This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast

Jess opens a demand gen role.

The brief: run ads, talk to customers, build in public. Sixty applicants land in her inbox in 48 hours. Six months later, still searching.

Josh's read on the situation? "Do you just really suck at hiring?"

Most candidates checked two boxes. Nobody checked all three… until Kelly showed up and had CTV ads running within two weeks.

Hear how six months of searching ended with a hire who had an ABM program live before Jess could blink.

Get to the good stuff:
[00:00] Jess asks for a demand gen marketer. Josh says yes. Cue a six-month odyssey
[02:32] Jess had three boxes. Run ads. Talk to customers. Build in public. Box three is where most demand gen marketers ghost you
[05:06] Jess calls every marketing leader she knows. Same answer every time: hardest role I've ever hired for. Josh hints she just really sucks at hiring
[06:14] Demand gen means something different everywhere. ABM. Growth. "Write the blog, hit send." Jess’s preference? Someone who'd defied all the laws of checklist marketing
[08:20] Sixty applicants become twenty-five interviews. Two boxes, consistently. Never three
[10:12] Six months in, Jess is willing to try anything. Newsletters. Craigslist. Missed connections
[11:35] It’s December, the Series A is coming, sales want pipeline… and the company helping marketers run better ads still doesn’t have a demand gen marketer
[12:20] Jess has a "just hire someone" moment. Josh holds the line
[12:50] Eric Linssen of Demand Collective has a name. Kelly Arndt. Jess has been waiting 84 years for this moment
[14:32] Kelly has the demand gen chops and he also has a content brain. The six-month search suddenly makes a lot more sense
[15:40] Jess skips “where do you see yourself in five years?” and hands Kelly the real budget and the real targets. He comes back with month one
[16:33] Kelly could hold a room with a CMO. Box three — finally ticked. Jess considers drone surveillance and wire taps while she counts down to Kelly’s Day One
[17:54] Kelly basically starts before he starts. Sales calls, Slack channels, marketing plans. Disclaimer from Josh: entirely voluntary.
[18:48] Nobody's week two checklist says "run connected TV ads." Kelly's did. 180,000 ICP contacts. Surround sound campaign, activated
[21:40] Jess's mastermind asks: when organic starts dying, how do you nurture? Her answer. Ads. Their eyes lit up
[23:16] Vector ads are showing up on Disney+, Hulu, Paramount. People in their network are texting mid-show. Jess only watches shows involving ghosts. Unrelated
[24:13] Josh hears ABM program, and panics. Kelly has it live mid-panic
[27:49] Building a tool that pulls pain point quotes straight from sales calls and turns them into ad copy?  Kelly is living in 2049
[28:49] Time to stare deeply into the camera. Marketers, you need to hear this
[29:43] Three hiring tips from Jess, starting with: you're going to kiss a lot of frogs
[33:44] Josh tries to 6X the pipeline goal. Jess declines.
 
This Meeting Could’ve Been a Podcast is a Vector production.
Filmed and produced by Sweet Fish.
Editing by Handy Man Edit.
Show notes by Content 10x. 
Music by Peter McIsaac Music.

Creators and Guests

JC
Host
Jess Cook
Head of Marketing at Vector
JP
Host
Joshua Perk
Co-founder and CEO at Vector

What is This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast?

This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast drops you smack dab in the middle of the closed-door sessions where Jess Cook (Head of Marketing) and Joshua Perk (CEO) are working to turn their company, Vector, into B2B marketing’s next big thing.

In each episode, they tackle a real, strategic decision together—"Should we hire an agency?", "Should we push free trials or demos?", "What are we going to do with all the swag Josh bought?!"—dishing out pros, cons, knowns, unknowns, wins, challenges, and stories along the way.

Come for the big picture strategy and day-to-day tactics, stay for the jokes that make HR nervous.

Jess:

Hey, Josh. I think it's time we hired a demand gen marketer. Someone to run our ads and show everyone how to use Vector for Vector.

Josh:

Hey, Jess. I totally agree. Go find our person. Six months later. Hey, Are you

Jess:

are you I found him. Hey, Josh. Remember when we decided we needed to hire a demand gen marketer and then it took us six whole months to find a demand gen marketer?

Josh:

I do remember that. You were you were almost dead by the time you finally found one.

Jess:

That murdered me.

Josh:

Yeah. What took you so long?

