How Airmeet Reached Series B and Built a 24-Person Marketing Team (Interview with CMO Mark Kilens)

Introduction: Mark Kilens and Airmeet

Mark Kilens

00:00How are you folks doing? Good. Excellent. Excellent. So this is gonna be twenty minutes. It's actually very interesting because we're gonna build off a lot of what Anand just talked about and give you tack tactical, toolkits, strategies, to actually implement. A lot of those things he's telling you not to do. My name is Mark Kilens. I'm at a company named airmeet. It's a series b company around event technology. I was at HubSpot for eight and a

00:24half years. I was a hundred and fortieth employee. I left. There was 3,000 people. And I was at Drift. I was around 200, scaled to 600. Both companies were, you know, HubSpot was 600,000,000 when I left, and Drift was about a 100,000,000. So excited to talk to you about how I was able to really grow marketing teams at both those companies. So there's gonna be a lot of content, you'll be able to get a lot of

People, Process, Performance Framework

Mark Kilens

00:46this content after I speak to online. Just just keep that in mind. So I'm gonna break this down to three things. People, process, performance. Right? You can't have a team without great people. The team, the end of the day, needs some sort of process to be cohesive, and you need to create a high performing team. Right? That's how your business is gonna grow and it's gonna scale. So I'm gonna break these three things down into these

01:09three different sections. So I'll go through each thing. Again, very actionable takeaways, tangible things you guys can do right after this. And the caveat is, how many of you folks have a team that's mostly remote? Raise your hands. Yes. Most people. Right? Remote hybrid. This is a lot of the lessons I've learned from HubSpot was purely in person. Right? There was no remote work back in 2010 when I joined. Today, fully remote company. So all of

01:38these things are have to do with how to actually communicate, build a team in a remote first setting as well. So just keeping that in mind. So first, people are everything. Right? If you don't have great people, that's for nothing. So the first thing I'm to break down is how to set a vision and a set of values for your team and how you're to think about using those. I'm going to talk about manager sessions. This

Setting Vision and Values for Marketing Teams

Mark Kilens

01:58is especially important when you're small, but as you scale, don't rely on just HR to grow your team. I'm gonna talk about what we do with manager sessions and then party hats. So vision and values. Super critical. I think of this as the why, how, and what. The why is your vision. And you should have a company vision. Right? Vision or mission, whatever you wanna call it. But then your marketing team should have its own vision

02:21that ladders underneath that company vision. Right? And for us at airmeet, know, our vision is is empowering the world to join together from anywhere. So we've built a set of, you know, values that help bring that vision to life. And how we built these values, you could think of them as principles or values, you can have them at the company level. I like to have them at the company and team level, is how you create really

02:42strong team cohesion. And the way we did this is we did it together. So, we got the teams together, spent about three months over the course of a few different brainstorms, really understanding what people cared about. And these values, and these are the actual values that we have on the team, are all very specific, action oriented, and everyone was included in the creation of these values. So how do we use these? We use them for hiring.

03:05So when I'm hiring people, I'm interviewing people against most of these values. When we're doing performance reviews, we're using these in performance reviews. When we're giving feedback, we're using these in feedback sessions. When we're doing coaching, you get the idea. Right? So vision and values are critically important to set the right high level guardrails for your teams to operate in. Gives them autonomy, gives them the confidence to do work in the way they wanna do it

03:28without deviating too much from the pack.

Manager Sessions and Team Development

Mark Kilens

03:32Manager sessions. This is the thing I started to do in my past company. You know, HR HR is great, but, you know, you can't rely just on HR to man here we go. To manage and grow your team. You need to take that into your hands. So what we do at airmeet now is every two weeks, I sit down with my directors and managers. It's about six people. My marketing team's 24 people right now. And we

03:54have conversations about these types of topics. Some of my favorite right now is business strategy, managing up, and running one to ones. At the end of the day, your managers are how you're going to get those results that you want and the business needs. Right? That's how it's going to happen. So, if you don't spend time developing your team, and you could be doing this as a founder, as a marketing leader, it doesn't matter, you are

04:18gonna be missing an opportunity to create that cohesion, right, and that accountability. So, example, we do a lot of things where we have open conversations, none of these are recorded, and we're giving practical advice on how to say, like, look, you're trying to work with someone in sales. Talk me through how how you're doing that. What are you struggling with? And we're all going around the room giving advice. I've brought in guest speakers to talk to

04:40these folks. I've brought in people that are in my network, in our CEO's network, and we're trying to really make it interactive and help people understand how to actually do their job better and grow their team. Because again, I'm dependent on my people. Right? So if you don't do some types of these manager sessions, at least once a month, I highly recommend you start doing it. HR is good. Right? You're gonna use them and leverage them

