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Kacie Jenkins

Vice President of Marketing at Sourcegraph

Kacie Jenkins is a seasoned professional known for her expertise in Facilitative Leadership, Purposeful Brand Development, Multidisciplinary Marketing Strategy, Substantive Storytelling, Grassroots Community Growth, Global Campaign Execution, and Strategic Communications. With a background in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and experience at renowned organizations like Sourcegraph, Ace Hotel, Fastly, Roku Inc., FANDOM, and Capitol Records, Kacie has demonstrated a track record of success in building trustworthy brands through authentic human connection.

Highlights

Aug 29 · linkedin

It seems ludicrous to apply last touch attribution to virtually anything else:

How’d you fall in love? It was that last isolated phone conversation about what to eat for dinner.

How’d you become a CMO? The last email with the recruiter did it.

How’d you win the marathon? My latest run (just that last one) really sealed the deal.

In hockey, players get equals points for assists and goals. The goals don’t happen without the assists!! (Hat tip to Maria’s husband Dave for highlighting this 100% relevant sports fact.)

Why on earth do we think it makes sense to distill the “credit” for multi-month SaaS buyers’ journeys down to the last isolated touchpoint and ignore all of the assists that happen beforehand?

Aug 28 · linkedin

Attribution may be the biggest factor in the abbreviated avg tenure of CMOs.

We need to collectively change not only outdated attribution methodology and the expectations that come with it, but the vocabulary we use to educate and communicate about marketing impact.

🔥This rant was inspired by brilliant posts from Sam Kuehnle, Liam Moroney, MC (Marie-Claire) Silfer 🩵 — go read them.🔥

Despite strong proof that:

  • Integrated campaigns outperform single/dual channel campaigns
  • Performance marketing depends on brand marketing to succeed
  • Outbound doesn’t work without a strong brand
  • Buying journeys are anything but linear
  • Almost never (never?!!) is a deal closed by one isolated touchpoint with one singular person in a vacuum
  • Never is a deal won without collaboration between both sales and marketing teams
  • We all know that magical “levers” and “silver bullets” are bs

Despite all of this, somewhere along the line, under immense pressure to deliver short term “wins” and repeatedly prove our value…

We broke down and allowed the idea that channels are singular/additive instead of complementary and force-multiplying (borrowing Sam’s language here because I would love to see it take hold).

We agreed to try to treat and track each channel as its own isolated little universe vs part of a complex, complementary, cross-functional ecosystem

…and something deeply destructive took root.

We caved into unreasonable requests from well-meaning leaders who wanted marketing to be perfectly trackable, clean, predictable, and algorithmic when humans are anything but — and we set unreasonable and incorrect expectations, ultimately setting ourselves up for failure.

Any marketer who is not actively studying the interplay of channels/teams and strategically combining touchpoints to multiply the impact of the revenue team’s efforts…

Who isn’t using multiple attribution methods to put together a holistic picture of the GTM ecosystem and explain + show finance, the leadership team, the board, the company that no, it is not an accurate or useful approach to assign —and fight over— singular “credit” (for a complex, multi-month buying process that involves many people and teams) to ONE random isolated direct visit to the website, one isolated email, one ad, one webinar…

Is failing. Is set up to fail. Will fail.

And none of us believe in, want or deserve that.

Kacie Jenkins
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United States