#202: Marketing Leadership | How To Build A High Performing B2B Marketing Org with Peter Mahoney, CCO at GoTo

This episode is from Drive 2024, our first-ever in-person event for B2B marketers in Burlington, Vermont. Peter Mahoney, Chief Commercial Officer at GoTo, and author of The Next CMO, shared strategies for building and leading high-performing marketing organizations.

Peter covers:

• 10 Guidelines for building (or re-building) a marketing organization
• Running marketing: how to build your CMO operating system
• 5 strategies for effectively leading an organization

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Peter
  
• (05:08) - - Are there requirements for being a CMO?
  
• (10:06) - - Do you really want to be a CMO?
  
• (10:35) - - How CMOs spend their time
  
• (11:18) - - 10 Guidelines for building (or re-building) a marketing organization
  
• (13:05) - - 1. Align to your marketing strategy
  
• (14:05) - - 2. Ensure the financial model supports your organization
  
• (16:00) - - 3. Make it simple
  
• (16:35) - - 4. Build in clear accountability
  
• (17:51) - - 5. Resist layers
  
• (19:31) - - 6. Do not design around the individual
  
• (22:15) - - 7. Clearly define what is a service center and what is an outcome center
  
• (22:53) - - 8. Build the smallest organization necessary
  
• (24:04) - - 9. Make a hiring decision as difficult as laying someone off
  
• (25:04) - - 10. Define your full-time vs. part-time vs. outsource strategy
  
• (27:52) - - Running marketing: Building your CMO Operating System
  
• (29:15) - - 5 strategies for leading marketing
  
• (32:02) - - Q&A
  
• (39:28) - - Closing Remarks

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:

You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. Hey, it's me, Dave. So this is a special episode. This was a session that we recorded live at drive. Our first ever in person eventually, which was early September in Burlington, Vermont. It was incredible. We had 200 people there. The NPS after the event was 88.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:32]:

We're going to do it again this year. Don't worry. I know there's a lot of FOMO out there. For those of you that didn't make it, we're going to do it again September 2025. But we have all of the recordings right here for you on the Exit Five podcast. Now, this is just the audio if you want the full video and see the slides and everything that is available exclusively in our community. Not on YouTube, not on the Internet, nowhere else, except inside of Exit Five in the community. Join 4400 members exitfive.com and you can see all the content.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:00]:

Okay, let's get into this session from drive. All right, now let's get into some marketing stuff. So Peter Mahoney is our first speaker and I asked him to do this because he is somebody that when I think about operating as a marketing leader, he is the guy. Think about anybody read his book? The Next CMO? Yeah. Oh, there's a lot. We got to get some books out of these folks. What have you all been doing? He is chief commercial officer at goto. He runs sales and marketing over there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:28]:

And he's really the guy to talk about when you talk about operational marketing excellence. Get your notebooks ready. Peter, you're up, my friend. I'm excited to have you here.

Peter Mahoney [00:01:38]:

Here we go. All right. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for driving up to Vermont or flying to Vermont. Who came from Australia? Who's the person from Australia? Axel. Hey, welcome. That is pretty amazing.

Peter Mahoney [00:02:03]:

So hopefully I don't disappoint too much. I'm thrilled that Dave asked me to come to this event. I realize actually that the last in person event that I went to and presented at was with Dave Gerhardt. And I think it was in 2020. It's about four years. It was when you were at Drift and we did an event. We did like a meetup at the Drift office there. And it was literally the last time that I've been an in person event.

Peter Mahoney [00:02:28]:

So it's amazing to come Back and see people in real life. And since then, I try to account. I think that I've done somewhere north of 300 digital events between those two. So if I break into trying to communicate to you people on the chat interface or something like that, that's what that's all about. Unfortunately, I'm unused to talking to human beings. While I was building my company, Plana that I sold back in 2022, I did most of my work in my office up in the third floor of my house. And my wife would make fun of me all the time because I never actually interacted with the real world and talked to real people. So I'm not used to it anymore.

