How to Hire a B2B Saas Marketing Leader

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: I'm Mark Evans, and welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less. Successful marketing happens for many different reasons, but I would suggest that one of the keys is a strong partnership between the CEO and the head of marketing. It's an area that I'm excited to explore with Aditya Khotadiya, CEO of Avoma, which delivers insight to salespeople and marketing by recording, transcribing, and analyzing conversations at scale with AI. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Aditya Khotadiya: Thanks, Mark. This was a really great introduction, and excited to be here.

Mark Evans: As I said off the top, one of the keys to marketing success is a partnership between the CEO and the head of marketing. Now you recently hired a new director of marketing. Can you give me some insight about the recruiting and hiring process? How did you do the search? How long does it take? And how do you see creating that win-win partnership? A loaded question, many different aspects, but I would be really interested in learning about that whole journey from having no head of marketing to having a new head of marketing.

Aditya Khotadiya: It's a loaded question, and it was also an interesting journey how we hired Yash. And it also came based on a lot of mistakes I had made in my previous attempts of hiring. So this is it would be unfair to say this was the first time we tried to hire. There were a few attempts I had done in the past, and they did not work out. And the number one lesson I had learned back then based on those experiences was you need to hire for the fit for the company of the stage where you are at. And it was not about the reason that some of the previous candidates did not work out was not about they were not great candidates, but because they were probably mismatched in between the expectations or they were great at a certain stage of the company and where we are at. So one of the goals that I had was to find someone who is a hustler at this early stage company, who can have more generalist approach rather than a specialist approach. So look for that kind of personality as well. The story with Yash is unique enough. It happened in a way where one of the things that and this was, I think, three years ago or two years ago, when Yash was working at his previous company, it was Freshchat, where he was heading the marketing department there. And I was using Intercom back then and had some concerns about Intercom's pricing, so I complained about it on Twitter. Yash pinged me on Twitter individually and tried to book a meeting with me, explained, tried to address my concerns that I had with Intercom. And I remembered that conversation two years ago. And I was like, this guy is in marketing. He needs to worry about scaling, bringing more traffic at scale, why he is hustling at an individual tweet level and trying to convert me as a customer. Since then, we got connected on LinkedIn, Twitter, so, but I kept watching him, all his content. We kept engaged for the last year and a half. And so and the more we started knowing each other, I realized that we need to bring him to push our brand, explain customers what we do, which we were lagging. We were not doing a great job of doing that. And so that's kind of how it was a unique process, but I realized that he's the perfect fit for the stage that we have, and that hustler mindset was important to me. And also, he's just too nice of a guy, has been building a great brand for himself, working with a lot of the community leaders. And I felt that also is a value that I would learn how to build community for what we are building. So those are the reasons we ended up bringing in Yash. To your second part of the question, how you have the win-win situation, it's a we are still early in our journey, but the way I felt was when I started chatting with Yash, I told him, look. You have certain strengths, and I would love to learn from those. And I would want to have you continue to drive and teach me what you're doing and what you're passionate about. If I try to step in and try to give him more chores or tasks and not play to his strengths, I'm going to add more of a hurdle. So I told him that the number one thing that you should do is play to your strengths, which is content, brand building, evangelizing. That's what you love, storytelling. Continue to do that. We will continue to hire other resources in other areas over the period. But that's kind of how I'm trying to play to his strengths, support him for the things that he's not great at or he probably doesn't want to do a lot more work. We'll continue to work through that process. That's how I think about it. We'll see how it gets executed over the period, though.

Mark Evans: It's interesting because I think an important element of that partnership creation is establishing the rules of engagement. And so both parties know what the expectations are, what the journey is going to be like, how you measure success, what the feedback process is going to be like. Because a lot of relationships between CEOs and marketers fall apart when you're misaligned. When the CEO has certain expectations and they fail to materialize, and it's a it becomes a blame game more than a partnership. What went wrong? Why didn't you do the job? Why aren't you doing your job better? Whereas it should be, how can we do better? How can we as a team improve going forward? What do we need to look at? What kind of different approaches do we need to take? Do you take that into consideration when you're going to be establishing a new partnership with Yash?