Jess:

It's a good question. Because demand gen marketer, I feel like, is usually one of the earlier hires Yeah. On a marketing team because, you know, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline. Yeah. And that's usually the closest thing you can tie to it.

Jess:

And, yeah, it took us a minute. So let me go back to some early hiring decisions we made. So we hired we hired me.

Josh:

The one and only.

Jess:

And then I very quickly was like, I need someone to do product marketing. Yeah. Because I knew we were going to be a very different company in six months and probably a very different company again six months after that. Which has now come true. I'm so thankful we had Alex Ferdin, who's our product marketer, with us through that entire pivot and figuring out positioning.

Jess:

And so that was the smart first hire for our team. But we also are a product for demand gen marketers. We sell to demand gen marketers. They are our daily user and power user. And so there was this feeling of, we need someone to come in and show us how it's done.

Jess:

We can see our customers are doing really interesting things with our product. But now we need someone to come in and run our ads and show us best practices for how we think we should be using Vector, how we think our customers should be using Vector.

Josh:

Yeah. It's great framing. I think we to read it back to you, you came in and were like, if we don't have any way to distribute into the market, it doesn't matter what we build. So you nailed that. Then it was like, well, if we don't know what product we're building, it doesn't matter what we distribute.

Josh:

So Alex came in there. And then we started to nail those two things. And it's like, oh, now we probably need to generate some pipeline and capture all the stuff that we're doing. So it was time.

Jess:

Yes.

Josh:

But boy, were they hard to find.

Jess:

That was a tough road. It was a tough road.

Josh:

What were you looking for?

Jess:

I had three main boxes I needed this person to check. First of all, I needed them to be great at running ads, because that is what, like, we're all about. That is what our product helps you do. And we needed somebody who was like, that was their bread and butter. So I needed somebody to come do that and run vector for vector.

Josh:

Yep.

Jess:

Second, I needed them to be customer facing on day one. Yeah. And and prospect facing, frankly. Like, get into sales calls, show them what you're doing, be kind of the the facilitator or the translator for sales to get in there and be like, hey. Here's what I'm doing that's really interesting.

Jess:

This actually would make a ton of sense for your business based on what you've shared with me. Oh, you're running ABM? Yeah. That's this is how we're doing that. Right?

Jess:

Someone to go in and show them that, like, we're also walking the walk, talking the talk, and we have the same challenges you do. But here's how we're solving them with the same product. And so that was really exciting to me. And third was someone who was willing and able to build in public. We have this history of having folks on the team you, me, Alex, Sarah who are really good about talking about what we're doing in the company, get people excited about the things that we're building, and how we're building them, and how we think.

Jess:

And I wanted somebody I wanted our version of our customer seeing themselves in this person and being able to talk about all the things he or she was doing with the product and how it was growing the business.

Josh:

Yeah. Well, all three of those were interesting. I remember in episode one, we talked about raising our Series A. One of the things that was hard for me to overcome in the Series A was like, we're an ads product, but we don't run ads. Yeah.

Josh:

Right? So that was number one for you, someone to come do what we do. So that was huge. And then to your second point, we didn't have a user of our own product inside of our company. And so the role was unique in that we wanted them to almost be a marketer while also influencing our product.

Josh:

Like tell us what's working, what's not, which was unique. And then the third one, which if you add all three together, just made this like finding a unicorn, was we market to marketers. And we have a history of hiring people in our marketing team that are essentially part of the marketing story. And so we needed someone that not only felt comfortable being on camera and writing playbooks and stuff, but someone that wanted to build a brand and an audience. And those three things were very unique about the role.

Jess:

Totally, and hard to find.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

So we started decided we were pivoting in July. And at that point was when we made the decision, we're pivoting to ads. Yep. And now we need to find someone who will come play that role

Josh:

for us. You open the roles July?

Jess:

Yeah. Sure. July.

Josh:

What are you doing for six months?

Jess:

Let me tell you. That's what this whole episode is about, Josh. Well, I opened that role in July, and I was very clear in the job description. Like, this is what I want. And and at that time, I started talking to other marketing leaders who were also hiring for demand gen roles because I wanted to understand what were they looking for?

Jess:

What were some, like, green flags, some red flags as you were interviewing people? And also, do you have some folks that weren't quite the right fit for you, but were still amazing? And did you, like them.

