I’m STOKED for you to meet today’s guest, he is a go-to-market LEGEND.
Marketing Bestie, meet Mike Wolber.
Currently the Chief Revenue Officer at Rent Dynamics, Mike is responsible for the go-to-market strategy spanning Marketing, Sales, and Account Management.
It’s safe to say he’s got his toes dipped in every aspect of go-to-market.
I had the pleasure of asking Mike the juiciest go-to-market Q’s on The Marketing Millennials Podcast, here’s what he had to say in his own liiiightly edited words.
1. Marketing’s role in revenue:
“I’m a sales guy that believes deeply in the power of marketing. I’ve seen it work firsthand at every business I’ve been part of.
Like you, I’m a consumer of marketing and I spend a lot of time falling in love with brands because of the role that marketing plays in building and capturing demand (YESSS).
Marketing makes it easier for your business to find revenue, if that’s through sales or inbound. Our business has grown from 8 people now to 45.
We’ve seen a powerful impact from scaling our marketing team, simply from making it easier to get into doors.
Some of it is measurable, some of it’s hard to measure and we’re comfortable with both sides because our business has grown remarkably.
It’s also been fun to see Marketing’s impact on the internal and external side of the business. When I first joined the team, it was hard to get into new opportunities, our efforts were very much an outbound motion.
We saw an opportunity to do some new things, especially efforts that would be easy to measure, like email marketing, paid advertising, and thought leadership.
But also doing things that we’re much harder to measure. Lots of activity on social media, conferences, and podcasts.
We’ve really kitchen-sinked the business over the past couple of years, our brand and reputation has grown, making it much easier to get into new deals.
(Just making it happen, I love it.)
The inbound motion has taken off as well, making recruiting easier thanks to our reputation that’s deep and wide within our niche and industry.Reputation is a superpower.
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2. Go-to-market choreography:
The full-fledged flow is marketing -> outbound -> sales -> implementation -> CX.
Marketing is the funnel, they own awareness, category creation, demand, and pipeline. Rather than tying them to an MQL type number, they’re totally tied to pipeline (this is HUGE).
If their efforts are not tying into actual sales accepted pipeline, marketing’s not performing. If they get a bunch of webinar downloads, it’s only if they convert into the sales pipeline that we chalk it up as a success.
Look at marketing as the pipeline function, but it is also much bigger than that.
They’re involved in every aspect of the business.
We have product marketers, social media marketers, and two people that focus on our B2B as well as our B2C arm.
We have a demand gen person who owns HubSpot and they do all of our outbound when it comes to content and email.
We’ve had a ton of success building an outbound team with hyper personalization and we prioritize sales engagement.
They’re fully focused on qualified meetings, so they work with marketing and with sales.
And then sales is our full cycle sales org, we have 9 people that are in territory and then have a lean implementation team.
We really focus the implementation team on speed to revenue, making sure that after closing, there is a predictable process and fast to bill
3. Perfecting your go-to-market strategy:
We do a lot of after-action reviews after conferences, to make sure if there are any lessons we can apply to the next.
(If you aren’t learning, you’re losing.)
Every department in our company does a monthly roll up to the CEO that the entire executive team joins.
We believe in progress over perfection. It’s all over our core values to make sure that we go fast. Speed, especially in marketing, is a weapon. (This is my entire motto, I CANNOT emphasize this sentiment enough!)
Rather than debating adjectives, font, and color (which matter), moving quickly and being able to follow the signals is more important in my opinion.
Quick iteration, with the CEO at the helm who’s at the core of everything you’re doing, promotes organizational clarity which is something that makes a massive difference.
4. Become an executive:
One of the best things anyone can do is commit to being a world-class learner and consume as much as they can.
There’s so much content out there. Listen to podcasts, and learn through doing. (You can also learn a boatload from others’ failures.)
There’s a lot to be said about building out your playbook before you have an opportunity to do the role. Be active in how you consume content and always be learning.
The second piece of advice I’d give is community.
I’ve always been plugged into private communities, especially HubSpot’s Revenue Council.
We meet on a pretty tight frequency. It’s comprised of senior level executives that are all focused on revenue and go-to-market.
It’s been a phenomenal way to become the person who can come up with answers and solutions. But the biggest benefit has been behind closed doors, leaning on this network and community and asking questions vulnerably.
5. Willing to die on this hill:
Not all of your marketing needs to be easy to attribute or measure.
There are signals in marketing that matter a lot. And obsession with measurement is real right now, especially with the economic headwinds that we’re facing.
My like radical belief is that marketing should be hard to measure, but there should be signals in your business that show your efforts are working. These allow you to keep doubling down on things that matter.
Marketing fuels winning, fuels recruiting, fuels conviction (I might get this tattooed on me LOL).
On top of that, what gets measured is ultimately what gets managed. It’s important to focus on the metrics that matter most, removing all of the vanity.
Making sure that you have tools, processes, and obsession with making sure that the business is architected to hit your goals.
Your people should be doing the things that are the highest and best use of their time. And one of the things, as a consumer personally, that I am totally obsessed with is “best in class”.
Using the best possible thing to do something, even if it’s super niche.
That’s been a big part of our approach at Rent Dynamics, putting in a go-to-market technology stack that enables each department to have tooling that makes their role easier to do and to report.
You have so many blind spots in business without tooling technology, it’s so hard to know what’s working and what’s not, especially as you scale.
And so for us there’s been a couple really important plays that we’ve made from a technology standpoint.
They’ve been expensive, but they’ve also paid themself off quite quickly.“