Aditya Khotadiya: Absolutely. And this is a great point that you brought, Mark. One of the things that the way when Yash came on board, we had not worked together in the past. So the first thing I said, look. Right now, you look up to the world in a certain way. You have certain role models. You have built your own philosophies, your value system based on what you have observed, read so far. I have done the same. I have some different role models. I've looked up to what I believe in the concept. And so maybe there's a mismatch right now. So what we need to do as a first thing in the first few weeks is to help us understand each other, what you, how you get inspired from, what you like to follow more in the world, and share those stories with me so that I will understand his context. I will understand when he recommends something, when he provides a feedback, instead of thinking that, oh, this is Yash's feedback, and then that's very self-centered kind of thinking that you think about it. But now if I have a little bit more context, why did Yash suggest this thing? Oh, because he followed these principles, because he believes in this kind of value system, now I have better understanding and better context where he's coming from. Same, I actually suggested to Yash that this is how I think about it. These are the things that I believe in this. These are my values, belief systems. And the more he has understanding about those, now we don't have to do an explanation. When we give feedback, Yash knows that where I'm coming from. That's kind of one of the things that we started aligning ourselves to really be going back and forth. You also talked about goals and all of those things. There's also a point of view that I told him this is what the company needs to go. This is where we want to go. What do you think? So there is a combination of bottom-up. We're getting inputs from him. This is where we are at. And if you want to jump to this level, how much of this is accomplishable? Can we do this? And I might have a very high expectation as a CEO, but I want to make sure that when he comes on board, he doesn't get scared away because of those ambitious goals or lofty goals that we might have. And there's a path also to probably you can get aggressive goals later on once he understands the rest of the ecosystem or product nuances, then he would be able to build up. Giving these ambitious goals for the first few weeks or first months or quarters is going to be failing him or setting him up for failure itself. So that's kind of how I also think about the goal setting itself is a collaborative process. You can't just say that, hey. This is where we want to go. Go figure it out. That's where, again, you're going to set up the leaders for the failure itself.

Mark Evans: It was interesting that earlier this week, Spencer Stuart issued a study looking at the lifespan of the typical CMO, and it actually fell by one month to 40 months. So they barely last a little more than three years, whereas the average tenure for a CEO is 6.5 years. Curious given that you've been an entrepreneur for a long time is why do you think that CMOs don't last very long? It's they're almost hired to be fired. Is it a lack of patience, a lack of understanding of marketing, the pace of business is so fast? How do you explain that?

Aditya Khotadiya: Honestly, it would be difficult to say that I know it all in this particular area. And the way I still think about it, I've also worked at larger companies where these situations have happened. So considering those lenses, the way I think about these things is that it's less about if the CEOs or the CMOs are great at the skills that they are at. It goes back to me, it's the alignment between the CEO and the CMO where CEOs or even general founders, when you think about it, they have a lot of ownership mindset that they are basically carrying this Atlas shrug on their shoulders, and they feel like the whole weight is on their shoulder to make the company successful. And so that end-to-end ownership mindset is what CEO thinks about. They are thinking about product. They're thinking about sales, customer experience, and all of those things. So when they're thinking about the company positioning story, the vision, they have a lot bigger perspective and bigger context. If the CEO has that perspective, the question is that how the other leaders in the company would have those perspective as well, have their context as well. The misalignment happens because when the CMO is trying to put some agenda that they might have, or personal agenda that they're trying to bring in versus trying to put the company first, trying to understand the context of the interim vision that the CEO had. Once you understand the CEO's visions really well, then you can still take the ownership and start executing those as well. When you see that friction, that gap is there between the vision that the CEO has and if the marketing leader is not executing based on that context, that's when I feel that CEO eventually figures out that, hey. Maybe this is not working. I'm trying to communicate these things, and then I'm not seeing the results. But the results are not being seen sometimes because of this lack of the understanding itself. And that's how I still see. But, honestly, there are many factors could go wrong as well. But at least what comes top of my mind, this is something I would say.

Mark Evans: Let's shift gears a little bit and move to the idea that many companies need to be customer-centric, more customer-centric than ever. How much should product and marketing listen to customers and when should companies not listen to customers? And I think of a quote by Henry Ford who once said, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. So as you develop your product and move forward, how much do you weigh what customers tell you versus what your vision is for the company and the product?

