31. CMO Kevin Marasco on building high-growth SaaS marketing teams at Zenefits

CMO Leadership | How top Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) build high-performing marketing teams with Ty Hayes

Kevin Marasco, CMO at Zenefits, joins us on the show this week.

Kevin is an all-star CMO, having helped multiple SaaS companies grow fast, raise capital and get acquired. Kevin has three-time 1,000% + growth experience at startup, private and public SaaS companies and is also a board advisor, LP, startup investor and venture advisor.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Kevin is building a modern marketing team at Zenefits, what patterns he’s noticed when entering high-growth companies, how he works out what capabilities are needed, and the skills Kevin looks for;
• How marketing, product and sales can work effectively together, how the modern CMO needs to work with all exec counterparts, and how to go about it;
• Kevin’s new book ‘People Operations: Automate HR, Design a Great Employee Experience, and Unleash Your Workforce’, co-authored with Jay Fulcher and Tracy Cote;
• What People Ops is, why it matters, and what it means for CMOs and CCOs; and
• What you can do right now to increase motivation and productivity of your team by applying some strategies from the book.

Before Zenefits, Kevin was the marketing leader at HireVue acquired by Carlyle Group, Taleo – acquired by Oracle, and Vurve acquired by Taleo.

This episode is packed with a lot of actionable content, make sure you get the notes for this one. To access this, head to growthgenerators.io, go to the Podcast section, look out for this episode and download the notes.

Enjoy the show.

References

• Daniel H. Pink - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
• Jay Fulcher, Kevin Marasco & Tracy Cote - People Operations: Automate HR, Design a Great Employee Experience, and Unleash Your Workforce.
• Ryan Holiday - The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph.

Contact Kevin Marasco

• Find Kevin on LinkedIn and mention you heard him on the podcast. Find out more about Zenefits.

Contact Growth Generators

• Find out how Ty and Growth Generators can help you design and build a modern marketing team that drives growth using our 3-stage framework for marketing team transformation. Follow or connect with Ty on LinkedIn.

If you enjoy this episode please remember to subscribe so you get each new episode as it drops each week to get more tips and insights to build a high-performance marketing team, tell someone about the podcast who you think may benefit, or leave us a review!

This episode was produced by Dylan Todd and edited by Lewis Hallam.