The Top 3 Takeaways From our Discussion With Patrick Edmonds

Patrick Edmonds is the Chief Marketing Officer of Proposify, the proposal software that gives control and insight into the most important stage of your sales process, the close. Since joining Proposify in 2016, Patrick has helped grow 2,000 customer companies to over 10,000, $1M in annual recurring revenue to almost $10M, and has seen a team of 10 grow to over 100.

Patrick spoke to our cohort about some key learnings from his experience being a CMO; here are three key takeaways from Patrick Edmond’s discussion:

1. Deeply understand your revenue engine.

How does your company actually make money? Defined by SiriusDecisions, a revenue engine is “all the go-to-market functions responsible for revenue growth: sales, marketing and product.” 

In order to have a revenue engine, and to be able to scale your revenue, you need all of these things to be true:

If you’re missing any of these components, you may be able to still generate revenue, but you won’t be able to scale it.

2. Understand where your growth is coming from and scale it out.

Who’s buying your product? Where is the traffic coming from? Double down on the channels that are bringing in the traffic. Understand that you won’t be able to be successful in every channel, especially with limited resources; however, it is important to experiment with different channels to see what’s working and what isn’t. 

You need that revenue engine in order for growth to happen. 

3. Building a marketing team.

As a one or two person marketing team, your marketers will have to wear big hats and have a basic understanding of each marketing function; they will need to learn or decide to outsource the areas they are not familiar with. Without the resources to dramatically grow your team, you have to figure out how to leverage the team that you do have, and once you are able to grow, know how you can improve it. 

Patrick recommends the idea created by Brian Balfour that marketers should be shaping themselves into T-shaped marketers. This idea essentially means that you have a broad understanding of the basics, and the benefits and disadvantages of each channel, yet you have a deep understanding of a channel, or two. Being a T-shaped marketer will set you apart from the rest. 

However, when hiring, look for capital I shaped marketers - someone who has a broad skill set yet an area where they particularly excel. You don’t necessarily want your team to be built of all specialists (T-shaped marketers); you want people who are really great in an area you are weak, yet they have an additional set of broad skills that enable them to be a key contributor.