Start-up marketing isn’t for the faint of heart, and if you want to learn how it’s done well, you can check out the highlight reels on LinkedIn, or you can spend time with someone who’s scaled marketing start up and discuss what they’ve learned.
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Abby Strong, chief market officer and chief customer officer at Cribl, joins us to share her insights on the realities of scaling marketing for early-stage startups.
Abby discusses the critical importance of clarity, earning founder trust, and building a technical foundation for sustainable growth.
Key takeaways from this episode include:
- The importance of clarity; if you can’t describe the problem your company solves in one sentence, you are simply “scaling confusion.”
- Earning the trust of founders by demonstrating a deep technical understanding of the product before translating it into value-based outcomes for customers.
- Why success in a growing company requires employees to embrace the current stage of the business and pivot quickly rather than dwelling on how things “used to be.”
Episode guide
00:00 Introduction
00:35 Meet Abby Strong
01:00 What’s missing from the common advice for start-up marketers on social media?
02:01 What do founders get wrong about start-up marketing?
03:13 Advice for talking to founders about marketing their start up
04:53 What are the most common mistakes made by start-up marketers?
07:08 What are the signs it’s time to scale marketing?
08:50 Where and when do you start building your start-up marketing team?
11:10 Advice for building out other revenue roles, like sales and customer success
12:53 What is the make up of a person who excels in start-up culture?
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Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Prior to joining Third Door Media as the Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.