How to build a marketing machine

This article summarizes the points made by Balderton’s new Executive in Residence (EIR), Dave Kellogg in an event he ran with our portfolio at Balderton’s offices on how to build a marketing machine.

Dave is 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 an 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.)

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 duelling 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.