Josh:

Other people keeping roles open for as long? Like, did it take other people six months, or did just really suck at hiring?

Jess:

I'm just really mad. No. Every marketing leader I talked to was like, this is the hardest role I've ever hired for. And I think it's because there are many demand gen marketer means a lot of different things to a lot of different marketers. Yeah.

Jess:

And there's many different titles that kind of feel interchangeable but are not. Yep. Right? There's Performance Marketer. There's Growth Marketer.

Jess:

There's Demand Gen. There's ABM. They all kind of fit into the umbrella of demand gen in some flavor.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

And so I knew we were looking for a pretty I knew demand gen was the right title because I envisioned this role someday over seeing a demand gen team that probably had ABM in it, that probably maybe had some performance in it, that had some growth marketing in it, potentially events underneath there. I don't know, right? But I wanted it to be flexible enough to allow for that.

Josh:

Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that's difficult is marketers only get to experience the version of marketing their company lets them do. I know I've talked about this before. We've been at companies where it's just like, write the blog post and hit send kind of thing. And we particularly weren't looking for performative fake marketing or checklist marketing.

Josh:

We were like, this person's going to do events. They're going to do ABM. They're going to do all this sort of stuff. And there's a lot of marketers out there that just haven't had the opportunity to run all of those things because they're working for old school companies that are just like, write the blog, send the newsletter. We call it marketing.

Jess:

Right. Yeah. Run the ads, report on the ads. Run the ads, report on the ads. And I wanted somebody who, one, found the product just fascinating and was excited to experiment with it and figure out, what is the best way to use this?

Jess:

What is the guide? And how can I write the guide? And so that was really the person I was looking for, somebody who was ambitious and excited about that kind of flexibility and autonomy and trust in this role.

Josh:

Yeah. Which isn't for everyone.

Jess:

It is not.

Josh:

There's certainly people that are just like, kind of enjoy being a cog in the wheel. Totally. That's fine.

Jess:

I like running the campaigns and optimizing the campaigns and reporting on the campaigns. And that's totally fine. This was just a different type of role. Yeah. So yeah, we put that out there in July.

Jess:

I think I got, like, 60 applicants in the first forty eight hours just off of my post Wow. In my LinkedIn inbox, which is rough. Yeah. You know a good problem to have. And so sorted through those folks.

Jess:

I also brought in people who colleagues had interviewed that weren't quite a right fit for that role, but could be for this. And what I found was most demand gen marketers, who consider themselves a demand gen marketer, check two of those boxes. Right? I can put them in front of a customer tomorrow. They can run ads.

Jess:

They love running ads. They understand the campaign metrics and the little tiny things you can do to bump performance or just certain things that just don't work. They've tried that before. Right? Yeah.

Jess:

But they're not willing and able to build in public. Yeah. Is not their bag.

Josh:

Which isn't a shade on them. No. It's like we particularly were looking for a unicorn. Yes. And we kind of accepted that, well, man, if you're really creative and good at running ads, you might not also be the right executive presence.

Josh:

Correct. Right? There's just two different cups of tea. Trying to find one cup that has all of those in them was really hard.

Jess:

We had that Venn diagram of person two, where it was like, they're great at running ads. They already have an audience. And they're building it. And people are engaging with their content. I did not feel comfortable putting them in front of maybe another a fellow demand run marketer,

Josh:

but

Jess:

not like a CMO.

Josh:

Right, yeah.

Jess:

There were people who just didn't really understand how to change the elevation of their conversation with people. So that was a big one for me. So we searched for a long time, six whole months.

Josh:

That's crazy. Fairly Six whole active six months.

Jess:

Very. I mean, I was like, good friend Kaylee Edmonson. I was like, will you put this in your newsletter? She did, because she's amazing. Exit five, put it in their newsletter and on their job board, because they're amazing.

Josh:

Desperate.

Jess:

I was desperate. I was like, anybody? Does anybody out there?

Josh:

You were on Craigslist, like in the classifieds? No. I was

Jess:

in the missed misconnections.

Josh:

Yeah. Maybe

Jess:

I saw you and maybe you run ads. Come find me.

Josh:

You were in the Starbucks. You had Google Ads open.

Jess:

I know this is not for you. Please.

Josh:

Your CPC was really low, but I did not get

Jess:

your hair. But I was afraid to ask

Josh:

for pain. I had not done my hair that morning.