Peter Mahoney [00:03:06]:

So be gentle on me if there's any networking and communication. Sometimes it makes me nervous. Not really. So this is what we're going to talk about. I've spent a longer career than many of you. Unfortunately, I'm finding out have been alive in marketing. And I want to share some of what I've learned along the way about, as Dave said, some of the boring stuff in marketing. I spent a lot of my career focusing on the stuff that you need to do to make marketing work.

Peter Mahoney [00:03:33]:

It's less about marketing itself, but it's pretty critical for marketing leaders to figure out how to do this stuff. Now, when I was planning to do this event, I forgot that we were in person and I put up this QR code that I don't want anyone to go to because I realized that I could just ask you in person instead of doing a survey. Literally. I forgot that you're going to be here in real life. So don't click. You can go there if you want, but it's not that exciting. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions first. So I want to get your sense for what you think is required to be a CMO in 2024.

Peter Mahoney [00:04:08]:

So first of all, how many people think you should have been a individual contributor who's had experience in more than two domains of marketing? All right, how about more than three? How about one? Just one? Is that okay? How about zero? Zero? Is that okay? All right. Now, how about education? How many people think it's important to have an advanced degree in marketing these days? Like an MBA or something that I got zero. Okay, how about like a bachelor's degree in marketing? What do you think? Is that important? Yeah, some people. Ross thinks it is. Okay, all right. He's probably got. Do you have an advanced degree in marketing? You might. Okay, all right.

Peter Mahoney [00:04:50]:

How about I don't know, at least take a class in marketing. Would that be handy? All right. Exactly. Okay, so I'm asking all of you these questions because I wanted to start this presentation by telling you that I am wildly unqualified to be a CMO. Now, Dave didn't share a lot about my background, but I've actually been a CMO many times. I've been a CMO of up to about a $2 billion public company for about five years. A company called Nuance in the voice recognition space. I built a company as a CEO and sold that company and then decided I had to do it one more time.

Peter Mahoney [00:05:24]:

So I took a CMO job. I had a company called Goto. It's about a billion dollar company that's private equity backed, a fairly large organization, and I am wildly unqualified to be a CMO. Let me tell you a little bit about my journey into the CMO office in case it's helpful. Inspiring, frightening, or something in between. So I went to college and I didn't. In fact, not only did I not get a degree in marketing or an advanced degree in marketing, I've literally never taken a marketing class in my life. It gets scary.

Peter Mahoney [00:05:55]:

Not only have I not had three individuals contributor roles as a marketer or two, or even one, I've literally never had a job in my life where I've had to do marketing. So how did that happen? So I have degrees in physics and computer science from Boston College down the street here, about four miles. And when I graduated from school, I said to my advisor at school, I said, what do you think I should do? And he said, I have no idea what you're going to do. And he recommended that I go talk to this company, IBM, because he had a former student who was a systems engineering manager at IBM. So I said, oh, that sounds pretty cool. So I went and I did all these interviews and ended up getting a job offer. And they said, actually, we think you're going to work out well in marketing. I said, great.

Peter Mahoney [00:06:41]:

I don't know what that is. Right. But sounds pretty good. So I show up the first day and what do they do? I show up and there's literally a stack of white binders. Did anyone remember white binders? That was, where are the old people? Where are my people? Okay. So I show up, there's a stack of white binders, and they say, read this stuff. And in six weeks we're going to fly you at Atlanta and you're going to take a test on that stuff. If you pass the test on the first day you can stay and you'll stay there for a month and continue your training.

Peter Mahoney [00:07:07]:

I said, great, that sounds pretty good to me. It was super easy stuff. It was stuff about product things. There was a bunch of finance stuff and there was a whole bunch of stuff on sale. And I said, what is this stuff? I had no idea. And it turned out that when IBM said you're in marketing, they actually meant you're in sales. And yeah, so I was a marketing rep for IBM and literally I was embarrassed. I couldn't tell my family.

Peter Mahoney [00:07:30]:

My family's literally. My two older brothers and my dad are all PhD scientists. Right? That's the family business, to be a scientist. And this was like embarrassing and miserable to be in sales. So fast forward a few years later. I ended up leaving and working for some smaller companies and spent a lot of time digging in and really trying to understand the business. And when I did that, I was running a small team running a channel sales organization across the US for a public company, a division of a public company. And they fired the head of marketing.

