Interview with Roberto Marzo — Senior Advisor of Inkef
As part of our “Meet Inkef’s Senior Advisors” series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Roberto Marzo, a well-rounded global leader in the Software industry and seasoned Sales connoisseur. He has been imperative to Inkef and has helped its portfolio companies with topics such as building out a Go-to-Market strategy or helping companies go international. In this blog post, he will tell us more about his impressive career path that includes leadership roles at Salesforce, MessageBird and DocuSign, and above all, will share some of his trade secrets.
1. You have had very senior roles at Salesforce, IPsoft, MessageBird and now DocuSign, please could you tell us more about your impressive career path?
I believe I have been lucky to be the right guy at the right time. I joined Salesforce when EMEA was very small, only 800 employees and then it grew to 6,000 over 6 years. I developed my career at Salesforce and had managers who believed in me. Then, one thing led to another, my responsibility grew and I ended up running the Sales Operations team for EMEA.
After that, I made a couple of jumps. I went to IPsoft (a global leader in conversational AI), where I met Frank (Partner at Inkef). It was a very interesting stint as IPsoft wanted to move from Services to Tech and had the aim to go public. Our timings did not entirely align but it was a very interesting and exciting experience. I was in Software all my career, then moved to Services and gained a lot of knowledge there.
After IPsoft, I moved to MessageBird, which was different again. It was much more of a consumption-driven type of business. At MessageBird, I got to run the CRO role and managed to build a Sales team, a Marketing team and a Customer Success team. During this role, I spend a lot of time in New York and Amsterdam. After a couple of years, a call was made to come home to Dublin, where I joined DocuSign. DocuSign was an interesting challenge, not yet very big, with a lot of aspiration to grow. DocuSign is a great company, very employee-friendly, strong technology, excellent use cases, and it’s making the world a better place. And here we are!
2. What made you decide to become Senior Advisor at Inkef?
Inkef came as an exciting opportunity to me, mainly because I truly enjoy working with start-ups and I knew that being exposed to them is extremely important. After all, start-ups are defining the future! There are a lot of things that smaller companies are trying to figure out, which I can help with. Often Founders have different kind of experiences, they try to patch things up or connect the dots. In fact, I enjoy speaking to Founders, or actually in general to people, who try to figure things out. In one shape or another, I have done the same, in different companies, and it’s therefore nice to put my skills to work. It has been a year and a half, so far a great experience, where I’m using different type of skills and help with a variety of problems.
3. Could you tell us what your role is at Inkef and how you add value to our portfolio companies and deal flow?
Founders usually come up with a topic that they might need help with and I then bring to the table how other companies have done it and discuss the best way how to do it, considering their stakes, level of activity, amount of investment they can make etc. Often, start-ups implement something that has worked for other companies, however this is not a guarantee that it will work for themselves too. It’s interesting to have conversations with Founders and open their eyes, and remind them that their personality has a lot to do with how they want to do things and what type of people they want to work with. Some Founder relationships are more on an ongoing basis, some are more “one shot” depending on what we discuss.
To give you an example, with one portfolio company everything is interrelated and part of the same puzzle. Everything they put in place has to be aligned with where they want to get in 12–18 months out. In the end, start-ups grow very fast. I would therefore never recommend a very long term plan, as for example 5 years is already very far out. With this company, I help improve their GTM strategy, explain how to track and strengthen business metrics and support with pipeline generation and conversion. So far, it’s paying off thankfully.
4. What do you believe are the most common GTM-related mistakes first-time Founders make?
It’s very important to understand where you are today and what your next milestone is. For example, Founders might need a certain type of resource, but know that this might change in the future. Often Founders make the mistake of hiring people for the future but these people have no patience to wait for the future. My advice is always to hire for today, if the person can’t scale with the company or the role then that’s fine and you hire above them.
Another thing is that early indicators are not always the reality. You might be in a situation where things are going very well; you are running something that could give great results, but it’s the follow through that is really important. You have to execute and measure towards your plan and not give up!
Finally, the hardest thing of companies who manage to sign a good volume of deals, is the creating demand. The demand generation piece is the most important part of success especially with scale. Hiring good sellers who can close deals is important, but if all of a sudden you have 20 sellers but have no demand to feed the 20 sellers and you are in trouble. My recommendation is always to have more demand that you can fulfil and at that point, hire the sellers and scale the team.
5. Finally, what is your nr. 1 lesson that you could give to Founders to help them succeed?
Founders need to be true to themselves, they need to understand what they are like to work with and work for, what works for them, what doesn’t work for them, what type of people they want to have around and what kind of working style (e.g. controlling founders should not hire people who won’t give them updates as that will only drive them mad). Once you have understood what type of Founder you are or want to be, you need to surround yourself with people that will get you there.
Some people say that you should surround yourself with people who are different so they can complement you, but when your company is small this makes it hard to get to agreement and might not be the best way forward. As the company grows and becomes more structured, focus on diversity and complementary skills, which will allow to go even faster.
