Best of Revenue Makers: Heidi Melin on What’s on Every CMO’s Mind

One of the other topics that comes up all the time that I’m not sure that I’m prepared to solve You don’t have all the answers? I do. Unfortunately, I do not. But the one that when someone asked me about it, I literally, like, physically have this horrible reaction, which is attribution. Literally, it makes my skin crawl. Yeah. At the end of the day, it should not be about assuring dollars to a specific campaign or channel. It truly is about understanding the anatomy of a good deal. Yeah. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by 6sense investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Adam. Do you like receiving gifts? The only thing I like more than receiving gifts is giving gifts. No. Yes. Gifts all day long. No. I’m not that greedy. I love a good gift, and this is a great one. We are in the process of unwrapping some of our early revenue makers episodes that some folks might have missed, and this is a great one. It is with Heidi Melin, who is senior operating advisor at Hellman & Friedman. And she has such a unique perspective because, yes, she has been CMO of companies like Eloqua and Plex Systems, but she now advises all the CMOs in the portfolio at Hellman & Friedman. And she has to, you know, bring folks along the journey, be on top of trends, help CMOs prepare for the board. And so just a really interesting perspective and really great advice and tips for existing CMOs or folks who wanna eventually be a CMO. And it was really good too. She had some insights kinda weaving between b to b and b to c a little bit because that, that firm does spend some time in in b to c. And I think it’s as people are sitting around the holiday table or the holiday fire or whatever you’re doing this holiday season Or opening gifts. Or opening gifts. Thinking about next year, you’re sure you’re well into planning, but there’s gonna be there’s there’s definitely some great taking points. I don’t know what taking point is. That’d be a talking point and other insights in here. So definitely check it out. Let’s do it. Heidi, thank you so much for joining us. Really excited for the conversation today. I’m excited to be here. Nice to see you guys. So just to start things off a little bit, you know, we’ve got varied folks in our audience. And if you could talk a little bit about the role of an operating partner, your firm, just get do a little more intro just for folks that may not be familiar with kinda what the model looks like. Absolutely. So I’m a senior operating advisor for Hellman & Friedman, and I consider that my semi retirement role as I’ve been a sitting CMO for a long time. And in my role as a senior operating advisor, Hillman Friedman’s a large private equity firm. H and F has between thirty and thirty five investments or portfolio companies at any given time. They are some very recognizable companies and companies that are in the growth stages as well as companies that scale. The portfolio includes a lot of technology companies and is about seventy percent b to b and about thirty percent b to c. My role actually is really fourfold. I get to work directly with usually three to maybe four portfolio companies at any given time where I’ll go deep with them, work directly with their CMO, with the CEO in many cases, as well as with senior members of the marketing team on current business challenges and things that there may be struggling with or working on. And so that’s a one part of the role. The second part of the role is I get to build a community across all the portfolio companies, which I have to say is one of the areas that I love the most because I get to be with my people. And so bringing together the CMOs across the HNF portfolio is one of the things that I do on a regular basis, both in person as well as from a virtual perspective. So building that community sort of the second area. The third area is I get involved in recruiting for CMOs with thirty plus portfolio companies. There’s usually always at least one CMO search going on. And so I partner with external recruiting resources and help work on recruiting for those roles. And then finally, I get involved in diligence projects when H and F is looking at a new investment, being able to engage and be the expert sitting around the table, which is fantastic for me because I’ve been on the hot seat part of that table for a long time. And so instead of being asked the questions, I get to ask them. So that’s really what the role entails, and I do it part time. That doesn’t sound like semi retirement, Heidi. All those things you’ve just said are like, that’s a lot. Unless it’s like I do that from the beach. Yeah. Well, it does give me flexibility. There’s no doubt about that. And the other thing that I’m so passionate about is that I worked for growth companies that were both PE and venture backed. You’ll always experience challenges as a CMO. And every once in a while, the PE firm would say, oh, we have this great resource, this person who is an expert in marketing and they’re gonna help you. And nine times out of ten, it was the guy who had just graduated with his MBA and had a specialty in marketing, but didn’t have any of that practical experience. Lots of knowledge, really smart, but I really needed someone with practical experience that could say, oh, I’ve seen this before. Here’s some ideas on how to