FLIGHT 2018: Setting up early stage Marketing (2/3)
We recently hosted FLIGHT, our annual event for founders of European intelligent enterprise companies at pre series A stage. The quality of speakers and insights shared at the event was such that we wanted to share this knowledge with the wider European enterprise community.
FLIGHT is solely focused on how to scale the commercial side of an enterprise software business. On stage we had practitioners ranging from early stage founders to experienced founders/execs, sharing experiences and key learnings around early stage GTM, marketing and scaling sales.
In this second post (of a series of three) we share the content from the enterprise Marketing theme:
- How to kickstart your marketing ecosystem on a budget (Tumai Huang, Head of Marketing, OpenSensors)
- How to build a lead gen marketing machine (Alex Steadman, Head of Marketing EMEA, Mesosphere)
- How to build a killer B2B marketing team: 7 things I wish I’d known at the start (Chiara Quadranti, ex-Director of Marketing, Onfido)
The previous post covered the Go-To-Market theme and the final post is all about early stage Sales & Customer Success.
1. How to kickstart your marketing ecosystem on a budget (Tumai Huang, Head of Marketing, OpenSensors)
Tumai has a broad range of experience across industries both in B2B and B2C, where she’s focused on everything from brand to communications to lead gen as well as content creation and strategy. She shares a high-level strategic framework to kickstart your marketing ecosystem, with some key pointers including:
- Building a roadmap with a well-defined approach, outlining what portion of marketing is lead gen (new business), brand awareness (to build credibility) and customer engagement (existing business)
- With that in place, enter the CCCT-framework: Customers, Content, Communication, Test
- For customer research on a budget, go both inside-out and outside-in: gather feedback from existing customers and your sales team as well as analysing online behaviour and identifying customer hangouts to determine where to promote — e.g. if they don’t use Facebook, you shouldn’t either!
Watch the full presentation below! Link to slides
2. How to build a lead gen marketing machine (Alex Steadman, Head of Marketing EMEA, Mesosphere)
Alex has just joined Mesosphere as Head of Marketing EMEA and at FLIGHT 2018 she shared her experience from building marketing teams at SnapLogic, Hortonworks and Trustpilot. Not only did she fill the room with energy but also shared some amazing insights, including:
- Lead Gen 101 — a breakdown of what lead gen is: PR/AR, digital/campaign marketing, field marketing, partner marketing, customer marketing — detailing everything that goes into each
- Hire a player-coach as the Head of LeadGen and you will scale automatically — someone who can individually contribute as well as grow a team
- A guide to building out the LeadGen team
3. How to build a killer B2B marketing team: 7 things I wish I’d known at the start (Chiara Quadranti, ex-Director of Marketing, Onfido)
Chiara recently moved to a new role as Head of Growth at Fiit, but at FLIGHT she shared, with the benefit hindsight, what she wishes she had known at the outset when building the marketing team at Onfido, where she was the first marketing hire in 2015.
Chiara has also distilled her thoughts in a fantastic blogpost about her presentation that you can read here:
Panel Discussion: Getting sales and marketing working in unison
Crane partner Andy Leaver moderates a panel with the Marketing theme presenters: Tumai, Alex and Chiara. Some of the questions covered include:
- What type of person should your first marketing hire be? Generalist vs specialist, attitude and characteristics etc.
- What should be on your first scorecard for marketing? What key metrics really matter?
- What marketing functions should you keep in-house vs outsource? What should drive this decision?
In the next and final post we share the early stage Sales and Customer Success theme presentations.
