SCALE YOUR BUSINESS FASTER AND MORE EFFICIENTLY WITH THIS FRACTIONAL CMO
Be curious. Learn as much as you can. Make time for thinking and pushing yourself to be better and do better – Sheila Kloefkorn
KEO Marketing, a leading B2B marketing agency in Phoenix, was founded in 2000 by fractional CMO, Sheila Kloefkorn. The company is a full-service, business-to-business marketing agency. The company specializes in fractional CMO services, marketing strategy, messaging, digital infrastructure, execution, and analytics. It delivers marketing strategies and programs that drive business results.
Mid-market companies hire Sheila Kloefkorn and her agency team to help them scale faster and more efficiently. With KEO Marketing’s fractional CMO + agency team model, companies can gain the expertise of a senior level head of marketing and senior level marketing specialists for about the same cost as hiring a head of marketing. This enables them to compete at a higher level against larger competitors, without the marketing budgets of those larger competitors.
MORE ABOUT FRACTIONAL CMO-SHEILA KLOEFKORN
Sheila is a business and marketing expert with three decades of marketing and sales experience. She helps companies increase leads and revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars. She leads a talented team of marketers in creating and executing award-winning campaigns around the world. She is a certified business coach and frequent national and local speaker on a wide range of marketing, business, and diversity topics.
Sheila is the recipient of many local and national marketing awards. She was recently named one of the “Top 10 Business Leaders of the Year,” “Top 25 Dynamic Women in Business,” by the Phoenix Business Journal, A Top 20 CEO by CEO Magazine, and one of 15 Arizonans to Watch by the Arizona Republic. On behalf of her company and clients, she has received manyStevie® American Business Awards for “Marketing Campaign of the Year,” and a Stevie Worldwide Women in Business Award in Advertising, Marketing, and Public Relations. In 2021, she was named a Top 100 Marketing and Advertising Leader by MARsum, and a Top 10 Influential Leader by Business Talk Magazine.
ENTREPRENEURIAL BACKGROUND
In 2000, Sheila recognized the emerging opportunities in online marketing and how they could support organizational growth. She founded KEO Marketing, setting the stage for it to become a leader in B2B marketing. Today, Sheila is a sought after fractional CMO, and KEO Marketing is a full-service B2B marketing agency specializing in marketing strategy, messaging, digital infrastructure, execution, and analytics.
For more than two decades, it has helped companies scale their marketing and sales results. KEO Marketing is based in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, and offers fractional CMO leadership services,and proven marketing programs for mid-market B2B companies that help companies scale.
Sheila followed in the footsteps of her father who founded and led a successful General Construction firm. She started her first business when she was ten years old. It was a bicycle repair shop in her parents’ garage. There she started to learn about sales and customer service and how to differentiate her business from other providers. Later, after helping to build a large ad agency in New York City in the 1990s, she founded KEO Marketing in Phoenix in 2000.
CMO’S SUCCESS MANTRA
Sheila has built her business by listening to customers, formulating strategies to solve their challenges, and always making sure that she and her team are evolving what and how they do what they do to achieve results.
The four most important success habits that underpin these successes include:
- Curiosity– Being fascinated by how things work and asking questions
- Always Improving– Always looking for ways to improve results, particularly driven by data.
- Rhythms of Work– Having regular routines for preparation, collaboration, client meetings, and reviews/thinking time that reinforce the outcomes we want.
- Being Agile– Always being open to changing how things work and moving quickly to take advantage of opportunities and changes in the marketplace.
Sheila further added, “There have been many make-or-break moments in my career, but the most impactful have been related to my leadership. I am a very different leader than I was earlier in my career. I sometimes lost key people, clients, and projects because I was less open to ways of doing things and was more directive. With the success habits mentioned above, and honed over the years, I am now a more collaborative leader, and act more as a coach than a director of our teams. It brings better morale, more productive teams, and significantly better results for our clients.”
CHANGES IN THE INDUSTRY AND GOALS
Digital marketing is always changing. Google, LinkedIn, and other marketing platforms make tens of thousands of updates every year. KEO Marketingspecializes in helping businesses adapt to those changes and use them to their advantage.
Sheila loves helping her team members grow in their careers. Many of the people who have joined her agency early in their careers have learned best-in-class marketing through their work at the agency and have gone on to senior marketing roles at tech companies, founded their own businesses, and continue to contribute at very high levels. When it comes to her Agency, Sheilais the proudest of her team, awards, and results on behalf of the clients.
For marketing to be successful, thefocus needs to be about solving someone else’s problems. Sheila believes that once you are clear about that message, then you mustshareit repeatedly. It is necessary to say the same thing over and over across social media platforms, on website, in your emails, in every communication to market the message. It is like a political campaign; you need to share it with more and more people to get your message across.
As a leader, or as a CEO, you also need to be very clear and repeat yourself. It is essential for your employees to know what your company does, and how itadds value, and get them enrolled in your vision. Today, executives receive more than 5000 marketing messages a day. To cut through that noise, it is important to add value, and solve their pains, and you’ve got to repeat the messagein a lot of different bite-size ways to be successful.
“As the leader, I make many important decisions every month, but I think the most impactful are the decisions to say no – to choose not to pursue opportunities or requests. Early in my career, I felt I had to say yes to every request. Now, I’m clearer about what makes a good decision, whether it is a client we can be successful for, a partner/vendor to work with, a new business opportunity to pursue. I’m clear about what I’m optimizing for in my life, which is meaningful relationships and community contribution, and in my business, client results and profitability,” Emphasizes Sheila.
