Read Time: 4 min, 4 secs

Carmen Cedeño is the Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Alma. They are a Series D company simplifying access to mental health care.

She was their 4th marketing hire back in 2020. Today, their marketing team is 50 people!

Carmen shared some incredible stories about scaling her team.

FAVORITE STORIES AND TAKEAWAYS

1. First 3 Demand Gen Hires as Alma Scaled

2. Marketing Experiments Gone Wrong

3. Earning the CFO’s Trust: Tactics for Marketers

We breakdown these down below 👇

BREAKDOWN

First 3 Demand Gen Hires as Alma Scaled

At the dawn of her Alma journey, Carmen was a one-woman army. She set up every demand gen program at 100 miles per hour. It was a high-speed chase, but it was unsustainable.

Carmen needed to hand off some responsibilities. Her manager calls it “giving your Legos away.”

First Hire - Marketing Ops Expert

One of her first projects was setting up Marketo - a task as crucial as it was complex. With that in place, they team could start to scale and automate.

Second Hire - Performance Marketer

“I needed someone that was much better than I am at this. That was okay with me. I crawled so this person could run.”

Third Hire - Email Marketer

They focus a lot of their time on nurture campaigns. Under Carmen’s guidance, email marketing blossomed, outperforming Carmen's own impressive benchmarks. She couldn't be happier.

Doing all of this has let Carmen focus on other things like forecasting, headcount planning, and long term goals of the GTM team.

There is one catch. To effectively hire these specialists, you must have enough expertise of their job to have an informed point of view. Without that, it will be hard to earn their respect.

Marketing Experiments Gone Wrong

Alma is constantly experimenting with new programs. But in the world of trial and error, not every note hits the mark. Candidly, Carmen shared a couple stories of failed experiments.

Avoiding Spam Leads

Google had a new advertising product that was good for DTC. Carmen was interested but skeptical. Trying it was a risk because 80% of their leads are inbound.

They ended up trying it. The result…an avalanche of spam. The team was flooded with new leads, but 70% of them were bots!

It was a marketing nightmare. Luckily they snuffed this out during the first week of the program and shut it down.

The lesson there: just because something works for someone else, doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. Make sure to take time to validate the concept for your business.

Changing Your Referral Tool

Alma’s original referral program was simple. I fill out a form to refer you, then Alma’s BDR team reaches out to you. “Joe referred you. Are you interested in learning more about Alma.”

But this format was very manual. It was a clunky way for Marketing Ops and Rev Ops to manage the program. So Carmen looked for ways to make it more scalable.

The spent 3 months rigorously collecting RFPs. Everything had to integrate with their stack. They were very focused on getting the technical side correct.

In the new program, I would send you my unique referral link. But it was up to you to fill out the form.

This new program added friction to referral signups. Enough friction that referral leads dropped by 30%. The GTM team was shocked.

But there was a valuable tradeoff. The people who voluntarily filled out the referral form…they were higher intent leads than someone who had the form filled out for them.

Alma’s referral close rate went from 60% to 80%.

This justified the long term switch. But if she did it over again, Carmen would spent more time evaluating the changes in the user experience and user behavior. It probably wouldn’t have changed the decision, but she would have been able to set better expectations with her team.

Earning the CFO’s Trust: Tactics for Marketers

One of Carmen’s biggest strengths is getting CFO buy-in for the marketing team. Here is her framework that you can use to get the CFO on your side.

Build the Relationship

Spend a lot of time with the CFO. You need to learn what they care about, what numbers they’re look at, what makes an investment worthwhile to them. Building this foundation will make everything else easier.

Make Small Asks

Let the CFO know what your larger thesis is, but don’t ask to test the entire thing. Tell them you want to try something small to start proving it out.

Set Conservative Expectations

This helps you build a track record of consistent performance. That consistency keeps the CFO open minded about new ideas that you bring to them.

Always Tie Your Goals to Efficient Revenue

CFO’s are objective people. They care about revenue and costs more then they care about the learnings in between. If you can’t connect your idea to revenue or costs, then don’t spend your relationship capital with the CFO.

NEVER Go Over Budget

Like seriously. Never do it. Going over budget is the quickest way to lose trust with the CFO. Once that’s lost, everything else you ask for will get scrutinized more closely.

📚 Previous Editions

Justin Rowe - Co-founder / CMO @Impactable [Ep. 1]
Marketing Max - Founder @Growth Daily [Ep. 2]
Angela Kayal - CRO @Help Scout [Ep. 3]
Morgan Ingram - Founder / CEO @AMP [Ep. 4]

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