A CEO’s Guide Marketing
(The 5 Things You Need to Know)
Dave Kellogg
EIR, Balderton Capital
Principal, Dave Kellogg Consulting
Author, Kellblog
@Kellblog
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You Thought You Founded a Technolgy Company
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Why Did You Found Anyway?
Founders create a product
business that needs distribution,
… only to discover one day the
business they’re running is a
distribution business that also
makes a product
3
90th

What’s The Scariest Thing a CEO Can Hear in a QBR?
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The Marketing Session’s Up Next
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Why is The Marketing Session So Scary?
Lost in unfamiliar territory that you didn’t grow up in
Overwhelmed by a blizzard of acronyms and buzzwords
Buried in a sea of numbers (e.g., counts and conversion rates)
Confused by ill-defined terminology and process
Drawn into conflict between sales and marketing
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And maybe you’re a little
afraid to admit you don’t
understand all this
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“OK, that was great.
Next session, please.”
(and continue to live, paraphrasing Thoreau, a life of quiet marketing desperation)
So you say,
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Your Marketing Guide Today is Dave
10+ Years a CMO
● Versant ($1-15M)
● Business Objects
($30M-1B)
● Alation (gig)
10+ Years a CEO
● MarkLogic ($0-80M)
● Host Analytics ($8-50M)
10+ Years a Director
● Alation
● Aster Data (exit)
● Granular (exit)
● Nuxeo (exit)
● Profisee (exit)
● Scoro
● SMA
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5 Things Every CEO Should Know About Marketing
1. Reverse-engineer marketing from buyer empathy
2. Marketing is all about funnels
3. Models are, at best, guiding abstractions
4. Messaging is a structured FAQ
5. Use a pillar profile to hire your next marketing head
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Deriving Marketing from Buyer Empathy
The Buyer’s Question:
Why buy one or why buy yours?
● Answer incorrectly at your peril
● Listen to Gong recordings
● Read market research
● Look at category formation
● Action: custom periodic study
Buyer Consideration:
Low or high consideration?
● Price is only one criteria
● Risk, scope, oppty cost
● In PLG, only initial is auto-low
● High means “long copy sells”
● Action: mix of long/short tools
● Action: seminal white paper
PLG = product-led growth, see resources page
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Imagine You Were Buying a Solution
● Where would you go for information?
● What evaluation process would you use?
● Who you want to speak to as references?
● What third-party sites or analyst groups would you leverage?
● What process would you use to make final decision? (e.g., people)
● On what criteria would make final decision? (e.g., vendor vs. product)
Action: don’t just imagine; ask customers about the process
Action: use market research to answer these questions
And your team’s effectiveness depended on it
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Marketing is All About Funnels: Conceptual
Awareness
Consideration
Trial
Purchase
● Have you heard of X?
○ Unaided, aided
● Would you consider buying X?
○ Price, quality, positioning, fit,
reputation, substitutes
● Have you tried X?
○ Ease of trial, prioritization of trials
● Did you purchase X?
○ Bought competitor, deferred
Action: use market research to understand this
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Enterprise SaaS Funnels: Marketing & Sales
SAL (S1)
SQL (S2)
Solution Fit
Demo
Vendor of
Choice
Legal
Won
Visitors
Names
Responses
Leads
MQL
SAL
Marketing Sales
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Remember There are Four Pipegen Sources
Stage 1 Oppties
Stage 2 Oppties
Marketing
SDR
Outbound Alliances
Sales
Outbound
And document (count-based) S2 oppty generation goals for all of them
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Tips on Funnels
● Remember to create pipegen goals for all pipegen sources
○ Overallocate when starting new sources (need 200 oppties, allocate 220)
● Measure and goal pipegen by oppty count, not ARR dollars
● Make marketing the quarterback of the pipeline
○ They should forecast pipeline coverage (e.g., NQ, NQ+1) from all pipegen sources
○ Avoid R4Q analysis and the tantalizing pipeline problem
○ Owns making the plan, across sources, for fixing forecasted problems
● In general, look first at these rates (approx. ranges)
○ MQL → S1, range 5-15%
○ S1 → S2, range 60-80%
○ S2 → Won, range 15-25%
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Example rates are anecdotal from my experience; see Sirius Decisions or equivalent for data
NQ = next-quarter, R4Q = rolling 4-quarter

