CMO in a B2B tech company: “Come as you are!”

Earlier this month, we gathered the Ring portfolio companies around one key issue for tech scale-ups which is the role and the place of the CMO. Indeed, since we started investing in French tech B2B scale-ups, we have the feeling that building a strong marketing and brand in B2B tech companies is a real challenge. That’s why we tried to understand what is specifically at stake when building a marketing team and a CMO role.

In order to create good conversations within the portfolio we try to have one return on experience from one portfolio company as well as an external expert’s point of view on the topic. For this workshop, we invited specifically 2 persons to speak:

Sandra Fernandes, CMO Splio

• Sandra Fernandes, who has been CMO at Splio since the end of 2020 after being head of Marketing and Communications for the company for several years;

Etienne Viellard, @Eleius Marketing

• Etienne Viellard, ex-Director of Marketing at Neolane and B2B marketing expert within Ring2Success, our operational support program.

In addition to the marketing people from our portfolio companies, we invited two CROs who are currently in the process of recruiting a Head of Marketing or CMO in order to help them identify the challenges for such hiring.

Six dimensions to reach

We started the conversation discussing one of the most important challenges for a CMO which is his or her ability to cover the wide scope of activities within the role. Indeed, this scope counts at least 6 _quite different_ dimensions to cover:

1. Branding to make sure that the company is perceived for its key strategic differentiators and that every communication / message / expression of the brand is consistent and conveys the right image.
2. Product marketing which covers mainly the definition of the product’s positioning and messaging with the objective to drive the demand and usage of the product. This part also includes relations with analysts. And it brings to creating thought leadership for the company on its market.
3. Content strategy (quite self explanatory) that requires a great capacity for story-telling as well as a strong sense of clarity in order to create attention around the product and the company and convey the right messages.
4. Communication and events to ensure a strong and consistent expression of the brand and of the key messages to the right audience.
5. Lead generation as a key part of the sales process since this has a direct impact on the Sales performance of the company and on the CAC ratio of the company. This requires complete alignment with Sales in terms of target identification.
6. Sales Enablement that corresponds to providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals.

When you read this, it seems quite clear that being a CMO cannot mean being an expert at these 6 dimensions. This is where the “Come as you are” makes sense. You can’t tick all the boxes and you need to think at a higher level. Indeed being a CMO means understanding all these dimensions, the importance of each of them, where are the company’s strengths and weaknesses and where you should focus on when building your team. It above all means leadership, vision, strong sense of analytics and focus on ROI, coordination with internal teams (marketing being the bridge between tech and sales) and above all, ability to assemble an orchestra that plays well.

And considering this wide scope of activities, Sandra from Splio sums this up saying that the role of the CMO is to be able to keep the big picture and to choose what activities you wanna push, how and when. This requires building the right team with complementary skills, with strong alignment on the objectives of the company and with a CMO who, in addition to his or her own skills in one or two areas, is capable of conducting the orchestra.

Marketing is about Culture

This wide scope cannot explain by itself the “youth” of marketing in many french B2B tech companies. What also came in the discussion is the lack of marketing culture in some B2B tech companies. Indeed, what was pointed out is that there is a huge difference between the USA and Europe / France when it comes to marketing. In the US, you can have a shitty product but you will have a very strong marketing. In Europe, you have very successful companies that are at the tiniest level of sophistication in terms of marketing. And then trying to implement a brand and marketing culture in a company that managed to succeed without it is quite tricky.

We can sum it up by saying that a tech company is a three person game: a tech, a sales and a marketing guy. French people are often missing the marketing guy.

We believe that this type of conversation should not stay as a marketing people level. Indeed, you can spend tremendous amounts of time talking among marketing people about the lack of marketing culture within the tech companies but it wouldn’t get much results. This topic should be at the center of CEO’s discussions to raise awareness about it and to try and show with examples what a tech company with strong marketing is and how it actually accelerates growth and increases the company’s value.

Spending the right time on the right activity

Last but not least, we talked about money! Indeed, marketing is also about budget. When recruiting and building your team, you need to think about the different activities that we mentioned earlier. And it means that you cannot achieve your goals by building a one or two person marketing team. And it also means you need to have a CMO within the executive team, who costs slightly more than 50k€ per year… And when you have such a team, you need to make sure to make the right level of investments. Luckily, we are not talking about tens of million euros per year. We are talking about having the right event budget, using the adequate tools and investing the necessary investments in PR and online acquisition.

At the end of this workshop, we asked ourselves about the use of such a discussion within our portfolio companies. And I see 3 outputs:

1. For the marketing people within our portfolio: experience sharing and clear example of the structured marketing team from Splio;
2. For the 2 CROs that attended the workshop: awareness brought to them on how to build your marketing team and what is at stake;
3. For us (Ring) : it is now clear to our mind that this topic should also be discussed with CEOs and that we, as investors and contributors to the investment decisions of our portfolio companies, have a role to play in increasing the marketing culture in our portfolio companies.