Jess:

I was was in messy mom bun mode and I had a bagel smear all over my face anyway.

Josh:

So anyway, you were in the Starbucks. You're looking for a misconnection. You couldn't find your demand and marketer anyways.

Jess:

Took a long time. I do think I interviewed and we're a startup. We don't have HR. I don't have recruiter.

Josh:

Right.

Jess:

It's me. You know, it's each of our, like, leadership team people when they're trying to grow their team. Like, they're we are interviewing. We're doing all of the reviews of resumes, all of that.

Josh:

Right? Yeah.

Jess:

And so, yeah, I think I interviewed probably 25 people for this role over that six months. Easy. Yeah. And and so many of them were incredible. They just didn't check all three boxes.

Jess:

And it was a very specific role we were looking for. So I think it was probably December. December.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

Right? And we're now realizing, like, we're gonna go try and raise a series a.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

It is gonna look very odd that we we have this product for demand gen marketers, and we don't ourselves have demand gen marketer who uses our product for demand gen marketing. Yeah. And so we're really getting down to the wire. I'm like, we gotta find this person. They have to be out there.

Jess:

Like, I know I'm asking a lot, but I just was not willing to settle. And I was starting to hear from sales, where's this demand gen marketer? We need pipeline. We need to be running ads. And I felt that.

Jess:

I felt for them. And at the same time, just not willing to be like, Okay, fine. We'll just hire somebody.

Josh:

Yeah. And you actually came to me at one point. I think maybe halfway through tell me if I'm wrong it felt like you were getting defeated.

Jess:

A little bit.

Josh:

Yeah. And I don't know if you use these exact words, but I think you basically asked me, Josh, if you want me to just hire someone, I

Jess:

can do do remember something that. I remember that.

Josh:

And I think we were like, no. Like, yes, we need to generate pipeline. Yes, we feel this pressure. But it would be such a mistake to settle and get two out of the three. Like, they're out there somewhere.

Josh:

We just need to find them.

Jess:

We just haven't crossed paths yet. So our friend Eric Linson, who runs Demand Collective, which is an amazing community for demand gen marketers if you're a demand gen marketer, check it out.

Josh:

Check it out. It's It free to

Jess:

is free to join. And it is like, it's a vetted community. Everyone in there has at least three years of demand gen experience. And we decided toward the end of last year, were going to sponsor that community. Made sense is a really nice fit.

Jess:

We wanted to be able to do events for them and provide value for that community. And we wanted to do a little test and see how it went. And it was going very well. And sometime in December, Eric came to me, and he was like, hey, do you still have that role open? And I was like, god, yes.

Jess:

Who do

Josh:

you have? Like a wisp of a woman. Like, it's

Jess:

still there.

Josh:

Yeah. Yes. I do. It's like the beginning of Titanic, like, eighty three years

Jess:

It's been eighty four years. As I dropped my 74 carat diamond into the ocean because I have nothing to live for. Yeah. He came to me. Mhmm.

Jess:

And he was like, there's this guy in my community. His name's Kelly Arndt.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

He is looking for his next right role. Yep. He's really good at demand gen. He's got decent budget, he really knows what he's doing of how to optimize and make sure he's getting the most for his money. He has a content background.

Jess:

Background. And that was like, wait a second. Wait a second.

Josh:

What? Yeah.

Jess:

First, I don't even understand how you go from a content brain to a demand gen brain.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

Like, that's baby genius level.

Josh:

Art of science.

Jess:

Yeah. That's like, I can't figure that out because I there's no way. And so that got me really excited. I was like, yes, please introduce me to him.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

And he did. And we had a great conversation. And we did the whole interview process, where he met with me, he met with Alex, he met with you and Nick. And we all were really excited about him. And I think a couple of things that really stood out.

Jess:

One, he did have just a ton of demand gen, like campaign experience across all kinds of channels. And not just traditional campaigns, but running experiments and really understanding signals and segmentation and ABM. He had some ABM in his back pocket. And I was like, oh, yeah. That's kind of where we're headed.

Jess:

Like, that's really cool. Yep. Two, his content background. He really understood story. So he wasn't all about, like, all of this has to generate pipeline, and all of it has to have some sort of return on ad spend for it to be worthwhile.

Jess:

And I'll get into a story of a great example of that in a bit. So I think he really he understood our values of marketing is definitely an art, And demand gen is the closest version of that to pipeline and science. But there's very much that we're not going to be able to track. And he was like, oh, yeah.

