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It’s only been a month since I decided to take over the marketing team for 12 months
It’s only been a month since I decided to take over the marketing team for 12 months
I’ve been building tools for marketers for the past 5 years so it’s only fitting that I spend time in their shoes to be a better builder...
Here’s how I spent my first 30 days:
We have 8 individual teams in marketing and each one of them did a v2mom exercise (v2mom stands for vision, values, mission, obstacles, and metrics). Basically aligning the team on what’s important and what stands in the way of achieving our mission. We spent the first 10 minutes filling up the respective buckets by ourselves with a timer (we ended up using Miro for some teams and Figma for others). See below.
Then, we spent 50 minutes calibrating our responses to come up with a team plan that we all resonated with. We ended with 8 v2moms that look a bit like this one below (we used this tool for this view since it’s a lot easier to process visually after the brainstorming session).
This one is for our content team:
Best part about this process is that once you do it as a team you finally feel like you understand what everyone cares about and how to measure of each member and the team is successful. Without it it’s tough to prioritize activities. And focus on what matters.
In some cases it took more than a meeting to agree on the things we listed on the board.
The metrics are a vital part since they are the most objective way to assess whether we’re on the right track.
One theme that often came through the “obstacles” part of v2mom was the ability to have a much longer-term view of our marketing activities. So we started having two tracks that we only managed to half complete:
Long term planning is a bit harder to do in areas where constant experimentation is needed to see before something scales. I’m still working on this piece to see if our CRO activities have a play into this before anything gets scaled and how I can keep an open mind for the long-term plans.
New game rules: Because I have a very high tolerance to risk as an entrepreneur and also am an engineer at heart I set up a new rule: no experiment is off limits as long as we can prove success first with a small budget. I rather everyone seeks to fail quickly and doesn’t ask me for permission.
In parallel we have setup OKRs for Q4 for the entire team:
The data goals determines our marketing team bonus. I hesitated on whether pipeline or this combined metric makes the most sense for the bonus but felt a lot more comfortable with a blend of top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel since it keeps the long-term activities in the mix.
Since I have a whole new function to learn and a lot more new people to meet, I decided to get rid of all meetings where we just go through updates. All these happen async. See an example of a template that needs to be filled for the async report:
Our weekly reports sometimes look like novels, but they allow me to process them at my own speed. The more context and data I have the better I can understand how something might be adding or not to our goals. It’s a lot harder to get the full context in a meeting.
There’s also a reminder weekly on my calendar to pick from these reports highlights to bring to everyone else in the company so they are aware of what’s going on.
I only keep meetings with my direct reports to help them navigate their weekly objectives and also because I believe my primary job is to help each team member unlock their full potential.
The decisions we also make async via decision memos (here are some examples of our decisions memos) so we can all have time to digest the information presented.
We also get on video calls when we need to brainstorm something or someone might need help to figure out how something works or isn’t sure about how to proceed.
Since I come from the product world I have an obsession with personas. I would constantly look at what my users needed to do and made sure that my software solved their needs a lot better than anything else.
But I was focused on their actions and their goals.
In marketing, personas are a lot more subtle. You need to understand what personas resonate with. Most specifically, what they resonate with at different stages of the buying cycle. And how they might resonate differently, depending on which segment they belong to (industry, size, culture).
And since our potential buyers get bombarded by a million messages from a million directions, Ii think it’s impossible to get them to pay attention using traditional marketing techniques.
Where you talk about benefits or pain points. Or industry jargon that you are the best “inbound conversion platform “ there is. Nobody cares.
What I am focused on instead, as I create our personas and segments, is to understand how I can add value at every stage — outside my product:
In essence, I think of our marketing organization as a creator of value to our potential buyers
So far I only managed to do four things in this direction:
I have watched/listened to lots of content from Refine Labs , Dharmesh Sha , read David Gerhardt’s book and content and Latane’s book.
I’m really grateful to content creators like them who put things out there for all of us to learn from.
My to-do list is a very long one. It’s geared towards optimizing processes at scale to get ready next year to bring a minimum of $100M in our pipeline from inbound and partnerships.
Here are some things on my current to do:
Results from the month are not a truly effect on my work so far but on what we have previously built to date through all the work our team has done in the past. We’re at 107% of our inbound pipeline goals and you’d think I’d be content…
But my mind probably functions a lot differently than most, since I always look at we do well and think: “Ok but how do we 10x this. How can we make it 10x more impactful".
As a result for my next quarter I keep thinking how I can 10x our inbound pipeline and I don’t feel like I’m winning unless I figure it out.
If you find this content useful, then I will continue to do more updates on my way.
I’ve been building tools for marketers for the past 5 years so it’s only fitting that I spend time in their shoes to be a better builder...
