Legends of GTM: Eloqua's Founder Talks Category Creation - Mark Organ

Feb 6, 2024

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Many entrepreneurs dream of creating categories. But few have actually done it - much less built a category worth billions of dollars.

Mark Organ is one of those rare few. As founding CEO of Eloqua, he pioneered marketing automation in the early 2000s, paving the way for other players and selling to Oracle for nearly $900 million.

Mark and I chat through how he co-founded Eloqua, the pivots and experiments needed to achieve product-market fit, and how category creators may be wired a bit differently.

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About Today's Guest

Mark Organ is the founding CEO of Eloqua (the first successful marketing automation platform) and Influitive. His greatest professional passions include creating new billion-dollar categories in technology and developing new leaders. Today he helps CEOs achieve their full potential in their businesses and their lives as the CEO of Categorynauts.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/markorgan/

Key Topics

[00:00] - Introduction
[01:05] - Founding Eloqua and marketing automation
[07:47] - Origin of the lead generation playbook
[10:39] - Getting to product-market fit
[16:03] - Genesis of lead scoring
[19:08] - Toolkit software vs. opinionated software
[24:25] - Pivots and brushes with death are the norm
[27:09] - When is it right to build a category?
[30:14] - Building a category around an under-served hero
[33:51] - Creating a category for the second time
[36:42] - Challenges with churn at Influitive
[41:05] - Alternatives to VC funding in SaaS

Resource Links

Categorynauts - Categorynauts is the leading global community of category creating leaders, helping CEOs looking to discover, develop and dominate their category.

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