Party Hats: Empowering Culture Carriers

Mark Kilens

05:01if you have that, but at the end of day, you gotta take matters into your own hands. And then party hats. This goes back to 2017 HubSpot Academy. Team was like 20 ish people. So party hats is an idea that if you have a team of like, say, ten, fifteen, or more people, you're empowering people in the team to help you grow the culture. Right? Culture is is many things. It's many, many things. Right? It's it's,

05:23you know, what you believe, who you hire, how you work together goes back to that vision and values, goes back to, you know, again, like, hiring for character, training for skill, something I believe in. But at the end of the day, like, you wanna make sure that you're taking the folks that are on your team and empowering them to to spread the the right types of behaviors. Right? And what we've done at at airmeet, at HubSpot,

05:46at Drift is we've gotten people together on the team who wanna be become the life of the party of the team. So these people are empowered. I give them budget. I give them x amount of money per quarter. They plan outings. They do quarterly manager awards. They do all these things. And it's not coming from me top down. It's coming organically from the team. So you really got to think through how you're going to take some

06:07of your team members, identify those people that are kind of the culture carriers, and empower them to do things like this. This is the annual lake day at my parents'lake house. Right? Actually, in New Hampshire, and this is the team having a ton of fun. And and we would structure the day. Right? This annual thing is this well structured event. But again, like, doing it on a monthly, quarterly basis and giving people the autonomy to

06:30do fun things, you don't have spend a lot of money, it's just about the intentionality you put into it.

Team Rituals and Monthly Priorities

Mark Kilens

06:37Alright. So, now you have a great team. You have some some team members that understand why they're doing what they're doing, why you're asking them to do what they're doing, how they should be executing their day in and day out through values, and you're trying to now figure out performance. So, I break it down into these three things. We're going to talk a lot about team rituals as we go along here. Monthly priorities, career growth plans,

07:01or types of rituals. Rituals create habits. Habits are super important. I really try to avoid micromanaging my team. I try to give them, again, the right guardrails to create creativity and execute with excellence, if you will. These eight are my top eight team rituals. Team meeting, Monday marketing minute, which is an email and a Slack that I sent to the entire company outlining brand, pipeline, and team updates across the entire marketing team. Pipeline review, super important.

07:32Pipeline's a lifeblood of a company. Monthly priorities, I'll get into that in a moment. Integrated campaigns, we'll talk about that. Career growth plans, super important. V two mom who knows V two moms? Anyone? One person. Wow. Okay. That's this should blow your mind. And marketing team awards, we talked about that with party hats. These rituals develop your own. These rituals help guide the team into the rhythm of their day to day, the rhythm of their work.

07:57Monthly priorities. At the very least, everyone on your team should be setting two to three high level priorities for their month. What are they setting out to achieve? And then reflecting back, what are the outcomes and the results of those efforts over the last thirty days? You might be asking yourself, well, if they just do that in isolation, that's not gonna work that well. You're right. We'll get to how to fix the hat and how to

08:19make sure that there is no isolated monthly priority setting in a moment, but this is super important. And then finally, from, like, a process standpoint, giving people the control of their career is super important. I started this like over ten years ago at HubSpot, career growth plans. I have the templates. It's gonna be shared out at the end of the presentation. You can steal it. It's like 12 to 13 slides that give people the autonomy to

Career Growth Plans

Mark Kilens

08:44take their growth into their own hands while you support them. This is everything from what are the competencies you're asking them to develop, what are the skill sets they need, start stop continues a great exercise, I love the one on the top left, but you're giving people the ability to actually understand how they're doing, where they stand, what are the outcomes of their work, and they're you're designing a ritual, a system for them to kinda use

09:08every quarter, and these get updated every quarter.

Positioning Altitudes: Landing the Plane

Mark Kilens

09:12Alright. The last three. Got about six minutes left. Told you there's gonna be a lot of stuff. Positioning altitudes, integrated campaigns, v two ons. So now you got a great team. You're starting to help them perform together through process, the right process. Now, how do you not just get your marketing team to perform, but pipeline and revenue is a team sport. It's marketing, sales, CS, and product. How do you get all of those teams performing together?