Aditya Khotadiya: Excellent question. The way I think about this is, Mark, it's not a single, simple answer for every situation. This is also where I feel that you have to break it down into strategic level and then at the tactical level. At the strategic level, vision level, you got to have a point of view as a founder, as a company. You cannot dictate that, do that based on what competitors are telling you, what customers are telling you. So you have to have your north star point of view. This is why the world is broken. This is why the world needs to be better and for your future. This is what the ideal state I would want to see if the world exists. You've got to have that. But at the tactical level, that's where you need to listen to the customer. So you have to have vision from your founder point of view, from the product point of view. But then when you're trying to deploy that strategy and try to deploy it into the hands of the customers, that's when if you don't listen, you're going to fail. So when the customer-centric thing is about if a customer gives a feedback, is it still aligned with your vision? If yes, listen to it. And try to implement that feedback into your existing vision. And as long as it's part of their vision, you make that experience based on how they are going to experience the product or service that you're providing. But on the other hand, if it's off that vision that you have, then you don't need to listen to their feedback. And that's when I would say that you need to take this from a two different lenses point of view. And I've seen this. This also helps, to be honest, the way I might be biased here. I came from a product management experience and background, and I do believe that having that product mindset does help you. If you're coming from just purely from the sales experience background, it might be a little bit of a challenge because you're going to overemphasize what customers are telling you. And you have to have that habit of being curious when customers say that I need this. You need to bring that extra level of curiosity. Why do you need this? And you ask three or four levels of questions to truly understand the need. And then once you understand the true need, what they have, you would be able to address their need in some other solution that you might have which fits into your vision. That's another way of kind of finding the balance between what customers are saying and still trying to make sure that you have a vision-centric view as well.

Mark Evans: One of the reasons why I believe you hired Yash is to raise the company's profile to become more embedded in the community to have a very high profile evangelist who can talk about Avoma and your category. But I'm also curious about the challenges facing companies in competitive marketplaces to break through to prospects because prospects are being inundated with marketing and sales and all kinds of other content these days. One of the areas that I wanted to ask you about is cold outreach because it gets a bad rap. Cold email, cold telephone calls, almost surprising prospects rather than approaching people who are warm or have brand awareness. What are your thoughts about the whole idea of cold? Cold marketing, cold sales?

Aditya Khotadiya: Honestly, it became a bad rap because how we have executed it. I don't think you cannot not have cold outbound strategy as a company if you're building something and educating something. And I also think about it's less of a sales problem. It's more of a marketing problem as well. Think about cold marketing or cold email is nothing but a free ad that you're doing and directly trying to reach out to somebody's inbox. At the end of the day, it's an ad kind of a concept. But to think about it, I get literally 50 emails every single day. Somebody's trying to sell me cold email. What, you know, what's happening? 45 out of those 50 emails are going to Google's spam box automatically without me having to do anything. Only probably four or five emails are reaching to my inbox. Why is it happening? Because we are starting to do a lot more of this personalization, automation, and all of that stuff. But at the end of the day, we are just doing automation at scale. And people are not being thoughtful, research-oriented, trying to not get personal as much. We have also, as a company, we have started implementing cold outbound strategy as well. And when we hired a few folks, early on, their expectation was, Aditya, we're going to get 30 to 40% open rate for cold email. That's the standard. That's what we have seen in the industry works. And I said that's ludicrous. I mean, you cannot operate trying to burn these bridges, trying to reach out to these people. Think about it. If there are only 40% people who are opening your emails, then the funnel starts from there. Only a few people are going to be interested and all of that stuff. We have implemented some frameworks, some strategies where we said, okay. How can we make it personalized? One of the simplest hacks, Mark, we implemented was that every single subject line needs to be unique to the prospect, that nobody else, that subject line should not resonate with someone else. That simple hack changed our open rates from 40% that the expectation was to 80% to 90%. It is unheard, and this is not once in a while we have seen it. Consistently, get open rates for cold email to 80%, 90%. And then once people open the email, they see the whole personalization the way we do. They get a delighted experience, and they see that they reply to us that, hey. This is one of the best cold emails I've seen. Again, when we hired sales reps, they had never seen this. They told me, I think we've never got responses like this. Because it was executed badly in some other organization, that's what people believe that that's what the world we expect and we should live in. But if you put a bit of personalization, and these are also we are able to scale it. We're able to not only send hundreds of emails every day, but we are able to send 30, 40 emails every day. I would rather take that shot than trying to send too many emails and have only less kind of automated responses or automated emails and not get any responses. So that's how I think, I mean, I still believe in the value of cold. We have booked deals. We have closed deals purely from the cold outbound. So I cannot control or convince enough that, hey. Why you have to continue to invest in cold? Because that's how you're able to control who you are going after. Inbound, I don't control who's coming to inbound to me. Yes. We might educate through the marketing messaging, but if you want to go after larger customers, if you want to go after increase our average contract value, we know who are those customers, and we will rather better control that journey rather than be waiting for inbound leads to come to us. So that's how I still think I extremely believe in cold email, cold outreach. It's just that it needs to be done right.

Mark Evans: Curious about whether you're using templates to do cold outreach or whether every single of those 30 to 40 emails is completely personalized.