Here’s how I spent my first 30 days:
We have 8 individual teams in marketing and each one of them did a v2mom exercise (v2mom stands for vision, values, mission, obstacles, and metrics). Basically aligning the team on what’s important and what stands in the way of achieving our mission. We spent the first 10 minutes filling up the respective buckets by ourselves with a timer (we ended up using Miro for some teams and Figma for others). See below.
Then, we spent 50 minutes calibrating our responses to come up with a team plan that we all resonated with. We ended with 8 v2moms that look a bit like this one below (we used this tool for this view since it’s a lot easier to process visually after the brainstorming session).
This one is for our content team:
Best part about this process is that once you do it as a team you finally feel like you understand what everyone cares about and how to measure of each member and the team is successful. Without it it’s tough to prioritize activities. And focus on what matters.
In some cases it took more than a meeting to agree on the things we listed on the board.
The metrics are a vital part since they are the most objective way to assess whether we’re on the right track.
One theme that often came through the “obstacles” part of v2mom was the ability to have a much longer-term view of our marketing activities. So we started having two tracks that we only managed to half complete:
Long term planning is a bit harder to do in areas where constant experimentation is needed to see before something scales. I’m still working on this piece to see if our CRO activities have a play into this before anything gets scaled and how I can keep an open mind for the long-term plans.
New game rules: Because I have a very high tolerance to risk as an entrepreneur and also am an engineer at heart I set up a new rule: no experiment is off limits as long as we can prove success first with a small budget. I rather everyone seeks to fail quickly and doesn’t ask me for permission.
In parallel we have setup OKRs for Q4 for the entire team:
The data goals determines our marketing team bonus. I hesitated on whether pipeline or this combined metric makes the most sense for the bonus but felt a lot more comfortable with a blend of top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel since it keeps the long-term activities in the mix.
Since I have a whole new function to learn and a lot more new people to meet, I decided to get rid of all meetings where we just go through updates. All these happen async. See an example of a template that needs to be filled for the async report:
Our weekly reports sometimes look like novels, but they allow me to process them at my own speed. The more context and data I have the better I can understand how something might be adding or not to our goals. It’s a lot harder to get the full context in a meeting.
There’s also a reminder weekly on my calendar to pick from these reports highlights to bring to everyone else in the company so they are aware of what’s going on.
I only keep meetings with my direct reports to help them navigate their weekly objectives and also because I believe my primary job is to help each team member unlock their full potential.
The decisions we also make async via decision memos (here are some examples of our decisions memos) so we can all have time to digest the information presented.
We also get on video calls when we need to brainstorm something or someone might need help to figure out how something works or isn’t sure about how to proceed.
Since I come from the product world I have an obsession with personas. I would constantly look at what my users needed to do and made sure that my software solved their needs a lot better than anything else.
But I was focused on their actions and their goals.
In marketing, personas are a lot more subtle. You need to understand what personas resonate with. Most specifically, what they resonate with at different stages of the buying cycle. And how they might resonate differently, depending on which segment they belong to (industry, size, culture).
And since our potential buyers get bombarded by a million messages from a million directions, Ii think it’s impossible to get them to pay attention using traditional marketing techniques.
Where you talk about benefits or pain points. Or industry jargon that you are the best “inbound conversion platform “ there is. Nobody cares.
What I am focused on instead, as I create our personas and segments, is to understand how I can add value at every stage — outside my product:
In essence, I think of our marketing organization as a creator of value to our potential buyers
So far I only managed to do four things in this direction:
I have watched/listened to lots of content from Refine Labs , Dharmesh Sha , read David Gerhardt’s book and content and Latane’s book.
I’m really grateful to content creators like them who put things out there for all of us to learn from.
My to-do list is a very long one. It’s geared towards optimizing processes at scale to get ready next year to bring a minimum of $100M in our pipeline from inbound and partnerships.
Here are some things on my current to do:
Results from the month are not a truly effect on my work so far but on what we have previously built to date through all the work our team has done in the past. We’re at 107% of our inbound pipeline goals and you’d think I’d be content…
But my mind probably functions a lot differently than most, since I always look at we do well and think: “Ok but how do we 10x this. How can we make it 10x more impactful".
As a result for my next quarter I keep thinking how I can 10x our inbound pipeline and I don’t feel like I’m winning unless I figure it out.
If you find this content useful, then I will continue to do more updates on my way.
Alina Vandenberghe is Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Chili Piper. She’s passionate about building fun SaaS products to solve hard problems and a company where employees thrive. Today, the Romania native and her husband are on their way to IPO — all while giving back to the community through our Citizens Of Our Planet foundation. Alina earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, Romania. She currently resides in New York City. Connect with Alina on LinkedIn.
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