Peter Mahoney [00:08:00]:

And the GM came to me and said, will you do it? And I said, sure. So my first job in marketing was running marketing for the division of a public company, which was ridiculous. So I'm totally unqualified to do marketing. So now I've convinced you not to listen to anything that I say, but I'm going to give you a little bit of advice about some things that I think are pretty important. Well, first of all, who wants to be a CMO in this audience? Who would like to be a CMO? Right. I got a lot of nos. This is cool, right? This is pretty impressive. So I've recently been actually interviewing a bunch of people.

Peter Mahoney [00:08:31]:

I'm actually in the hunt for a head of Global Marketing for GoTo as I took on a broader role. I started as a CMO and they asked me to take on the chief Commercial Officer role, including marketing and sales. As I interviewed people, a lot of people said, well, were CMOs originally who were looking for my VP of corporate marketing job when about 600 people applied. And a lot of them said, I don't want to be a CMO anymore. And I think this is one of the reasons why. So how do CMOs spend their time? So this is literally, I went and I looked at my calendar in August, which was my last month as like a full time CMO before taking on the sales side. It's changed a little bit since then and literally 5% of my time was spent doing marketing. Things.

Peter Mahoney [00:09:14]:

The biggest chunk, of course, was internal meetings. Now we're a billion dollar company, so it's a little bit complicated. There's a little bit of that along the way. A quarter of my time was on board prep and about 15% was on recruiting and 10% on planning stuff. The point is there's very little marketing, thank God, since I don't know anything about it. Right. So without any experience, it's actually pretty critical that that's the case. So I'm going to spend a few minutes here talking about building a marketing organization.

Peter Mahoney [00:09:43]:

And to give you some context, I've done this a bunch of times. I've built things from scratch, I've rebuilt things, I've broken things, I've fixed things a little bit along the way. And through that process, I've developed a set of sort of tools and standards to help me figure out how to do this effectively. And I wanted to share some of that with you. And by the way, this tends to be my approach. I spent a lot of time, I wrote a book called the Next CMO with my two co founders of my company. And it was really about putting in one place a set of frameworks and templates and ideas to actually run the marketing organization as a CMO. And we did it because we realized that it was a need in the market and it helped me sell some software along the way and build some great thought leadership.

Peter Mahoney [00:10:24]:

So that was fun. And when Dave asked me to do this, I said, wow, that would be fun. I don't really have anything to promote or sell. There's a giant honorarium, as you might expect, for doing this. I think it was zero. He paid for my hotel. But I love to do this. And one of the things that I wanted to do is sort of document some of the things that I hadn't done yet in my book.

Peter Mahoney [00:10:45]:

So this is relatively brand new. I'm thinking of actually either a new edition of the book or actually building a completely second book on some of these topics. But one of the areas is about building. So it's important to understand that building, though, is not enough by itself. You have to build, you have to run, and you have to lead. And I'm going to spend most of the time here. I don't have a ton on building, but we're going to talk about the other two very briefly. So here's some guidelines and I'm going to go through these.

Peter Mahoney [00:11:11]:

I'm not going to read the list because you all seem to be pretty smart. Here are some guidelines about the things that you need to do to build a marketing organization effectively today. So let's go through them quickly, one by one, with a little bit of time. So the first thing that's critical. So I'm building a new marketing organization. Absolutely. You have to align it to your strategy. So whenever people say to me all the time, well what's the ideal marketing organization? I say, I have no idea.

Peter Mahoney [00:11:35]:

How much should I spend on marketing? I have no idea. What's your strategy? What are your goals, what's your business, who do you sell to? What's your growth rate? All these things. You absolutely have to consider that. So if you look at a book and say, hey, here's the template marketing organization, it's almost always the wrong answer. So you need to start with your strategy. So as an example, if you're Exit Five and you've got a thought leadership strategy, you need to make sure there's some deep content experts on staff. That's going to be the center of your strategy, that's your product is those ideas. When I was running this nuance, this public company, we had about $1 billion division that was in healthcare.

