Last week, Front CMO Anthony Kennada sat down with The Official SaaStr Podcast host Harry Stebbings to talk all things marketing — from his career path, to the relationships between marketing and sales, horizontal marketing, how to beat your industry’s incumbents, and more. You can listen to the full recording below, but we’ve pulled a few quotes from the episode to give you a taste of what’s in store!
Sign up for a number to strengthen your relationship with sales
Sales and marketing teams are notorious for having a shaky relationship, and often it’s due to lack of alignment. Kennada says that’s why signing up for a number with the sales team is so important: you automatically align your teams’ goals. That way, marketing can enable sales with the right messaging, build the right collateral, and help do what it takes to get deals across the line.
“The best way to debug the relationships between marketing and other orgs is to have marketing sign up for some type of number to align incentives and accountability. We signed up for a pipeline coverage number at Front to show that we’re in this together with the sales team; our success is dependent on their success. This idea of very tight interlock between organizations is super important.”
In order to beat the incumbents, you have to lead with the “why”
Every industry has incumbents – the companies that have been around the longest, have the lion’s share of the market, and have the longest standing product. But as we all know – giants can fall. What’s one way to beat these incumbents? Make sure to always lead with your “why.”
“The best challenger brands being developed today fundamentally understand that the best shot they have to beat the incumbents is to lead with the ‘why.’ Customers ultimately buy products emotionally, even in B2B. Building an emotive, authentic brand in enterprise SaaS can really help accelerate growth unlike any other vector in the marketing stack.”
Develop messaging in a hierarchy
For marketers, if all your work is a tree, your brand messaging is the roots. So much of your strategy is based on it. When you’re developing your messaging, you need to have top-level messaging that works across industries and verticals and personas — all the types of customers you have. This high level messaging is what unites your brand and gives the world one view of your company.“
In our case at Front, we’re exploring at the highest level the human experience at work. But once you go down a layer or two, you can assign specific sets of messaging to relevant industries that’s informed by that higher level story. It’s not easy, but if a brand can unlock it… it’s a very powerful story that can pull the masses into this movement that you’re trying to create.”
Unlock your CEO’s inner CMO
At the end of the day, your CEO’s vision and perspective drives a great deal of your marketing strategy. As a CMO, you then have to think about how you can harness that vision and translate it to your prospects, customers, and community.
“It’s our job as marketers is to go and bring the CEO’s vision to the world. So what matters most is to unlock what’s authentic to those CEOs. If the primary currency a CEO has is time, we have a role to play to scale this authentic connection out to the world. If we do this right, it becomes a superpower.”
Listen to this episode on The Official SaaStr Podcast, Spotify, Apple and wherever else you get your podcasts.
Written by Paul Chalker
Originally Published: 17 April 2020