2019 FirstMark CMO Summit: Insights from Peloton, Harry’s, MongoDB, Zola, and more

Here at FirstMark, we support our portfolio aggressively to help accelerate their success. As early investors in companies like Pinterest, Shopify, InVision, Riot Games, and over 75+ others, we’ve learned a thing or two about how the right marketing strategy can impact a young company’s trajectory. Our annual CMO Summit is one our favorite days of the year not only because we bring together marketers from across the FirstMark family, but also because we welcome exceptional leaders from breakout companies like Peloton, Harry’s, Bombas, MongoDB, and others to share tactical tips on customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and more. For those of you who aren’t (yet, at least!) part of the family, here are a few of those top takeaways:

David Bakey, VP of Direct-to-Consumer, Harry’s

Key Takeaway: If something shows short-term improvements in LTV that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will be a long-term LTV win. If you align yourself with your customer’s interests, odds are you’ll make the right decision.

“We effectively made the mistake of assuming that a win for us was going to also be a win for our customers, instead of the other way around. What we should have done was start with: ‘what is the best thing for our customer?’ So we ended up sourcing a lot of our best ideas from listening closely to our customer support team, especially for smaller things that upon hearing are obviously beneficial to our customers. The best part? In almost all cases, these changes tend to be good for our business as well.”

Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, SVP, Head of Global Brand Marketing, Peloton

Key Takeaway: Brand and performance don’t have to be in competition — they can and should be joined at the hip. The brand team should be reading acquisition reports and performance should have a deep appreciation for the brand. When done right, the brand should be infused into everything because it takes all aspects of the company to create a fantastic experience — from our retail showroom teams to inside sales, to member support, to field ops delivery, etc. This makes fundamental sense because in the real world, your consumers don’t know (nor do they care) if they’re being targeted by a performance-driven ad or a brand campaign — it’s all the same.

Kate Huyett, CMO, Bombas

Key Takeaway: Identify everyone’s key strengths and weaknesses and build your org around them. Don’t be afraid to write down 1–2 strengths for every person on your team so you can have a more holistic view of where you have strong areas and gaps. This also lets you identify specific team members for non-obvious step-up roles on projects that they might be passionate about.

“Being aware of the balance of strengths on your team is what matters the most, and if that’s leveraging existing people or bringing in new people, that’s fine. At the end of the day, any org structure can work, it’s actually much more about the relationships and whether you have the right amount of tension in the right places.”

Mike Chi, CMO, Zola

Key Takeaway: Speaking directly to your customers with empathy will drive lift. For example, by making a landing page feel hyper-personal and speaking to a very specific user depending on how they arrived at the page, you can drive enormous lift — even 30% with some simple picture changes.

“What we’ve evolved to at Zola is hundreds of different landing pages that are associated with where the customer is in their wedding-planning process. We’ve been able to use the engagement we see through certain search terms, coupled with the volume of these terms on specific channels, to figure out where we should spend more time and go really deep to have hundreds of iterations.”

Meghan Gill, VP of Sales Ops, MongoDB

Key Takeaway: You have to think ahead about what data you’ll need to collect today that will enable you to create more customized experiences in the future — whether it’s email nurture tracks or digital marketing, etc.

“Everybody wants to be a data-driven marketer, right? That can be pretty tricky in a startup—especially in B2B—when you, at an early stage, only have a handful of customers or don’t have enough customers to draw meaningful conclusions.”

You shouldn’t have dozens of tools in your marketing stack as an early-stage startup, but you should have these four foundational tools in place: a CRM, a marketing automation platform, a data enrichment tool, and an event or webinar registration platform.

Maria Pergolino, CMO, ActiveCampaign

Formerly CMO at Anaplan, Marketo & Apptus

Key Takeaway: Webinars are incredibly impactful when you’re creating a new category, not because of the audience they may or may not draw, but because they’re great at seeding future content.

“From our webinars, we created a number of white papers. We turned each one of those webinars into seven blogs each. We used that to build some case studies and essentially those exact webinars turned into those white papers. We then packaged that into a certification. It wasn’t a certification for our company, but rather a certification for quote-to-cash—the category we were creating. We gave it out for free. We said, ‘Hey, you watched these couple of webinars, here’s a white paper summary of them. Here’s a 10-question test, you’ll be certified, and here’s your badge.’ All of this was critically core to helping us drive category creation.”

Alex Weinstein, SVP of Growth, Grubhub

Key Takeaway: Always keep incentives in mind. Facebook and Google have a strong incentive to show users dashboards when something, somewhere is going up and to the right — equally, your agency is highly incentivized to tell you something is working if you’re paying them to improve that particular aspect of your business that they’re measuring.

“I’m not saying that they’re acting nefariously, but I’m simply saying you should have some separation of church and state. You need the people who are doing the measurement to be very separate from the people who are doing the actual work. So, if you recognize these built-in conflicts of interest, and you’re able to separate the church and state of measurement and execution, you can start to create a healthy culture of, ‘Hey, I’m actually optimizing for the whole company, not for my own channel, and my success is running as many experiments as I can per unit of time. And this ultimately means that it’s totally fine to raise my hand and say something isn’t working.’”

FirstMark’s Annual CMO Summit is a private conference that gathers global marketing leaders from across the FirstMark family to learn from each other and from accomplished CMOs from breakout companies like Peloton, Grubhub, Harry’s, Bombas, Zola, ActiveCampaign and more. Click here to learn more about the FirstMark Platform, which connects our founders with talent, customers, and expertise.