The Get: Finding And Keeping The Best Marketing Leaders in B2B SaaS

When you look at the CMO role across hundreds of B2B tech companies, what themes emerge these days? In this episode of The Get podcast, host Erica Seidel talks with Matt Selheimer, VP and Research Director for B2B Marketing Executives at Forrester.
You'll hear about the top themes that have emerged in The Get this season. And you'll get a sneak peek at new Forrester research dedicated to CMOs.
Learn about:
How to classify marketing leadership roles: is the CEO looking for a supporter, a promoter, a partner, or a driver?
How changes in tech and buying behavior can be a catalyst for marketing leaders to claim a broader role and bigger budget
Advice to CEOs who have failed at hiring CMOs
How CMOs who create a continuous learning organization are the ones who will be the most successful
Why marketing leaders need to get beyond "polishing the pebbles on in-market intent signals" and instead invest to be the preferred vendor earlier on, to avoid being used as negotiating leverage against the preferred vendor
How increasingly, "your understanding of your buyers, your customers, and the markets you're operating in is your competitive differentiator"
Why so few CMOs are at the point of firing whole teams in favor of AI
How to avoid 're-org fatigue' while still responding to changing buyer behaviors

Memorable Quote:
"What I tell our clients, and CMOs in transition, is: make sure there's a really good fit here for the purpose of marketing. That what you see as the purpose of marketing and what your CEO and the board see as the purpose of marketing is aligned. If you need to do education, that's the time to do the education… and expand the aperture of how they think about marketing. If you don't get the CEO resonating with that, then that may not be the place that you want to go join, as an example. But if you are already in a function, already in a company as a CMO, what we're telling all of our clients is, now's a great time to recalibrate the purpose of marketing."

00:00 Introduction to The Get Podcast
00:17 Guest Introduction: Matt Selheimer from Forrester
01:32 High-Level Themes in SaaS Marketing
01:46 AI's Role in B2B Buying
02:16 Disciplined Experimentation in Marketing
03:03 Resurgence of Brand and PR Roles
03:32 Matt Selheimer's Background and Fun Fact
06:33 In-Depth Discussion on AI and Generational Shifts
10:05 The Importance of Testing and Experimentation
13:25 The Role of Brand in Modern Marketing
17:22 Advice for CEOs on Hiring CMOs
27:29 Marketing Organizational Design
36:09 Favorite Interview Question
37:25 Conclusion and Closing Remarks

The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today’s top marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
This season’s theme is how SaaS marketing organizations are changing — in both seismic and subtle ways.
The Get’s host is Erica Seidel, who runs The Connective Good, an executive search practice with a hyper-focus on recruiting CMOs and VPs of Marketing, especially in B2B SaaS.
If you are looking to hire a CMO or VP of Marketing of the ‘make money’ variety, rather than the ‘make it pretty’ variety, contact Erica at [email protected]. You can also follow Erica on LinkedIn or

In this episode of The Get, host Erica Seidel explores how AI-native marketing orgs are shaping up with guest Kady Srinivasan. Kady is CMO of You.com, the enterprise AI productivity platform that powers agentic workflows that deliver measurable business results. She previously held top marketing leadership roles at Lightspeed Commerce, Klaviyo, and Dropbox. She has been part of three IPOs. From her vantage point, running marketing in an AI-native environment, Kady shares her experiences, observations, and hypotheses for how the marketing org is changing – and will change – to enable using AI at warp speed.
You'll hear about:
How GTM leadership in an AI-native company is different from GTM leadership in a typical SaaS company
The org structures that enable using AI at warp speed
How the new marketing org has both humans and agents on the marketing team
The rise of new roles on the marketing team, like prompt marketers and influence engineers, and AI agent builders
Navigating the delicate CMO balance of "feeling you need to know it all" versus respecting your CEO's intuition
Sussing out, when talking to candidates, whether a company was successful BECAUSE of a candidate's contributions versus DESPITE the candidate's contributions
How to hire for "common sense"

Memorable Quotes:
"In an AI-native company, at least the one that I'm at, we have a lot to do to educate the market about the potential solutions that they can unlock with a technology or a platform like ours. So I came up with this idea… of a forward-deployed marketer, which is similar to a forward-deployed engineer, where you're basically coming up with use cases, coming up with solutions, coming up with things that you can tell people, look, this is the art of the possible…I think that's very different from SaaS, in that SaaS is a defined set of features and platform things that you can take to market."

