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SaaStr 761: How to Build Pipeline and GTM Alignment with Datadog’s CMO Sara Varni

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Oct 2, 2024

Sara Varni, CMO of Datadog, previously led marketing at Twilio and Attentive. She dives into aligning sales and marketing for pipeline success and shares her insights on the importance of cross-department collaboration. Varni discusses the complexities of pipeline generation across different market segments and highlights strategies for enhancing synergy between teams. She emphasizes balancing aggressive sales tactics with a positive developer experience, ensuring respectful engagement while maintaining brand integrity.

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ADVICE

Joint Pipeline Targets

Set joint pipeline targets across marketing, sales, and channels from the start.
This fosters shared responsibility and avoids departmental silos.

INSIGHT

Pipeline Analysis

Analyzing pipeline sources together reveals macro trends or execution issues.
If marketing and sales perform differently, investigate changes in engagement or strategy.

ADVICE

Shared Accountability

Ensure marketing and sales share accountability; celebrate joint wins.
Foster a shareholder mindset where marketers contribute beyond their assigned metrics.

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SaaStr 761: How to Build Pipeline and GTM Alignment with Datadog’s CMO Sara Varni

Sara Varni, Datadog‘s CMO, shares how to build pipeline and create alignment across sales and marketing. The CMO role at Datadog covers the usual aspects of marketing, including product marketing, corporate communications, events, partnership marketing, and solutions marketing.

While these insights seem like pipeline 101, they aren’t always implemented. Let’s look at some quick facts about Sara’s experience. She spent a decade at Salesforce before moving on to Twilio as CMO when they were at about $400M ARR with 30 sales reps. They had a healthy self-service motion, but growth was flattening.

About four years later, she joined Attentive as CMO, a late-stage startup in the SMS marketing space. Now, she’s the CMO at Datadog. Each of these companies had different GTM motions.

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Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code jason50 for an extra discount on our very best pricing.

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This episode is sponsored by: Anrok

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