Josh:

Also Love just loved his ability to, like you said, be scrappy and ship stuff out. Like in my interview with him or I think actually we were in a panel together. We had basically asked him to like Yes. Draft up like the first 90 of what he was going to do.

Jess:

And We gave him the budget. We gave him the budget, we gave him all the hard goals numbers.

Josh:

And we

Jess:

were like, how would you plan against this?

Josh:

Yeah. And I think what I was particularly looking for is of course, you're always going get the person that's like, well, I'm going to spend the first x amount of days or weeks observing. What I was really looking for was a strong opinion on, I'm going to get in there. I'm going to do this. And I don't have to have perfection of a six month ABM program or whatever.

Josh:

It's just like, here's what we can do by the end of month one.

Jess:

I was

Josh:

like, that's what we're looking for.

Jess:

Yes. Yes. And we'll talk about all of the signals that proved that he was the right choice in a minute. I think the third thing that really excited me about him was I could tell from our interviews with him, he was someone I could put in front of a customer. He was very excited about the opportunity of building in public, posting on LinkedIn, being kind of the face of the user at the company, going on panels, doing webinars with our marketing partners, and just for Vector.

Jess:

And so there was just he checked all the boxes, in short. I was like, I think we found him. I think this is him. So that was that was a very exciting day when we were like, yeah. I I we we all agreed.

Jess:

Like, this is the guy.

Josh:

He's like, this this. Surreal? You've been looking for so long. Yeah. You're almost waiting for, like, the other shoe to drop.

Jess:

Totally. I was like, what's gonna happen? Like Yeah. Or I was like, we need to get him an offer so quickly. Because if someone scoops him up, I might stab

Josh:

myself up house and force him to work here. It was essentially

Jess:

Fly this to his home with a drone. Yeah. Yeah. Like, get him to sign.

Josh:

Yeah. Then bug his house so we can hear the

Jess:

conversations he's

Josh:

having with his wife. Yes.

Jess:

So he joined the team. He's amazing.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

Kelly's so great. Big ideas.

Josh:

He started what? January

Jess:

January 20.

Josh:

Nice. Wow. You have that little I know. Committed to memory.

Jess:

Yes. Because I was, like, counting down.

Josh:

The angels descended.

Jess:

I know. I needed him. I was like, wait. When can you start? We also did a ton of like, he did a lot.

Jess:

I did a couple of meetings with him of, like, I walked him through all of our marketing plan, all of our budget, all of the stuff that you would probably do in the first couple of weeks of employment we did before he started. Because he knew that and he wanted to as well. He wanted to show that there was going to be a very significant lift quickly.

Josh:

Which great sign, by the way. Legally, can't make people work for you before you got them on payroll.

Jess:

Sorry.

Josh:

It was his he volunteered. But it is true that a good sign you often see in an early stage startup is someone just like, I'm so hungry. Send me over whatever you can. Put me in the Slack channels.

Jess:

He did. Yeah. Was like, send me the sales calls. Send me everything, was great. Yeah.

Jess:

We would never expect that of anybody. But he was just like I think he was so excited for this role. Okay. So I think some things that he has done since he started that were like, oh.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

Yes. We hired the right person. He had us on CTV within two weeks.

Josh:

It's crazy.

Jess:

Crazy. We got pretty lucky because I handed him basically like a whole CTV. But the fact that he understood the assignment, as they say, and really knew that I just need to get some things up and running and see what happens.

Josh:

Well, and talk about skipping the checklist. Yes. You go chat GPT a generic, what should a demand gen marketer do, week two is not like, run Connected TV commercials.

Jess:

Yeah, put a bunch of awareness out.

Josh:

Yeah. No. He got it.

Jess:

He got it. I think he knew the vibe that we just are operating on. And he really understood it. And we had all of these assets for

Josh:

him.

Jess:

We had a series of four very funny built for CTV ads. We had an explainer video. We had a UI walk through. We had a ton of ad creative that hadn't really had the full force of a really good demand gen marketer behind them yet. It was me.

Jess:

Yeah. That's not me.

Josh:

Not your thing?

Jess:

No, no.

Josh:

And by doing CTV, we were able to use our own products targeting to do make sure the right people saw the ads. And so in one fell swoop, he launched a campaign, also leveraged our product, gave us feedback around it. It was a win win.

