Michelle Heath is a Boston-based marketing consultant, fractional CMO, and advisor with an impressive track record. Her marketing leadership experience includes several startups as well as F500 companies like Fidelity Investments, J.P. Morgan, and E*TRADE. Michelle is the founder and CEO of Growth Street, a growth strategy and execution firm that offers fractional leadership and workshops for CEOs, CMOs, and growth leaders. The company pioneered fractional marketing services before it was trending and celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2023.
Michelle is preparing for the early 2025 launch of her new book Unrivaled: The Five Steps to Achieving Explosive Business Growth. A practical guide for businesses to unlock growth and build extraordinary customer loyalty, the book walks readers through five steps of the Unrivaled Growth Framework that Michelle has used to help her clients go from pre-revenue start-ups to VC and Private Equity acquisitions, from million-dollar to billion-dollar unicorn status, and from struggling challengers to stand-out market leaders.
In this interview with Startup Boston, Michelle shares her top tips for the first marketers at startups. Learn how to balance short and long-term wins, the importance of customer marketing, and Michelle’s advice for future female founders.
SB: What are some of the toughest challenges founding marketers face?
MH: A startup CMO or the very first marketer feels like they have to do everything and they have to do it fast. They’re on the hook for growth and revenue, but they don’t always have the budget, resources, or alignment to accomplish it all with a small team (or by themselves). And if their business has PE funding or VC funding, there is a huge demand for performance metrics - the board wants data deep-dives and reporting, along with “proof” that the go-to-market is working. When I left the Fortune 500 to be a startup CMO, it was like a shock to my system! I went from having a big team and budget, along with agency partners and lots of resources at my disposal to it being just me doing everything. As I work alongside marketing leaders in my work here at Growth Street, I deeply understand the challenges - most of the time, they are building the car while they’re driving it!
Many first marketers feel such pressure to deliver ROI and performance data from their channels that they skip some important foundational work. Like defining the company’s Ideal Customer Profile - going super deep and knowing them well and getting internal agreement and understanding. They also skip the fundamentals of brand strategy like claiming a market position, writing a unique value proposition, and create differentiated messaging. It can be really hard to prioritize these foundational elements because investors are looking for ROI and results, now.
SB: How can marketing leaders overcome this demand for short-term performance and focus on long-term strategy?
MH: Marketing is part art and part science. All CMOs to some extent have to be both a brand marketer and a performance marketer, but when the pendulum swings too far towards performance marketing, like it has today, companies are left flat-footed when things change.
In my fractional CMO work with my clients, it’s all about deeply understanding the ideal customer bullseye and then prioritizing the programs that will meet them along the buyer’s journey. A mix of brand awareness, engagement, acquisition, and retention is key to greasing the skids for sales and ringing the bell on revenue.
The problem for many marketers is that everything is an emergency, which means you’re never going to be able to start that long-term sustainable business growth. The CEO would say - “We need a X campaign” or “We have to have Y reporting!” In a lean team, it all comes from the same place. So I built an agile marketing process for the start-ups I worked for. I would put the tasks on the board and we would prioritize together. Marketers need to advocate for the importance of the long-term strategy and remind their leadership team that there is both a long-term and short-term game to play.
I think of the analogy of building a house. Every house needs a foundation. But in startups, marketing tends to go right to execution - like choosing a couch or putting the wallpaper up. But without building the foundation first, the first gust of wind that comes - like changing customer expectations, new market dynamics, whatever headwinds you face - your house blows over. We all know how this story ends. The right foundation sets you up for success - now and later.
SB: When you think about the first go-to-market team at a startup - the first marketer, sales leader, and customer success leader working together - what does success look like?
MH: There’s a lot of transparency, learning, testing, and experimenting together. They’re having honest conversations and really strong communication. That’s a must-have - healthy collaboration and communication is critical. At the same time, everything can’t be a collaboration. Disagreeing is important if you can have a healthy dialogue.
I often see sales, board members, and even investors weighing in on marketing campaigns and strategies. That tends to disenfranchise the marketing team and diminish the value of the marketing leader. It’s important to remember that the head of marketing is in a leadership position for a reason. So while healthy collaboration is important, there must also be trust and empowerment of leaders to do their jobs.
