As a 25-year veteran of tech marketing and multi-time CMO, Joe Garber has been around the block and has seen firsthand how a strong marketing team can deliver predictable pipeline and ultimately revenue acceleration.
Garber’s career spans multiple company types and sizes, which gives him added perspective that he draws upon as a leader. In the dot-com era, he was the fourth employee of a FinTech software company that had a successful exit, and he later held executive positions at other early-stage tech companies such as serving as CMO of a cybersecurity software vendor and running the marketing department for a legal technology provider. On the other end of the spectrum, Garber also has held vice president positions for billion-dollar enterprises like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, Micro Focus (recently acquired by Open Text for $5.8 billion) and Quest Software that deliver products to address a wide range of use cases.
Another key component of his background that Garber cites as paramount in building the toolset necessary to succeed in today’s marketplace is the breadth of roles he has held over time. He started his career in communications, working as assistant press secretary for a U.S. Senator and later for the world’s largest PR firm at that time. More recently he has been responsible for driving an array of marketing functions, including strategy, product marketing, demand generation, digital, partner/alliance marketing, operations, brand and corporate marketing, as well as marketing-adjacent fields like product management, customer success, sales enablement and business development.
“The secret to my success today is that I have learned from so many excellent mentors, in so many customer-facing parts of a business, in my past,” said Garber. In the current environment where fast-paced promotions are often expected, I see so many marketing executives rise quickly to leadership positions who have directly experienced only a small portion of the full marketing spectrum. These rising stars have depth in a given area but may not have the command of how all the elements come together in an integrated fashion to deliver meaningful business results. As a “full-stack” marketing executive who has broad domain expertise across the complete continuum, I have a different vantage point to assess and adjust. This allows me to better compliment strengths, identify misalignments and if necessary, fail faster.”
A New Frontier: Marketing-as-a-Service
When Garber’s daughter entered into the complex world of college sports recruiting, he decided to prioritize short-term flexibility so he could more effectively support her through the journey. He reached out to a former classmate from Cornell University’s Johnson School of Business to learn more about what he was doing as a fractional CMO. In this marketing-as-a-service model, a senior-level marketer typically works with multiple clients – often on advanced marketing strategy and outreach – in a fractional capacity, meaning they allocate a subset of their time during a work week to consult as needed. This was the kind of flexibility Garber was looking for.
He was already in touch with a former colleague who was now serving a principal at a business management consulting firm, Kainos Consulting. Garber was presented with an opportunity to join the organization as a fractional CMO, and he quickly switched gears and joined the firm. Today he works with clients’ executive teams across a broad range of industries, including software, services and nonprofit organizations – on core elements of the marketing mix like targeting, messaging and campaign strategy.
“Marketing-as-a-service is in extremely high demand right now, particularly with emerging organizations that do not have the in-house marketing expertise to scale their businesses, or with larger organizations who have been recently hit with layoffs or budget cuts and need extra firepower but can’t afford a resource full time,” said Garber. “What is exciting for me as a service provider is that it allows me to leverage my years of experience to help multiple companies and senior executives accomplish their goals. I got into this line of work for the flexibility, but it turned out that the ability to help smart, passionate people execute on their vision has been the greatest reward.”
Looking Ahead: Embracing Change
Garber notes that 2024 is a watershed moment for marketing. Many powerful forces are coming together at once that will dramatically change how the function is executed in the future. For instance, with so many layoffs, particularly in the tech sector, organizations are having to learn how to do more with less. As a result, marketing leaders are looking for opportunities to be more focused and to automate manual processes so they can drive efficiencies. Artificial intelligence-enriched targeting and account-based go-to-market technologies for more granular outreach – combined with an even more acute need for ideal customer profiling – are simply must haves.
In addition, buying patterns are evolving rapidly. Garber notes that potential customers are doing much more research on their own before they even speak with a salesperson. He states that, in the recent past, it was generally believed that marketing needed to touch a prospect six times on average before they took action. Today, with better purchaser access to peer reviews and customer forums, that number is more like 20 touchpoints. Content creation remains king and is critical to close this gap, and generative AI (GenAI) is now readily available to assist. But Garber cautions that GenAI is not a panacea. He states that a content strategy that is not bound to a comprehensive messaging framework to help drive consistency is doomed to fail, as message incongruity can have the unintended consequence of setting the touchpoint meter back to zero.
As for his future, Garber has a positive outlook on the practice of marketing and his role in it. “What I love most about marketing is that it requires a blend of art and science, which keeps you on your toes. There is always something to learn and a way to get better, and those who are constantly pushing themselves to look at the role with a wide aperture are bound to succeed over the long run.”