The Role of the Conductor in B2B Leadership

Christopher Lochhead wrote a book called Play Bigger. He was the CMO of Mercury Interactive and a couple of other real high-flying Silicon Valley startups and just an awesome guy. But he has a saying. He likes to say, "Thinking about thinking is the most important thinking you do. A lot of what we're talking about is stepping back because it's so easy to default to, Hey, I just raised my Series A; I'm in MarTech, let's go get somebody out of drift or let's go get a sale.

Let's go find someone in Salesforce marketing. Let's go get a director from Salesforce to run our marketing. Oh, they'll crush it for us. And it's a natural default, right? And then a person comes in and because they weren't clear... And usually that person, they don't know how to vet. So, they're told this and they're super excited. Oh, wow. This is my chance. Put a stamp on it, but they forget that I'm not going to be in Salesforce anymore. Meaning, I'm not going to have, first of all, the Salesforce brand and just all the power of that. I'm not going to have all the resources.

And so anyway, the questions are just so important. Our guest, Mark Donnigan spends a lot of time just going through with the CEOs and the founders he works with and just really talking it through.

Listen to the rest of the interview with Mark.

Part one of this interview is here:

The Two-Way Interview with Mark Donnigan

About Susan's Guest:

Mark Donnigan designs and executes marketing programs and go-to-market strategies that build markets and establish disruptive innovation companies as a category king. With 20 years of experience as a transformative and strategic B2B marketing and business leader Mark understands what’s required to succeed in today’s winner takes all market. Leveraging marketing and growth tactics that work, Mark produces real business results for early and growth-stage technology and disruptive innovation startup companies. Being well versed in SaaS, software licensing, wholesale, and retail distribution models, he helps companies build nimble, highly efficient marketing teams that routinely outperform larger marketing groups. Mark is passionate about extracting the most value from every marketing dollar invested. He provides startup founders in the early stages of building their sales engine with high-impact marketing playbooks so that they can reach their revenue goals and scale sustainably.