09:40And as a marketing leader, you're ultimately, my opinion, shaping how the company goes to market. Right? Ultimately, the CEO decides go to market strategy. That's my opinion. I think the CEO owns that. You're acting as the CEO's right hand person to make it come to life. So I'll give you an example of this. Figuring out how you wanna tell your story, the messaging, the positioning, the content, How do you land a plane? You don't land a

10:07plane from 30,000 feet to the runway within two minutes. It's it's not how you land a customer these days either. How you land a customer is through taking them through a journey, helping them understand your brand. We believe in people first joining together. We believe that there's a better way to do that. Something called Event Lab Growth, solution level positioning. We believe that we've built a great product suite, the Event Experience Cloud, to help them do

10:33that. We believe we have these great features in these products. And ultimately, the most important thing is value positioning. We have evidence from other customers that they are seeing tremendous results,

10:46tremendous value. Right? Case studies, customer stories, benchmark, etcetera. At the end of the day, if your company can design your marketing sales CS to align to these levels of altitude, you're going to be able to take people through a journey. And no, it's not linear. It's never going to be perfectly linear. But you're gonna need to have all of these five levels, these altitude levels to really make sure people understand why you're different, why you're better,

11:11and how you're ultimately gonna help them solve their problems. That whole what's in it for them mentality.

11:17So how do you bring that to life? Integrated campaigns. This is one of my favorite things. We use integrated campaigns at Drift. We kinda did it at HubSpot. We're all in on this at airmeet. Breaks down to three four things. The campaign level messaging. So, I go back to people first. That's our brand level campaign. Event led growth. That's the solution level campaign. You could have a product level campaign too. You know, we have one around

Integrated Campaigns Framework

Mark Kilens

11:40event intent data because we're building and launching a product that is all about using engagement signals from events to drive revenue. So the campaign is the high level messaging and story. There's usually something that necessitates the need for a campaign, a trigger point. There's usually a very specific, you know, specific but not too specific audience for a campaign. Really specific audience development happens at the program level. You, of course, have a campaign level set of messaging,

12:06and then at the program level, you have targeted messaging. So for us, an example of a targeted program is one that's going after CMOs. One that's going after maybe a competitive program. And that nests within that campaign. And then for each of these programs, have different offers. Events, content, could, you know, be PLG, product offer, could be anything. Right? But these offers map into that specific targeted program messaging and audience, and then you have different channels

V2MOMs for High Performance Alignment

Mark Kilens

12:34that activate it. This is a super important thing to align your marketing team, not just your marketing team, though your sales team as well. Because everyone now is starting to understand how to take this and turn it into action. And every campaign has goals, that's the last thing I'll talk about. V2MONS, vision, values, methods, obstacles, metrics. It comes from Mark Benioff, Salesforce. We did this at HubSpot. We made it, you know, something a little bit different,

12:58turned into a cute thing called the M SPOT. Mission strategy playbooks, omissions targets. Of course, HubSpot had to do that. Right? M SPOT instead of V2MOM. But this is this is how you create high performance. I see too many companies do this too late. We did this, you know, probably when we were like 50,000,000 at HubSpot. We did this kind of when we were at 40,000,000 at Drift. We're doing this now at airmeet even sooner. Right?

13:22So this is helping everyone at the company, everyone though in the marketing team align to the top line targets that I have. My ultimate targets are pipeline. My ultimate targets are driving more engagement and efficient growth. So everyone on the team is going to have one of these filled out. And what we do is every week, they track their progress. And this provides super autonomy and, you could say, discipline around making sure they're focused on the

Summary: People, Process, Performance

Mark Kilens

13:49right monthly priorities. What am I doing every month and what are the outcomes of those things driving? And how do they ladder up from from them to me? And then to me to the CEO. So V2Moms, there's a ton of stuff on the Internet about these. We have these templates. We'll share these out. It's a critical thing that you guys got to do to create a really high performing marketing team. So, to summarize, you have people.

14:13People are everything. Everything I'm understanding about hiring and not settling, all that stuff, hire for character, train for skill, could not agree more with. But you got to get people excited. You need vision, you need values, you need that alignment. You got to give people training and upskilling. Don't rely just on HR to do that. And you gotta make sure they're fun. There's there's there's team cohesion, psychological safety being born from that mentality of party hats.

QR Code and Closing Remarks

Mark Kilens

14:40Process, build rituals. Rituals are critically important. Rituals create habits. Habits create sustainable, continuous growth and performance. Super important. And then from a performance standpoint, how do you not align just your marketing team, but the whole company around what you're trying to do? Because at the end of day, if you can activate the whole company from a growth standpoint, you're only gonna grow faster. Take a picture of this QR code. You'll get this presentation. You'll check out

15:07my office. You can book time with me. Let me know what you think about the experience. Really appreciate you all listening, coming today. Hope you enjoy the rest of the event. Thanks so much. Cheers.