Peter Mahoney [00:12:11]:

I had five doctors on staff. Their job was to create content to be thought leaders. So we built an organization based on the needs of building great thought leadership and great content. If you're digital demand, you might think about, hey, I want to build that in house capability versus rely on everything outside a house. If I'm a PLG person, I might organize my product a little bit differently. And if I want to do lots of in person events, I want to make sure I have a really strong field capability. But it has to be based on what your goals are as an organization and what's the strategy that you have as a marketer. So the second thing here is you need to make sure that it actually fits with the financial model.

Peter Mahoney [00:12:52]:

The financial model supports the organization that you're building. So is everyone familiar with cac? Customer acquisition cost. Okay, really important thing to understand what a lot of people ask. I alluded to this before. They'll often ask me how much should I spend on marketing? And people think about it. These days people always say, well, what percentage of revenue should I spend on marketing? The answer is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that the percentage of revenue is not the most important determinant. The most important determinant is how much growth do you need to create on an annual basis and how quickly do you expect to pay back the investment on that growth.

Peter Mahoney [00:13:29]:

So when you're building an organization, sometimes you're building ahead of that scale level you're trying to create. So what you need to do is one, you need to understand not only the current model, what's the current financial model in constraints you're working with, but then what's the target cap ratio over time do I expect to be able to acquire a dollar of recurring revenue for A$1, 50, 85 cents, etc. Really critical for you to understand because it gives you a guideline. And that guideline is going to say, well, that's my cac. My CAC has to include all my marketing and all my sales. What's my go to market strategy? Is my go to market strategy field led, Is it marketing led, et cetera, that will help you drive the split. But the organization model that you build has to fit in the financial guardrails that you're operating in as a leader of that organization. Okay, next you got to make it simple.

Peter Mahoney [00:14:25]:

This is my organization. This is a 200 person marketing organization. At the top level it looks pretty simple. There's me until about a month ago. Anyway, I've got a product marketing head, a growth head, a corporate marketing head and an ops head and that's it. I got a chief of staff and I have an ea, but and there's stuff underneath there. But it has to be drop dead simple. Why does it have to be simple? It has to be simple because not only do you need to understand the organization, the organization needs to understand how to work with each other, needs to work with other functions in the company to make sure that things can actually happen.

Peter Mahoney [00:15:00]:

And people really struggle with building the world's most complex thing. Absolutely. You need to focus on driving for radical simplicity in the model. The second thing is clear accountability. You need to make sure you absolutely drive for accountability in an organization that you're building. So it starts with your corporate goals. And the CMO should be accountable for driving that element of the corporate goals and make sure that each element of the organization has very strong alignment and accountability and KPIs for what they're trying to do. I can't tell you how many organizations that I've talked to as we've either acquired companies or I've built things where people just don't have a clear understanding.

Peter Mahoney [00:15:42]:

What are your goals? Well, we're gonna grow. Okay, well that's great. Well, you're in corporate marketing. You're actually a service center. So what are you doing to enable the rest of the organization? Maybe your KPI should Be around your turnaround time and your efficiency with dread. So what are the specific goals? What are you accountable for in your part of the organization? You need to make that crystal clear. The other thing that you need to do is make sure you absolutely resist building layers in the organization. So I've been doing this for a long time back earlier in my career and I think thankfully this is changing people really drove her.

Peter Mahoney [00:16:16]:

I want to be at this large organization, lots of layers, things like that. It felt good. There are huge issues with building layers in the organization. And I want you to think about these two charts. The first one shows visibility compared to layers. So visibility, what does that mean? It means you as a marketing leader, do you have a clear understanding of what everyone is doing? But more importantly, do each of those individuals at the end node in the organization understand what's going on up above of that? That two way visibility is really critical to understand. And it's a really simple chart. If you've got very few layers, visibility is very high.

Peter Mahoney [00:16:55]:

The more layers you get, the lower the visibility gets. Super simple concept, right? But there's a second thing that I think is almost more important and that's about camaraderie. So you've all been. I hope you have. I'm the only one who hasn't been an individual contributor in marketing. I think most of you have. Right. And you often get stuck in this tiny little node of an organization and it's incredibly unproductive.

