatever categories and then across functions from marketing to sales to customer success, product, whatever, how all that is feeding the needs of this particular customer segment. So building that kind of muscle early on yields benefits outside of marketing alone over time. Secondly, just touched on this, it's incredibly important to start to test and iterate on who the right audience is, what's the right message, what's the right way to convert them, what's the right way to move them through our funnel and building some cadence and some good process hygiene not just in product development but also around experimentation and marketing. The sooner you start to do that the sooner you'll be able to course correct, validate assumptions that are wrong and get data that you can then bring to bear to make your team smarter. And then finally, you know, everybody's after this idea of hockey stick growth and I think the importance of starting to seed the machinery for your organic flywheel can't be understated, right? And this is back to the point that there's only so far you can go and bind your way to growth through Google AdWords, for instance. It takes time to build a brand, it takes time to build advocacy and word of mouth and so the earlier you start to put the machinery in place to unlock that virality the sooner you'll get to the point where you start to unlock that hockey stick or virality. Then there's a question of when. You know, I have this analogy I use a lot around where how marketing evolves through the life stage of startups. You know, early on and this is I don't think specific to marketing at all early it's very common to have a team of Swiss Army knives. Like these are people who are utility players who can do a little bit of everything. Right? They can run Google ads. They can come in and you know if you need them to put product samples and envelopes and get them out the door they can do that. If you need them to you know help find office furniture for the new hires like these are people can do a little bit of everything and are really critically important because they're also the keepers of the culture early on startup. You don't need me to tell you that. I would say when it comes to marketing specifically you're looking here less for people who are deep functional experts in any one discipline of marketing but that they can more that they can speak the language across different marketing needs whether it's the quant side of you know running some online ads or writing a press release or working with the product team in a launch plan for a release they can do a little bit of everything then over time as you start to grow you transition from the Swiss Army knives into scalpels right. Like okay we need someone who's awesome at email who can do that all day long. We need someone else who's a pro at corporate communications who can do that all day long and you know you go deeper into these areas of functional expertise. Oftentimes what I see that I think is an underrated challenge in that is that as organizations get into a team of scalpels there's a risk of losing the connective tissue and to get to scale I think that's incredibly important. You need to have a balance of functional depth and expertise but with some breadth also with some generalists and the team whose job is to coordinate what all the specialists are doing into integrated marketing campaigns and unified messaging etc. Let me pause the net for a minute. Any questions so far? Does analogies make sense? Good. Keep going. All right silence is approval. And then let's talk about the how. Here I want to just get into the details of some basic principles and then we'll bring this around and wrap up. I only have a few more pages. First of all I think it's not surprising as in most functions you can start lean. I don't think early on early stage startups need to take on a huge bloated marketing team you'll see I'll share some sample org charts in a minute and you'll see one of the one of the interesting points is I like I find sometimes startups get a product into market they get some initial traction and raise an equity round and then the mandate is like okay let's start marketing let's go find a CMO and usually my message at that point is you don't need a CMO yet right you really want a mix of doers and player coaches so I think there are ways to do this that enable and we'll get deeper into this in a minute that enable you to build the machinery while also staying true to the idea of building a lean org so generally I think it's important that you meet at least one person who's a generalist who can keep the trains running on time and mesh the machinery together and play that Swiss army knife role think you need one or more people who are going to instrument the basics around the digital funnel to make sure that you're capitalizing on whatever interest you're creating and also building out as I mentioned that process hygiene around experimentation iteration there are wise ways to leverage contractors and agencies and you know full disclosure that's a little bit of what I do right now not as an agency but with a team of fractional operators but there are some watchouts and I lived this as a CMO myself I think it's really important to be force yourself to be as precise as possible on what's a must and what's a want especially with hiring agencies a lot of agencies will offer that you know we can do this and this and this and this yes we can be your one stop shop for everything more often than not they have one or two sweet spots that they're really great at and they're not so good at the other stuff and so I would just be really sure that the if you're bringing in an agency that they're the best for the number one must that you have that you absolutely have to get right I'm a personally I'll reveal you know my bias this is exactly what we do a 621 is just a big believer in the embedded model of whether it's a contractor an agency or whomever you want them to operate as an adjunct member of your team as opposed to just a service provider you know it is early stages of the startup like buy in an engagement to what the company is trying to do or are incredibly important and it will amaze you even with direct marketing