Meagen Eisenberg is a rockstar marketer who also happens to be the CMO at MongoDB, a scalable, document-oriented database company. She’s been at the company for less than two months, but she’s by no means a rookie CMO. Previously, Meagen headed up demand generation and customer acquisition programs at Docusign for more than three years.
I was fortunate enough to video chat with Meagen about her new role at MongoDB, B2B martech, and big data. I’m excited to share the video with you today, but first, let’s get to know her a little bit better. Here are a a couple fun facts about Meagen:
What’s her favorite TV show?https://terminus.com/account-based-marketing-blueprint/
Silicon Valley
Biggest marketing heroes?
• Nicolas Draca – Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations, LinkedIn
• Scott Fingerhut – VP of WorldWide Marketing at Elastic
Check out my full interview with Meagen Eisenberg here:
Here are my favorite takeaways from my conversation with Meagen:
Big Data Adventures
During our conversation, Meagen Eisenberg shared that she feels right at home at MongoDB. Both her previous employer, Docusign, and MongoDB have a freemium model, meaning they offer free and paid subscriptions. They’re also both cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
One big difference between the two businesses is the target audience. The Docusign audience is mostly comprised of consumers, while MongoDB markets to developers and IT management professionals. Another difference is that MongoDB is an open-source product, meaning that developers can freely download the platform and build on it.
Meagen explains that MongoDB’s goal is to help developers “build amazing applications that were never before possible on top all the data that is currently available.” The challenge of marketing to developers is that they can smell marketing from a mile away.
Meagen’s team addresses this by providing a great developer experience and an amazing product. This strategy is working. MongoDB has ten million downloads, 350,000 students in its university, and 35,000 members in its user group.
[Tweet “Providing a great #developer experience brought @MongoDB 10 million downloads. – @meisenberg“]
The First 90 Days as a CMO
The first 90 days are crucial in any new role — but especially as a CMO of a rapidly growing tech startup. Meagen had some solid advice for how to best approach this challenge.
Her first suggestion is to spend a couple weeks gathering intelligence and determining a baseline. It’s important to understand the business as much as possible, as well as the personas that you’ll be marketing to. Meagen spent a great deal of time interviewing team members to accomplish this. But she didn’t just stop at the marketing department. She took time to seek out the wisdom of the engineering, product, and sales teams with the intention of learning how her team could best support them.
After gathering this intelligence, she recommends choosing three top priorities. She noted that there will likely be more than that, but a typical team can only focus on three things at a time if they want to execute them well. The next thing she did is get the team up and running by clearly communicating the goals and expectations.
As time goes by, she suggests evaluating your team members to determine areas where you may need additional expertise and support. As CMO, you’ll want to begin hiring to fill in those gaps so you can continue to expand on your team’s current strengths.
[Tweet “In the first 90 days as #CMO, focus on top 3 priorities & grow the team. – @meisenberg”]
Get Sh*t Done as a CMO
Meagen is on a mission to grow MongoDB quickly. I asked her about her goals, and she had some awesome answers.
Her first mission is to foster strong marketing and sales alignment. She wants to make sure both teams are on the same page and working as a well-oiled machine. The handoff of leads between the two teams must be seamless so nothing falls through the cracks.
She also desires to have marketing technology systems in place to ensure that her team was as productive as possible. One of the first wins in this area was getting Eloqua launched at her company in an astonishing nine days. She credited her talented team for their hard work over many nights and one weekend to make this happen. Coming from Pardot, an competitor of Eloqua, I can attest that it often takes much longer than nine days to implement a marketing automation solution.
Closed-loop reporting is another top priority. “It is important to know what is working and what is not,” says Meagen. Having the proper data and reporting can make or break a marketing team’s success in an organization, so I think she is right on the money with this.
Finally, she wants to make sure that there is alignment across the entire organization on go-to-market messaging. Everyone in the company should communicate a similar value proposition when speaking about the product, especially within the marketing and sales teams.
[Tweet “@MongoDB’s talented #MarTech team implemented @Eloqua in just 9 days. – @meisenberg”]
Looking into the B2B Marketing Crystal Ball
MongoDB is a data analytics platform, so it’s no surprise that Meagen’s first prediction is about predictive analytics. She said that modern marketers are making use of the mass amounts of data available and looking for insights.
The future involves predictive scoring where models can tell you which accounts you should go after and exactly what messaging you should deliver on a personal basis. I recently discovered Crystal, which helps handle personalization on an individual level. And I must say that it’s pretty accurate!
On a larger scale, data platforms can take huge amounts of customer data and enrich it with information from their own databases. They use this combined data to determine best-fit customers for your business as well as what kind of content will be helpful to move those customers forward in the buying process.
Tip: To learn more about predictive data tools that integrate with Salesforce CRM, check out the Account-Based Marketing Cloud.
Know Thy Customer
I love that Meagen referenced the customer experience several times throughout our conversation. For one thing, she talked about how SaaS brands must know how their customers are interacting with their app. “Every company needs to figure out what their customer experience looks like and how they will deliver it,” she points out.
She explained how she utilizes the Wells Fargo mobile app to conduct the majority of her banking and how well the company creates an experience that meets her needs as a customer.
MongoDB has a similar goal of providing a platform for developers and companies to build out a next-generation modern customer experience. Meagen stresses that the end-to-end customer experience is very high on the list of priorities for team.
[Tweet “”Figure out what your #CustomerExperience looks like & how you’ll deliver it.” – @meisenberg”]
Mobilizing Social
Meagen is fascinated by companies that conduct authentic social media automation at scale. She says that Insighpool is helping her team to accomplish this in a great way. The tool helps marketers find influencers on social media and target them directly with personalized messaging.
She also mentions the importance of mobile. As more consumers consume content on their devices, “all companies need to be cognizant of how people digest information,” says Meagen.
[Tweet “@Insightpool helps @MongoDB personalized their #SocialMedia messaging. – @meisenberg”]
More Resources for CMOs
I truly enjoyed speaking with Meagen Eisenberg and hearing her tips for marketers in a new CMO role. If you’re the CMO at your B2B company — or you dream of being one someday — I’ve got another great resource for you. It’s a free e-book that explores a lot of what Meagen and I talked about, from data to marketing technology. Download the Beginner’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing to learn more.