Peter Mahoney [00:17:18]:

And you get this tension where people in your organization want to grow and they want to be a manager. I want to be a manager because that's part of my path for growth. So people push to say I'm going to stick one or two employees under this person, I'm going to call them a manager. And that's terrible for those employees because they're stuck. You've created a challenge. With too many layers in the organization, there's no visibility. And they have a very small number of people that they can work with as colleagues to really understand how they can effectively get their job done. So it's a really huge issue in organizations and something that you absolutely have to resist in the organization.

Peter Mahoney [00:17:56]:

So the next thing is you absolutely have to avoid this idea of designing around the individual. By the way, I went into Dalle and said something like tech bro Chad or something like that for this guy. And it kind of looks like this guy, right? So okay, but you've all known this guy and by the way, it's almost always a guy and you've Known this guy who says, yeah, I'm going to be the super senior vice president of special projects and strategy and I'm, you know, high flying and you have to give me all these things. Absolutely. Do not do that. You have to fundamentally avoid this. I encounter this literally once a month in my organization and resist all the time to the point where people will quit. And I don't care because the downside is so massive.

Peter Mahoney [00:18:49]:

If you break the way the organization works for one individual and then guess what, that person, that guy usually is going to leave anyway or wants some new thing. And you've designed your organization around Chad, which is a bad idea. So now next you need to clearly define in your organization what is a service center and what is an outcome center. So this is really critical because in my organization I think of it this way. Product marketing and growth marketing tend to be outcome centers for me. And corporate and ops are its service to them. And it's not a bad thing to be at service to someone. But you have to understand your role.

Peter Mahoney [00:19:27]:

You have to understand your role is to enable and support and help people be more successful so that they can drive as much outcome as humanly possible. But understand the role in the organization. Understand what they are. Eight is you should build absolutely the smallest organization that you can. And large is slow. Large has restrictions. Every time you add someone, they're huge problems and give you a little bit of context. So OpenAI has about 1500 employees.

Peter Mahoney [00:19:57]:

They've got about 90 billion, probably 100 billion by now in enterprise value. Berkshire Hathaway corporate has 25 or 30 people. My company, before I sold it a little smaller, enterprise value, unfortunately we had a maximum of two marketing employees, right? And we did a ton. In fact, I make fun of my 200 person organization all the time because they cannot keep up with the pace that we were able to keep with two employees. So resist being large. It's a huge problem. And one way to do that is this thing is to make a hiring decision as difficult as a decision to lay someone off. Who's had to lay someone off? Most of us.

Peter Mahoney [00:20:38]:

Right? It's terrible. It's a terrible thing to do. I probably tried to count at one point well over a thousand people I've had to lay off over my career. And it's terrible. I've been in a lot of companies that have gone up and down. It's an awful thing to do. So why should you hire? You should be hire if you're confident that you need this role for a long time. Two to three years if it's 12 months, 18 months, bring in a specialist, bring in a consultant, outsource, do something different.

Peter Mahoney [00:21:07]:

Right. You also have to be willing to ask this person for a third of their life. It's actually probably a little bit more the way that we all work these days. They're literally making a decision that is taking up a huge portion of their life critical to understand. And you should think about that when you're bringing them on board. Get comfortable with the idea that you have to be the one to lay them off if you have to get rid of the job. So make sure it's a high filter for hiring someone you see a lot of, especially people early in their careers. They just want to hire higher, higher, higher.

Peter Mahoney [00:21:38]:

And sometimes it's important to drive growth. But you have to be thoughtful. And most people fail because they get over their skis. And then the last piece of this element and then I'll have just a couple more slides and we can take some questions. Maybe is it's really critical for you to define what you need to own full time, what should be a part time specialist resource and what you should outsource and some of the things to think about. So when do you select full time? When it's really core and critical to your strategy, when it's a long term need and it's affordable. So I told you we had this great content strategy and we had five doctors on staff. When you're an early stage company, you can't hire five doctors by the way.