you know companies that will run your it could run your Facebook or Google ads for you how much artistry can go into their attribution and they're they're tracking so you really want to make sure that these people are working as a part of your team and invested right I just saw something pop up in the chat let me see Steven asked a question how do you evolve from early into next day into the next stage where you're a bit bigger maybe 30 employees or further on once you've been around for a decade what can a stable like a seven-year-old company learn from these principles oh you have to leave a little early got it okay Steven thank you for the question so let me see if I can pick that apart yeah so the first part about evolving to when your 30 employees in a way that's scalable and then what can yeah stable companies learn from these principles okay let me try to let's feel free to feel free to weave it into whatever you're doing I just I have to go to another meeting at 10 30 and I wanted to make sure I got a question and that's okay so I'm sorry thank you no no no that's quite a right let's do this let me get through this page because I think I'll address some of those things at least tangentially and then before we talk about the org charts we'll go back to your question thank you those are great questions yeah so then I mean this I think I could spend half an hour on which I won't but there are a lot of watchouts and working with contractors and agencies I will say for instance here's something I I lived myself as a CMO and I see a lot from companies we work with and working with PR agencies which are like wow they pitched us I lived with the senior people the managing partner say they sounded so passionate about our business I believed everything they got it and then as soon as we signed a contract I had a someone who was fresh out of university as my day to day person and they don't seem to know anymore about this than I do and so I like that's one of many I think it's super important just to to vet these companies and also to make sure that they're really hungry for your business because the reality is in the early stage of a company when you don't have a big budget you're not going to be a big profit center so to these to these outside parties so they've got to really believe that investing their time and and sweat equity in you is going to enable their business to take off as you grow so anyway I'm happy to answer more more questions on that I think and and Steven that this is one that I would argue is a often a breakdown with companies at any size or stage whether it's an early stage start-up or you know more mature business that's been around is it always amazes me like go into large marketing organizations and we'll see well we need more insights we gotta do more research more research more research and more often than not when you get under the hood you find out that that that there's a lot of insight in the building already that isn't being socialized and digested right and so and I see it I see it within marketing teams and I see it between marketing product marketing and sales et cetera et cetera where you know if the marketing team is in the front line getting customer feedback on the product on the messaging and positioning et cetera et cetera you need to make sure that what they're learning is being disseminated into the company and affecting not just the marketing but also the product roadmap is I do find that look the best orgs have people throughout the organization who are well even if it's just with friends and family they're having touchpoints with potential customers and if they're not disseminating that back into the company that's a lot of lost knowledge I do think that consistency is incredibly important as you build the team and as well as cross-functional like that I mentioned this idea of losing the connective tissue I do see a lot of times in marketing orgs like the email person is running with their plan and the paid media person has theirs and the content person has theirs but then from the customer perspective they're receiving all this and it's almost like they're receiving it from people working in three different companies right and so clarity and alignment and consistency are important is the other thing is whether it's a B2B or B2C business your customers get fatigued if you're hitting them all the time with competing messages so make sure you do it you know strategically and selectively I'm a big believer that less is more Michelle and I were talking before before we started just about the importance of fit I'd say especially in an early stage company like there's the skill set but then there's the level of like hey just is this person going to fit in our culture and especially in marketing because if they're going to be the face of your brand then Demet you want to make sure that like they're a good representation of the culture um finally I think it's incredibly important in all this to just be savvy to the fact that all of this will change and so like Stephen you asked about like whether it's 30 employees or a 70 year old company where I see a lot of them get tripped up is they're fighting the last war right like the needs of the business have changed or they've outgrown some of the talent or they've got people doing you know marketing jobs that made sense a year ago but don't make sense now and so it doesn't mean that you always have to purge the team and start over but I think at least for my my own subjective experience in marketing may be more so than some other functions you have to constantly be thinking about do we have this talented person in the right role for their skill set and how do we adapt that so look I'd say and Stephen going back to your questions the last thing I'd say is that I don't think these themes are unique to startups and I don't think they're frankly and I've seen this at various stages as an operator myself I think the threads are very common regardless of the stage of growth so I tried to I kind of chipped away at your question a few different ways did I hit the high notes is there anything else you'd like to ask them up before you have to jump yeah no that that's really helpful and I guess just as a comment