"It used to be that we used to have these silos - product, marketing, demand, gen, and brand. Those were the big pillars in marketing. What I've found is that with AI, you don't actually need those silos anymore. What you need instead is people who are very outcome-focused. So I have a team that's only focused on inbound. I have a team that's focused on outbound. I have a team that's focused on storytelling, brand comms, that kind of stuff. The reason I've turned it that way is in this new world, every marketer needs to become like a T-shaped marketer, which is they have a spike, but they scaffold themselves with all the other functions, and that's easy to do because of agents, because you have AI."

00:00 Introduction to The Get Podcast
00:20 Meet Kady Srinivasan: CMO of You.com
00:43 The Unique Role of a CMO in an AI Native Company
02:36 Kady's Career Insights and Advice
04:22 Organizational Structure and AI Impact
12:03 Hiring the Right Marketers for the Future
25:57 Challenges and Strategies in Modern Marketing
34:56 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today’s top marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
This season’s theme is how SaaS marketing organizations are changing — in both seismic and subtle ways.
The Get’s host is Erica Seidel, who runs The Connective Good, an executive search practice with a hyper-focus on recruiting CMOs...

In this episode of The Get, host Erica Seidel talks with Monica Ho, CMO of SOCi, the leading AI-powered marketing platform for multi-location businesses. Monica reflects on her CMO journey as revenue has grown from ~$10MM to ~$100MM. She gets real about how she has built her adaptation muscles and her boardroom voice, and she shares how AI and efficiency have reshaped her org chart and choices.
Monica and Erica discuss:
How "earning and re-earning" your seat at the table is imperative as the business evolves
Rethinking the organization at every stage of growth, and pivoting towards "more strategists than doers"
"Forcing" AI adoption by taking away tools that the team previously relied on
The importance of reverse mentoring – interns and junior employees can bring in creativity and have better results, "because they are having more fun."
Fueling experimentation, not just with tests and tech, but by collaborating in different ways
Bringing specificity to the hiring process by asking a candidate for their current boss's name and that boss's perception of the candidate
Making yourself uncomfortable in Board meetings by sharing "the bad stuff -- that way, you're not in defensive mode but rather in collaborative problem-solving mode


Notable quotes:
"If I'm not in a changing environment, I produce that myself."
"A successful life has to be earned and re-earned over and over again. Just because you're successful at something doesn't mean you're going to keep being successful….  I liken that to the CMO role. 'I had a great year. We crushed our goals.' Guess what? No one cares anymore. What am I doing next year? What am I doing this next quarter? And that earned and re-earned concept is just really instilled in me."
"I have learned that you earn your seat at the table, yes, but then you have to make sure you have a voice, and you've got to keep earning that seat at the table. If I'm not coming with really good insight or an opinion or what we need next, I'm going to lose that seat."
"So if I went back to my pre-CMO self, it would be to get out of my head, find my voice. One of the things I remember so clearly was it was a room full of very big personalities, and I'm also a big personality, but I'm a little bit more thoughtful. I like to listen before I speak. There was no time for me to speak. There wasn't a pause, and what I learned is that I had to interrupt people. That's not natural for me, but in order to get my thoughts out, that was just an uncomfortable place I had to put myself in, and I got a lot more comfortable with it as I held that board or held that seat."

00:00 Introduction to The Get
00:32 Meet Monica Ho, CMO of SOCI
01:13 Monica's Journey and Leadership Insights
14:49 The Impact of AI on Marketing
23:41 Hiring and Career Advice
30:05 Concluding Thoughts and Industry Changes

The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today’s top marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
This season’s theme is how SaaS marketing organizations are changing — in both seismic and subtle ways.
The Get’s host is Erica Seidel, who runs The Connective Good, an executive search practice with a hyper-focus on recruiting CMOs and VPs of Marketing, especially in B2B SaaS.
If you are looking to hire a CMO or VP of Marketing of the ‘make money’ variety, rather than the ‘make it pretty’...

How do you not only keep up with seismic changes as a SaaS marketing leader but also proactively confront them?
In this episode of The Get, host Erica Seidel of The Connective Good talks with Wanda Cadigan, SVP of Marketing for Cloudinary.
Wanda shares how she delivers on the 'supply chain of revenue' in an environment where AI has joined the buying committee. From growing organic traffic when buyers arrive far more informed, to orchestrating smartly across PLG and enterprise motions, to building trust not just with humans but with AI-driven gatekeepers, Wanda offers valuable insights for leading SaaS marketing teams.
You will learn about:
Treating the entire go-to-market as a revenue supply chain, not siloed teams
Why experimentation can go off the rails if it’s “a mile wide and an inch deep,” and how to drive disciplined experimentation with rapid prototyping by micro experts
Treating AI chat agents as a persona to market to, since AI is now part of the buying committee
How PR teams will experience an opportunity to really prove their worth and connect to more commercial intent by leaning into citations, structured data, and micro-influencers, and optimizing for discoverability in both human- and machine-driven ecosystems.
Designing an org with both Swiss army knives and scalpels: a mix of broad generalists and more narrow specialists to tackle specific experiments and channels
Orchestrating across PLG and enterprise motions without siloed thinking
Smarter interviewing: Defining not just questions, but also what good, average, and great answers look like to align interviewers across the org
Protecting your time: Staying fiercely focused and resisting the “people pleaser” trap