Peter Mahoney [00:22:20]:

They're expensive if you probably haven't figured that out. And how many do I have? I've got of my 200, there are about 120 who are full time employees of the company. Part time is you need them when they're specialized skills. So it's an area where you actually couldn't afford to get someone. I call it short term affordable. I can't afford to get the world's deepest expert in every single domain, but I can rent them. And we live in a world where it's really easy to find and rent these skills. You don't especially have to buy them.

Peter Mahoney [00:22:51]:

Great example is we're going through some really deep pricing work. I've resisted building a pricing team in my organization because what it turns out is that one, we want the skill to be deeply embedded within our product team, but we need some focused areas. So we're spending a whole bunch of money with some deep pricing specialists to get us through a knothole. That's an important thing to Do I have somewhere between, depending on where it is, 10 to 50 interim roles going on at any time. We're doing a large digital transformation and I think that's going to go up to probably about 75 people that are part time working in the organization and then outsourcing. Why would you outsource things that aren't critical to your core, they're difficult to source, et cetera? You all can read pretty well and in fact, one of the ways that I got to fix the organization that I inherited when I joined here at GOTO about a year ago, I unfortunately had to. About three months into my tenure, I laid off 40% of the organization. That wasn't fun and I did because they were overbuilt and the strategy changed and nobody changed the organization.

Peter Mahoney [00:23:55]:

So what we did is we needed these resources, we needed work done. We created a very efficient outsourcing model to get there and we've kind of baselined our organization and now even in a time where, you know, we're owned by private equity, that means there's lots of financial pressure. We're actually not cutting anything. We're growing, but we're growing from a much stronger base. So understand which of these layers are critical for you. So that's my top 10. I meant to go to ChatGPT this morning and see what ChatGPT said. I have no idea.

Peter Mahoney [00:24:26]:

So I encourage you to do that. I left in the slides a checklist form of this. So if you're looking at building an organization, you can check on that later. A couple of quick notes on two things. So we talked about building. What about running? I've written a lot about this about running an organization. One thing to think about is your CMO operating system. Dave and I were talking about domains before your exit.

Peter Mahoney [00:24:48]:

Five thing reminded me, I actually went and I reserved the CMO OS for the CMO operating system. I haven't done anything with it yet, but here the commose. Exactly. I am famous for bad domains, by the way. Plana. My wife made fun of it for years. So this is my operating system for marketing and this is how I think about it. I think about it on a cadence of weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually.

Peter Mahoney [00:25:12]:

What do we have to do? And then I break it into planning, performance, people in perspective. So this is the way that I build and run the machine. And as a leader, if you've got three people, you can do this with 200 and now with sales, 800 people. I do this with an amazing chief of staff who sort of makes the Trains run on time, but she makes the trains run on time because she knows what the operating system is. And the operating system is. It's not that fancy. Literally, we go and we schedule a bunch of meetings and we have a bunch of KPIs and dashboards and we track things. And that's if you haven't been a CMO, that's a lot of what you do.

Peter Mahoney [00:25:49]:

Okay, so, but you can't just randomly do stuff that's the operating system. And then last before, maybe I can take one or two questions. Is the idea of leading. So running an organization, running a marketing organization, doing all that stuff, delivering your growth is table stakes, right? That's sort of the minimum thing that you can do. A truly successful marketing leader leads the organization. So what does leading mean? It means that you need to think about what's my long term financial model. I may be hitting my numbers now, but what is the perpetual financial model I need to get to in three, four or five years? A lot of people mistake the fact that, hey, I'm spending, you know, as A E to r, I'm spending 12% on marketing. That means I'm going to spend 12% on marketing forever.

Peter Mahoney [00:26:35]:

Guess what? You're not. You need to figure out how to drive incremental efficiency over time. Transformation is critical. One of the things that I always do when I start with an organization is say, where are we going? Right. What's our three year vision for what this organization needs to be? And when you define your three year vision for the organization, it helps you think about the decisions you're going to make in interim weeks, months, quarters and years that help you drive towards that long term transformation when there's a strategy change. So my current company, goto, has gone through lots of strategies change, lots of M and A. They were public, they went private, they spun off things, they bought more things. Every time there's a strategy change, you need to think about what's the implication of the organization? Again, you can't just run it like it's not changed since you got there.