what I see is that after companies have been going for a while they kind of forget the urgency of being fresh with their messaging and their marketing because they start to believe their own hype and their own marketing story if you ask and it becomes all about the company or you know of course you should come to us because we're the best and instead what you need to maybe be thinking this is my own reflection so you can correct me but you should always be thinking about how can we serve our customers how can we be it's not about us it's about them and sometimes it feels like organisations have been around for a couple decades it's all about our story rather than it's about your story so yeah I love that I agree wholeheartedly with that and you do see I think and it's very tempting particularly in companies with with a lot of with a sophisticated product that it's very tempting for your marketing just to become very self-referential right like here's what it is it's great you should love it but at the end of the day whether it's B2B or B2C you got to make sure that the person on the other end of it that it's it's addressing a problem that the person on the other end of it faces so yes I love that point and back when I showed that that image of the arrows going into the customer that was exactly you said it much more elegantly than I did so thank you and then finally I just had two more things to share and look this is all with the giant caveat that this is not meant to be the definitive way to do it but I want to just as a teaser to share this is something we use with some of our private equity partners we work with around helping them think about the early incarnations of a digitally savvy marketing world so there's one for B2B and one for B2C and thanks to what we've done here is to say look what's in blue are your highest priority hires gray probably comes next and then the one with dots if you keep growing you'll probably hire eventually but they might be places to start with contract resources right and so what you see here in B2B is making sure that early on you're building two mussels that kind of generalist corporate marketing muscle and the digital the efficient dimension and digital upswatt and so those become the places starting and you'll note both here and in the next page as I mentioned earlier you don't see the CMO or VP of marketing as the very first hire you know I think there's a lot you can do here by starting with the lieutenant level building out these are people who are player coaches who can be strategic but can also roll up their sleeves and get things done which you want to avoid is over hiring at this point where you get someone who's super senior but isn't comfortable rolling up their sleeves and doing right so I'll hit the B2C one and then you guys may have some questions on these on these org charts the B2C it looks fairly fairly similar you'll notice a couple differences here this on the left rather than corporate marketing I've combined brand and product marketing into one which over time you it's not it's not uncommon to have them segmented but it's very similar to the corporate marketing function in the B2B side as a separate head around acquisition and growth and then I do think an email someone who's actually executing and managing email and drip campaigns and all that becomes really important now what would I put here that you may not do at the beginning but I am a big believer from my own CMO experience over time this is a smart way to go that I am a believer in splitting life cycle from acquisition it's very common in marketing orgs to roll retention under a broad growth team that's very acquisition focus and the risk in that is honestly the retention priorities usually are always like the step child that doesn't get enough attention and building good unit economics I think having one team that focuses on life cycle and one that focuses on acquisition helps you and when the more discipline deeper way address cack on one end and LTV on the other let me pause there there's a lot on these two pages are there other questions I'll go back to the B2B one for a sec if anyone has questions on that you see content potentially you can do through a contract or early on too you know just what we're trying to get out here is a little bit of the sequencing you go through of like there's probably a first wave of hires then a second wave and then a third and I think that's all I've got thank you for thank you for bearing with me I know that's a lot of information to throw at you are there other questions or observations of those would be okay to actually have quite disjointed from if your current teams in New Zealand which ones would be okay sort of culturally to fit maybe up in the US or wherever a country is exporting to yeah it's a good question Michelle I mean I think I won't answer it as specific to New Zealand you know but what I would say in general as it and I didn't get into this as much here because we're you know I was thinking more through the lens of early stage but it is important as the organization grows and as businesses doing meaningful business across markets that there's that kind of the balance of centralization versus local customization right like I was talking about business yes it's SAS business yesterday it's based in Australia that's very much in the product to light growth and they're having a hard time getting that model to translate into the US right and so I think that it's not to say that you have to have boots on the ground in every single market that you're in but I think it's incredibly important to be sensitive to the cultures of the markets you're doing business and in understanding how the go-to-market model needs to vary when it comes to PR and communications you very often do need local resources who know the press and know the communication channels etc etc Yeah and then you know look I want to say that the degree of digital savvy and focus and focus on you know acquisition marketing versus brand marketing can vary by market but ultimately I'm of the mind that you know as a startup grows they're going to need a balance to those regardless nice okay Madal do you have a question Yeah yeah I had a meeting in Mellin