Notable quotes:
"Nobody just wakes up one morning and says, I'm going to submit a Contact Us form. Of course not. It's been pre-planted in your head. You've learned about a company or been educated about a problem that you may have been grappling with, and you could be exposed to press relations, analyst reports, events. You might have seen a vendor at an event. All of these great marketing programs do influence the final point of conversion of, Hey, I'm going to reach out and talk to these people. I think they can help me with my problem… so it's a supply chain."
"Your time is your most valuable asset. Be ferociously protective of it and resist the common marketing challenge of being a people pleaser."

00:00 Introduction to The Get Podcast
00:29 Meet Wanda Cadigan: SVP of Marketing at Cloudinary
01:26 Wanda's Journey and Marketing Strategies
03:47 The Dual Funnel Approach at Cloudinary
08:31 Navigating the Tsunami of Change in SaaS Marketing
13:05 The Role of PR and Brand in the Age of AI
16:10 Experimentation and Micro Experts in Marketing
21:43 Hiring Strategies and AI in Recruitment
28:22 Final Thoughts and Advice for Marketing Leaders
31:59 Conclusion and Next Episode Teaser
The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today’s top marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
This season’s theme is how SaaS marketing organizations are changing — in both seismic and subtle ways.
The Get’s host is Erica Seidel, who runs The Connective Good, an executive search practice with a hyper-focus on recruiting CMOs and VPs of Marketing, especially in B2B SaaS.
If you are looking to hire a CMO or VP of Marketing of the ‘make...

How are PE-backed environments unique for SaaS CMOs? And what's the difference between the CMOs who flourish in PE-backed companies and those who flounder? This episode is required listening for any current or prospective CMO in a PE-backed company.
This week on The Get, Erica Seidel dives into the nuances of marketing leadership in PE-backed B2B SaaS orgs with guest Julie Zadow, Growth Marketing Leader at The Riverside Company. They explore Julie's role in private equity as a marketing operating partner, insights into aligning marketing strategies with investment firm goals, and the impact of AI on marketing roles and operations.

You will learn about:
What it's like to be a marketing operating partner in a PE shop: As Julie describes it, she offers "battle scars for hire" and brings a mix of empathy, speed, and practicality
How to speak marketing in a way that aligns with the investor's lens
How to talk about brand in a way that doesn't make your investors run screaming
How the different phases of the hold period matter for marketing – and how conversations with investors should evolve as the end of the hold period approaches
Coaching junior employees in an AI+ environment, and a shortcut for contextualizing things for your most junior employees so they don't just 'do' with AI but 'learn' as well: Julie asks her interns: "Where did you feel you were parroting AI without understanding what it was saying?" and "What do you recommend that AI didn't think of?"
The role that is hardest to disintermediate with AI
The line of questioning CEOs are likely to pose to CMO candidates about their AI fluency
Advice to CEOs who have failed at hiring marketing leaders

00:00 Welcome to The Get: Introduction and Overview
00:58 Introducing Julie Zadow: A Marketing Leader's Journey
02:10 The Role of a Marketing Operating Partner in Private Equity
03:58 Aligning Marketing Strategies with Investor Expectations
14:30 The Impact of AI on SaaS Marketing Organizations
26:18 Advice for CMOs in Private Equity-Backed Companies
34:21 Final Thoughts and Conclusion

The Get is here to drive smart decisions around recruiting and leadership in B2B SaaS marketing. We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today’s top marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.
This season’s theme is how SaaS marketing organizations are changing — in both seismic and subtle ways.
The Get’s host is Erica Seidel, who runs The Connective Good, an executive search practice with a hyper-focus on recruiting CMOs and VPs of Marketing, especially in B2B SaaS.
If you are looking to hire a CMO or VP of Marketing of the ‘make money’ variety, rather than the ‘make it pretty’ variety, contact Erica at [email protected]. You can also follow Erica on LinkedIn or sign up for her newsletter at TheConnectiveGood.com.
The Get is produced by the team at Simpler Media Productions.

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