Jess:

Let's talk about this. All right. So So this is what we have been calling Kelly's surround sound play.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

So within LinkedIn not everyone knows this you can run CTV through LinkedIn.

Josh:

Yep.

Jess:

It gets real powerful when you can do contact level targeting. So he used Vector to create 180,000 person audience of our kind of target ICP. Yep. He put in front of them through LinkedIn CTV ads. Yep.

Jess:

Just some, like, single image ads of of varying flavors. Right? A bunch of different messages just to kind of test those out. And thought leadership ads that were had they had been posts that someone in the company had written that had done really well organically. Yep.

Jess:

Or they came from an influencer, and they had done really well organically. And so we put them kind of into another bucket. So all of these same folks who are, you know, marketing leaders or doing or running demand gen, doing or running ABM, they're all right. Their ultimate goal is pipeline, pipeline, pipeline. And how, in this new world order of AI, am I going to build pipeline when I'm losing 30% of traffic to the site to AI Answers?

Jess:

And so we kind of have this really beautiful story around how paid becomes a really great, reliable nurture channel when a lot of your organic traffic is dying off because of this new world order.

Josh:

You had a really interesting insight. You had called me, I think, after you're part of Mark Killen's what does he call his group that he has?

Jess:

The Marketing Mastermind.

Josh:

The Marketing Mastermind. So you're in this professional development community. And you had called me, and I think you had sort of this moment where it sounded like you guys were having a mastermind discussion around channels and their efficacy and things changing and how we have used to send newsletter emails, and this was how we generate awareness. And I guess the question was essentially like, well, what now? Right now that all these channels are changing.

Jess:

What else do we nurture?

Josh:

And you had a really interesting framing on

Jess:

Well, was like, well, at Vector, the way we're doing it is we're able to use ads for nurture. Because we understand who is landing on the site and why. What content are they looking at? Or what are they researching? What kind of intent topics are they focused on?

Jess:

What ads are they clicking on? So we know what message resonated with them. And so we're able to understand that and nurture around those messages with ads. And their eyes lit up. It had never occurred to them before to be able to use ads in that way, besides maybe a typical traditional retargeting place, the best you could do besides Well,

Josh:

because it wasn't really possible before, right? You only had, like you said, either retargeting or top of funnel. But then you had to convince leadership, it's not going to result in anything So you had two issues. You couldn't do the right targeting of the right people. And then two, when people engage with the top of funnel stuff, you knew they weren't going to fill out a form, you couldn't even prove they were there at all.

Jess:

Right. You have no idea who they are. Exactly.

Josh:

You crushed that. And just from a tactical perspective, LinkedIn supports Paramount and Peacock. Yeah. And they've got a pretty good

Jess:

They're on legit channels. We're on Hulu, Warner Brothers, and yeah. We're on Disney plus. Like, I mean, we even had like some folks in our network who were like, holy crap. I just saw a Vector ad while I was watching, you know, How to Get Away with Murder.

Jess:

Thursdays at seven.

Josh:

Are still watching that show? No.

Jess:

I that was why is that the first

Josh:

one that I've been Ghost Whisperer with Jennifer Love Hewitt. That's oddly specific.

Jess:

Deep cut.

Josh:

Jess only watches shows related to ghosts.

Jess:

Dead dead people, murderers.

Josh:

Ghost whisperer. Ghostbusters.

Jess:

Yeah. That's it.

Josh:

Vectors commercials.

Jess:

Whole way of watching television since joining this company. So he's been running this surround sound campaign. Same audience. We know exactly who they are.

Josh:

All of

Jess:

them are ICP. They're getting CTV. They're getting single image ads. They're getting thought leadership ads. Amazing.

Jess:

Second huge green flag for Kelly was he allowed us to start doing ABM or start setting up an ABM program much earlier than I think we would have traditionally. As a company of our size, at our current revenue, I don't know if we're there yet. But I think because of, one, the nature of our product and him having that kind of ABM background, we were able to stand up a pretty sophisticated ABM program, actually. And so we're really in the middle of that right now of what are the signals that show us someone is super ready to buy? And how do we turn that into, through vector, a named contact level segment?

Jess:

What's the message that matches that? And how are we going after these target accounts that we know, Okay, these are the 60 for the quarter that really matter to us. Yeah.

