Power to the Marketer — Growth Marketing Lessons From Vercel’s Vice President of Marketing, Morgane Palomares
By Krista Canfield McNish
Continuing our long standing tradition of having talented executives share their predictions (see Fortune’s For startups, remote work versus return-to-office is a balance — and an experiment) and knowledge (about IPO prep and other fun topics) with CRV and its companies, this week we took a field trip to Vercel’s sleek San Francisco office to hear from our latest guest speaker. Vercel provides the developer tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale and secure a faster, more personalized web. CRV proudly led Vercel’s Series A, sits on the board and backed Vercel during its B, C, D and E rounds. Morgane Palomares, Vercel’s vice president of marketing, has been in marketing for nearly a decade working with prominent brands like GitHub, Zendesk (another CRV backed business) and Change.org.
We had an incredible turnout for the event. Nearly three dozen CMOs, marketing leaders and public relations pros joined us for the session. We had a packed conference room of in person attendees and a screen full of remote attendees tuning in over zoom.
During the discussion, we had a wide representation of startups from seed stage on up to Series E and from drone driven businesses like Flock Safety to fintech companies like Mercury all the way over to serious security startups like Astrix and Legit Security. Leaders from CRV companies like Cribl, Postman, CodeRabbit, Napkin and StarTree were eager to pepper Morgane with questions about growth marketing… especially since it means something different to everyone and since growth marketing teams often have very different goals.
“The way that I like to describe marketing is that there’s the vibes part of marketing and there’s the engine. Growth marketing is often the engine that’s motivated by helping the company hit revenue targets, so if you’re in growth marketing, you like to help the company make money.” — Morgane Palomares
Morgane joined Vercel in September 2021. Back then the marketing team was just starting to get built. At organizations similar to Vercel, Morgane mentioned that marketing typically represents about nine percent of the company. Today, at Vercel, marketing is a lean well oiled machine representing just three percent of the company.
During those early days, one of Morgane’s first tasks was to enable Vercel’s outbound motion, so the sales team could start going after accounts instead of relying solely on inbound leads. Her other mandate was owning the self-serve revenue target. It was in owning that number that Morgane got to flex Vercel’s growth marketing muscle. (The enterprise side of Vercel’s house is focused more on demand generation/revenue marketing since it also includes field marketing.) One of her top tips for building out a growth marketing team early on is to hire the right kind of people… Swiss Army knives, like fellow attendee Lindsay Gilson, who Morgane gave a shout out to. (Lindsay is a Vercel alum who now handles growth at Browserbase, another CRV backed business. CRV co-led Browserbase’s Series A in 2024, and joined Browserbase’s board.)
“…people that you can sort of throw at any problem and they just have the tenacity to learn and ship and they will figure it out.” — Morgane Palomares
- If you’re a marketer focused on the top of funnel motion, Morgane mentioned that bringing on a growth marketer who understands SEO, paid digital or brand (or ideally someone who is intrigued by all three of those topics) is key.
- For marketers keen to drive their enterprise pipeline, Morgane suggested looking for a hire that has acquisition experience, but is also knowledgeable about the demand funnel. The ideal candidates live among MQL, SQL and S(Q)O and also know how to work with a sales development (SDR) team.
- For product-led growth (PLG) companies, marketers that have experience in the activation or retention realms are a must. Marketers that moved into product and are growth product manager (PM) or a growth manager can be a great fit.
During the meeting, both Juliette Rizkallah (Kong’s CMO) and Tyler Cascade (Sleuth’s head of marketing) brought up some r modern demand generation practices they’ve been working on, so naturally we had to grill Morgane about her top intent tool recommendations. At the top of her list were:
- Koala (In 2024, CRV proudly led Koala’s $15 Million Series A.)
- Clay
- Common Room
- Sumble
- Clearbit
- ZoomInfo
“…you should know who your ICP is and then should have these intense signals and have a really clear understanding of who’s worth your while. That’s who you’re going after, so those tools have dramatically changed.” — Morgane Palomares
Morgane also noted how AI is upending content strategy when you can simply ask ChatGPT rather than relying on tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. Gone are the days of Legion, content syndication and paid social ads gating content. Now we’re in a world where traditional SEO is colliding with how LLMs consume information and how, in turn, they’re serving up your brand.
Morgane also took us back in time to when she was handling marketing at Zendesk. She mentioned how rare it was, if ever, to get feedback from customer service audience members about if an e-mail she’d written was garbage or if it had a lack of depth. That’s definitely not the case over at GitHub nor is it the case for her today at Vercel. Vercel has a voracious, and very vocal, audience of super savvy developers and they have a very low tolerance for what she calls “cringey” marketing. (Cringey, according to Morgane, is marketing that contains a lot of fluff and words that try to describe things that mean absolutely nothing.)
“The key differences, in my opinion, of marketing to other folks versus developers is that developers just have like a really low patience for ****** marketing.” — Morgane Palomares
For Morgane, marketing to developers requires having higher expectations for yourself. She feels as though marketing to developers requires you to continuously learn and evolve, while also having a sense of curiosity, so you truly understand what you’re marketing. It also requires a swift set of scissors and no fear when it comes to cutting a copy and tightening it up.
“I always focus on building better experiences.” — Morgane Palomares
Simplifying and keeping the focus on seamless core flows is something that Morgane says has never steered her astray across her marketing career. During the Q&A section of the event, it was wonderful to hear CRV backed companies like Cribl, Kong, Niantic, Postman and Vercel getting to know their sister companies, how they pull off amazing large scale in person events and what advice they could learn and share with each other. CRV has been in business for over 54 years and one thing we never ever do is stop learning. We cherish opportunities when we get to have experts share their knowledge and expertise with us and can’t wait for the next time we get to bring brilliant minds like Morgane to the table to chat with our startups. If you’re an entrepreneur who has a similar mindset, reach out and get to know our team. We love batting around ideas and brainstorming with people who love iterating on the bleeding edge of tech innovation.
