Just a quick post to highlight that Exit Five has published the audio from my presentation at their recent leadership retreat.
The presentation was entitled How To Be the CMO Everyone Wants To Work With, and the audio is about an hour long. Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt published it as Episode 342 of The Dave Gerhardt Show.
Thanks to those who attended and thanks to Dave for inviting me to speak at the event.
I’m a big fan of Dave Gerhardt and the Exit Five marketing community he has built. While I have always liked the idea of peer-networking communities, I think they change from vitamin to painkiller in times of rapid change. Why? Because the playbooks haven’t been written yet.
Take SaaS, for example. Today, you can find scores of blogs — including mine — that talk about how to run SaaS businesses, how to plan SaaS businesses, and how to produce and interpret SaaS metrics. Twenty years ago virtually none of that existed. You needed to figure it out. And one of the best ways to figure it out was to spend time with other people who were doing the same figuring.
There’s a time for timeless wisdom and there’s a time for talking to other people who are doing the same thing as you are, right now. I think AI and the massive disruption it creates in marketing — from content to workflow to performance marketing to analytics — means it’s an awesome time to join a marketing peer-networking community.
I tell this to literally every CMO I work with:
That’s not to say that following thought leaders isn’t a great tactic, too. I keep an eye on Emily Kramer, Elena Verna, Carilu Dietrich, Alice de Courcy, and Jon Miller. And I can’t wait for Rand Fishkin’s rumored new book on Zero-Click Marketing. If there are other marketing thought leaders you think I should be following, please let me know.
All this is why I was thrilled when Dave Gerhardt invited me to speak at Exit Five’s Marketing Leadership Retreat on March 19-20 in Phoenix. Given the above, I knew I wasn’t going to be the person delivering fresh-from-the-trenches information on AI tools and methods. The audience is 100x more qualified than I am to do that.
So what did I want to offer up instead? Some timeless wisdom. Specifically, timeless wisdom not just on how to successfully do the CMO job, but on how to be the CMO everyone wants to work with.
Why that topic? And bear in mind it takes a lot for me to pick a title that ends with a preposition. Because I thought it captured the key to success in an important way.
Why does that last point matter?
Ultimately, I’m saying that CMOs should want to position themselves as the CMO EW2WW.
Put differently: “Marketer, position thyself.”
(Adapted without permission from Luke 4:23.)
With that as background, here are the slides from the presentation, embedded below, and downloadable here. I had a fairly miserable time in Gamma building them so apologies for the upside-down funnel, some of the formatting, graphics, and mechanics (e.g., the absence of copyright notice and slide numbers). There is only so much time I’m willing to spend explaining to a chatbot what expression to put on the reflected image of a face in a mirror. And once you drop into PowerPoint to make changes, there seems to be no going back.
Thanks again to Dave for having me and to Allison Saxon for working with me to make it happen.
Posted in AI, Career, Communications, Leadership, Marketing, Silicon Valley, Startups
I did this analysis last year and it became a popular post, so I figured I’d do the same retrospective today. Following are the ten most-read Kellblog posts in 2025, regardless of the year in which they were written — and it includes some golden oldies.
Technically, my Best of Kellogg post also made the list, so if you’ve not checked that out lately, perhaps you should. I’ve recently revised it as I do about once a year.
I was happy to see that five of the ten top posts were from 2025, which I think hits the right balance of healthy re-use of the classics along with some endorsement of my new material. Thanks for reading.
To the extent that most sellers today started their careers as SDRs and to the extent that there is a strong trend to replace SDRs with AI agents (e.g., Piper from Qualified), I have a simple question: whence will come tomorrow’s sellers? [1]
It’s not news that this is a trend across all entry-level work, though I just found a new paper on the topic by three people at Stanford who examined ADP payroll data as the basis for their analysis: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence. And another one that analyzes resume and job posting data: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Résumé and Job Posting Data.
But in today’s post, we’re not going to look globally at the topic — no matter how interesting it is — but instead look specifically at just one question: if all the SDRs are AI agents, then where are we going to get sellers from?
I should also explain that I have a dog in the fight. My son Brian just graduated from NYU and started this summer as an SDR at Ramp. (If you’re a US-based company with 150+ employees and interested in spend management, please let me know and I can connect you.) I recommended that he take the job because it’s an amazing company, they have built an excellent sales machine (and the early-career learning on how to do things right is invaluable), and he definitely has both the raw material and the mettle to be successful in technology sales. But as I made the recommendation, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d be in the final cohort of human SDRs.
