Hey Reader,

OpenView has a problem.

So does Airbnb.

So does Doordash.

So does Uber.

They all have two audiences.

On one hand, OpenView has to build trust with investors.

And they have, to the tune of a $570M fund (their seventh).

But, they also have to build trust with founders who they want to invest in.

As a VC firm, if they can’t build trust with both of those wildly different audiences…

they lose.

Typically seen in marketplace SaaS co’s, the “double audience problem” is real and requires a different approach to marketing.

Here is where OpenView excels: since its founding in 2006, they’ve raised $2.4 billion and partnered with 60+ companies including Datadog and Calendly.

I sat down with Margaret Kelsey (former VP of Marketing @ OpenView) and Meg Johnson (Head Producer at OpenView) to get a behind-the-scenes look at how they use marketing to build an overwhelming amount of trust with both investors and founders.

This is part one of an ongoing series on how incredible marketing teams actually acquire customers.

What you’ll read here are words. Some Margaret’s. Some Meg’s. Some mine.

— Brendan

PS — If you’re a founder building marketing from scratch or thinking of revisiting the strategy/structure of your marketing team, you can/should work with Margaret.

Also, check out Meg’s (extremely creative) Substack “Sorry I Missed You,” here.

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How OpenView Builds Trust

1. How far out do you plan your marketing in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?

Initially, the goal was to plan in 6-month increments including resource planning and hourly allocation to each goal (% of time per week/month).

Most startups don’t have the luxury to spend one month to plan the next six, but at OpenView, it’s critical.

If you like to read between the lines, you can imagine the month leading up to their planning meeting was… intense.

Things had to be way too concrete.

What they learned over time is that refining the practice of experimentation far exceeds their initial process for goal-setting.

When you’re over-processed, it can be hard to experiment (they’d commit to something too far out and feel like they still had to do it).

Now, it’s a quarterly process.

They re-question their goals and strip away a lot of the bulky documentation with a larger focus on letting the team DO the thing (versus planning it).

Margaret’s advice is that a lot of early stage companies (especially ones still focused on figuring out what marketing tactics work) would be better served creating a process of experimentation.

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2. Do you use OKRs in some form?

Not exactly OKRs, but it was around a goal + key result: Ex: it could be binary (yes/no).

For new programs, they’d first goal production metrics vs impact metrics.

If you goal on impact too soon (especially for programs that can take some time to see results) you risk demotivating your team.

When starting a new marketing program, goaling on production metrics incentivizes the right behavior (which may or may not be the right thing to create impact).

For example: if the goal was to increase organic traffic, before they start measuring traffic, the goal is to publish 5 articles/wk for a given time period.

But as a manager, every metric can be gamed if we goal against it, right?

So, if this metric is gamed, will this still work? If somebody did game this, is that behavior still the intended behavior that I want?

Eventually, that production serves as learnings to transition to a decision-making framework and impact-based goals.

For example: When Margaret started at OpenView, the blog program was based on producing 5 articles/wk.

But, she noticed that the production goal was working against them and wasn’t leaving enough time to do proper research ahead of time.

So, they looked at what they’d already produced, made notes on criteria for net-new content going forward (ex: Have we heard this from founders?), and moved to impact-based metrics.

Today, OpenView has a prospect journey committee and a dashboard for each section of that journey (from unaware to aware).

Tracked via Google sheet, they want to convert X% of founders in [city] to each stage of awareness and have experiments mapped to those.

Everybody pitches experiments and they vote on them.

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3. How do your review meetings work? What is that process like?

For timing, they had:

1. Weekly → Review a metrics spreadsheet
2. Monthly → Update vertically to partners
3. Quarterly → All hands to give updates to the broader team.

Margaret noted that OpenView was the most thoughtful organization she’s been a part of when it came to goal processes, goal creation, and where people’s time is going.

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4. For marketing strategy, who comes to these meetings, who runs the meeting, and how often do you meet?

OpenView has a really unique operating structure.

In lieu of rigid team structures, they operate with different “committees” for different things (since it’s a partnership).

Committees change based on the firm’s priorities and as those change, so do the committees.

Each committee was headed by a partner (or partners) with interest in that specific area.

Marketing, specifically, rolled up to 2 committees:

1. A prospect experience committee (funnel)
2. A portfolio experience committee (customer marketing)

Biggest focus for marketing right now is the prospect journey committee.