Peter Mahoney [00:27:25]:

Market change. Sometimes there's a massive market change that goes on in the market that you're serving. You need to think about how are you going to change your model if you just sit there and do the same stuff. Think I'm just going to turn the crank and do my job in my nice CMO operating system. Guess what? You're going to fail because things are going to change all the time. You constantly need to be looking for this change and then finally it's about new marketing models. Right? Who's using Geni based tools today in marketing? Right. Who was using them three years ago? Nobody.

Peter Mahoney [00:27:54]:

Right. They didn't exist. You thought you were. That's interesting. Maybe you were writing them. So the point is, there's always new stuff, believe it or not. So this is how old I am. When I started in marketing, there was no web.

Peter Mahoney [00:28:06]:

Right? There was no web. And in fact, when the web happened, it required a huge transformation. Then there was mobile. There's things like abx. All these things are major transformations that you need to think about. So understanding that is critical. Okay, so you're also unqualified to be a CMO. But I guess what I posit here is that you're actually unquestionably qualified to be a CMO, because I think everybody here has probably more marketing experience than I do.

Peter Mahoney [00:28:36]:

You've now seen the playbook. It's pretty easy. You can get the book. I don't get paid for it anymore because I sold the rights when I sold my company. But get the book if you're interested in learning more playbooks, et cetera. And I think you all have amazing potential here to be really the next CMO in your organizations or keep your job if you're there already. So thanks very much.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:58]:

Stay here, stay here, stay here, stay here. All right, that was great. I can always tell the best measure of a presentation is how many people are taking notes and taking pictures. And there was a lot on that. Also, that was the worst introduction ever. This guy's a wildly successful multibillion dollar CMO. And I'm like, here's Peter Mahoney. To be fair, nobody gave me a damn introduction either.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:21]:

And we're starting our event. All right, so we're going to do some questions. You better ask this guy questions. Do we have another mic? Yeah. All right, cool.

Peter Mahoney [00:29:29]:

Hi, I'm Jess Cook. Hey. Jessica. Hi. That was a fabulous presentation. Thank you so much. Curious where you have seen between service and outcomes, like what are the characteristics of kind of those two parts of the org working together that you've seen in top performing orgs? Yeah, the key top performing orgs understand whether they're a service organization and whether they're outcome organization. Because what happens is ultimately we all need outcomes.

Peter Mahoney [00:29:56]:

Right. But you need to figure out what part of the factory am I? And when people lose the thread and lose the understanding that you know what their job is. And you often see this with things like a corporate marketing function who kind of sits back and says, no, we know everything, we're smart, we're corporate. And the reality is most of their efforts should be really driving its service of growth, if that's your primary objective as an example. So it's really about just deeply understanding their role and embracing it. It's not bad to be in service, and some people think it is for some reason. So it's just sort of owning your model. And by the way, it starts from leadership.

Peter Mahoney [00:30:35]:

Leadership has to be clear about what is your role. And when you're clear with the role and you own it, then you can be successful. If you don't, all hell breaks loose. Thank you. Hi, Peter. Rachel Weeks. Nice to see you. Oh, hey, Rachel.

Peter Mahoney [00:30:48]:

Nice to see you. Earlier you had mentioned keeping your organization simple. It should fit on a napkin. But then you also said to resist layers. Can you explain that? As you're building a larger organization, you don't want to get too broad, but you also don't want to get too deep. Yeah, build a small organization. That's the trick. Right? So there is always tension, Rachel, in an organization, what I'd encourage you to do is focus on clarity in the organization.

Peter Mahoney [00:31:14]:

So sometimes, obviously you have a span of control issue. So if you have to get to the point where there are lots and lots of people for one particular function, you need to bring in a management layer, et cetera. The point is that you can do that, but you should do it at the right level. And what you shouldn't do is add layers, just to add layers. And it sounds like if you're going through growth and you need to all of a sudden have. When I got to go to, we had a 45 person brand team, which is kind of nuts, to tell you the truth. I know, I see some gasps. Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:45]:

It's like a dedicated Frisbee designer.

Peter Mahoney [00:31:47]:

Pretty much. Pretty much. And they were amazing. Right. But we had a strategy change. We had an organization. We went and did a major rebranding. We were called logmein.

