Episode Details
Back to Episodes#135: Marketing Leadership | Traits of a High Performing CMO (with Dave Kellogg)
Description
Dave Kellogg is a former CEO and CMO with operational experience across companies from $0 to $1B+. He served as GM/SVP of Service Cloud for Salesforce, CEO of MarkLogic, and SVP of Marketing at SAP / Business Objects. Today, he is principal at Dave Kellogg Consulting, EIR at Balderton Capital, and author of the popular SaaS blog Kellblog (www.kellblog.com). He has also served as an independent director across 10 startup boards and has a unique perspective on what top-performing SaaS companies do and what role the CMO should play.
We talk about:
- Being a great partner to sales and why it is marketing’s job to make sales easier
- Mastering the art of becoming the dispassionate analyst, presenting the facts
- Being a partner to the CEO
- Dave's thoughts on the importance of benchmarks, his POV on category creation, lead gen vs. demand gen, ChatGPT, and more.
Timestamps
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (05:00) - Dave Kellogg's Journey
- (10:00) - Insights on Blogging and Career
- (15:00) - What Makes a Great CMO
- (20:00) - Aligning Sales and Marketing
- (25:00) - Leveraging Data and Market Research
- (30:00) - The Role of Brand and Category Creation
- (35:00) - The Future of AI in Marketing
- (40:00) - Understanding SaaS Metrics
- (45:00) - Closing Remarks
Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Learn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/
***
Brought to you by:
Optimizely - A no-code AI platform where autonomous agents execute marketing work across webpages, email, SEO, and campaigns. Join the next cohort of Opal U, a live 5-day course designed for senior marketing leaders who are ready to ship more with AI, at optimizely.com/exitfive.
Vector - A contact-level ads platform that lets you build audiences from actual people on your site, clicking your ads, and checking out your competitors. Learn more at vector.co, and get their new MCP server by clicking here.
Customer.io - An AI powered customer engagement platform that help marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. Learn more at customer.io/exitfive.
Join us in Stowe, Vermont for Drive 2026 - three days away from your desk to learn what's working in B2B marketing from the people who are actually doing it. Grab your ticket at exitfive.com/drive.
***
Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.
They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.- Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.
Visit hatch.fm to learn more