013 | How a B2B CMO Can Lead Toward the Horizon with Nicholas Holland | Studio CMO - a podcast by Golden Spiral, Shaping Technology Marketing

Nicholas Holland breaks things. Then he builds them better than before. His role at HubSpot puts him in the cockpit with SMB and Enterprise CMOs who are trying to fly their marketing jets to new heights. He's heard their struggles and tries to give them tools for powering their futures

This interview powers through topics including:

• Why your existing customers are the biggest catalysts for future business
• Why integration between sales and marketing really breaks down
• How to amp up marketing automation and personalization
• How to sit at the revenue table in confidence
• The next two years of marketing

Our Guest

Nicholas Holland is a product maker, entrepreneurial dreamer, and lover of mixed martial arts. He's the General Manager and Vice President of Marketing Hub at HubSpot.

He founded and exited from several SaaS companies in the Nashville area before joining forces with HubSpot to run their marketing labs endeavor.

Listen starting at 3:00 to discover more of Nicholas' career journey and lessons learned.

Show Notes

When Nicholas was a SaaS leader, he considered HubSpot for his CRM and marketing automation platform, but ended up going with someone else. Find out at about 4:30 why he made that decision.

HubSpot set themselves apart and continued to iterate and innovate through imprinting their culture throughout. Explore this slide deck to learn more.

 

Nicholas recommends Drive by Daniel Pink as a guide to help identify and define autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Every single system that you stitched together has a small coefficient of drag on how fast you can go. - Nicholas Holland

The Flywheel

HubSpot departed from the idea of a funnel and adopted a flywheel. Why? What brought it about? Listen at 17:00 to join in the debate.

Nicholas illustrates the flywheel by considering your net promoter score.

Integration between sales and marketing breaks down, as does the true power of marketing data, at this point: when you aren't willing to invest in connecting all your systems together, you'll never truly understand what your customer is thinking and feeling.

The Ultimate Reason You Need a Marketing Automation Platform

Can I sit at the revenue table with the sales leader? And can I show the points I've put on the board? That's it. You want to crack open a CMOs brain, ask them to sit down and have a frank discussion about how much revenue they should get credit for versus the sales org, versus the service org. - Nicholas Holland

At about 23 minutes, Nicholas talks about how to truly integrate your systems to get better vision into your customer. He also talks about better, more highly refined governance and ABM.

The Next Twenty-Four Months

Customer communication will be a challenge. 

You're just not your audience anymore. - Nicholas Holland

The emergence of the CDP, a customer data portal.

Leveraging personalization.

Building a Team for the Next Two Years

1. You will need someone to oversee the entire journey.

Be sure to listen to the story at 38 minutes about when Nicholas made a new hire in this area. She had an outrageous request.

2. An OPS person whether Marketing Ops, Revenue Ops, or Data Ops

[Caroline Japic at Kenna Security knows the power of the marketing ops role. That's why she hired Jeremy Middleton. Listen to how they work together in episode 11.]

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