Where I landed after planning my first quarter in charge

Welcome to Evidently—the bi-weekly newsletter where a first-time VP of Marketing shares the (sometimes) ugly truth of what it’s like to do this job. If you’re just joining, I’ve talked a lot about reflecting, journaling, and running so far. Hop into the archives if any of those verbs speak to you. Today, though, is all about planning.

Now that the dust from stepping into this role mid-quarter is starting to settle, I want to share how I’ve approached planning for my first full quarter with the team. A little context: we operate on a non-standard fiscal year that runs from February 1st to January 31st. So in our world, Q2 = May-July.

This isn't an exhaustive breakdown of every project on the roadmap. It's more about where my head's at for our team’s overarching goals and some of the ways we’ll be defining “success.” 

I identified four areas of focus. This is actually what I shared with the board when I first took over to show my vision for the team and where we go next. One of my concerns at that time was the vision piece. Did I know what to do? What bets to make? It turns out my experience has given me more POV than I expected in my initial nervousness. So being able to share this with the board, with our cofounders, and with the team felt like a good way to build confidence in me from the start.

1. One team, one goal

I raised my hand to take SDRs under marketing back in April. For Q2, I’ve consolidated our pipeline goals into one goal across inbound and outbound. I could probably dedicate a whole newsletter to that decision.

We’ve historically tracked different channels, with SDR outbound and inbound as separate. That setup created noise: attribution debates, divided energy, teams technically working toward the same outcome but not really working together. So I’ve combined them. SDR outbound and inbound are now one goal, and we’re all incentivized in our bonus comp plans to perform against it. 

We have good setups for personal attribution at the rep level for look back. But with one combined goal, the idea is that we should be able to spend less time arguing about which team gets pipeline credit, and more time getting more of it.

2. Reducing pipeline dependencies

We had a few things we were leaning on pretty heavily for pipeline coming into this quarter. Totally normal but it also means you're exposed if any of those things shift on you.

Moving forward, I want us to have more options while also continuing to strengthen our foundation under the plays that have been working. Higher quality, more consistent, more within our control.

Part of that is being more deliberate about our organic efforts on LinkedIn. Mark had a huge audience and presence, and some of that moved with him. But LinkedIn is still big for us and I want to make sure it stays that way by finding ways to encourage more activity from the team and making it easier for our CEO Evan to keep doing what he's doing there. Our Director of Content Marketing Jillian recently shared how she created a tool using our MCP server and Claude to help with that. 

We also want to reduce our reliance on paid channels that can be inconsistent on quality. We've run incentivized campaigns that drive a lot of TOFU volume, but the conversion has been spotty. I'd rather build sources that might be slower to spin up but prove more defensible over time. Instead of trying to do all new stuff, what is working right now that we can double-down on? For example, thought leadership ads on LinkedIn are some of our best performers. By developing more of those types of posts organically, we can put more intent behind sponsoring them.

3. Building owned audiences

It's always harder and more expensive to go out and grab net new people. So the move is to bring more folks into our ecosystem intentionally and actually nurture them. On the macro level, I’m betting on owned audiences becoming even more important for pipeline building in software.

We have a great brand. The Outpost is growing. Evidently is growing. It's time to make all of these efforts pay off by being more deliberate about list building, creating better offers to pull people in, and having a real nurture path once they're there. The goal is a marketing engine that compounds, not one that's constantly paying to refill the top of the funnel.

There's also a bottom-of-funnel gap I want to close. We're genuinely strong at thought leadership and brand awareness. Where I think we can do more is in the product-focused, use-case-specific content that helps someone who's already interested understand why UserEvidence is the right call for them. We're investing in that this quarter.

4. Creating great brand experiences and be world-class

This one is less of a project and more of a standard I'm trying to set across everything we do.

Brand experience lives in every touchpoint, whether it be a piece of content, a direct mail piece, or the first cold call an SDR makes. That’s why one of the things I care most about this quarter is improving how our SDR team shows up in conversations.

I have a mentor who gets paid serious money as a speaker. He's insanely good at it. One thing he taught me that I’ll never forget is that 80% of great public speaking is just knowing your content by heart. ‘Cause if you're on stage trying to remember what comes next or reading your slides, you're not present in the moment. You're not reading the crowd and adjusting.

The same thing is true on a cold call or a demo. If you know the product and the persona deeply, you're free to actually be part of the conversation. You have the space to listen, to read the room, to be genuinely helpful. That presence is what builds trust. So we're investing in that, improving the demo experience, and better equipping SDRs to have real conversations over just delivering pitches. This is just one way we’re focused on brand experience. 

How we’ll measure success

One thing I want to be clear about is that these four focus areas aren't siloed by team. SDRs, product, growth, content are contributing to all of them in some way. The metrics below aren't strictly ownership markers, they're the places where each team's work is most directly visible. Worth noting: I’ve taken out all specific numbers. 

SDRs

• Become one team with one goal by combining pipeline goals

• Set activity standards that drive team success and clear expectations

• Align with marketing to build better relationships with prospects

• Become experts on our product and customers

Growth

• Build tools to increase conversion through the sales funnel

• Understand the marketing funnel to improve website-to-offer conversions

• Source X Stage 2 opportunities (combined goal)

Content Marketing

• Build Outpost audience to X subscribers and Evidently to X subscribers

• Refine content experience to make it best in class

• Hit Highline attendee book goal of X and meet planning deadlines

• Increase LLM-sourced website traffic and evidence visibility

• Reduce TOFU dependencies

Product Marketing

• Build our shared company language across marketing and sales

• Show the value of the UserEvidence product in-market, fill BOFU gap

• Support customer enablement and win rate goals

What I’ll improve for next time

I got some hard feedback on these OKRs when I shared them with a CMO mentor. OKRs shouldn’t be split out by function even though it makes sense for the work, and everything needs to have a measure you’re working towards instead of being a project to complete. I griped back a bit that we might not see drastic improvement across everything we’re doing within the quarter, and we don’t own the direct outcome of all our work. But that doesn’t necessarily matter. Even if you don’t hit the goal, you need a way to show the improvement you’re working towards. 

Then, all of this should actually just be rolled up into company OKRs and the main measures we work against. Which is just pipeline. Those should be the headlines, not what I shared above. 

That was helpful to hear, and I’m working on a v2 to practice that framing. But things are never perfect. The quarter has already started and we’re running with this version for now as I work in the background to improve it for our board meeting and Q3. 

What do you think of our focus areas and investments? Anything I’m missing? I’ll let you know how this quarter progresses.

—Al

3 things I’m digging this week:

• ARSENAL ARE PREMIER LEAGUE CHAMPIONS. Yes, I’m going to be insufferable and I think I deserve it. 

• Enablement is top of mind for PMM and CMA folks - Really liked this post from our PMM Mary about what we’ve learned from our AI launch (and how email is a great message tester).

• Mostly Metrics SaaS benchmarks - Some interesting trends as SaaS continues to feel like a wooden rollercoaster past due for maintenance. Retention and growth are tough right now!

UserEvidence, who?

UserEvidence makes it easy to earn and keep trust from first touch through expansion.

We turn customer evidence, references, and advocacy into one system that builds credibility with buyers and strengthens relationships with customers.

• Not buried in Slack.

• Not stuck in decks.

• Not dependent on a hero effort from one person.