How you scale your
marketing smarter
- Pandemic or not
Segolene Finet - CMO
@SegoleneFinet

2
100% SaaS player: need to acquire market
share fast
Sales-driven organisation
Marketing drives majority of the sales
pipeline
Highly competitive market with LARGE
competitors
Talentsoft context
7,8
14,4
21,5
27,3
37,1
51,5
65,5
80
100
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
FY
12
FY
13
FY
13
FY
15
FY
16
FY
17
FY
18
FY
19
FY
20
Invoicing in € millions

3
Growth isn’t linear, and isn’t a nice series of steps either
TRADITIONAL
MARKETING
DEMAND
GENERATION
INTEGRATED
PIPELINE
REVENUE
MANAGEMENT
How it really feltWhat the slides will show

GROWING YOUR MARKETING
TEAM

5
o Scope: one main market
o One or two brave souls start the
marketing function
Growing your team - Phase 0 – MARKETING NEEDED
What’s good about this period:
- It’s a bit like “playing house”
- You can experiment a lot
What’s difficult about this period:
- Feeling of constant firefighting
- Not easy to measure success
- No specialisation of team
What I recommend:
- Hire good trainees early
- Hire a CMO early

6
o Scope: one main market, and
some emerging markets
o 5 marketers + CMO
o A few brave marketing
professionals try to deliver a bit of
every marketing function
Growing your team - Phase 1 – MULTIPLE HATS
What’s good about this period:
- Everyone is a generalist so they learn a ton
- Everyone is very flexible: you can move
projects around
What’s difficult about this period:
- High risk of burnouts
- Hard to focus and deliver on with consistency
- People can’t imagine their future clearly
- You can only afford junior people
What I recommend:
- Clarify ASAP what’s Demand Gen versus
what’s Branding and get people to focus

7
o Scope: 5 countries
o 10 marketers + CMO
o First major capital increase
o Field marketing function
emerges
o Clarification of lead gen/
branding
o Deployment of marketing
automation
Growing your team - Phase 2 – SPECIALISATION
What’s good about this period:
- People are happier as they specialise in their
strength
- Marketing becomes more professional
- Higher productivity
What’s difficult about this period:
- Risk of burnout for the CMO (too many direct
reports and operational responsibilities)
- Deployment of marketing automation tools
drains time and resources before paying off
- Old timers have trouble with reduced scope
What I recommend:
- Don’t wait to bring seniority in

8
o Scope: 15 countries
o 17 marketers + 3 managers + CMO
o 2nd major capital increase
o Central and field marketing
functions get defined
o Branding in international markets
o Content marketing strategy
o Corporate marketing automation
expertise center
o France is just “a market” and
doesn’t take over corporate
resources
Growing your team - Phase 3 – GLOBALISATION
What’s good about this period:
- CMO can now breathe because added layer
of managers
- Org is very scalable – easy to add countries
- Internal mobility is possible
What’s difficult about this period:
- Harder to obtain team cohesion & alignment
- Market have very different maturity levels →
tensions
What I recommend
- Put effective reporting in place ASAP
- Structure internal communication
- Harmonise processes ASAP

9
o Scope: 15+ countries
o 26 marketers + 3 managers +
CMO
o Focus on customer engagement
o Focus on building European
brand
o Focus on ROI, metrics, overall
efficiency
o More sophisticated use of
Marketing Automation: ABM,
dynamic content, etc.
Growing your team - Phase 4 – NEW AMBITIONS
What’s good about this period:
- Everyone can grow their skills
- Brand equity = easier to recruit
What’s difficult about this period:
- Need to fight marketing silos
- Need to redefine FMM roles vs central ones
- CMO has to let go and manage differently
What I recommend:
- Get tools to help with marketing planning,
budgeting, ROI analysis, etc. It’s a big
machine now.
- Structure team vision, mission, values, etc.

10
o Scope: 9 countries
o 27 marketers + 4 managers +
CMO
o Working 3 days a week and
100% remote
o With lots of young kids (!)
o Focus on 3 key projects :
• User conference
• Digital lead gen
• Customer Satisfaction
And keep marketing tech +
reporting going
Growing your team - Phase 5 – Global Pandemic
What’s good about this period:
- Everyone is super engaged
- There is lots of kindness and solidarity
- People are super flexible about jobs and
duties
- We have to work differently
What’s difficult about this period:
- Difficult to address any deeper HR issues
- Workload “equity” impossible to obtain
- We have to work differently (!)
What I recommend:
- Get collaborative tools in place BEFORE the
next crisis.
- Never wait to address performance issues.
- Invest in experienced managers.