navigate. And so being able to do that for the portfolio companies at Helm and Friedman, I get really excited about because it’s something that I know I would have appreciated as a sitting CMO. I had the benefit, Heidi, of attending one of your CMO community on sites. And the way you not only are working with each of the CMOs to obviously understand their business and recommend approaches, but also the way you were kind of bringing them along as a cohort. And here’s what’s next, and here’s what you should be thinking about. It was really unique and obviously it’s fun for you having done this in your different roles throughout your career to now be able to advise in such a forward looking specific way. Yeah. It’s great because the thing is is that I, in working with many of the portfolio companies, as well as I sit on boards outside of Hellman and Friedman, the challenges and problems are the same. And sometimes all it takes is getting a group of people sitting together, talking about what their opportunities are, what the challenges are that they’re facing to help them navigate and not feel like they’re by themselves. And so, you know, I tend to love to pick hard topics like CMOs presenting to the board. That’s a hard topic. If you yeah. Yeah. And everyone struggles with it and really helping them be resources for each other as well because we’re all within the same ownership. It has been great. And the community building piece, Saima, is the part that I just I absolutely love because I love community building. CMOs love to get together. And there are a lot of meaty problems and lots of change going on at all times. And it can be lonely at the top. And so it’s not easy to find those peers who are addressing the same problems or at least going through something similar. Exactly. And also being PE owned is a whole special thing as well during this market where there’s a heavy focus on efficiency, a heavy focus on returning to profitability. All these companies are facing the same challenges because of being within the same portfolio, and there’s a lot of pressure on the CMOs. So you talked about pressure return to profitability. So I guess my question is what’s keeping your Portco’s CMOs up at night, and where are you digging in right now? Yeah. I would say there are a couple of areas that I hear consistently from the CMOs in our portfolio. Certainly, we just came off the planning process, and the planning process in any sort of down market is also very challenging because every CEO on the planet wants to do ROI based budgeting, which is very difficult when you think about marketing and the difficulty in measurement and attribution, and it just gets really messy. And so that is an area. So looking at benchmarks, looking at what other companies are doing, looking at where the portfolio companies are investing and how they’re shifting investments, that’s been really important. I would say the second and maybe even the bigger area is something that everyone in the industry is struggling to keep up with, which is Gen AI and the evolution of AI in general. I would say, in my experience, the CMOs that I’m working with, everyone feels like they’re behind. And, frankly, I think everyone is to some extent. And interesting because we have companies within the portfolio that are heavily leveraging AI in their products as well as within their companies. And really thinking about not only AI, how does it impact product development and product offerings for customers, but how are we using AI and generative AI specifically to help accelerate and improve productivity for our marketing teams? And so that’s an area that we’ve spent a lot of time on, And I don’t think there’s anyone that I can point to in the last six or eight months that says we’ve nailed that. We got this because everyone’s just trying to keep up because of the speed of the evolution of the technology. So that’s another area where I think the portfolio companies are definitely focused on. I would say the third area, especially with the b to b CMOs, is how do we leverage technology to get more targeted and more efficient with the dollars that we’re spending. And that’s something we spend a lot of time talking about. And today with the technology that exists, we can get so much more targeted and so much more efficient with every dollar that we spend. And it is a mindset change for many CMOs, and it’s also a change when you think about what is the value that you’re adding to the business. And there are CMOs that still today think that the value that they’re adding is the top of funnel lead support and volume. And certainly that’s an important component, but it’s now really about the entire revenue process and how can marketing help throughout the buying cycle. And a lot of our CMOs are struggling with what does that look like inside their companies and means they have to get better at things like segmentation and identifying who their target accounts are. Like, it sounds so easy. We’re like, just decide who your target accounts are. That’s the hardest part of the process. And so I would say those are sort of the top things that the CMOs are working on right now. You know, your last point there. Obviously, technology can be a force multiplier. Right? You just mentioned the impact of what bringing on that new technology to allow you to scale can do. But, again, going back to macroeconomic conditions, there’s so much of a lens on spend and efficiency and reduction there. And so how do you balance that? Like, what strategies are you recommending to your portfolio companies to make sure that their budgets are allocated in the right way to take advantage of changing market trends and staying ahead of the curve and the competition, but also being really diligent in spend. Yeah. I think one of the areas is in focusing on spending the dollars on the targets that are ready to buy. And so if they can figure that out, that makes their efficiency model so much better. The other piece that I think is really important here is the impact that marketing has on a business. And there are marketing organizations and CMOs that are more tactically oriented, so they’re more of a support function for the organization, supporting the selling cycle and the sales team. And then there are marketing organizations that are more strategic. And I like helping companies move to that more strategic marketing focus. And that means they have to stop just looking at leads coming in, but they have to look at the quality of the pipeline that they’re contributing and the overall pipeline dynamics regardless of where that pipeline is coming from. And so one of the trends that I am seeing is CMOs that are truly stepping up and taking responsibility for overall pipeline at the company. You know, CROs, chief sales officers are so good at looking at in quarter pipeline. And for an enterprise software company, as an example, where your sales cycles go well beyond a quarter, it’s really important to have the CMO looking at long term pipeline dynamics and whether or not the contributions across the organization are gonna meet the pipeline requirements for quarter plus one, quarter plus two, and even quarter plus three. And that’s an area where I really see CMOs starting to step up and take their place at the table and adding value to that revenue process because it’s a gap. Yeah. We like to say being stewards of the pipeline, and that gets, you know, that makes sense right where it’s like we owning the whole thing. It doesn’t matter who’s generating what and where and so forth. Do you see organizations where the CMO is either stepping up to do that or trying and there’s resistance from those same sales leaders who say, like, stay in your lane. I’m running this, you know. Right. I got the pipeline. I got this. Me. Because I would imagine that comes up a lot. Right? Hundred percent. Where I see it changing is when you have a CRO that truly understands not just in quarter, but understands the importance of long term pipeline. That’s where you really get the inroads. And so if you can say, I get it. You’re gonna focus on in quarter, and that’s critical, and don’t stop doing that. But let’s have eyes on the longer term impact of pipeline so that we can forecast better, so that we can understand where our business is going and anticipate challenges before they’re on top of us. And that tends to be a little bit freeing to chief sales officers and CROs because they’re like, oh, actually, that would allow me to maybe focus on in quarter and the execution that’s required because sales leaders, they live and die by quarter by quarter results. And as CMOs, we have to take a much longer term view, and we can actually help support and help the CRO be more successful with that long term view. And so, but there absolutely, there are those relationships that are still a little bit adversarial and sales officers that are like, just get me the leads and then I got it. And being able to demonstrate how marketing impacts a customer buying cycle is really important. I always suggest that CMOs, if they aren’t doing the anatomy of a big deal at the end of a quarter, They should be. And truly looking at the biggest high profile deals, every quarter you’re like, this is the amazing deal that we signed. Well, go back and look at all the touch points across that deal from the time the contact was initiated all the way through to closed won, and you’ll be shocked at how many touch points there are. And yet the sales officer is like, we got this. Just give us a lead. I’m like, actually, you don’t got this. Like, the touch points along the way are really important. And so that’s one of the ways to help that conversation. Yeah. Help the conversation. I think it goes back to the first point you made about being able to measure all the touch points that marketing is driving because the more you can paint the picture making a visual representation of that timeline, printing it out on a very large piece of cardboard and putting it in the sales area on the sales floor so that they understood the impact of all the things, not just the small things. Okay. It totally helps to see it. And that sounds so elementary when you say it’s between ten to twenty touches for an average enterprise sales deal. Like, okay. That’s interesting. But when you actually see them over time and you understand what they are and how they work together over time during a buying process, especially for a high profile deal, everyone pays really close attention. What about you come into situations too where you can’t do that? There’s no data or they’re not tracking. Yeah. Right? So thinking about, like, you know, you’ve got your traditional marketing operations. Maybe there’s sales ops and the CMO says, I wanna be able to do this, but I can’t. Or I’ve got my data, and sales has got their data. We’re not unified. I mean, I’d imagine that’s another one where Mhmm. Like, let’s solve for that too. Like, what’s your play there? Yeah. It happens all the time where the marketing team’s like, this is how much we contributed to pipeline, and the sales team’s like, that’s not what I have. And so that’s where you start. You have to crawl before you can walk, before you can run. And so really looking at infrastructure and data and how you are reporting and whether or not you are truly looking at measuring the entire revenue process is critical. I mean, I’ve sat in meetings as a CMO where you spend the first thirty minutes arguing about whether the number’s five or twelve. You know? And it’s like, okay. Well, that’s really not because the number’s supposed to be thirty. Yes. And you’re like, okay. Why are we doing this? Like, we need to be working off a common set of numbers. And I’ll tell you, that is one of the places where I see the evolution of rev ops as being a very positive thing. And truly looking at the entire revenue cycle and having a view not only of the data, but of the infrastructure and systems across that entire revenue cycle. Whereas historically, marketing and sales have had sort of separate stacks. You know, you have the marketing stack, which frankly, the marketing stack has been far more complicated, involving many, many more sets of technologies and lots more integration. And then the sales stack being the CRM system, in many cases, Salesforce. And the evolution to revenue operations is allowing us to step back and knit those things together. And frankly, that is a benefit to everyone because then you’re working off a common set of numbers. And I would say to CMOs, if you’re arguing about what the number is the first twenty minutes of every meeting, perhaps you need to put in place an initiative to align reporting so that you can actually focus on what’s the business at hand, what’s the challenge that we both need to be working on versus my numbers this and your numbers that. Totally. It’s a hard one, and it’s one that I do see on a consistent basis. So, Heidi, I feel like we’ve talked a lot about trends, change management internally to meet those trends and the demands of the market. It starts with leadership. Right? And you obviously you you mentioned that you’re meeting and always recruiting CMO candidates. So we’ve got a lot of folks in the audience who are working towards those roles. What characteristics do you look for in a great CMO or in a great marketing leader that maybe is a little bit more of those intangibles? Right? One of the things that I think is so critical for marketing leaders is the ability to build relationships across the organization. And marketing, first of all, as a function, as a team sport to start with, even though there are specific disciplines and functional areas within marketing, they all have to work together to have the impact on the company. And the same holds true as far as marketing working with the other functions within the organization. And so understanding how to build deep relationships both inside the company as well as with partner communities, with vendor communities is a really important trait. And that’s one that’s hard to interview for, but those are the CMOs that I see as being most successful that can step into that more strategic role that are able to look beyond just marketing and looking at the business. And so those CMOs that I work with that I just get excited because they’re taking that next step to be truly strategic are the ones that understand business outcomes and are willing to say we need to improve here in marketing. They’re not in that constant battle of defending marketing. And part of that is relationship building, and I tend to be a fan of CMOs reporting into CEOs versus into revenue officers because of that long term, short term thing. But a CMO that doesn’t understand sales and doesn’t understand the challenges that sales teams face are not good CMOs. So those CMOs who have either spent time in sales or CMOs who have spent time learning about sales and partnering with sales are some of the strongest leaders I’ve seen. Just to poke back a little bit, when you were talking about some of the things that were keeping the companies up late. We’re talking about GenAI, and it was there was sort of a distinction you were making of, let’s put GenAI in our product, which, you know, a lot of companies have done. Or they’re talking about. Yeah. Actually, somebody told me the other day that they saw somebody was doing had built a golf driver with AI into it, which I I don’t know if that was a proper application on it, but, hey. They got AI in their product name, which I have to go look into because they just opened a golf store. Anyway, and then Jenna AI is a tool for helping facilitating growth, productivity, and so forth. And you were talking earlier about efficiency because like you said, nobody’s got it. But what are you seeing that’s really from a CMO’s perspective, let’s say on helping on the growth drivers, some of the early indicators of like, that’s a use case that’s really interesting and it has some weight to it. Well, I think certainly the most obvious one is in content generation for marketing teams. I don’t think it replaces those folks creating the content, but it actually can improve productivity and speed to