sorry because there's a lot of background noise there sorry about that preemptively unmuted myself Yeah thanks Scott that was that was amazing thank you for that my question is possibly twofold but they might be connected so you talked early on about sort of building this machinery for organic of course growth I guess and kind of that that flywheel are there any specific roles that you think are really critical to that early stage in the context of B2C and the secondary part that question was how important do you think those content roles are I guess for B2C organisations and I see you have in those this little bit of a second priority but are they quite important in terms of that kind of flywheel for growth Thank you Madal I appreciate the question so let me make sure I heard so the first one is about building the organic flywheel and B2C and the second is about the role of content in B2C I get that Yeah exactly and I'm wondering if I was connected Yes well so on the organic flywheel you hit on one of the things we touched on in our last workshop which is one of my like things I hold very near and dear as a B2C person by background is that I think there is a big opportunity to have your early customers really be the face and mouthpiece of your brand right and to me organic the unlock on organic happens much more naturally when it's kind of in a very authentic way versus a transactional way like when transaction is like there's only so far you're going to say hey we'll pay you to make a bunch of recommendations for something that you like but don't love right I'd rather see that you have a small group of people who just love and live and breathe by your product and really want to talk about it and so you know whether it's putting them on your website or building testimonials case studies you know any opportunity for them to kind of like a very mission driven B2C business I was worked with a lot over the last couple of years they do like all their Facebook ads are basically just showcasing stories from their existing customers so to me that's the right DNA to start to start to build your organic flywheel I think what you have to get comfortable with and again we could spend hours on this topic alone is you have to be comfortable with the idea of starting a lot of little fires and a lot of them are just going to flame out right and you know it's not so much like and so you need to find a way to do it that is fairly turnkey and you know limited amount of customization so that you can do them really well right so anyway we can certainly chat more about that on content and I'm a huge believer in the power of content and this is actually both your questions are connected in a way because I do think the content can help really build organic momentum I think the mistake I see a lot of companies especially early stage companies make with their content strategy twofold one is I see this a lot in my business we'll meet companies say hey we just need content we'll say slow down a second what's the strategy behind the content and then let's populate a calendar that maps to that strategy so I do think that stepping back for a minute is helpful the other thing is really tempting and I see this a lot to make your content all promotional or almost advertising in nature talking about how great we are and how great our product offering is and look I do think that's an important part of the content strategy but it's one part of the equation I think what's equally or maybe even more important is thought leadership content where you're finding conversations in the culture that are already happening and plugging into those and providing a unique point of view on you have to be comfortable in that situation with the idea that you're not shamelessly plugging your product as much but you're building a voice for your brand is having an interesting point of view on a conversation that's happening already does that make sense like there are a lot of productivity softwares or hacks out today and it would be equivalent rather than just talking about our product and all the features work from home is a big trend here are some things we're seeing and how work from home is going and how that's influencing productivity writ large in the culture and what I like about that is that that thought leadership content is honestly much more likely to get shared because nobody likes feeling like they're being advertised to and it's much more likely that they'll say that was interesting these guys made me think of learning about your brand that answer your question yeah that's great thank you and I might reach out yeah no thank you any other questions we covered a lot of territory Michelle in a short period of time today yeah so Mellon you've got any others or Julian if you wanted to bring anything up at all yeah have you two got each another email address Scott do you want to put your consulting share yeah I'm always happy to answer more questions on this there we go and then also the recording that Scott was referring to for the last session is there on that website and then that's also the same one that you can register for brand positioning as the next session as well Mellon what does speak sense yeah if you go into that link it's yeah so we had um we've done building the marketing team was today our customer acquisition building your MVP marketing engine and then the our customer acquisition is the one to come on the 19th we've had building your MVP brand positioning thank you yeah go and check those out and yes Scott to answer your question so speak sense we're really really stage and we're based in Wellington in New Zealand and we are an AI powered direct consumer platform for fragrance so we help people find fragrances that suit them using machine learning oh cool I started my career in package goods and so we dealt with fragrance manufacturers a lot I can't say I'm an expert on it it's a fascinating space and I also know I have a terrible nose I'm not any good at judging fragrance that's very cool and I love it's fun to hear the B2C related questions good well if Julian thank you for your I see your chat not a problem at all and if either of you have further questions let me know happy to talk further on these topics