My question actually has two parts, so let’s take them one at a time: (i) an assumption that SDRs will be replaced with AI agents, and (ii) the realization that doing so would seriously interrupt the sales career development pipeline.
Will All SDRs Be Agents?
I think the answer here is no, though I do think a good number of them will be. One easy division is inbound vs. outbound. Inbound SDRs primarily qualify and route people with intent (“hand raisers”) to sellers for a discovery and qualification meeting. Input: MQLs. Output: stage-1 opportunities. Outbound SDRs focus on some set of target accounts and work them via outreach sequences in order to get them to take a meeting. Input: contacts. Output: stage-1 opportunities. While they might also receive MQLs from their target accounts, they start higher in the funnel and are more responsible for developing interest in a meeting than someone who downloaded an asset, like it, and wants to speak to a seller.
I believe inbound SDRs provide less value than outbound SDRs and their job is more automatable. Ergo, I think inbound SDRs will be quickly replaced by AI or superannuated by targeted, hybrid inbound/outbound models (i.e., my job is to get into Citibank and I’ll take all the names, leads, and MQLs we have and leverage them to get meetings within the account).
I think outbound SDRs are here to stay. And Ramp, for what it’s worth, seems to agree. I know they’ve onboarded another cohort since Brian’s and they seem to believe that their SDR model works quite well for them. So if the old career path was inbound-SDR into outbound-SDR, I think the new one will start with a hybrid. You’re just an SDR and your job is to get meetings within some target. Sometimes you’ll have a lot of inbound interest to work with, sometimes you won’t.
The first-principles argument here is simple. When automated outreach sequences are table-stakes that every firm can easily do, the only way to break through the AI-generated and AI-automated noise will be via some combination of people/execution, message, and air support [2]. That’s why we’ll still need SDRs — and good ones — in the future.
Where Will We Find Tomorrow’s Sellers?
Since I believe there will be SDRs in the future, I think we’ll find our future sellers there. But in case that’s wrong, let’s examine where we might find them additionally or instead. I’m old enough to remember life before SDRs. So where did we find salesreps back then and where might we find them in the future?
As the SDR ranks shrink due to the pressure brought by AI, companies will have to be more creative about where they find their salespeople. Some will certainly walk up the SDR path. Others, the junior sales path. Some, the top sales training path. But I don’t believe there will be a shortage of sellers in the future. Just a shortage of good ones, as there is today.
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Notes
[1] Turns out that while both “whence” and “from whence” can be considered correct, technically standalone whence is still better in my humble opinion because whence means “from where” so “from whence” is, well, redundant.
[2] In the form of marketing, awareness, reputation, brand, etc.
So, you’re on the executive staff of a startup and you’ve been asked to present at an upcoming board meeting. That’s great news. Board exposure is a key benefit of working on the e-staff. You’re getting the chance to build relationships with the venture capitalists and independent directors who sit on your board. These people can help you in many ways, e.g., providing tactical advice, acting more generally as mentors, helping you extend your network, approving your future promotion to a more important position, presenting you with outside board or advisory opportunities, and — when the time comes for it — helping you find your next company.
The board can be a tailwind accelerating your career or a headwind slowing it down. Let’s talk today about how to make a good impression in board meetings and how to start building good relationships with the members of your board.
Here are six tips:
If you follow this advice, you’ll make a better impression on your board than most and you’ll start to leverage board meetings to set up offline conversations that will hopefully lead to a few career-long and career-changing relationships.
As CJ Gustafson replied when we discussed the idea of building relationships, “oh, you could find a relationship like Scorsese and DiCaprio.” Yes, exactly. That worked out pretty well for both of them.
Posted in Boards, Career, Leadership, Silicon Valley, Startups, VC
I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, blogger, and podcaster. I am an EIR at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon perspective to enterprise software, having more than ten years’ experience in each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director roles in companies from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over six years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues.
I love disruptive startups and and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, Gainsight, Hex, Logikcull, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, Tableau, and Unaric.
I currently serve on the boards of Cyber Guru, Light, Scoro, TechWolf, and Vic.ai. I have previously served on boards including Alation, Aster Data, Granular, Nuxeo, Profisee, and SMA Technologies.
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Kellblog by Dave Kellogg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
