About Dave
Dave Kellogg is Executive in Residence at Balderton Capital, the London-based VC that closed $1.3 billion in new funds in 2024. Before Balderton, he spent nearly a decade as CEO of Host Analytics and before that held senior marketing roles at BusinessObjects and Salesforce, among others. He writes at kellblog.com, one of the most analytically rigorous marketing and strategy blogs in B2B, and has been doing so for over 15 years.
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Dave Kellogg started his career watching a technically superior product lose to Oracle, year after year. That experience imprinted one thing permanently: the best product doesn’t win. Everything he has built since then follows from that.
In this episode, we covered the full arc: how marketing’s job has changed over 30 years, why traditional SaaS companies are becoming zombies, and why the CMO role is being structurally dismantled at companies that have simply run out of patience.
Here’s what I took away.
1) Marketing’s job has changed five times in 30 years. The next version is “go get customers who drive outcomes.” From boxes of leads at trade shows, to qualified leads, to opportunities, to weighted pipeline, to deals that renew and expand. Each shift added one more layer of accountability. The next one, driven by outcome-based pricing, is go get customers who actually consume and generate results. The CMOs who don’t see that coming are still optimizing for metrics that stopped mattering two transitions ago.
2) Marketing exists to make sales easier. That’s it. Dave heard this from a VP at Oracle early in his career and it has guided everything since. His view: the CMOs who resist it are the ones who secretly want sales to be their pawns, a model that works in consumer goods and nowhere else in B2B. Embrace it and you become a full-funnel operator with a medical bag full of tools. Resist it and you spend your career fighting a losing political battle.
3) The three fastest ways to get fired as a CMO. First: refusing to be accountable for a pipeline target. Second: dismissing attribution as too imperfect to bother with. Dave’s position is clear — attribution is imperfect, but the CEO, CFO, and board will not stop asking. Your job is to provide it and manage the misinterpretation. Third: treating win rate as a sales problem. If only 5% of stage-two opportunities are closing, that is a marketing problem too.
4) Traditional SaaS companies are becoming zombies. There is no middle ground anymore. You either have a genuine AI product with an AI growth rate to match, or you are a profitable financial investment. The companies stuck between those two things, moderate growth, no compelling AI story, break-even economics, are the zombies. And the old trick of selling a future AI story in slides no longer works. The growth rate is the proof now.
5) Trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets. Dave’s response to AI-generated content flooding every channel: don’t be in the slop business. His AI slop detector is simple: his brain stops when he is reading something. The em-dashes give it away. The solution is not a content framework. It is a hard filter on everything you publish and the discipline to never over-claim. One credibility failure can erase a year of trust-building.
6) The CMO role is being dismantled. Function by function. Dave is seeing it happen more frequently at companies that have burned through multiple CMOs. Product marketing moves under the product team. Demand generation moves under the CRO. Brand and communications go directly to the CEO. What is left is sometimes called a CMO, but the job has been hollowed out. Dave is not recommending this. He is describing it. His diagnosis: CEOs cannot find the full-funnel athlete the role requires, and after the third or fourth failure, they stop trying.
Where to find Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelloggdave/
Enjoy,
— Jordan
