Why You Need a GTM Leader on Your Board with Elana Anderson

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Elana Anderson. I first met Elana 25 years ago, 20 years ago, when she was a Research Director at Forrester, and since then she has gone on to have a storied career as a product leader and as a three- time CMO of Veracode, of Demandware, of Vidyo, and now she spends a lot of time advising startups and growth stage companies as an independent consultant and as an independent director. So Elana, it's great to see you and have you here.

Elana Anderson: Great to see you, Matt. Good to reconnect after all these years.

Matt Blumberg: Absolutely. So my question to you is, you are a go- to- market leader, and you are now spending time as an independent director and advisor of companies. We spend a lot of time at Bolster talking to our clients about the importance of having independent directors on their board and thinking about what skillset and experience that they're looking for when they're hiring an independent director. So my question to you is, what are some of the reasons that a founder should add go- to- market expertise in the form of an independent director on their board?

Elana Anderson: Yeah, it's a great question and I think that a lot of boards can benefit from more depth and marketing and go- to- market understanding. I think it's probably one of the larger gaps, in terms of board expertise. I think for the viewers here, maybe focusing on why small to mid- size growth companies could benefit makes the most sense. Yeah, so first and foremost, I think somebody with a strong go- to- market background expertise can help scale demand creation and accelerate pipeline growth which, given the work I'm doing, I think is probably the number one issue that boards are concerned about when they acquire and get into businesses. So if you're a small to a mid- size company, you probably don't have a deep marketing bench on the team. The sales team is probably doing all the heavy lifting with a lot of emailing and dialing for dollars, so to speak. But as the company grows, the approach is that we're working for you as a small company with a handful of reps. They typically don't scale well as you begin to scale your team and also scale the market footprint, so generally speaking, the role of sales is very one- to- one focused, whereas marketing's role is to be much more broadly market facing and one to many facing. As you grow, the importance of those one- to- many activities also grows because they give you reach, the reach that you need to scale the business. Having somebody in a board seat who understands that can educate the board, and can help also guide the team towards investing in the scaling functions, the staff, the expertise and the activities that will really drive and accelerate growth.

Matt Blumberg: So that is the most obvious number one you could come up with, right? Once a company is in scaling mode, once they've found product market fit, it's all about scaling demand.

Elana Anderson: Yep, totally. Absolutely.

Matt Blumberg: All right, number two.

Elana Anderson: Yeah, so number two I'd raised is the market and customer understanding, that a company can gain. I think it's unfortunate and really frustrating sometimes that many investors view marketing as the, make it pretty people. The truth is that a strong marketing leader often has a much deeper quantitative view of the business than their peers. To do their job well, a CMO needs to have their finger on the pulse of the market, the competitive landscape. They need to have a deep quantitative understanding of deal dynamics, win- loss, customer perception, and so forth. For that reason, I actually think that marketing execs should be included in more board meetings because they're often not even in invited to the party.

Matt Blumberg: That's a mistake. That's a different topic for another time. That is a big mistake. I agree with you. Marketing-

Elana Anderson: Exactly.

Matt Blumberg: I mean, your second point, which applies to that as well, is that marketing can provide customer context and market context.

Elana Anderson: Absolutely. Absolutely. But the skillsets also needed at the board level because a quantitative understanding of your market, your customers, why you win and lose, where deals get stuck and the multitude of other things requires that a company has to put processes in place to capture the right data, analyze that data, and then they need to communicate it effectively across the business. And that data supports both tactical day- to- day stuff, as well as long- term strategy. Again, having that voice on the board who has the expertise can help guide the business to get the right processes in place early, so that the culture of the business is more data driven and that business decisions are guided more by quantitative data than by a qualitative view of the world, which I often see in my consulting.

Matt Blumberg: So I love both of those, and now I'm dying to hear what number three is.

Elana Anderson: Well, I'm going to go maybe off the rails on that one and say that I think putting brand awareness challenges into perspective. I cannot count both as a consultant, as a former analyst and as a CMO frankly, that I've heard many times from senior leadership teams and from boards, nobody knows who we are. We need to work on our brand awareness. And then, often the CEO, or even the board, will then dictate that the marketing team, what they should do about it, right? So maybe they start a big rebranding project or a big PR push or something like that. Unfortunately, big branding projects are notorious for failure. You probably remember the big Gap rebrand many years ago, or the more recent, the statement-

Matt Blumberg: And worse than that, they're extremely expensive.

Elana Anderson: Exactly, exactly. You hire agency, I mean, Staples probably spent millions turning the paperclips sideways into a staple. Not sure what it got them in terms of sales, but small companies also tend to spend a lot of money on these projects that, ultimately, don't deliver expectations. So for many companies, rather than investing in that huge branding project, maybe start with something like building a library of great customer stories or customer reviews or building out your customer spokespeople. If you have a gap in that area, the brand project's not going to meet expectations. Now, once you have that content, maybe then it makes sense to do a big brand project or a PR push. The real point that I want to make though is that having that voice on the board with a strong go- to- market perspective, you can help them empower the team on the ground by guiding the board not to prescribe the answer and really help the team get to the root of what the challenge is and put a rational plan in place.

Matt Blumberg: It's such a great point. In a lot of ways, the perfect first independent director for a company might be a product person to help make sure that the board doesn't become the product department and dictate product, but then once you get into scaling revenue and customers, I think all three of these things are great takeaways.

Elana Anderson: Yeah, I think in fact all three of them are related to how do you scale a business effectively.

Matt Blumberg: Thank you so much for joining us Elana. Great insights on why you should have a marketer in the boardroom.

Elana Anderson: Thank you.