How CEOs can find CMOs who can lead Growth

David Badler is a Partner at Susquehanna Growth Equity, leading the value creation practice. He partners with CEOs and their teams to accelerate growth by collaborating on key strategic, go-to-market, talent-related, and operational areas. The fund has invested in 55 companies and has over 30 active portfolio companies, of which about 20 are B2B SaaS companies.

In David’s words, “My job is to help CEOs grow their companies from $20 million to $100 million plus,” In this episode, see why he refers to CMO searches as ‘revenue searches’- and how CEOs can ensure they find marketers who can lead growth.

When it comes to marketers worrying about the title they will hold in a high growth company (VP Marketing or CMO) -- or whom they will report to (the CRO or the CEO) David quotes Sheryl Sandberg: “If you are going to get on a rocket ship, try not to worry what seat you are on”.

He also shares how CEOs can avoid their preferred CMO candidate getting vetoed by investors, and the pitfalls to avoid while searching for the ideal CMO. Hint: it’s all about getting your scorecard right, and aligning with the board and investors well in advance.

Want a peek into the scorecard that a CEO of a B2B SaaS company could be using to evaluate CMO candidates? Here are some key elements from one CMO search:

- Lead and demand generation experience, with a focus on the functional expertise that matters to the company - inbound versus outbound

- Numerical fluency

- Demonstrated ability to work with sales to drive revenue

- Strong marketing operations ability - putting fundamental processes and systems in place

- Scale, speed and impact in past roles. For example, someone who made a great CMO at a $5 million company may not make a great CMO at a $50 million company. Someone who has never owned a function but excelled at parts of it may do really well stretching into a larger role.

Join Erica and David as they walk through exactly what investors are thinking when they are helping their CEOs and Founders find the right marketing talent to help grow into their next set of millions!

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy