Best of Revenue Makers: Kelly Wenzel’s Guide to a Marketing Rebuild

So I would say the top down board and executive pressure was drive pipeline, drive demand. Totally get it. That’s job one. Okay. But as CMO, I’m sitting there saying, we must launch our technology product this year. I’m the one who went to the board and the executive team saying, we must do a massive go to market reset, and it has to be centered around us launching our technology product to market. And so, I mean, that was self inflicted, but it was absolutely the right thing to do. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by 6sense investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Saima, do you love a good project? I know I love a good project. I love a good project. Home projects, but also work projects. Yes. So in our third of our unwrapping, and I’m gonna apologize again because that was my pun of not good pun, of episodes that go back a ways that maybe some of our audience haven’t heard. This was a perhaps one of the most commented on in terms of LinkedIn and very positive comments. We had Kelly Wenzel, who’s the CMO of Andela, and she talked about her journey from joining the company and going through a pretty significant rebuild. The team, the company was pivoting strategy. That in of itself, really great. But how she talked about leadership, how she talked about bringing people along was pretty inspirational. I mean, you’re lucky enough to have worked with Kelly in the past. She is phenomenal and a rebuild. I mean, again, we’re at the end of the year. I I see on LinkedIn already a lot of folks are taking on new jobs, and so I imagine there is gonna be some form of a rebuild on the horizon for so many listeners. And let’s just listen to somebody who’s done it and done it beautifully and come out on the other side with her team intact, with great sort of, leadership and with great Success? Absolutely. Success. Let’s do it. Kelly, thanks so much. We’re really excited to have you today. And we have a really great topic. I don’t wanna just tee it off with, I guess, you could say, like, the negative or it’s not negative. It’s just sort of what sounded like a really daunting, interesting last year and a half. But the topic today is talking about a marketing turnaround, and we call it a marketing rebuild. For you, you’re CMO at Andela now. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you got to Andela and what the role you thought you were getting into, and then ultimately what you had to do and what it morphed into and, I guess, where you are now. Alright. So great question. So let’s start with Andela. So I guess I would just back up and say I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for a long time. I’m, like, really gonna date myself, but going on, this is year thirty of b to b high-tech marketing. And so many times in the CMOC, and I kind of built my career on doing turnarounds or transformations. It did, you know, you can pick a word. I’m generally going into an organization that has a marketing function that is either not optimized, sometimes it’s downright dysfunctional, and in many cases, there’s an aspiration to do a build out. And so this was no different. Andela I’ll just set a bit of context. So Andela operates the world’s largest private talent marketplace of skilled technologists. So if you wanna draw a parallel, you would think Upwork, Fiverr, like, a public marketplace. Anyone can get in, any kind of talent, any kind of company. We run a private marketplace. You have to be vetted to get in, and we operate with technologists in hundred and thirty five countries around the world with the predominance of the talent being in Africa and Latin America. So there’s a big mission, you know, and purpose to this brand. I was very drawn to that. The company has the coveted unicorn valuation, and they’re ten years old. And so have had this amazing trajectory, but in ten years and lots of growth and unicorn valuation, they’d never had a CMO. And so they were looking for, okay, how do we grow? I was at Amazon at the time running b to b marketing and business to developer marketing for Amazon Alexa. So I was already used to dealing with that developer engineer audience, and I just was so enthralled with the purpose of the brand. And in all my years, the one thing I’ve never gotten to do is an IPO. And so I was like, yes. I am totally here for it. Build up a rocket ship and help drive this company, build growth, and lead us to IPO. And they were pretty candid about the fact that the marketing function had been really not very successful. It had been scaled back kind of repeatedly. The investments weren’t working. So I knew that I was gonna come in and do a build out. And I started in March of last year and pretty quickly realized it wasn’t, like, going to be okay, Kelly. It’s time to put the rocket fuel in the engine and take off. You don’t have an engine. You don’t have solar panels. There’s no landing launching pad. Like, you really have to do a complete build first. And I got into it, and then I realized, oh, wow. This actually isn’t a transformation yet. This is triage. I mean, when I walked in the door, guys, there was no marketing ops function. There was no comms function. There was no social media function. There were some basics in place, and then there were other basics that weren’t in place. And suddenly, the magnitude of, oh, wait a minute. You have to lay brick first. This is completely about put the right people in place, put the right process in place, make sure you have the right infrastructure tech stack to do the job. So it was a complete and total, I think, level set for me of, like, oh, wait, Kelly. Before you get to the good stuff, you’ve gotta do the basics. So, Kelly, I mean, that is quite the context you set, and especially coming from a place like Amazon where I am sure you had a mob’s team, at least. You can’t do this transformation