Ep #145: The One Marketing Play That Helped Salsify Scale to Over $130M ARR, w/ Rob Gonzalez, CMO of Salsify

The Marketer's Journey

On this episode of The Marketer’s Journey, I’m joined by Rob Gonzalez, CMO and co-founder of Salsify. Rob is an ‘accidental CMO,’ with a background in engineering and product management and design. He took on the role of salesperson when he and his co-founder started Salsify and from there, eventually scaled the marketing plan to keep up with Salsify’s rapid growth. As a founder, he’s stayed focused on where he can add the most value to the organization and ensuring they stay true to the tactics that drive awareness and growth. In this episode, we discuss a founder's role as a super-generalist, Rob’s path to CMO, and why running too many experiments at once can be a bad thing.

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Key takeaways from this episode:

• Less is more. Rob believes that many young marketers fall into the trap of trying too many things at once. This can lead to attribution problems on top of being exhausting for marketing teams. Give yourself and your team the chance to discover what strategy is working before jumping onto the next marketing trend.
• Stick to the tactics that work for you. Rob and his team were aware from the start that advertising was not going to be effective in awareness building for their category. Instead, they focused on strategic outreach and invested in that tactic once it delivered results.
• CMOs need to be comfortable with numbers. Rob believes that CMOs must be good with quantitative revenue marketing, which means being able to analyze the numbers in front of you and understand how they inform your strategies.

Learn more about Salsify here: https://www.salsify.com/

Learn more about Rob here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robgonzalez