The First-Time CMO Playbook (Alice de Courcy, ex-CMO at Cognism) - Momentum #3
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Alice de Courcy spent 7 years as CMO at Cognism, scaling the company from 3M to nearly 100M ARR and she documented almost every lesson publicly along the way.
In this episode, Jordan sits down with Alice to unpack what it actually takes to build a B2B marketing engine that compounds over time: how she earned the CMO title from within, how she structured a 28-person global team, and why she eventually blew up her entire lead generation model to replace it with a content-driven demand creation machine.
They go deep on the math behind ungating content, how she sold the shift to a skeptical C-suite and board, the tools she used to measure what happened in the dark, and the content pillars framework she built to make memorability systematic.
Alice also shares her current work as a fractional CMO, what she's learned from the outside looking in, and why quality of content is the one moat that AI still can't replicate.
WHERE TO FIND ALICE : https://www.linkedin.com/in/alice-de-courcy-5205516a/
Book "The diary of a first-time CMO" : https://amzn.eu/d/0h0vDLCC
Book "The diary of a first-time CMO: Volume 2" : https://amzn.eu/d/04Dn3lUa
WHERE TO FIND JORDAN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanchenevier/
WORK WITH BULLDOZER: https://bulldozer-collective.com/
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Bulldozer maximizes marketing & sales performance for SMBs and Scale-Ups across their entire funnel. Our hybrid agency/collective model gives us access to the best talent on the market and allows us to act on every performance lever for our clients (Outbound, Paid, SEO, ABM, RevOps, Data…). In 4 years, our strong social media presence, talent pool, and 360° vision of growth have fueled rapid growth and attracted 250+ clients (Aircall, Qonto, Doctolib, Hexa…).
Our ambition for the years ahead is bold: design and operate world-class growth strategies and become a global leader on the topic by 2030.
To work with us 👉 https://bulldozer-collective.com/
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00:00 - Introduction
01:35 - Alice's journey at Cognism: from 3M to nearly 100M ARR
03:34 - What changes between early-stage and scale
06:23 - How she earned the CMO title from within
11:59 - Building the team: hiring for attitude over experience
17:39 - What she'd do differently with today's AI
21:17 - The seniority trap
31:30 - Fractional CMO: setting the right expectations
34:44 - Demand capture vs. demand creation
38:04 - Building a content engine that works like a media machine
43:28 - New metrics: demo requests, conversion rates, ACV
44:37 - Why most companies fail at demand creation
47:33 - Distribution: why great content isn't enough
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