How to build a marketing machine: an evening with Dave Kellogg at Balderton HQ

NOV 15, 2021

BY Alice Lankester

Last week we welcomed a room full of marketing directors, CMOs, and founders from the Balderton portfolio to our HQ to discuss when and how to transition from an artisanal, start-up marketing model to an industrial machine, scale-up model. This was the first in-person marketing event we’ve hosted since lockdown and there was a real buzz in the room.

The session was run by Balderton’s new Executive in Residence (EIR), Dave Kellogg, a renowned Saas expert, author of Kellblog, and business leader, with more than twenty-five years of experience working across C-Suite, board, and executive roles in some of the world’s most successful SaaS and enterprise software firms. As EIR, Dave supports the portfolio by providing a unique perspective on start-up challenges across growth, scaling, US expansion, metrics, and marketing. (Read Dave's thoughts about the EIR role on his blog here.)

Dave Kellogg at Balderton HQ

In his fast-paced, interactive presentation Dave touched on the following points:

  • When the C-suite and board say they want a “marketing machine” they’re really saying that they want a black box: money goes in and sales opportunities (or your company’s primary marketing output) come out.
  • How to link inputs and output directly into your marketing budget.
  • When to use both average versus incremental maths in answering the question: how much does an opportunity cost?
  • The need to position complicated topics, specifically attribution, when presenting the marketing machine to the C-suite.
  • Ensuring the marketing machine is linked to the sales machine, without creating dueling models between marketing and sales, or - worse yet - marketing, sales, and finance.
  • Understanding the by-products of this demand generation machine and its impact on communications and positioning.
  • The importance of building a marketing machine in additive layers as you scale over time.

An earlier recording of the presentation can be viewed below, and the slides downloaded here.

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