market. And so I think that an an idea generation, that’s an area that I would say all the companies that I’m working with are at least testing. How do they leverage that and how do they think about developing content, whether it’s static content, whether it’s video content, but really truly using the tools out there to help them improve productivity and time to market. So that’s definitely happening. I’m not sure that I’ve seen anyone say, wow. We’ve improved productivity, like, eighty percent. I think it might be too early to start to say that, but I think there are some positive signals that that is gonna be something that is opportunity for the future. Where I’d like to see it go is one of the biggest challenges that any marketer has is data, quality of data, data from disparate systems, and how can we leverage generative AI to help that problem. And so there are companies that are doing that today and thinking about how, for example, vendors that you’re already working with where you have existing technology stack and you have vendors in that technology stack, whether it’s Sixense, whether it’s Salesforce, they’re investing so much money in understanding AI and how it impacts their products and doing a lot of testing themselves. Get in those beta programs. Test those products that are already part of your stack. It’s low risk. And so the data problem, that to me is, like, if we can harness the power of GenAI to help solve that faster? Because there is no company that I’ve ever worked with in my entire career that is willing to raise their hand and say, our customer data is awesome. We have the best customer data in the industry, says no one. And it’s especially hard with marketing because you have so many sources of data. So if we can use it for that, and we’re starting to see that with work that Sixense is doing, with work that Salesforce is doing, to me, that’s where the real productivity enhancements for marketers is gonna come in. Know your customer, know your ICP, and then capitalize on it. Really. You know, it sounds so simple. It’s really hard, and there’s a whole lot that goes into it. Heidi, we’re, you know, nearing the end, but I did wanna ask, you know, it’s beginning of the year. Any other trends? We’ve talked a lot about, obviously, tech tech consolidation, gen AI. But any other specific trends that you’re foreseeing on the b to b marketing side, and also how are you encouraging portfolio companies to capitalize on them? I talked about it early on, but the whole concept of understanding your target, understanding your segmentation, and working on identifying in conjunction with the field selling organization who your target accounts are, go do that. If you’re doing nothing else, go do that because it’s gonna help create alignment with your field organization, and it’s gonna help you as you move forward and implement technologies to help you get very targeted. And so to me, twenty twenty four is all about improving targeting because the tools exist today, and we can do it, and we need to be doing it. And it also drives efficiency. And that to me is probably the biggest trend that I see for twenty twenty four. You know, there’s always one of the other topics that comes up all the time that I’m not sure that I’m prepared to solve. You don’t have all the answers? I do. Unfortunately, I do not. But the one that when someone asked me about it, I literally, like, physically have this horrible reaction, which is attribution. Literally, it makes my skin crawl. Yeah. It’s like a rabbit hole that you can go down in complex selling cycles in b to b specifically, and it’s a rabbit hole that doesn’t have a bottom. And you go into that rabbit hole and you’re like, okay, I’ve just spent six months trying to build this attribution model and, like, I don’t even know what to do with it. And I tend to encourage companies not to jump in the rabbit hole, And there are some attribution models out there that some of our portfolio companies are working on that we’re starting to bring to the surface that take you know, everyone’s like first touch, last touch. Okay. That’s great. We’re good. But what about the twenty seven other touches during the middle? And trying to put in place a basic model to answer the attribution question because that’s what every organization wants. Every CEO asks the question. It’s a messy one to answer. If we can focus on what’s the best way to do that in b to b, I think we’d be helping everyone. And so I’m spending a lot of time with the portfolio companies looking at the different models that they’re using and, trying to evaluate what’s working, what’s not working. And those models, are they adding value to the business, or are they just proving that marketing is working? Because yeah. Because it’s like, why are we doing it? What is the outcome? What are we gonna do with this information? Yeah. I once bought an attribution platform, which, again, that’s this is a a multimillion dollar industry now. I think at the end of the day, I was just trying to get that journey map. I just wanted to know a, b, c, d. And they’re like, well, we can set up w shaped and y shaped. And I was like, I don’t the alphabet? What? It was That’s part of the rabbit hole. You’re like, I wanna learn about that, and all of a sudden you end up down the rabbit hole. They’re like, well, thirty seven cents of the w based. That was a scary, it was scary