The Front Lines
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Steve Keifer.
Chief Marketing Officer · Ordway
Finalist for CMO of the Year 2025 and CMO to Watch in 2025 by the CMO Alliance. Led marketing at five B2B SaaS, cloud, and fintech companies, including several with rapid growth that reached a $1B valuation, IPO, or strategic buyer exit. Over the past 10 years, he has focused on startup and scale up of marketing teams as the first marketing executive at three early stage companies (Series A, Series B, and Series C) backed by venture capital and growth equity firms to launch new categories and disrupt existing markets. Earlier in his career, he was Chief Marketing Officer at late stage, private equity-backed SaaS firms and public companies with a mix of organic and inorganic (M&A) growth strategies. Led global teams ranging from 25 to 250 employees distributed throughout Europe (EMEA), Asia Pacific, and Americas.
Guest
Steve Keifer
Chief Marketing Officer
Company:
Ordway
Location:
Reston, Virginia, United States
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In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Steve Keifer, CMO of Ordway. Ordway serves recurring revenue businesses with finance automation software, targeting fractional CFOs and back-office teams at early-stage SaaS companies. Operating with a lean team of 10 across outbound, inbound, and brand functions, Steve has built a scalable marketing operation that generates approximately 100,000 outbound emails monthly while maintaining strong deliverability. His approach centers on adding value at every customer touchpoint, avoiding gimmicks, and treating sophisticated finance buyers with the respect their expertise demands. From offshore BDR teams in India to algorithm-focused digital strategists, Steve's playbook demonstrates how smaller B2B companies can compete through disciplined execution and strategic resource allocation.

Topics Discussed:

Eight takeaways from this conversation.

Actionable for Sales & Marketing Tech Builders marketers

  1. Engineer Deliverability Through Volume Distribution
    Ordway sends fewer than 25 emails per day per mailbox across 100 different mailboxes, generating roughly 100,000 monthly outbound emails. By rotating messaging regularly and ensuring emails don't look identical, they've solved the primary challenge of inbox placement before worrying about open rates or replies. For teams scaling outbound, the math matters more than the messaging—distribute volume across infrastructure to stay under spam thresholds.
  2. Apply Firmographic Enrichment for Early-Stage Targeting
    Traditional data providers like ZoomInfo and Apollo struggle with early-stage companies that lack thick credit files. Steve uses newer tools like Exadata that crawl websites to extract signals: is the company product-led or sales-led based on CTAs, who are their customers based on case studies, what geographies do those customers represent. This approach surfaces buying intent signals that standard enrichment misses entirely.
  3. Qualify Demos with Banted Criteria for Pipeline Clarity
    Before advancing leads past demo stage, Ordway's sales team must answer four CRM fields: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. This creates a "banted MQL" metric that clarifies whether pipeline problems stem from lead quality, brand/pricing issues, or sales execution. When 60% of demos meet three of four criteria, the issue isn't top-of-funnel—it's conversion or positioning. This framework shifts diagnosis from finger-pointing to targeted problem-solving.
  4. Build Offshore Teams by Investing in Quality Sourcing
    Steve challenges the assumption that offshore BDRs can't match US performance. His India-based team handles the entire outbound motion, eliminating cold calling entirely in favor of hyper-scaled LinkedIn and email. The key isn't accepting lower quality for cost savings—it's investing time to find digitally native talent that performs at the same level. For distributed teams, the sourcing effort determines everything.
  5. Treat Each Social Platform as a Distinct Specialization
    Instagram requires polished, professional content; TikTok demands authentic, imperfect realness; Twitter moves at news speed; LinkedIn rewards infographics and career advice. One social media person posting identical content across platforms wastes 80% of effort. Steve argues marketing has entered an era of hyper-specialization where each channel requires dedicated expertise—creating a talent arbitrage challenge where teams need 40 specialized seats but have 10 people.
  6. Test Outdoor Media in Geographic Concentrations
    Despite serving distributed customers, Ordway ran a Silicon Valley billboard that generated months of word-of-mouth. For B2B companies with target account density in specific regions, outdoor advertising cuts through digital noise while building brand recognition among decision-makers. Steve's testing event-based takeovers—monopolizing Uber/Lyft inventory and billboards around trade shows where competitors exhibit.
  7. Default to Fast Follower Positioning in Martech Evolution
    With the martech landscape changing every three months instead of every 18, Steve abandoned pioneer positioning. Rather than spending entire days evaluating emerging tools, he relies on curated sources and peer recommendations to identify proven solutions. For resource-constrained teams, being second delivers 80% of the value at 20% of the research cost.
  8. Recognize AI's Practical Limits in White-Collar Work
    While AI assists with content creation and research, Steve observes that less than 20% of marketing work involves producible output—the other 80% is meetings, Slack, email, and organizational coordination. Until digital twins can attend meetings and negotiate on behalf of humans, the apocalypse for white-collar jobs remains distant. Focus AI adoption on the 20% where it actually drives efficiency rather than expecting wholesale transformation.

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