We Can Build Elegant, Integrated Models
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But Then Reality Hits You in the Face
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● 15 contacts
● 4 buyer roles
● 75 touches
● Nurtured up to 2 years
● Across 2 different companies
● Heard from friends
● Recommended by partners
● Saw us in search results
● Downloaded e-books
● Talked to us at a tradeshow
● Asked Gartner who to evaluate
● 20 webinar attendees
● Ran RFP process and committee
Reality is anything but linear; beware the Excel-induced hallucination

“All models are wrong, but some are useful”
-- George Box
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Using Models as Guiding Abstractions
● Build them, integrated from sales hiring to demandgen budget
○ Recognize their limitations
● Use models as tool of enlightenment, not oppression (model myopia)
○ Don’t hold executives’ feet to the fire over the model outputs
○ Hold them accountable for pipeline coverage and sales performance
● Pro tips:
○ Judge sales by capacity realization in under-staffed situations
○ Use demandgen cost in cost/oppty analysis; measure S&M effectiveness with CAC
● Action: ground yourself with these two sessions at every QBR
○ Win/loss analysis to inform why you are winning and losing deals
○ Win-touch analysis to remind you of the reality of how deals get won
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Messaging is a Structured FAQ
● Messaging is standardizing the answers to commonly asked questions
● What needs messaging?
○ Your company, your product, your new announcement, …
● What should be included in messaging? 5W+3H
○ Who?
○ What?
○ Where?
○ When?
○ Why?
○ How?
○ How much?
○ How different?
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Messaging Should be Simple, Ergo Memorable
● Impose simplicity: turn a grey reality into black and white
○ Good: we have aggregate-awareness, they don’t
○ Bad: our aggregate-awareness is better than theirs
○ Worse: only we have “true” aggregate-awareness
● On offense, you want black and white
○ Only we have Query Log Ingestion (QLI) that uses logs to improve search relevance
● On defense, you want grey (i.e., muddy the waters)
○ Well, actually we both have a Consolidation module now, ours came out last month
● Follow the Rule of Threes
○ The answer to every question is always three points
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You should be able to tell your story on a paper tablecloth

The Magic of Messaging: The Ternary Tree
Intelligence
● Query log ingestion
● Behavior analysis
engine
● Expert identification
Collaboration
● Wiki pages
● User referrals
● Conversation threads
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Remember 9 things by remembering 3 things about 3 things
Guided Navigation
● Intelligent query editor
● Real-time suggestions
● In-built governance
(Example only: similar, but not identical to the messaging of an affiliated company)
What differentiates us from the common alternative?

Conceptually, Marketing Has Four Pillars
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● Assess what you need
● Assign 1-5 points per pillar
● The trick: you only get 15 points
● There are no 20s
● There are no (5, 5, x, x)s
● I’m a (5, 3, 5, 2)
● Series A maybe (5, 4, 2, 4)
● Series E maybe (3, 5, 4, 3)
Product
Marketing
Launch
Messaging
Content
Demand
Generation
Digital
Programs
Events
Marketing
Comms
PR/AR
Stories
Brand
Sales
Development
Inbound
Outbound
Hybrid

Using Marketing Pillar Profiles
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0
1
2
3
4
5
Product Demandgen Comms SDRs
Desired Candidate 1 Candidate 2 Candidate 3

