B2B Marketing Metrics Framework - with Bill MaCaitis - Former CMO Slack, ZenDesk and Salesforce

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Bill MaCaitis, former marketing executive at Slack, Zendesk and Salesforce, and the creator of CMO Pro. Today, we'll be covering three primary topics with Bill. First, the top lessons learned from marketing leadership roles at category leaders. Second, the catalyst for developing a marketing metrics framework with six different categories. And then third, we're going to ask Bill to go ahead and prioritize those marketing metrics from the top six into the top outcome metrics, the lagging indicators and the top input metrics. So with that, Bill, can you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey becoming my guest here in the Metrics and Measure Up podcast?

**Bill MaCaitis** (1:24)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Ray. Big fan. I've been listening to the pod for a while and I love how much you guys go into the metrics, the benchmark. So super excited to be here. Yeah, my journey, I spent about half my career on B2C, half on B2B. I did start up right out of college. It was an early kind of SaaS gaming subscription model. So we did rankings and tournaments, grew to 10 million members. We got profitable, sold that, went to work for several other large media companies. So companies like IGN Entertainment, Run Tomatoes, built that network up, sold that to News Corp and then went to work for leading up marketing for a lot of their sites as well. So everything from Fox Sports or Fox News, or Wall Street Journal. It was just a ton of fun building those big iconic brands up. And then actually shifted over to the B2B side. So Salesforce had reached out, had a chance to actually work with your partner Dave, which was awesome at Salesforce for a little while, led a lot of their online marketing initiatives, learned a ton from them, from Mark, and then did a couple last tours of duty at Zendesk. I came in as their CMO and took them through an IPO, and then also with Slack came in as their CMO, and an eventual IPO slash acquisition. Now, I help out other SaaS and AI founders with their growth. My specialty is driving capital efficient growth, really looking at it holistically from a marketing sales success support perspective. My role at Slack, I was CMO, but I also did CRO, so I run the sales success and support teams. I really like to think about holistically, how do you drive growth, but really capital efficient growth, and beyond that, even customer-centric type growth. I'm a big believer in customer centricity.
Anyways, that's a little bit of the background and was excited to talk with you today.

**Ray Rike** (3:02)
The following is a public SaaS announcement. Has your company experienced the challenge of achieving efficient, profitable growth over the last few quarters? Are you interested in learning more about how SaaS companies use metrics and benchmarks to drive decisions that optimize growth and maximize enterprise value?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:18)
Join us and 3,000 of your peers at SaaS Metrics Palooza on October 8th and 9th for two days packed with insights, strategies and best practices from industry leaders. Register now at benchmarkit.ai and take your SaaS leadership to the next level.

**Ray Rike** (3:33)
Okay. Well, you're singing to the choir here with capital efficient growth, right? And to the entire industry, especially the VC and private equity communities over the last eight quarters, maybe not over the last five years. But we won't go into the beginning of the career and a lot of those leading B2C digital marketing, digital media roles, but Slack, Zendesk and Salesforce. I think if I was going to name the top 25 SaaS companies over the last 20 years, all three of those would pop into my mind, right? So Bill, so tell me about the lessons that you learned across those three companies that are really best practices and things that you try to convey to all your clients and fellow CMOs.

**Bill MaCaitis** (4:18)
Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. So maybe I'll break the rules a little bit here and give you one lesson I learned from my very first startup out of college, which was we didn't even know about VCs at that point. I grew up in the Midwest. I didn't know there were VCs that would come and give you money. And we basically used the capital we had coming out of college, which was zero. I was eating ramen noodles. And so it really forced me to think about, hey, in marketing, how do we drive growth? But not just how do you drive, but how do you do it efficiently? Right. And I think that's something that I really took with me to Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack was, hey, there's, you know, the rub with marketing is you can do a thousand different things, right? There's so many different tactics you can use. And some of those are going to generate growth, but they're very expensive, right? And I think one of the big things I noticed when it came from B2C to B2B was that B2B, I don't know what it was, but, you know, was very conservative, used a lot of tactics that, you know, almost seemed like they came from 30 years ago, right? Like, let's write a press release and send it out.