MadKudu's Next Chapter
The Modern Marketers’ Frustration
Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working and sharing ideas over coffee (or, more recently, on a Zoom call) with hundreds of marketers. It is through these conversations that my two co-founders and I realized the monumental problem being faced by B2B marketers.
Many business leaders often find themselves overwhelmed - it’s normal. With marketing leaders, however, I'll go so far to say they are downright enraged and frustrated (often secretly). And of course, they can’t admit that they don’t understand their funnel, aren’t confident in what they are reporting, and are really just shooting in the dark and hoping for the best (a pretty scary place to be!). They are dealing with imposter syndrome and other hidden insecurities about the growing expectations. Plus everybody and their mother has an opinion about what the marketing team should focus on, what shiny new tool should be added to the tech stack, and what the next campaign should be. In comparison, does anybody care what technology the CTO uses? Not really. And then there is the quest for the unicorn CMO - she is data-driven, can build a new category, is a thought leader in the industry you’re in, is a demand gen guru and can implement a killer product strategy. That person just doesn’t exist. It is just unrealistic to expect someone to be all of those things.
We’re living in a world where artificial intelligence (AI) and data science are literally all around us. But the truth is that very few marketers have seen their results improved by these capabilities.
The Missing Link, And Our Next Chapter
Over the past several years, MadKudu has made small waves in several B2B marketing circles. We’ve shaken things up in the predictive lead scoring category and are incredibly humbled and proud to have worked with some of the best brands and marketers in the industry. People like Guillaume Cabane, Kelly Watkins, Alex Poulos, June Bower, Chris Rodriguez, and Andy Mowat - just to name a few. Since we founded in 2014, our software and our team has served nearly 100 companies!
Our work with these companies started by helping their marketing team align and work better with their sales team. While it seems simple to many (we all know the importance of a service level agreement), marketers had a hard time creating a two-way accountability system that went beyond just timeliness of following up with inbound leads. To help tackle this urgent problem, we helped our customers identify the best fit leads that were ready for the sales team and orchestrated the buyer journey at scale. This improved sales and marketing relationships across the board.
But what about marketing’s relationship with the rest of the organization? What we discovered is that marketers need a way to truly articulate what their department is doing by using a metric that could be understood - and accepted - by the rest of the organization, the CEO, and the board.
MadKudu is uniquely positioned to provide exactly what these marketing leaders crave, which is why I’m so excited to share the beta launch of our MadKudu Insights product functionality. Insights is the first tool of this kind to give these CMOs a forward-looking view of their pipeline and the ability to articulate their value with a metric everybody understands and trusts: expected dollar value. With a user-friendly reporting interface to visualize KPIs, it empowers their teams to make critical decisions about budget allocation, marketing performance measurement, and sales and marketing alignment.
Revenue Marketing Movement
We’ve all seen the stats on how little trust CMOs have from their CEO, how short their tenure is, and more. However, I believe we’re reaching a tipping point in the evolution of the CMO. They can now prove the value of their department in revenue with confidence, which completely redefines their positioning in the enterprise. We’ve been testing this concept privately for several months and we’re excited to see how transformative it is.
MadKudu’s growth and continued momentum is evidence of this tipping point. In fact, we’ve just announced some major accomplishments (in addition to the new intelligence offering - MadKudu Insights - that I just mentioned above) and we have no intention of slowing down.
- $5.5M Series A: Led by Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) with participation from Partech and Alven, this capital will be used to fuel our vision and drive the revenue marketing movement forward.
- Growing Board of Directors: Eric Buatois, general partner at BGV, will join our board of directors and Sarah Benhamou, an associate at BGV, will join as a board observer.
- New Advisory Board Members: We’re thrilled to share that we’ve added two strategic members to our advisory board: Alex Poulos, vice president of marketing at DocSend and Kelly Watkins, former vice president of global marketing at Slack and current chief executive officer at Abstract.
- Named Leader in G2 Grids: MadKudu was recently named a Momentum Leader and High Performer in both the Lead Intelligence and Lead Scoring categories for Summer 2020.
- Newly Revamped Website: We hope you’ll take a look, and stay awhile to learn more :)
A huge thank you to our team of customers, investors, advisors, friends, and most importantly teammates (our beloved Kudus), for the effort and energy getting us here. I’m truly so excited about what marketers are about to see and experience next, and so proud that MadKudu will play a key role in it in this next chapter.