thing. But Yeah. It’s hard. And just because we’re going down the rabbit hole, I do have a POV on here that I’d like to share because I’ve owned data science in years past. I’ve built every version of an attribution model. At the end of the day, it should not be about assuring dollars to a specific campaign or channel. It truly is about understanding the anatomy of a good deal. And when you know that, you will do more of the things that help progress those deals, and you will take away resources and time and effort from the things that aren’t. And if I think folks to start with that, understand that you should have one source of pipeline truth, whatever model you pick. First step to last is pick it. And then from an attribution perspective, it is just about understanding the touch points and building on that and digging deep. And I personally feel that there should be maybe a handful of folks in the organization, whether it’s marketing analytics, whether it’s your data science team who is looking for those trends and bubbling up those trends to domain gen, to your ABX team, to everyone else. But everyone doesn’t have to be in the rabbit hole. One source of pipeline to understand what’s working, have folks who are really understanding the technology and what the nuances of that data is, and then have them be your guide. Because otherwise, it’s a never ending battle. Yeah. And the the connection to business outcome is so important because so many times I work with CMOs, senior marketing leaders that will say, I’m trying to prove that our investment in x, events, conferences, webinars, like, insert whatever you want is worthwhile. And I’m like, well, actually, that’s the wrong approach. You need to look at how do all these things work together to drive pipeline and quality of pipeline and conversion. And it’s a mindset shift. Don’t look at it from the defensive mode, like, we’re gonna prove that these dollars are worth it. But instead, look at contribution to the business and start there. And CMOs that are able to do that tend to have an easier time than ones that are in that place that we’ve all been in, where we’re like, no, this is the right thing to do and here’s why we’re doing it. And that defensive mode forces you down the rabbit hole that is hard. Absolutely. Yeah. So, Heidi, we love to end our podcast with one question, and we’ve got a bunch of really interesting answers from folks. What is the most ridiculous thing that you have been asked to do in your career? There are a lot of them. But the one that comes to mind most immediately is I was responsible for a large portion of the marketing organization at PeopleSoft many years ago. And one of the parts of the organization that I was responsible for is the events and conferences. And we, like many other software companies, had a very large conference. And we were in rehearsals for the conference with the CEO at the time, and it was the night before because it’s always the night before. Right? Of course. And he decided on the fly, on stage during his rehearsal, that he required a gospel choir for his presentation. That’s amazing. It’s amazing. And everyone looks at me, and they’re like, so what are you gonna do about this? You’re like, we got a guy. I’ll call him real quick. Dial. You have a nice little mind. Guy. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And so I learned something really valuable. So to fast forward to the end of the story, we got the gospel choir. It was amazing. Did it add value to pipeline? I’m not so sure it did. Was it worth the the drama? Maybe, maybe not. It was great. It turned out terrific. We happened to be in LA at a customer that starts with d based in Los Angeles, and they were a customer as well. In addition, we had a production company that had relationships, and we leveraged relationships, and we had a gospel choir there that next morning. It was unbelievable to see the ability to do the impossible or what seems like the impossible when you leverage relationships you built over time, whether those relationships are with a customer, whether those relationships are with a partner, whether those relationships are with someone outside in the industry, those relationships are critical. It felt ridiculous at the time and when I say it out loud I’m like we needed a gospel choir. Duh, it was Enterprise Software Conference, doesn’t everyone need a gospel choir? But it proved to me that those relationships that you spend time on and invest in help you do the impossible. Sometimes that might be a gospel choir. You know, you’re probably the first person that went took the ridiculous and then just came back with a really, really valuable Outcome slash lessons slash truth bomb with that. And there’s other ridiculous things that I’ve done that I’m not going to share. Like, and now I’m actually, I sort of wonder what our. What our gospel choir strategy is going to be going into this year. So we have to think about this now. Clearly. Everyone needs a gospel choir. Hundred percent. Well, Heidi, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation and learning about gospel choirs, but also all these other great insights that you brought. So thanks so much for joining us, and really appreciate the time. Great spending time with both of you. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at 6sense.com/revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.