all at once. And so how do you even begin to prioritize or determine where to start? Where is the fire raging that you absolutely need to be putting out? And then how do you prioritize the rest of what all needs to happen to get to a place? It’s a great question. So, like, I do have a playbook after doing this for so long, and I kind of alluded to it. Right? One, people, process, infrastructure. Do you have the right people and skills on the bus? It’s the right process in place for all of it. Right? I mean, for lead disposition, for brand, for comms, for social, for content, and then do you have the right tech stack? And so the very first thing that I did actually, before I even started at the company, I hired my go to person on messaging, and I said, get started. I was on kind of this long notice with Amazon, and then I wanted to take a break. But I was like, I can’t afford to wait. So you get started without me. Bring me in when you need to. Here are the stakeholders. Go. So that way when I started, I would already have a start of is the messaging the right messaging and whatnot. I actually started interviewing people before I’d even started at the company, and I put in place the key functions. Hire number one was a VP of growth. Adam, that should make you happy. Hire number two was a marketing ops person. Because if you don’t have that like, the basics of your infrastructure, how are you gonna run any campaigns to drive demand, to drive growth? Got an agency up and running to help with social and comms and content until I could make hires. And so I would say it was very much about fundamentals and basics. One of my discoveries, like, I’m smiling now, but I remember the horror in the moment, was that the leads that were coming from the website actually had not been making their way to sales, I think, for, like, sixty days, maybe even longer, and no one noticed. No one noticed. And it wasn’t till the marketing ops person got in there that they figured it out and told me, and I was like, wait. What? You know, mind blown. And then that really hit me. Okay. Wait a minute. We’ve got a bigger problem that we have a nonfunctional website. The plumbing wasn’t even working. And so while on one thread, I have let’s work on messaging and packaging and are we do we have the right value proposition codified and being told in market? At the same time, I’m like, okay. Now we need to go rebuild a website. And my instruction to the team was get a website live in ninety days. You have ninety days to do it. So scope accordingly, and let’s get live whatever we can get live. And I will tell you I wasn’t super proud of the site. The aesthetics were fine. The messaging was fine. Was it a lift over where it was? Yes. But what I was really trying to solve for was a back end and make it work. Right? And be confident that if I’m going to start to turn on the paid engine and drive campaigns, I need to drive it to a place where I know I can capture that demand, process it. They’re gonna have a good CX, and I couldn’t even do that in place. So then I’m, on the one hand, telling management, I know I said I’m here to drive growth, but I can’t actually start running campaigns yet, and here’s why. And then in parallel with that, I learned that the previous regime was like, you know what? We just give all the leads to sales. Just give it all to us. We will follow-up on everything. There was no lead scoring. There was no stage definitions. Right? And so what that actually meant, I’m sure you guys are nodding and smiling, and most of your listeners will know what was the effect of that. The give us everything meant they followed up on nothing. Well, that’s why when they weren’t getting leads for six months, they didn’t even realize because it’s not like they were doing anything with it. But even prior when they were getting leads, they were not great leads. There was no intent. There was no behavior signals. It was just tire kicker. Someone spent time. Maybe they filled out a form. Hey. You’re ready for sales. We all know better. And so we had to, like, claw that back as well. And so there were all these gating factors of laying that foundation in place. Like, you can’t have running water yet, guys. I’m still laying the pipe and the plumbing. We actually had to partner with the sales team to say, because, of course, I can’t do this in a vacuum. You would never. Okay. What are all the sales stages? What are the entry and exit criteria? How are we gonna do lead scoring? Wait. What’s the ICP? Are we aligned on it? So when I talk about basics, it was basics on truly every single dimension. Right? People and roles, skills. We repatriated people on the team. Yes. We did top grading. Yes. We brought in new people. We didn’t quite double the team in a year, but we came close. I think I need nine hires in nine months, which that’s pretty impressive, I think, to be able to grow that quickly. You know, I started in March, and we turned on our campaign engine at the end of August. The website did go live in less than ninety days, but then we had all the funnel stages and the instrumentation to make sure that we were aligned between and Salesforce and to the just all these gating factors. And I will just say it was an exhausting first six months. I mean, maybe an exhausting first year. It was, yeah, it was really tiring. I’m sure that the leadership team was like, hey. Sure. Let us know. And there was no pressure to do anything, and there was probably nothing going on in the business either that you needed to actually work on. Let’s flip that question around. What what was going on in the business? I’m sure there was TikTok in terms of any number of initiatives that you had to get to. Yeah. So one, the business climate, if you’ve been paying attention, especially in tech, and that is what we do is tech hiring. Tech hiring didn’t have a great twenty twenty three. People were doing layoffs. Things were very