Peter Mahoney [00:31:57]:

As a public company, we rebranded as Goto. And we had an amazing world class brand team, but we didn't need them because we had gone through that change. And that was a case where we had to have a couple of layers because it was a big complex organization. And we struggled with de layering that because when you bring in someone who's not quite, you know, the head of the thing, but has the capability and then you don't know what to do with that job anymore. So it's just resist it. But absolutely, sometimes you have to add a Layer and it's always a balance. I know that's kind of a cheap cop out, but that's the way it works, right? Good to see you, Rachel.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:31]:

Darren Howerton, also from Worcester, Massachusetts.

Peter Mahoney [00:32:33]:

Hey, bring a friend.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:36]:

Wanted to go to the other slide on the. Or the other graph on that slide. The kind of camaraderie one you had. Yeah, it looked pretty linear to me. I'm curious what your thoughts are, especially now that we're in more of a remote world. As you go from one to maybe that smaller team, do you think it's changed and maybe not as parabolic.

Peter Mahoney [00:32:56]:

Here's the way it works. It's a great question. In a remote world, it's almost more important to resist sort of the small, tiny nubs of a team. And the point is, you don't want to create these little cul de sacs, these little islands of organization in your team because even if they're remote, it's actually worse. Right? So if you're a remote person in. So we have a. I mean we're a big organization. We have like an RFP team and the RFP team has this thing and they've got this one thing where there's literally one person who does this one thing and she reports to a manager.

Peter Mahoney [00:33:28]:

And I feel badly for her all the time. And I told the team, what you have to do is we should think about compressing the organization, get rid of the layer. Because the reality is she's the only person. She only talks to herself and her manager all day long. And in a remote world, it's more and more important. So I think it's more critical than ever now. It's always a balance. Just like everything in that when it gets too big, especially in a remote world, it's hard as a manager to pay attention to employees.

Peter Mahoney [00:33:54]:

And it's one of the things as I had on my operating system. A key thing in your operating system is you actually have to support and engage your employees and have one on ones. Some people don't believe in them. I think it's critical to make sure that you create that space for employees. But in a remote world, it's actually. It can be worse. It's much more difficult. Hey, I'm Jeff.

Peter Mahoney [00:34:13]:

Hey, Jeff. Love the presentation. So the question I had is around like, let's say you stepped into Goto and you're trying to install your operating system. Do you usually start in the same spot or is it kind of case by case basis or like what do you kind of do first when you're assessing the landscape of a new project you're stepping into. I love that question. There is no standard way to do it, what it takes. And I like puzzles, right? And it's why I like complicated, messy companies. I like to fix things and solve things.

Peter Mahoney [00:34:41]:

It's fun for me. Some people hate it. By the way. You need to start by listening and learning. And I didn't have a lot of time and Goto as an example, I had about three months to learn and I had to just consume as much information about the organization, about what was going on in a very, very short period of time. But then the second thing you need to do is you need to focus on what's that future state in this nebulous future time space off in the distance, what are we going to look like as an organization? It's kind of like doing a bonsai, right? Your bonsai. You picture in your mind eye what the tree is going to look out and you take the pieces. They don't look like your picture.

Peter Mahoney [00:35:17]:

Right? And it's very similar for that kind of organization. But you need to dive down to the depth that you can tolerate to understand the detail. And that's what I tell my teams all the time. My strategy is I always dive deep. I'm in the details. I like to understand the numbers, I like to know the people. I like to understand the process. But I can't live there.

Peter Mahoney [00:35:37]:

I have to dive there to understand. And then you have to pop up and then you have to make your own assessment for how you make that transformation. In our case, the brand team was an obvious thing. It was way too big. We had a 75 person web team too. So we had some big teams that were just legacy from long term things. You have to assess each situation individually and then make it look like that future picture in your mind.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:02]:

Awesome. Thank you. That was great. Thank you so much. All right. That was so fun. That was awesome. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:14]:

If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review.

Peter Mahoney [00:36:19]:

Review.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:19]:

Because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exitfive.com our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five. There's nearly 5, 000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:53]:

Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free, and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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