Ep. 497 | Tech to Tactics: A CMO's Guide to B2B Marketing Balance

Episode Summary

In this episode, Jayashree Rajan shares her unique journey from electrical engineering to becoming a seasoned marketing leader, emphasizing the importance of aligning marketing and sales strategies through trust, empathy, and shared goals. She discusses best practices for balancing inbound and outbound approaches, determining the right marketing mix based on organizational maturity, and prioritizing accounts and leads in an account-based strategy. Jayashree also highlights common challenges in marketing automation, such as data silos, and the need for vendor support and empathy. Throughout the conversation, she shares insights and recommendations that underscore the value of empathy, continuous improvement, and a customer-centric mindset in driving marketing and sales success.

About the guest

Jayashree Rajan is a seasoned marketing and product management professional with over 20 years of experience in both B2B and B2C sectors. With a background in programming languages and enterprise software development, she has a unique ability to build marketing infrastructures from the ground up and optimize IT marketing frameworks. Jayashree's management philosophy is rooted in collaboration, leading by example, and fostering team growth. She is passionate about mentoring women and draws on her journey to encourage others to break barriers. Her focus remains on leveraging technology to drive marketing excellence and customer engagement.

Connect with Jayashree Rajan

Key takeaways
- To align marketing and sales build relationships based on empathy and trust, have joint ownership of goals, and work backward from revenue targets.

- When balancing inbound and outbound marketing, Jayashree recommends starting small with outbound, training the sales team, and gradually expanding the approach based on success and organizational maturity.

- To determine the right mix of inbound and outbound look at past performance, ROI of tactics, and the team's skills and comfort level, then continuously adjust the approach.

- For account-based marketing, Jayashree stresses the importance of marketing keeping in touch with target accounts, building their interest, and prioritizing MQLs based on demonstrated intent and engagement.

- Key challenges in marketing automation include data silos from too many tools, which can be addressed by simplifying the tech stack and consolidating data to reduce friction for sales.

Quotes
"Leads don't mean much. It's the opportunities. At the end of the day, we all win when you have the right opportunities."

-Jayashree Rajan

Recommended Resource

Books:

- The Advantage by Patrick M. Lencioni
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