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A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of promoting Mike Volpe, my VP of marketing, to chief marketing officer. I thought I'd take a minute to talk about why I promoted him, as it might be interesting to other folks working their way up the marketing ladder.
By far, the number one reason I promoted him is because he has built a scalable lead generation machine that powers the HubSpot growth engine. As you can see below, he has grown new leads coming into our funnel from 18K in October of last year to 38K in March of this year, and he did this without having to spend a boatload of money on advertising, list rentals, tradeshows, etc. As a CEO, this fuel is what I really care about at the end of the day. There are a lot of other things that contributed to my decision, such as the good work he has done with our brand, the great team he has assembled, his cultural fit, his leadership. All that is nice, but at the end of the day, this CEO needs leads that scale, and I'd argue that all CEOs need the same thing from their marketing team if they want to do something special with their business.
When I say "scale," I really mean it. I suspect if Mike and his team took the month of May off and spent no money, we would probably still get 25,000 new leads. This is pretty darn cool from my perspective.
So, how the heck do they pull off this magic? Well, his team creates a boatload of remarkable content in the form of blog articles, ebooks, grader apps, webinars, etc. Each piece of content is like a mini magnet that pulls in leads. The nice thing about this content is that stuff they created 2-3 years ago is still there pulling leads into the business. From a CEO's perspective, the economics here are fantastic, because you don't have to start each new month from scratch and spend your way to a number that will feed your hungry sales mouths.
To give you a feel for how this scale works in practice, consider the "Reach" Mike's team has attracted to HubSpot—the total number of people who opt-in to our email list, subscribe to our blog, follow us on Twitter, etc. As you can see from the graph below, our Reach has grown from 500K in October 2010 to 800K in March 2011.
Each piece of new content we create expands HubSpot's Reach—the better the piece of content, the more our Reach expands. The more Reach expands, the more leverage each new piece of content has.
For example, if you have a Reach of 1,000 to whom you market a new webinar, that is interesting, but if you have a Reach of 800,000 to whom you can market your webinar, that's a whole different ball game. As time goes by and your marketing team creates more content, they just build more leverage. It works in a similar way to the compounding interest in your bank account or 401k.
So, my advice for anyone who wants to get promoted to Chief Marketing Officer like Mike did, is this: build a scalable lead generation machine.
Good luck!
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