Aditya Khotadiya: We use templates, but the way we do it, those templates do have custom variables there. And the personalization is not that I saw you on LinkedIn or just adding your first name tag and the company name tag and try to make that a personalized thing. We try to do the research. There's a prospecting research phase where we do, hey. These are the things that we have observed customers' LinkedIn page, their company page, and we try to put those variations of different observation that we have done into a spreadsheet. We try to give at least four to five minutes to each of this research. And then through that research, then, obviously, those fields map to the actual templates that we have. So that we will not be spending way too much time in sending these personalized emails, but when a prospect receives those emails, they find it very research-heavy. They find it very personal to what they're doing. And we're also not stalking people, hey. I saw you like rugby or football and try not to get too personal. That's not really personalization. To me, it's more about relevancy. Looking at what initiatives are happening in their company and then anticipating, hey. You have done these things recently. You've announced these features in your blog. You've announced these hiring requirements. Based on that, we anticipate you might have these needs. Is this something that you would be open to learning more? And even starting a conversation, we are also not trying to book a meeting in the first meeting. It's a no-no for me. You try to get one 15-minute call right there in the first meeting. We have a concept of warm-up phase. First week or two, we just try to warm up the lead with sharing information, asking information. And then after those warm-up phases, then we go hard-selling phase in the cold email in the sequences. We do use sequences. We use templates. That's where the scaling comes in, but we want to make sure that we don't lose the touch of personalization, the relevance, when we are reaching out to these prospects.

Mark Evans: So on one hand, you've got sales doing cold outreach and other forms of connecting with customers. And then you've got marketing, building community, creating content, developing sales and marketing collateral. How do the two departments work together? Because in many organizations, they operate as silos. Marketing doesn't talk to sales. Sales doesn't talk to marketing. Sales complains that marketing's leads are crap. Marketing complains that sales can't close. In an ideal world, they're sitting side by side. They're comparing notes. They're working together. Is that something you think about when it comes to Avoma?

Aditya Khotadiya: Oh, absolutely. I have lived with this pain in my previous companies, and I want to make sure that when we are building this organization, this doesn't become an afterthought. A lot of times what happens is that when it's too late, when the problem is already there, and if it's too late, it gets even harder to fix it. So the best way is to start when you're already starting from day one itself. To me, Mark, the way I think about these things, there's no single silver bullet that will fix this problem. The way I think about this problem is threefold. There are people itself, the crux of it. Then there are processes that you build in the company to collaborate and work. And lastly, I call this as platforms as well. What platforms or tools that you're using? So when you think about it, first of all, people itself, you've got to identify what are the motivations of these individuals who are there at the leadership level, how connected they are with the company's mission, company's vision. When they operate, when they propose some ideas, you can sense that are they self-centric, or are they trying to put the company as a first center? The more people are self-centric and have their own agendas, that's when the more silos start happening. People try to operate in their own ways. And you identify people who are thinking about these things at a company level, put the company first, then you would see more collaboration happens. So that's the first thing. I continue to observe what kind of people are we bringing in, how do they operate. And if they're not doing at the same level, then you give feedback to them. That's the number one thing I would do. Obviously, then processes come in as well. What processes have you implemented? Are they defined, documented? If they're not, and at an early stage company, we struggle with that too much as well because these processes are being built as we go as well. But if you don't put a little bit of thought ahead of time, then you're going to see people are working ad hoc in any manner that they want. And so documenting certain processes, and then it should not be a lot of policies or restrictions, then you're again adding more friction. But as long as you talked about it, hey. This is the expectation between the collaboration. Every week, we review these numbers. Every week, we talk about the wins and failures here. And it's not about pointing fingers. It's about identifying who made a mistake. It's about how do we improve upon it next? What do we need to do as a change as a company? So having those retrospectives is extremely important for us. So we try to have those conversations so that everyone gets aligned. That's another process that we define different mechanisms, meetings, documentation, all of those things could happen. Lastly, it comes down to platforms as well. Most of the problems I've seen happen because people are trying to access information, and they don't have access to that information. So marketing is living in one different tool, and sales is living in a different tool, and both of them are not able to access that information easily unless marketing has to chase salespeople, let's meet, and then share only that information, then it becomes extra work. If you let people access information by themselves and have tools adopt tools which are collaborative in nature, you would see even more people start sharing information with each other. So to me, one of the reasons we started Avoma was exactly that, that we felt that customer-facing conversations are being only held by salespeople only or they were only having access. What we wanted to do was to democratize that intelligence that salespeople are having and have marketing people to listen to the voice of the customer firsthand rather than listening to it from the subjective opinion that the salesperson might bring in. We also let that information be heard by product people and other engineering teams. That's how we're trying to believe that the more tools and platforms you have, these collaborative platforms, you would see more collaboration between these two teams as well.

