Is Marketing a Math Problem?

“We need someone who really gets growth marketing.” 

This was a conversation my co-founder and I had when things were not going so well at the real estate tech startup we founded. I was our CMO and I couldn’t make more customers appear. That’s bad. It was deep 2017 ZIRP days, and along with Grammarly and Monday.com you could see a handful of B2B or enterprise tech companies doing massive growth marketing campaigns run by people with what I can only assume were vastly different skillsets from mine. And they were clearly winning.

We hired a consultant. There was a lot of talk about Zapier and Segment.io and automated forms, quizzes, and other gimmicks that of course demanded a lot of painstaking tracking and instrumentation. Optimization was everything, after all. And scale. At one point our new CMO heard about how ads with people holding signs with words on them worked well with one algorithm or another. Gotta test it, what do we know?

Thankfully we wound up getting acquired in the end but we never hit the scale our VC funding would hope for. I got lucky and met Ari Paparo who hired me to be Beeswax’s CMO and a little over a year later we got acquired by Comcast. Then I went on to run marketing at a public company for a while. And while I learned from that success, something kept nagging at me. 

Was all that “growth” stuff…bullshit?

(You might be here because you read my Twitter thread that got literally dozens of likes)

In a future post I’ll go over what was really stopping our growth (tl;dr great product-market fit with a very limited TAM, absolutely cursed combination), but ever since then I’ve wondered what the “trick” is that I just didn’t get. 

Now clearly not all growth marketing is bullshit or Monday.com wouldn’t be a $10B market cap company who is still up 12% from IPO. Companies with built-in sharing loops (Docusign, Zoom come to mind) some might call “PLG” are exceptions too. I’m sure there are more.

But chances are you are not them. In fact, you’re so not them, that every time I hear from a CEO who admires how Monday went about doing marketing I tell them how relieved I am to hear they’re ready to really invest in marketing, like really invest, and that spending $100M/year sounds like a great idea and I wish them the best of luck. 

We have a laugh and then can have a good conversation about how this fantasy of growth hacking and building an automated “marketing machine” is keeping them from doing some really easy obvious things that actually will work. Including but not limited to:

1. You don’t have nearly the scale to “test and grow” your way into anything

I work with primarily B2B enterprise companies. Meaning, they sell to the top end of the market because that’s where the money is and it’s easy to know who your customers should be. At a certain point those companies entertain targeting mid-market, and that’s where sometimes this ‘growth machine’ fantasy comes up, especially when they look into how expensive it is to hire and train a mid-market sales team. But even then we’re not anywhere near the scale necessary to test all those shades of blue or different “lady holding sign” variations into any result that’s statistically significant.

2. Selling to enterprises (or “whales,”) is a multi-owner, long, complex process that can’t be meaningfully represented mathematically

Sorry it just can’t. Your MQL growth numbers won’t tell you that your deal champion just added your competitor’s CEO on LinkedIn or that the CISO’s had a bad night’s sleep and doesn’t want to get too deep into your 97 slide deck on SOC2 compliance today. It also won’t tell you that your prospect told your sales rep that she “has been seeing you guys everywhere” and sure, she’d love to be on your podcast next week. If you’re hinging your success on “measurable outcomes” you’re not doing things that result in “unmeasurable outcomes,” the gooey messy stuff that actually gets your prospects to like you. And that brings me to:

3. People buy from companies and people they like; they often do so against all logic and product fit

Who hasn’t heard the classic complaint from Sales: “[Competitor] just came in and took it. And their product sucks!” Your competitor’s product always sucks. So how are they doing so well? All those big dinners and ugh did you see how they went nuts at Cannes and had that gaudy activation? Yeah, they’re doing all that because they’re stupid, that’s why. Or are they doing it because that’s actually the stuff that gets your target customer to close? You have to ask yourself this and be honest with your answer. 

Next week I’ll get into what obvious things I’ve found do work, as reluctant as some companies are to do them, and how you can work some semblance of measurement (or at least gut-checking) into really effective enterprise marketing.

Meanwhile, if you want numbers, go see a Kraftwerk show instead. They killed it at the LA Philharmonic last weekend!