tentative. So we’re also selling into economic headwinds, which was really challenging. And then this is a business that had a technology platform that they had not really done a great job of launching out to market. So I would say the top down board and executive pressure was drive pipeline, drive demand. Totally get it. That’s job one. Okay. But as CMO, I’m sitting there saying and we have a differentiator here in our talent cloud, our product, that hasn’t even been taken to market. We haven’t packaged it properly. And so I enforced my own deadline, if you will, of saying we must launch our technology product this year. And so that became horizon number two. Horizon number one was get the website live. Horizon number two was get the campaign engine going. Horizon number three was launch our talent cloud, our platform, out to market. And that meant an entirely different work stream on the product didn’t even exist as a package to entities. So there’s product packaging, positioning, architecture, messaging. Right? That whole thing. So in a way, you could argue that was self inflicted because I’m the one who went to the board and the executive team saying, we must do a massive go to market reset, and it has to be centered around us launching our technology product to market. And so, I mean, that was self inflicted, but it was absolutely the right thing to do. One of the things that I was unpleasantly surprised by was how long everything took. I’m used to Adam, you know, because we’ve worked together in the past. I’m a pretty impatient leader, really high bar, get shit done, make it happen, deliver results, points on the board. And I kind of, a little bit maybe, had the hubris from past experience that says if you build it, they will come. And you do a good job and you turn on campaigns and you get your messaging down and you run good campaigns, it’s gonna happen. And we turned on the spigot, and it was slow, really slow. And I can’t tell you the number of town halls and talks with my team that I had to do over the summer where I was like, guys, nobody lose heart. We’re gonna play our game. We have a plan. We have a mission. We know what we’re doing. We’re not gonna shift. We’re not gonna veer off course. The evidence, the proof was not forthcoming very quickly. And it was up to me as the leader to say, this is the hill we’re taking, and we’re gonna keep taking the hill, and we’re gonna keep playing our game. I know these are the right things to do. Nobody lose faith. And meanwhile, I have to take that same message and sell it slightly differently up the hill, right, and just say, guys, I know it’s taking longer, but bear with me. This is just gonna take longer than we thought. And I will tell you, I don’t think we saw really the fruits of the labor until we turned the corner into twenty twenty four. So that’s nine months into this transformation. And I will tell you in q one, we finished the quarter exceeding our top of funnel goals at MAL, at MQL. Here I am in q two. I’m recording this midway through the quarter. I’ve already met my quarterly goals for top of funnel demand. We’ve dropped our cost per everything by high double digits, so we’re showing efficiency. My last board deck was every chart was up into the right. And I was finally like, okay. Right? We stayed the course, and the results did come. But, like, how do you know to stay steady and not get knocked off your game when you’re like, wait a minute. Is it really working? Is it gonna work? I mean, Kelly, there’s a lesson in there. And I know you had your people process technology, which makes so much sense, but there’s a lesson here in just fortitude and strength and conviction. And I would love to dig in on how you set that context, particularly with the executive team, how you build those allies in a new role. Like, you’re the new kid on the block. Right? You are the one who’s being brought in, yes, with the mandate, but when it’s taking longer than expected, when you’ve had to reset expectations early on in, How do you do that? How do you build that trust and that influence within that group? I love that question for so many reasons. One, because I think part of my personal style is about influence and how you do exert and use influence to try and drive the ball down the field if you’ll forgive the sports metaphor. So number one is nothing happens in a vacuum. You cannot operate in a vacuum, especially when you are leading that wholesale transformation like this. You have to know who are the key stakeholders that I need, but you cannot do it alone. And so number one was making sure, do I have sales leadership on side? Are we aligned? And I had a new chief business officer start about five weeks after I did, and job one was drive alignment between he and I. Are we aligned on what needs to happen, why it needs to happen? We used to have this analogy that it was like landing planes, like air traffic control, and the sequencing that we had to drive between sales and marketing was pretty significant. So even while I’m working on tech stack, infrastructure, sales process, sales stages, I mean, he’s my key stakeholder in all of that. Right? Even though my team was helping drive entry and exit criteria for each stage and driving that instrumentation, Again, I can’t do that without him. I had to work with his sales ops team and the rev ops function to say, are we aligned on this? Are we on board together? And there were many moments during that, like, oh my gosh. This is exhausting, where he and I would look at each other and we’d be like, thank god you’re here. Thank god we’re aligned on this. And I think it helped tremendously that your two go to market leaders were able to go to the executive team and to the board completely and totally aligned on this is the mission, this is the hill that we’re taking, here are the pieces and parts, the planes that we both need to land in our respective areas of the