Mark Evans: I do a lot of work with B2B SaaS companies around positioning, help them tell a better, stronger, more compelling narrative. And I'm curious to see how much effort that Avoma has invested in positioning and messaging. Is it something that you thought about while you've moved the company forward, while you've tried to improve your marketing and sales?

Aditya Khotadiya: This is such an excellent question. I actually think about this pretty constantly. And there's a reason we did struggle for a while to define ourselves who we are, what we want to do, because it happens. Right? So if you don't define your own point of view, what you're trying to build as your positioning, someone else will start building it for you. And then that might be too late for you as well. Then you get pigeonholed into some sort of category that's being created. And there are a lot of things that we think about. So do we create our own category, or do we try to stay in the existing category and try to differentiate in the same category? And there's also a notion of, okay, you have an ambition to create your own category. Who doesn't want to create a category and be number one in that category? But can you support it from a resources point of view, financial point of view? It's not just you come up with a name for your company and then suddenly it becomes a category. You have to invest in that. You have to educate the world. Do you have resources financially, team-wise, every single thing to educate the world and/or analysts and all of those things? So to me, it has been a challenge for us where we wanted to explain ourselves differently, but we were struggling to do that. And that's why I do keep constantly seeing how we are evolving as a company, how competitors are evolving, where do we compete, what are our strengths? Just because our competitors started positioning themselves in some way, is that our strength? What are our strengths? Do we play by our strengths or not? And so those are the things I constantly think about. And positioning is extremely important for me. It's how we are able to explain customers who we are, why we stand. And I'm not saying that the positioning's goal is not to please everyone. It's to attract customers who believe in our vision. We will say no to a lot of customers, and they'll go to our competitors, totally fine, because that's what they believe in, and that's what competitors do. We don't have those things. We will stay away from that positioning, and we will try not to convince those customers to buy us and eventually get disappointed. So it helps for me to convince our team because they'll come and ask me, Aditya, we compete with these, these, these. What do we do exactly? And so I have to have that clarity in my thinking to explain them, okay. We have these sets of customers. How does Avoma fit into all of these things? So it helps me to communicate to my team, have them aligned, and that alignment is helpful when we make the product decisions, when we decide what areas we need to invest. So again, positioning is extremely important. It's not just for the marketing copy, but it goes beyond that marketing copy, a landing page copy to how you want to execute as well.

Mark Evans: Final question, just for fun. Have you read a great book recently?

Aditya Khotadiya: I did. The recent book I read, and I'm learning tennis right now, and one of the books I've read called The Inner Game of Tennis. Now it sounds like it's about tennis, but the book is about in hindsight, it was all about the business learning. The book was about how do you perform at tennis when you are at peak performance. And the idea was that it's not just following the routine that you have, but trying to think about your inner game. When that level of peak performance is achieved only when you're not forcing yourself and you're letting it happen. And what it means by that, as you do more and more of these things, it becomes a habit. It becomes natural to you. If you start observing that, hey. I want to play forehand this particular way, and if you put more emphasis on putting the forehand, then you're not really executing. You're making it happen. The book was saying, 'Let it happen.' Just let your hand tell your brain, and your brain will go and make those actions. And there was a lot of great learnings. I started learning about how do we run a company? How do we do these things? What are my strengths? There are a lot of tasks I don't enjoy doing it, and I'm forcing myself to do that. And I don't end up doing the best work in that particular area. For example, the whole community building. I might not be the best person. That's exactly what I knew. We need to hire someone who is best at it. They enjoy doing that, and I would rather do something that I'm best at. And that's kind of that book was a short book. I really loved it, and I'm going to actually reread that book one more time just to again comprehend because I initially, when I started reading it, was about tennis coaching. Once I read it, I'm like, wow. There are a lot of other lessons here. How do we run life? How do we run business? That I need to reread that book again.

Mark Evans: I'm also an avid tennis player, and I have read the book Timothy Gallwey. And it is interesting because he started off as a tennis pro in this little country club and developed this methodology or this process of teaching people how to play tennis. And then he got hired by companies around leadership and motivation and corporate culture, and it is a great story. And for anyone, even if you're not a good tennis player or you're not a tennis player period, it's a must-read. I want to ask you, if people are interested in learning more about you and Avoma, where do they go?

Aditya Khotadiya: My email address is the best one. As long as you send my personal email, I will always reply. So it's aditya at avoma dot com, aditya@avoma.com, or find me on LinkedIn. That's Aditya Khotadiya on LinkedIn. Just search me, and you should be able to find me.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe by iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Aditya, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to mark@markevans.ca. I'll talk to you next time.