Summary and Conclusion
● Odds are you’re spending 2x+ on S&M compared to R&D
● Welcome to running a distribution business: sales, success, marketing
● Marketing need not strike fear into the hearts of the e-team
● Great marketers make it easy; bad ones obfuscate
● Remember the 5 things you need to know
1. You can reverse-engineer marketing from buyer empathy
2. Marketing is all about funnels
3. Models are, at best, guiding abstractions
4. Messaging is a structured FAQ
5. Hire your next marketing leader using pillar profiles
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THANK YOU
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Appendix
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Resources, I
● Benchmarks/comps: https://www.meritechcapital.com/public-comparables/enterprise#/public-
comparables/enterprise/valuation-metrics or https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/ or
https://blog.publiccomps.com/
● Product-led growth: https://openviewpartners.com/product-led-growth/ or
https://www.insightpartners.com/blog/product-led-growth-the-new-paradigm-in-software-selling/
● Marketing buzzwords: https://clictadigital.com/top-100-common-digital-advertising-acronyms-
abbreviations/
● Martech landscape: https://chiefmartec.com/2019/04/marketing-technology-landscape-
supergraphic-2019/
● Market research: https://kellblog.com/2021/05/15/navel-gazing-market-research-and-the-
hypothesis-file/
● Buyer question: https://kellblog.com/2018/06/13/the-two-archetypal-marketing-messages-bags-
fly-free-and-soup-is-good-food/ or https://www.productmarketinghive.com/pmm-hive-talk-with-
dave-kellogg-marketing-in-hot-and-cold-markets/
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Resources, II
● Long copy sells: https://www.businessinsider.com/if-you-think-short-copy-sells-more-think-again-
2013-5 or https://neilpatel.com/blog/david-ogilvy/
● Sample market research firms: https://toplinestrategy.com/ or https://velociti.partners/ or
https://www.kingbrown.com/
● Bradley effect (lying to pollsters): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect
● SAL/SQL name inversion: https://kellblog.com/2019/11/22/a-historical-perspective-on-why-sal-
and-sql-appear-to-be-defined-backwards/
● Inverted funnel model: https://kellblog.com/2019/12/03/why-every-startup-needs-an-inverted-
demand-generation-funnel-part-i/ and https://kellblog.com/2019/12/05/why-every-startup-needs-
an-inverted-demand-generation-funnel-part-ii/ and https://kellblog.com/2020/01/26/why-every-
startup-needs-an-inverted-demand-generation-funnel-part-iii/
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Resources, III
● Pipeline forecasting and coverage: https://kellblog.com/2019/09/29/ive-got-a-crazy-idea-how-
about-we-focus-on-next-quarters-pipeline/ or https://kellblog.com/2021/04/30/using-this-next-all-
quarter-analysis-to-understand-your-pipeline/ or https://kellblog.com/2021/04/29/using-to-go-
coverage-to-better-understand-pipeline-and-improve-forecasting/
● Funnel conversion firms: https://www.siriusdecisions.com/ (now Forrester) or
https://www.gartner.com/en/topo-now-gartner (now Gartner) or https://clozeloop.com/
● Sales bookings capacity model: https://kellblog.com/2020/02/15/how-to-make-and-use-a-proper-
sales-bookings-productivity-and-quota-capacity-model/
● Messaging / imposing simplicity: https://kellblog.com/2020/03/08/a-missive-to-marketing-
impose-simplicity/
● SDR reporting: https://kellblog.com/2019/11/26/should-sdrs-report-to-sales-or-marketing/
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Resources, IV
● Me rambling on marketing: https://kellblog.com/2020/12/09/chatting-about-marketing-slides-
from-a-pe-portfolio-company-ceo-summit/ or https://kellblog.com/2020/08/28/how-to-get-sales-
and-marketing-working-together-presentation/ or https://kellblog.com/2021/09/05/appearance-
on-the-yes-and-marketing-podcast/
● Positioning: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006B7LQ90/
● Sales: https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons-ebook/dp/B09236J2XX
● Persuasion: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-New-Expanded-Psychology-Persuasion-
ebook/dp/B08HZ57WYN/ or https://www.amazon.com/Words-That-Work-What-People-
ebook/dp/B000Q9J0K6
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Resources, V (Books)
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Five marketing classics (my brand-manager daughter’s Christmas present)
See
https://kellblog.com/2019/02/28/the-three-marketing-books-all-founder-ceos-should-read/
https://kellblog.com/2014/06/15/ten-classic-business-books-for-entrepreneurs-startup-founders/ Revised to swap out a more
pop marketing book for
Crossing the Chasm