GROWING YOUR
TECHNOLOGY STACK

12
Growing the Technology stack
TRADITIONAL
MARKETING
DEMAND
GENERATION
INTEGRATED
PIPELINE
REVENUE
MANAGEMENT
Emailing software
salesforce
All data in Marketo
Optimise entire funnel
scoring nurturing
campaigns
100+ landing pages
lead-gen optimised
corporate website
Salesforce
Go to Webinar
ABM pilots
A/B testing on website
Content marketing
700+ landing pages
at Internet
Salesforce community
for customer
engagement
ON 24
ABM for all countries
Focus on speeding
up
sales cycle & BOFU
content
Leverage Marketo
for cross-sell
Campaign-level ROI
analysis
Planning & Calendar
DAM deployment

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LEAD GEN IS A TECHNOLOGY BATTLE ▶ invest is your technology stack early on
MARKETING AUTOMATION IS A MINDSET ▶ hard to know who has is and who doesn’t
GROWING SKILLS IN-HOUSE IS NO GUARANTEE OF KEEPING COMPETENCIES ▶ have a mixed
model with expertise both in-house and outside
NEVER ASK YOUR IT TEAM TO CHOOSE BETWEEN SUPPORTING YOU OR SUPPORTING
CLIENTS ▶ keep control of budget and tool
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE COST OF INTERFACES ▶ buy as much tech as you can from a single
vendor
YOU ARE IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL ▶ pick vendors who can challenge your team & processes for a
long time
THIS IS NOT AN EXACT SCIENCE ▶ accept that sometimes you will have to unbuild what you have
built
Lessons learned

14
o The tools that we invested in to manage growth are the tools that are helping us respond
to the crisis and show resilience.
o Having people autonomous on marketing automation is critical for pivoting fast.
o Very important to have fully trained backups for any “technical jobs” and give them the
proper licences/rights on the system.
o The “painful” areas are the jobs we didn’t digitalize enough (like content production and
management).
o Thank God for collaborative tools – we couldn’t have done this just with email.
o But I do wish we had put Trello in place before.
Lessons learned during Covid19 crisis

POLL

GROWING MARKETING
MISSIONS

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And first came demand gen
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
4000
4500
Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3
Demand Generation Brand Awareness Customer Engagement

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o Leverage digital tools to look bigger than
you are
o Segment your audience precisely
o Be ruthless about evaluating new events
or programs
o Create thought leadership (starting small
is OK)
o Invest in AR instead of PR
Brand Awareness on a budget

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o What your brand conveys during a crisis will BE your brand after the crisis.
o It’s better to be a bit too silent than to be tone-death.
o Branding is a team sport – especially during a crisis.
o Pivoting content strategy (ebooks, etc.) is slow going – we had better luck with thought
leadership (co-founder blog posts).
Lessons learned during Covid19 crisis

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Customer engagement – online and offline
Club Talentsoft brings 1000+ customers and key
stakeholders together every year
Talentsoft Community brings together
4000 customers every week

21
Customer engagement – how marketing brings it all together
ONBOARDING ENGAGEMENT
ADVOCA
CY
EXPANSIO
N
Go live
Award
Project
question
Engagement
Phase
Enablement
Survey
Business
Review
Anniversary
Wishes
Thank you
Card
Welcome
Emails
Welcome
Kit
Onboarding
Video
Project
Kick Off
Call Run
Ticketing
Access
Access
TS Community
Reward
Program
Cross-SellNPS
Sales & project Customer Care, Premium, CSM, Account Manager & Marketing

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TO IMPACT CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT, MARKETING HAS TO DEEP DIVE INTO PROCESSES
OUTSIDE OF MARKETING ▶ no more comfort zone
IMPACTING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT MEANS BREAKING ORGANISATIONAL SILOS ▶ it takes
change management skills & advocacy
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT (LIKE LEAD GEN!) IS A DATA BATTLE ▶
First questions to ask: where is customer data? What quality is it in? And does it provide a 360 view of the
customer?
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT PROGRAMS REQUIRE INTERNAL TRUST ▶ Marketing impact is harder
to measure, success is 100% collective
Lessons learned

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o Even the least “digital” customers are very happy to go digital when there is nothing else.
o Communication with customer during a crisis is EVEN MORE a data battle. The more you
know about them, the more you can segment your messaging – and that’s critical in highly
emotional times.
o Ideally you would want only 1 to 1 communications to customers – but that’s hard to scale.
o More than before it’s time to open up and ask them what they want from you. Good
response rate from satisfaction survey!
Lessons learned during Covid19 crisis

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1
Plan for non-
linear growth
of your team
Stay in touch?
sfinet@talentsoft.com
2
Build a strong
base for your
marketing Tech
stack
3
Revisit Marketing
missions at each
major growth
phase

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