Professional development in the firm is also related to opportunities to lead committees, creating more paths for ICs to become a partner without having to be a manager.

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5. How many marketers did you have? How did that team change over time?

When Margaret joined OpenView, there was one existing person on the marketing team.

Since she was 6-months pregnant when she joined, Margaret hired 3 more marketers before taking maternity leave.

From there, OpenView tended to hire about 1 marketer per quarter to backfill roles.

Currently the core marketing team is 5 people (plus 3 others), but almost every role at the firm includes some aspect of marketing.

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6. Do you structure your team around channels, products, user types, user journey, outcomes, or something in between?

Marketing stayed away from channel-specific hires as long as possible.

Margaret focused on two sides of their marketing:

1. Brand & content team (megaphone marketing)
2. Conversion-focused team (scalpel marketing)

Her goal with the conversion-focused marketing wasn’t to get in front of founders who were ready to talk to them.

Instead, get in front of founders who were two years before they might be ready to talk to OpenView. They asked “what’s the signal of a founder at that point in their company’s journey?”

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7. What’s your primary tool for tracking tasks and campaigns?

The team used Asana and left Margaret out of it for the most part.

This runs counter-intuitive to the way a lot of marketing teams are managed.

Margaret wanted to collaborate on goals and measurement.

But, believes directors and managers should have autonomy on how to get the work done.

There’s an “altitude of leadership” where the higher up you are, you should be looking further out to:

• Identify strategic objectives
• Discover future roadblocks & unblock them early
• Internally, champion ideas that are 3-6 months out

Very little of that work happens in Asana.

But it’s not an easy cycle to break.

To-do lists have such high dopamine production that it can be challenging to break out.

It’s easy to say “I did 5 tasks today.”

It’s harder to say, “I spent the day thinking about this big hairy problem and I still don’t know the solution.”

That’s very uncomfortable, but that’s very impactful work.

As a leader, there are 3 days you can have:

1. Heads down shipping (individual contribution)
2. In office having lots of conversations (percolating)
3. Heads down (thinking)

Being a rising leader is moving more into day 2s and 3s.

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8. Is there something philosophically core to how the marketing team and leaders think about acquiring customers?

Over time, Margaret has extrapolated out what a strategic brand should be responsible for and it’s an overlap of:

Internal culture External brand Content Community

It becomes a shared decision-making framework where everyone in the marketing org was hired under those values, have those values aligned to their personal values, know how to operate in those values and make decisions from those values.

Every marketing decision, content decision, and community decision is aligned.

This manifested in OpenView’s underlying marketing message that OpenView connects you to people, insights and ideas about how to grow your business.

First, this shared decision-making framework establishes focus.

Chaotic creativity has really poor results.

Focused creativity is magic.

They ask: Is OpenView’s marketing connecting our founders to the right people, insights or ideas about how to grow their company?

If not, they don’t pursue it.

What OpenView does really well is make people feel seen. Especially working with people who don’t want to have to water things down for VCs.

Everything centers around trust.

Earning trust, especially in a (mostly) terrible VC world.

Today, a lot of OpenView’s marketing takes into consideration a crucial question: what can you do when your audience is all extremely skeptical of you?

For them, it centers around (despite all their accolades) remembering that the function of their marketing is to be the guide, not the main character.

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9. What were the best performing channels for you?

Email.

Another thing OpenView is good at is ruthless prioritization of things that aren’t serving them.

Bringing themselves fully to the edge of “give me one good reason not to kill this off here and now.”

This helped them navigate hard conversations, especially when so much of their content is based on the personal brands of their partners.

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How to use this info:

1. Send a DM to your teammate: “Amanda — I read about how OpenView builds trust and thought there’s X things in there that might really help our team. Mind if I send them over?” Then send her this link.
2. Meeting with your boss: "If we’re thinking about raising funding again in the future, I just got a behind-the-scenes look at how marketing helped OpenView raise a $570M fund. Think we can use that to our advantage? If so, this might be worth bookmarking."
3. LinkedIn Post: 3 ways to build trust with multiple audiences. (make sure you connect with & tag Margaret and Meg!)

Thanks for reading!

This is the first of a long series.

If you have a tip or feedback, I’d love to hear it.

See you next week!