The trifecta of marketing, sales and customer success working together to attract, nurture, engage, retain and grow customers is what success looks like when you want to run an efficient and effective go-to-market.
SB: People often have the impression that marketing is all about new customer acquisition. But let’s talk about the role that marketing plays in customer retention.
MH: One of the biggest opportunities I see is for marketing to support the ongoing customer relationship. As I said before, the sales + customer success + marketing trifecta is powerful! It’s not enough to send a monthly newsletter and call it a day. The ongoing relationship is human to human. It sounds very basic, but when I come in to help companies, I typically see the majority of the marketing focus is on creating demand. When I ask, ‘Who’s in charge of customer marketing?’ The answer is unclear or, in many early-stage startups, no one! Someone is chipping in here or there, but nobody is exclusively focused on it and that’s a challenge.
You need to be consistently engaging with customers, so you see signals that they are unhappy or might not renew, or that they are over-the-moon obsessed with your company and your biggest fans. And, when the customer is ready - to renew, to re-engage, to expand - you’re there top of mind. And this all ties back to the ideal customer profile. When you truly know your ideal customer, you will know how to reach them, what they’re experiencing, and what messages will resonate. At the end of the day, these are people - people buy from people they like and trust.
Don’t forget, satisfied customers can be such a powerful tool for your marketing team too - they could speak at an event, provide a quote for social media campaigns, or join you on a webinar. You need to nurture customer relationships and stay in touch with them. That means sharing the responsibility of customer communications between the marketing and customer success teams.
I often see marketing efforts heavily weighed on acquisition. Customer churn can be a sneaky problem - the leaky bucket is expensive. My clients often come to me with churn problems that are killing ARR. We need to get back to basics - to the foundation of why the customers chose to buy from them in the first place and understand what has changed? What is their perception of the brand? How do we plug the holes and fill the gaps to retain customers? Customer marketing is not just a newsletter or campaign. It’s deeply engaging with your customers along their journey to remind them why you are the best choice for them and to keep that recurring revenue!
SB: This is such an important point! What other lessons can readers expect to learn from your new book when it comes out?
MH: They can expect the giddy up, which is what I'm known for! In writing the book, I tried to put myself in the reader's shoes. I wrote the book as an actionable guide to help business leaders achieve explosive business growth. The book is organized practically in five steps, so marketers and leaders can learn the steps to growth, understand real examples, and execute them at their own company right away. I created “mad-lib-style”, fill-in-the-blank sections where readers can work through critical questions with their team members. Maybe you get five different answers from five different people! That's where the collaboration and innovation come in and how you can define your brand and differentiate yourself from your competition.
A lot of startups are in crowded markets where there are so many competitors. You don't have to play the same game as your competitors! The whole goal of the book is to give leaders the secret sauce on how to be an unrivaled market leader, stand apart, and play in a league of your own instead of just trying to claw your way to success. This book will help business leaders build a foundation to achieving explosive business growth - that’s the giddy up!
SB: As a female executive and a founder of your own business, what do you advise for new founders? Or, specifically, for female founders?
MH: My advice for female founders and executives is to invite others in. There were times that I felt I needed to figure everything out myself - don’t let them see you sweat! I learned the hard way that it took longer to figure things out on my own instead of asking for help. I built my career during a time when there were not a lot of women role models and many women saw other women as a threat, so they didn’t want to help. I had to figure a lot of it out on my own, which can be so lonely! That is why I am so passionate about supporting women and helping women succeed - all boats rise with the tide! Find people who can be your allies and grow together.
As a female founder, my mindset is to pay it forward, because we all are better together. Think about how you can share what you know with other people, and give back to your peers and community. Growing a business is hard, so founders need to surround themselves with people who they trust and who are there to lift them up. Giddy up!
To learn more advice from Michelle, you can read her full blog post 10 Key Learnings for Start-Up Marketers. To get in touch, you can reach out to Michelle on LinkedIn or visit the Growth Street website at https://www.getgrowthstreet.com/
For more guidance on how to build a marketing strategy for your startup, read our comprehensive guide to "Launching To Success."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Colleen Trinkaus is a Boston-based marketing consultant for startups and small businesses. A member of the Startup Boston marketing leadership team, she manages the blog content for Startup Boston. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
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