Aaron Lober
Key takeaways
- 8:09When standing up a marketing function, enter with clear strategy but listen more than you assert in the first 90 days — extracting the lived reality of the people already in seat helped Aaron ramp pipeline at CivilGrid faster than at Blameless or Caddy.
- 19:22Account-level ABM is still spray and pray with a slightly smaller aperture; contact-level intent — like knowing a specific Black & Veatch project manager is bidding on a PG&E RFP — lets you design something for one person.
- 22:28CivilGrid's demand gen lead Colin Brooks built signal-triggered sequences that use Claude to draft personalized copy fed into MixMax, so reps just edit and press play — earning strong feedback from sales in the first two months.
- 2:01Direct mail like Sendoso pies keeps working: at Procore the pies got meetings, and Aaron's teams still set delivery alerts to start a conversation the moment a pie lands.
- 18:20The vertical SaaS playbook has shifted from pre-COVID blitzscaling to capital efficiency — acquiring fewer customers at higher ACV is where the healthy business is built.
Questions Aaron Lober answered
Yes — ABM was nascent as a concept then. Procore was mostly doing programmatic batch-and-blast, with real ABM only around the margins for the enterprise team and tight launch motions; the team essentially figured it out as they went.
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 061:00
Aaron hopes not — for him the reality is constant travel. The person overseeing a startup's marketing function has to be ready to hop on a plane to pitch, talk to the board, or attend a show wherever needed.
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 064:05
Mostly San Francisco while standing up the team — building HubSpot from scratch, integrating Salesforce, and deploying Influ2. Soon it will be Texas and Arizona, seeding the Southwest, since the business is built on investor-owned utilities like SoCal Edison, PG&E, Atmos Energy and CenterPoint.
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 065:06
Enter with clear perspective and strategy, but do far more listening than asserting in the first 90 days. Every series A/B startup is different, so he extracts the lived reality of counterparts already in seat — which helped increase pipeline velocity faster than at Blameless or Caddy.
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 067:09
Mostly through first-phase hiring already; the last outstanding strategic head count is a product marketer. Having been a PMM for much of his career, he jokes candidates get the full ninth degree from him in interviews.
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 0610:10
In Aaron Lober's words
“To me the key to getting a marketing function stood up is to enter with clear perspective and strategy, but to do a lot more listening than asserting of what things will be in your first 90 days.”
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 068:09
“Trying to do account-based marketing while just remaining at the account level is this weird exercise... it's still spray and pray. It's just with a slightly smaller aperture.”
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 0619:22
“It's so barefaced in its attempt to leverage your hunger or your sweet tooth for commercial gain, but it works.”
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 063:04
“My philosophy about marketing is that most things in fact don't work — or at least they don't work the first time.”
Listen more than you assert, but send the pies with Aaron Lober | People are People | Ep. 0624:30