Dave Kellogg is a former CEO and CMO with operational experience across companies from $0 to $1B+. He served as GM/SVP of Service Cloud for Salesforce, CEO of MarkLogic, and SVP of Marketing at SAP / Business Objects. Today, he is principal at Dave Kellogg Consulting, EIR at Balderton Capital, and author of the popular SaaS blog Kellblog (www.kellblog.com). He has also served as an independent director across 10 startup boards and has a unique perspective on what top-performing SaaS companies do and what role the CMO should play.
We talk about:
- Being a great partner to sales and why it is marketing’s job to make sales easier
- Mastering the art of becoming the dispassionate analyst, presenting the facts
- Being a partner to the CEO
- Dave's thoughts on the importance of benchmarks, his POV on category creation, lead gen vs. demand gen, ChatGPT, and more.
Timestamps
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (06:34) - Dave Kellogg's Journey
- (11:34) - Insights on Blogging and Career
- (16:34) - What Makes a Great CMO
- (21:34) - Aligning Sales and Marketing
- (28:50) - Leveraging Data and Market Research
- (33:50) - The Role of Brand and Category Creation
- (38:50) - The Future of AI in Marketing
- (43:50) - Understanding SaaS Metrics
- (48:50) - Closing Remarks
Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.com
Join the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Check out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/
Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership
***
Today’s episode is brought to you by Zuddl.
We’re halfway through 2025, and one thing’s clear: events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking - you name it. Everyone’s leaning in.
Events are a core part of our playbook this year at Exit Five. So far, we’ve hosted two virtual sessions each month, one large virtual event, one in-person meetup, and we’re deep in the weeds planning our Drive conference coming back to Vermont this September.
Zuddl helps us run a smarter event strategy - from driving registrations, managing invites, automating comms, reminders, analytics, tracking. Their Salesforce integration also makes it simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without pulling in ops.
On top of that, the differentiator with Zuddl is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us - and that’s how we’ve been able to keep the momentum going with 12+ events already this year, with plenty more to come.
If events are part of your marketing strategy, you need to look at Zuddl to see how companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike, and Iterable are using the top event platform for Business events in 2025.
Head over to zuddl.com/exitfive to learn more.