business. Without that, I don’t think we would have bought the time needed to drive the transformation. So that’s point one. Collaboration is an easy word to throw out, so I think it’s deeper than that. I think you need to Simon, you used the word conviction. So I definitely have conviction in my playbook, but I don’t need to be right about it. So when you can operate with curiosity and go in and say, hey. Look. This is what I think needs to happen. What am I getting right? What am I getting wrong? And with true openness, be receptive to whatever comes back on the other side. That’s how you earn trust. And, yes, I realize I’m using an Amazon leadership principle here, but I think trust has always been a high part of my DNA. One thing that I would tell you as a point of pride is if I look back over my previous software companies, I know that if you were to go talk to most of the CROs that I partnered with, they would say Kelly was one of our best partners, one of the best CMOs I work with because we were in it together. Right? I used to joke that marketing is here to serve sales. That does not mean we’re subservient. It doesn’t mean sales gets to say jump and we say how high and how long would you like us to stay airborne. It’s recognizing, like, they need us to do their job, but we need them too. All the great demand in the world is useless if you don’t have a strong sales team to carry it over the line. And so I think operating with that degree of trust and transparency is really key, Saima. But I will tell you, I actually found that part easier knowing that I had a team that I had to manage through so much change. And this is a marketing organization that knew it wasn’t working. Right? They knew we’re not delivering. Who wants to be part of that team? Nobody. So they were very downtrodden, I would say, and exhausted and fatigued. And I come in and I am now this whirling dervish of change operating at a high pace. The bar just went from, like, here to, you know, here, and there’s very little tolerance for anything below that bar. And it’s suddenly like, okay. Lean in, step up, or you can decide to step out. That’s fine too. And do you know what I will tell you? Even through leading through this period, I talk about it a lot, Avuca. Do you know this phrase, Avuca? Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And any CMO or any business leader who has led through a transformation will tell you you are battling some or all of that volatility. How fast are things changing? Uncertainty. Is it clear the path forward? Do I know which way I’m going? Complexity. How many various moving parts are there? When I look at the complexity of the turnaround we were running, literally every dimension needed an overhaul across sales and marketing and product for that matter. It was enormous. And ambiguity is like, are there known unknowns? We’re unknown unknowns. I don’t know what to do. When you are managing through that kind of scenario, keeping your team bought in and engaged, especially what I would call through the heart of darkness where you’re doing it and the results aren’t there. Do you know we turned the corner? I’ll tell you another thing I’m super proud of. I have the highest eNPS in the entire company, and we have no voluntary attrition through that whole transformation. I look back over that, and my mind wants to go like and that’s a testament, I think, to the team and how much they care. But also when you can set a vision or mission, take that hill, and it’s inspiring to people, there’s nothing a great team can’t come together and do. It’s amazing. Gets back to that conviction you were you were talking about earlier too. There’s one thing I wanna zoom in a little bit because you talked about obviously, you were building marketing muscle that wasn’t there, and you were building that alignment between sales and marketing. But you talked a bit about a product launch. And I’m imagining there was probably some other work, other muscle, other things that had to happen far outside of the world of sales and marketing across the entire org. So I went to the executive team in June, so I got there in March. By June, I hadn’t launched a website yet, not many points on the board yet, and I said, we need to drive a commercialization effort here and launch our product. I picked an event, which was the Gartner Symposium in October. So I said this gives us less than six months to do it, five months, but we need to take this product out to market in a big way. It’s one of our core differentiators, and we are not talking about it the right way or at volume, you know, at any scale. And the company got on board. The exec team got on board really quickly, and that’s because they know that billion dollar valuation that Andela got was on the heels of we are going to deliver a technology platform that is going to automate and streamline this process of hiring technical talent at scale. I think it’s McKinsey or Deloitte. I’d have to go fact check myself, but several of the big firms have projected that we’re gonna have a shortage of four million engineers by twenty thirty. There just are not enough of them to do the work that needs to get done to drive digital transformation across the enterprise. And you cannot make the world your hiring pool on the backs of humans alone. You simply can’t do it at that speed and scale. And so getting this product launch was absolutely critical. So exec team bought in quickly, board bought in quickly. Internally, wow. This was not a muscle that our team had. And I’ll start by saying one of the reasons I love my job, absolutely love what I do, is because I view marketing as like the lightning rod. And we sit at the center of so many constituents, like the center between the market, the customer, the prospect, press, analysts, employees, product. And that that doesn’t mean we’re the sun in the middle of all that. We’re not everybody’s revolving around