Josh:

He proved to us how quickly you can move on stuff. Like when he first said, like, we're going to roll out an ABM motion, I was like, how long is that going to take? But he did a great job partnering with RevOps, sort of getting the buy in of the systems. And then just very quickly figuring out what are the minimum things we need to know of which accounts are surging and we should focus on. Just Speed was huge.

Jess:

Totally, which I so appreciate. I think we all do in this startup environment. And then third, he is definitely our leader in marketing in terms of adopting and using AI.

Josh:

Oh, he's so good.

Jess:

He's living in 2049. Yeah. I am blown away. And when he explains it to me and I've had working sessions with him where he's helping me set up systems. And the way he explains it makes it seem so easy.

Jess:

And then he goes away, and I'm like, what do I

Josh:

do now? Yeah, where was that button again? Paralyzed, yeah. Yeah, super good.

Jess:

He's so good.

Josh:

Didn't you even at one point run some workshops with your team that he took maybe lead or charge of showcasing how to build stuff for the

Jess:

AI? Absolutely. Yeah. So we're really trying to use it now as we can all build our own kind of things that we need to for our own use. But there's also something to be said about, as a team, what are we doing together to build an AI to make sure that we're doing things more efficiently as an entire team, challenges that we all face together that we could probably solve with some sort of AI build.

Josh:

Were you specifically interviewing for AI skills? No. Just we got lucky?

Jess:

I mean, I think it's important someone at least be comfortable with AI at this stage. But that was not one of the boxes. Was not like, I need someone to come in and run this. Because July of last year I mean, this is insane to say, but things were so different.

Josh:

That's a great point. Yeah. Hearing you say, no, we weren't looking for it now. Like now feels like, woah, wow. We were crazy for not looking for it because it feels so obvious.

Josh:

But you're right. Nine months ago, right? It wasn't as obvious.

Jess:

The Claude was not the Claude of today.

Josh:

No, you didn't trust it

Jess:

for the things Yeah. We do And so I was looking for someone who was comfortable with AI because we were using it then for real simple stuff. Yeah. And I don't think I think we got real lucky again because he checked a box we didn't even know we needed to check, which was very fluent in these systems, and understanding how to build with AI. Were

Josh:

there any examples of things that he's built with AI? Like maybe people listening are trying to interview for demand controls elsewhere. You're like, he showed us this, or he built this. And that was mind blowing and showed us that he was ahead of the rest of the world in AI adoption?

Jess:

The first time where I was like, oh my god, wow, was he basically took our we used Fathom to record our calls.

Josh:

He

Jess:

built an integration into Claude with Fathom. And we were able to mine for quotes around very specific pain points. So we have like five pain points that we've identified for demand gen marketers who come to us that feel very consistent and things we can solve. And so he built this whole thing that would mine sales calls for those kinds of quotes that were proof of pain points.

Josh:

Crazy.

Jess:

And Okay, you can't build pipeline out of that per se. However, you can write real great ad copy. You can understand, oh, there's a whole theme here. We need a piece of content around this. So it's a lot of strategic work that I think I didn't realize was possible until he started to show us, no, these are the kinds of things you can build pretty easily, actually

Josh:

Really cool.

Jess:

And get really great insights out of.

Josh:

Love that.

Jess:

Yeah. Hey, Josh.

Josh:

Yes.

Jess:

Do you know what time it is?

Josh:

What time is it?

Jess:

It's time for positive affirmations.

Josh:

Affirmations. That's where we like stare deeply

Jess:

into the camera.

Josh:

A little uncomfortably.

Jess:

It's kinda corny. Yeah. But you know, we like to make people feel good about themselves.

Josh:

Tell them what they need to hear.

Jess:

Marketers need it.

Josh:

It's a tough world.

Jess:

It is. Let's do it.

Josh:

Dear marketer, your branded merch goes for triple on eBay.

Jess:

Dear marketer, your in person events create FOMO for the people who were there.

Josh:

So the net net is like you went on a war path to basically find the demand marketer, which I feel now makes you really equipped to give advice on what to look for, what not to look for. If you had to synthesize down, what are the key things you're looking for when hiring a demand gen marketer, what would you say?

Jess:

Okay. I have three. First, I would get very specific about the type of demand gen marketer you need.

Josh:

Okay.

