If you've ever felt like you're shouldering the weight of your company's growth goals with limited resources, too little credit, and way too many hats, this episode is for you.
This one is a special rerun of my appearance on the Tech Success Stories podcast, where the host, Agil, asked about the journey that shaped Growth Activated: ten years scaling a B2B services company from $50M to $750M, a hard reset at a $1M ARR startup, and everything those two stages taught me about marketing leadership, hiring, and keeping a seat at the executive table. I loved this conversation, and the questions pulled stories out of me that I rarely get to tell in this much detail.
Why do CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite?
Because too many of us stay locked into marketing instead of locked into the business.
A few days before this conversation was recorded, I was speaking at a conference and asked a room full of marketing leaders to raise their hands if they could tell me what their CEOs and CFOs report to the board: the numbers beyond revenue, like customer churn, retention, and profitability. So many marketing leaders never get into those numbers with their executive partners, and that disconnect shows up directly in how long we keep our seats.
"CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite, and I truly think it's because we aren't locked into the business."
Marketing leaders earn influence by thinking like business leaders, and the modern version of the role looks a lot more like the chief market orchestrator Matt Heinz and I talked about than a channel owner with a bigger title. The shift pays off.
"Marketing becomes really easy when you know your business, your customer, and your market really well."
What does scaling a B2B company from $50M to $750M teach you about marketing?
It taught me that marketing earns influence when it is built around enterprise value, and it showed me the ceiling of running a function on tactics alone.
I spent ten years at a B2B professional services company while we scaled from $50M to $750M through both organic growth and acquisitions, running the full end-to-end marketing function with a team of about 25. At that scale you learn what it takes for marketing to operate at the level of the business, with a hand in everything that drives enterprise value.
Then I did the opposite. I jumped from a $750M company to a $1M ARR SaaS startup that had just raised $10M in funding, joining as head of growth strategy and operations. Sitting outside the marketing seat opened my mind to a much bigger picture: how marketing fits into the broader company, and how different the building stage is from the scaling stage. Living both is what shaped how I advise companies today.
How do you know if you are burnt out on marketing or on how it is being run?
Ask whether the exhaustion comes from the craft itself or from the system around it.
I hit a point in my corporate career where I was SO burnt out that I walked away from a company I loved. It took the startup detour for me to see what was underneath that feeling.
"During that time, I realized it wasn't that I was burnt out on marketing. It was that I was burnt out on how marketing was being done for most companies."
This is the hill I will die on: the problem is rarely the craft. It is the system marketing operates inside. We spend our careers getting great at content, SEO, or whatever our specialty is, and we rarely learn how to be marketing executives. Naming that gap is what Growth Activated was built to fix.
What gets lost when marketing is reduced to lead generation?
Product marketing, brand, and thought leadership, the areas carrying some of marketing's biggest long-term ROI.
One of the things that worries me most from a talent perspective is watching businesses relegate marketing to a pure lead generation function. CEOs are predominantly demanding demand gen, so demand gen is what gets budgeted, hired, and measured.
"Product marketing is one of the most overlooked hires at the early stage, arguably one of the most important hires you can make."
Underneath it all is a measurement gap. We have over-salesified our metrics to the point where everything ties back to lead generation, and I broke down where that leads in my episode on the 7 mistakes marketing leaders make when proving ROI to the C-suite.
"No matter what company I walk into, the CEO and CFO say they want marketing to produce ROI, but the second you ask them what that means, they can't define it."
We have not figured out a shared operating model for marketing ROI as an industry, and that gap is a big part of why I built the CMO Operating System: one architecture for how marketing runs, reports, and scales.
How should you hire marketing talent for a scaling B2B company?
Hire for growth mindset and business curiosity first, functional skill second.
When I evaluate marketing talent, I look for people who are willing to learn, ambitious, and open to change. Hire them for the great skill set they bring, and screen just as hard on whether they are open and strategic enough to think about the bigger picture. It starts with us as CMOs too: we have to stay connected to the business and communicate those goals down and across so the whole team rallies around them.
One habit I have kept for every marketing hire I have ever made, from coordinator to executive director: I ask them to give a presentation on their area before we hire them.
"There's nothing quite like seeing someone do the job before you hire them."
What is the biggest sales hiring mistake early-stage startups make?
Hiring great salespeople who are the wrong fit for the stage.
When I ran the full growth team at that SaaS startup, sales included, we brought in people with incredible track records from established companies: clear product-market fit, strong enablement, solid messaging, a proven playbook. We were a $1M ARR company figuring things out daily, with a product that changed almost weekly and personas that kept shifting. That environment takes a unique breed of salesperson who can operate in constant ambiguity.
"The biggest mistake we made wasn't that we hired bad salespeople. It was that we hired great salespeople who were the wrong fit for our stage."
My advice for avoiding the same trap: do not skip reference checks, run multiple interviews, and watch candidates do the work before you hire them. The cost of a bad hire runs far higher than the cost of a thorough process.
"I think about it as 'team member debt,' similar to technical debt. You keep hiring and onboarding people who weren't the right fit, and that debt compounds."
And balance the rigor with kindness. Be transparent with candidates upfront about what your process looks like and why. A long process handled with honesty strengthens your employer brand instead of hurting it.
Why is executive alignment on growth strategy a competitive advantage?
Because most leadership teams agree on the goal while disagreeing on how to get there, and that gap gets expensive.
"A lot of companies have an overarching company goal but are rarely aligned on how they're going to get there."
Department leaders go off and build their own roadmaps, and they rarely come back together to make sure those roadmaps integrate. Marketing relies on product. Product relies on marketing. Sales needs both. At the startup I joined, the CEO and CTO shared the vision but split on the path: one wanted product-led growth, the other wanted sales-led growth. We ran out of money while trying to figure it out.
That experience is why alignment is the first thing I push for in any new seat, and it is the backbone of how I think about the first 90 days as a CMO.
"Pushing for alignment and collaboration has been a superpower for me throughout my career."
How do you stay agile without losing the long-term strategy?
Hold the long-term vision steady and flex the tactics underneath it.
Things are changing fast, and AI is changing daily. Marketing tends to be long-term and strategic, which is part of how we differ from sales, and that can make agility feel like a threat to the plan. The failure mode I watch for is the opposite one: throwing out the long-term vision and falling onto a hamster wheel of activity-based execution, with no one asking whether any of it moves the business.
Balancing agility with strategic clarity is something I am constantly thinking about, for my clients and for myself. I am still figuring some of this out too, and I hope hearing the full journey helps you design your own next chapter. Thanks to Agil and the Tech Success Stories team for such a fun conversation!