us, but it just means the role we get to play synthesizing the inputs between all of those different constituents so that we can craft a message that resonates, a value proposition that’s meaningful, campaigns that resonate with each of those different audiences. What could be more exciting than getting to sit in that seat? And when I look at this commercialization effort that we ran, this go to market process, some of the spirit of that is is captured in this go to market process. So, yes, Adam, we’ve been through this before. I’ve been using the same launch strategy, launch plan since two thousand and nine, and I’ve used it dozens and dozens of times now. It’s refined over times. I I would actually put it up there against almost anything out there in terms of a go to market plan, And it starts with establishing a cross functional team, which we did. And the idea like, you should have seen the like, what? Why do you need someone in sales on your launch team? Why do you need rev ops? Why does finance need to be on your launch team? But, I mean, they were like, game. Sure. We’ll come along. We’ll be there. We have no idea what’s in store for us. We’ll be part of the process. But there’s a difference between I’m gonna get you to show up, and then I’m actually gonna get you to carry water. So we started with the cross functional team, and then there was so much education on this is what a launch plan looks like. Here are the I think there were twelve different work streams in the launch plan. Things from, like, solution definition, product delivery. Do you think the product team was used to marketing, inspecting their delivery against road map and timelines and feature delivery? All of a sudden, it’s like, wait a minute. Who are you? Why are you doing this? And, again, there’s a freeze. There’s a verb that I love here, which is, like, the idea that you have to enroll people. Right? I don’t get to come tell you’re participating. I have to get you to enroll. And to do that, you have to buy into the mission. You have to buy into why are we doing this. That actually wasn’t as hard as it could have been, but then it was an entirely different way of working for this team. You know, at Amazon, we’re very used to inspection, and here we weren’t. And there was a little like, wait. Why are you checking on my work? I don’t know if that feels so good. So lots of change management went into that process. I could talk to you all day, Kelly. I mean, number one, a badass female leader, but your stories of transformation, driving change, leading teams through this is just remarkable. So thank you for everything you’ve shared today. We have a question that we ask everyone on the podcast, and you have thirty years of experience on the b two b marketing side and go to market side. What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve been asked to do in your career? Good or bad? Well, the bad ones would be not safe for work. So you know how it goes. Woman coming up in tech at certain stages that wasn’t always easy. So let’s not go there. I think the most ridiculous in a good way would be getting to lead the project at Amazon that put Alexa on the Artemis one mission. And so I got to lead the cross functional project across Amazon Alexa, and then we were doing this as part of the Callisto payload. This is the payload that went on the Artemis one rocket, and we were doing that in conjunction with other brand partners like Lockheed Martin and Webex by Cisco. And so I’m getting to work with powerhouse brands. I’m partnering with NASA. I was working in mission control for the better part of a year going down to Johnson Space Center to get to be at Cape Canaveral when the rocket finally, after two failed attempts on attempt three, when it finally launched was just amazing. To get to be part of that history was so incredible. At one point, I was kinda geeking out about it. I mean, I had young kids, and my son is a little bit of a space nerd. And they could tell I was really into it, so they walked me through mission control. And they take me into this, like, broom closet. I kid you not. And in the broom closet, they showed me the vacuum tubes where the little messages would go from mission control and wherever they went across the building, and I got to see the dusty old vacuum tubes and the switchboard that decided which tube went where. It was just to see, like, the original mission control completely refurbished. And then probably, like, my cool mom moment was I got to take my family to Johnson Space Center, and we were in the mission control, my kids, my husband, when the rocket splashed down. And that was truly an epic moment. Part of the mission was that with Alexa up in space and we were using this Webex whiteboard, we could literally write a message on the whiteboard there in mission control, and then you would see it up in the rocket. And I got to write a little love note to my husband and my kids and see it up in space. That’s pretty ridiculously cool. You win. That’s pretty ridiculous. Yeah. I think she won. That question we may have to retire that question now. I don’t know because I think you may have just won. I you know, I don’t know. I think there are people who have big advertising budgets, who vendors, like, court all the time, and they get to do ridiculous, I don’t know what, go see concerts and stuff all the time. That’s never been me. I wish, but this one was pretty cool. I don’t think we can top that at this point. That’s pretty remarkable. So we probably should have recorded at the beginning of this. I’m Kelly Guenzone. This is my master class because this really was so you just gave us so much. So thank you so much. I hope it was coherent, guys. I hope I didn’t ramble and talk too much. Not at all. Not at all. This is great. Really, really appreciate it. 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. 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