Jess:

Right? Like, had three boxes. What are your three boxes that you need this person to check? They probably won't be the same as mine. But if it's like, I need someone who is really good at reporting.

Jess:

I need somebody who is great at industry segmentation, right? Really think about what it is your business needs in terms of demand gen. And go find that person. They're out there. I promise you, it might take you longer than you think, but they're out there.

Jess:

So that's the first one. Really get specific about the type of demand gen marketer you need.

Josh:

Knowing that they come in different shapes and

Jess:

colors

Josh:

and all of that.

Jess:

You're going kiss a lot of frogs.

Josh:

You can kiss a lot of frogs. If you're not running ads, you don't plan to run ads, you don't need a demand gen marketer that's got great ad expertise. Correct. If you're going to do a lot of in person events, you might want event expertise.

Jess:

Exactly. Yes. But that all falls under demand gen in some flavor, shape, form, So that's the first one. The second one is show them your budget. Make sure you set up the expectation around, this is the budget that you will have.

Jess:

And these are the goals that we expect to hit with that budget. So we shared all of that with Kelly before he was hired because I wanted him to know what he was coming into. We are now a series A company. We have some money in the bank. But even then, we aren't spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on ads, I wanted him to understand, the first quarter, you're going to have $60,000

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

What do you think we can accomplish with $60,000 knowing that at the end of that quarter, we need to be here in terms of pipeline of revenue?

Josh:

Oh, interesting.

Jess:

And so I think it just gave him a very realistic feeling around, like, what am I actually going to be doing? What are the top priority things that I need to think about before I go

Josh:

in? Yeah. And like, what chapter of the company am I coming into? Yes. Right?

Josh:

If you're a demand gen marketer at Deloitte, and you've got millions of dollars, right? And you're used to certain almost like standards of living, right, to do your role. You all of sudden, you end up in a startup. And you're like, oh, we don't have the resources for all of that. Yeah.

Josh:

It's very important.

Jess:

He was coming from somewhere with larger budgets than what we have. Yeah. They're a more established company. And so, yeah, I wanted him to know, this is what we have. But I know that we can get there if we're really smart about it.

Jess:

And he believed that, too. So that was cool. So I would show them your budget, show them your goals, make sure that your expectations are realistic and aligned together.

Josh:

Great advice. What's your third?

Jess:

Third is don't settle. And it's really hard. Because like you said, I came to you midway through, and I was like, should we just hire? Should we just find someone that we feel good about, fits the culture, checks two of the three boxes, and we figure out the rest. And I'm so glad that you said no.

Jess:

Because if you would have said yes, I would have gone, and I would have hired somebody. Yeah. And it wouldn't have been Kelly. And I think, you know, find the person who checks all the boxes. It takes longer.

Jess:

But man, hiring is a costly mistake if you hire wrong.

Josh:

Yeah.

Jess:

And that's a big one. Someone who's going to go in and run budgets for you, who's going to kind of be in control of the trackable part of your pipeline, man, you've to get that right.

Josh:

And I feel like that's just as much advice as is for the marketing leader that's hiring the demand gen role as it is sort of the C suite or the founder that's asking the marketer to do that. Because if I would have put a I put pressure on you. We needed pipeline. But if I would have prioritized the pipeline over the pressure of picking the right person, that would have made you be in a really tough spot. And then ultimately, it's like, Okay, so you get a body in the seat.

Josh:

You find out over a six month period of time that they're not the right person. You have to go through the awful culture of letting that person go. Then you spend another three months trying to find the right person. It's just better to the right time the first time.

Jess:

Absolutely. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I can't that morale hit, Yeah.

Josh:

No one wants to do that.

Jess:

I wouldn't have survived.

Josh:

Yeah. Okay, Jess, I know when we did our planning, I said I was going to triple your pipeline goal. But now that we've got a demanded marketer, I think we could be able to six x it. No problem.

Jess:

I think you're insane.

Josh:

Just four x? No. Okay. Well, this was a great meeting.

Jess:

It was a great meeting.

Josh:

This meeting could have been a podcast.

Jess:

It could have.

Josh:

And it was.

Jess:

It was. This meeting could have been a podcast as a Vector production. Vector lets you build ad audiences from real people that visit your site, click your ads, and research your competitors. Imagine seeing exactly who will see your ads by name before you spend a dime. It's a great time to be alive, marketers.

Jess:

Go give it a whirl at vector.co. See you next time.