CMO

Series B SaaS platform

Outcome

Marketing-sourced pipeline increased 60% YoY

Client context

The company had crossed $18M ARR and closed a $40M Series B six months before we started. They sold a workflow platform into mid-market and enterprise revenue and operations teams, with an ACV between $45K and $140K depending on segment. The CEO had personally closed roughly 60% of the lifetime revenue on the books. Headcount had grown to 140 people, with sales at 22 and marketing at 6, the latter still reporting into a VP of Marketing who had been hired at the seed stage and had recently stepped into an operating advisor role. Marketing-sourced pipeline was tracking at 28% of total, which the board considered too low for a Series B in this category. Net revenue retention was healthy at 122%. The investor syndicate had been clear at the post-close board meeting that the next 18 months would be defined by whether the company could move from founder-led, relationship-driven sales to a marketing-led pipeline engine that supported the new VP of Sales and the planned move into the enterprise segment.

The challenge

This was the highest-stakes search the company had run. The CEO wanted a senior operator with a public profile. The lead investor wanted operating depth and pattern recognition from at least one $20M to $100M ARR scale moment. The CRO wanted a partner, not a peer who would relitigate territory and quota every quarter. The board chair wanted a CMO who could front the company on stage and in analyst conversations. The previous attempt to fill this role through a generalist search firm had produced a long list of impressive resumes and no real conviction. Two finalists had been declined late in the process. One had been a brand-marketing background in a category that ran on pipeline, the other was an excellent demand operator who could not credibly run analyst relations. The cost of a third miss was visible. Pipeline was already running thin against the new plan, and the sales team was starting to lose confidence that marketing would catch up.

Search strategy

This was run as a full executive search using the Topgrading career-history interview as the spine of the assessment. We started with a four-hour intake involving the CEO, the CRO, the board chair, and the lead investor, separately, so we could surface where their definitions of success differed before any candidate saw a job spec. We then mapped 96 CMO and senior VP profiles across B2B SaaS companies in the $30M to $200M ARR band, with a strong filter for operators who had been promoted into the seat rather than parachuted in. 28 were approached, 14 had substantive first conversations, 8 went through a structured Topgrading interview covering every role in their career, and 4 were taken through a working session with the CEO and CRO. Two finalists went through deep reference work, including the standard Topgrading practice of contacting references chosen by the candidate plus a small set of backchannel references the candidate had not nominated. The shortlist was delivered in three weeks, which is fast for a search at this seniority.

Result

The hired CMO came from a comparable Series B that had since scaled past $90M ARR, where she had owned the pipeline engine through two consecutive years of 70%+ growth. She started 35 days after offer. In her first quarter she made one senior hire, a VP of Demand, and reorganized the existing six-person team around three pods: demand generation, product marketing, and lifecycle. By the end of her second quarter the team had grown to 12 with a clean operating cadence and a unified pipeline model that both finance and sales agreed on. By the end of her first year, marketing-sourced pipeline had moved from 28% to 41% of total, and absolute marketing-sourced pipeline was up 60% year-over-year on a meaningfully larger total. She also led the analyst-relations work that produced the company's first inclusion in a major analyst report in their category. She remains in the seat, two years on, and is now part of the executive team driving the next funding milestone.