This episode features an interview with Amanda Malko, CMO of G2. Amanda is a 3-time CMO and award-winning marketing executive with a track record of leading high-growth companies at the intersection of marketing and technology. Prior to joining G2, Amanda was Head of Partner Programs and Marketing at Mailchimp. 

Amanda is a three-time CMO.

• When starting any new role, you want to be more of a listener than anything else.
• Retention can be easily overlooked, but it is the foundation of growth.
• One of the main jobs of marketing is to bridge the gap between sales and marketing. Alignment here has ROI that’s invisible to many organizations.

“My philosophy is to not come in with assumptions but rather to come in and really listen. I think that's core to anyone coming into any role, but certainly in a CMO role. It would be easy to say, ‘well, I've done this gig before, I'm going to come in with my playbook and we're going to run that.’ I really think every business is different depending on the team you have, the trajectory of the business, and what's worked and what hasn't in the past. So my first 90 days were really about listening, both to our internal team and our customers.”

“Thought leadership is my number one most uncuttable budget item. Especially if you're in businesses like the ones I tend to work with, which are creating categories, it is critical that your customer understands and believes in your category. You cannot win their trust, you cannot win their business if they don't understand your category, let alone your product. And so I think thought leadership that's backed by data, ideally proprietary data to help your customer understand your space, the value of investing in your space, is a really critical one.”

“Retention is the foundation for growth. And I think it's one that's easy to overlook as you're focused on pipe gen and getting more customers. But if you invest in customer success advocacy and building a community, then you're going to continue to have a very successful business because you're going to retain and grow the customers that you already have.”

“One of the first things I did was put a new chatbot on our site...I would say there's multiple components to what we're trying to do with conversational marketing. One is really make it easy for people in the marketing space to be able to quickly get in touch with us and to set up their profile to get feedback and advice. But also if you're interested in our paid offerings to learn more about those, it seems like such an obvious thing. But doing that well in multiple regions for multiple products is something that is an evolution for us. And I think we've made some great strides just in the first three months with this new experience.”