Pipeline Visionaries

Find all the information online at www.qualified.com/podcast/uncuttableEvery week, we sit down with marketing leaders from some of the world’s fastest-growing companies on the Demand Gen Visionaries podcast to uncover the demand gen strategies that have been fundamental to their skyrocketing success. In each episode, we ask our marketing leader guests which three areas of investment are most important to their demand gen initiatives. Tune into this two-part mini series to hear the budget items our CMO guests couldn’t live without!Part one of this special two-part mini-series features 11 CMOs and marketing leaders from some of the world's fastest-growing companies, including:Scott Holden, CMO, ThoughtspotSara Varni, CMO, TwilioNate Skinner, SVP Global Marketing for CX, OracleCorinne Sklar, CMO, IBM iXRyan Bonnici, former CMO, G2Mike Marcellin, CMO, Juniper NetworksTracy Eiler, former CMO, InsideViewLatane Conant, CMO, 6senseTom Butta, CMO, KyribaJulie Liegl, CMO, Slack‍Dave King, CMO, AsanaSponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

This episode features an interview with Sarah Kennedy, Vice President of Global Growth and Demand at Google Cloud. Prior to Google, Sarah led multiple marketing transformations as CMO of Marketo and as CMO for the enterprise software divisions at Adobe and Sabre. On this episode, Sarah discusses the marketing efficiencies and ROI drivers she’s anchored her career around, how to navigate the macro mindset shift that every marketing team goes through, and why being a career catalyst for your customers is the most rewarding impact a B2B marketer can have.Key TakeawaysHow every marketing team must undergo a macro mindset shift in order to embrace that every dollar and every minute spent must either directly or indirectly drive demand and growth for the business.Why your primary goal as a marketer is to be a career catalyst for your customer. The biggest reward of any B2B marketer’s career is to see somebody get promoted or get their next job because of the decision they made to bet on you. How to align with sales counterparts on a deep, strategic level that establishes a balanced engine that efficiently drives scale and growth.Quotes“All of your investments drive demand. [It’s important not to] view brand as one thing and demand as another. They all interplay with one another to drive growth. That's been part of the mindset shift that I've been driving really my last five years, including now at Google.”“Every interaction, every second that you consume of someone's attention, you have to quantify the value of what you're bringing. Minutes are precious, so you’ve got to think about the trade-offs [your audience is] making. It's different this year than ever before and that makes the bar even higher. It always should have been this high, but I think this year we're actually seeing that come to fruition and I like that. I think that's great for all marketers and every customer we serve.”“Being a career catalyst for a customer is one thing that I always say is my primary goal. If we see them get promoted or we see somebody get that next job because of the decision they made to bet on us, that's the reward of any marketer's career. It’s the biggest reward–that you can walk away from a career and look back and say, wow, I really impacted hundreds of people's livelihoods by making sure that I clearly communicated to them the value of our partnership and I delivered on it. For me, it’s a motivating way to look at the career of a B2B marketer.”Whatever you do, start with your first priority being your relationship with sales…I have found that no matter how much investment, energy, creative tactics, whatever you have, if you have not aligned with your sales counterparts on what the true objectives are and co-signed up for any targets that you're going to hit together, it really doesn't matter what you do. If you aren't already doing that, that's where you begin and end, because that relationship and accountability and alignment is the foundation for all success.Our job is to be career catalysts for our customers, but our second but equally important objective is to be comma catalysts for our quota carriers. All I want to do is put M's in their bank account every day of the week and if I do that, I've succeeded. Having that mindset that we're responsible for their livelihood is the right approach mentally as a marketer, because that makes you focus on the right things and make better decisions that also end up better serving your customers.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

This episode features an interview with Suku Krishnaraj, CMO of Sumo Logic. Suku is a seasoned senior executive with extensive experience scaling growth at companies like AppFog, HP, CenturyLink, and SolarWinds. On this episode, Suku explains his strategy for driving revenue for the Machine Data Analytics pioneer that went public earlier this year, why the CMO’s primary job is to solve problems, how to never lose sight of marketing’s role in driving revenue, and the importance of having empathy for your customers.Key TakeawaysThe CMO’s job is to drive revenue. Never lose sight of that fact. Keep your eyes on the ball and don't get caught up in vanity metricsBuyers are all at a different stage. You have to educate and nurture them through their journey by looking at the entire customer life cycle. That means a complete end-to-end mapping that bridges your sales and marketing teamsHave empathy for your customers. Think of the buyer’s journey, and try and fix their experience with consistent messaging and a consistent experience, and your results will be there in the long runQuotes“The CMO’s job at the end of the day is to solve problems…Demand gen is one of those things, but I really think of my role as growth. I partner with the CRO and our chief customer officer to drive growth in respect to two things: How do we acquire net new logos–net new customers at scale–and how do we continue to market to our existing install base.”“Marketing is, if not to drive revenue, I don't know what it is. Ultimately it's about closed-won revenue.”“I think one of the things that a lot of marketers miss is that ultimately the folks that are going to win understand how to drive empathy, emotions, and have a lot of care for the folks that you're trying to market to. What is it that they want? You're going to win if you deeply understand what they care about, what they do, and if you show a lot of empathy.”“Our job as CMOs is to drive revenue. Never lose sight of that fact. Don't go for vanity metrics. Keep your eyes on the ball with revenue, which is the hardest thing to do for a lot of CMOs, but do that with the help of your counterpart in sales.”“For any playbook, you have to adapt it to your situation. And the only way to do that is fail often, fail fast. I have several weekly meetings with different groups in the team and they know they have to give me bad news at the beginning. If they're not failing, it's a red flag for me.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

This episode features an interview with Kyle Christensen, VP of Marketing at Zuora. Prior to Zuora, Kyle served as CMO of 6Sense, SVP of Marketing at Invoca, and VP of Marketing at Responsys, where he drove the growth of the enterprise business up until the company's $1.5B acquisition by Oracle. On this episode, Kyle shares his demand gen master plan that starts with a marketing strategy that permeates the entire company and explains why the best brand storytelling attaches you to a narrative of overarching change much larger than the company itself.Key TakeawaysHow to create a compelling, tactical content strategy that elevates a targeted, account-based approachWhy you must treat content marketing as a virtuous cycle. By helping your customers succeed and learn from their experiences, you can turn learnings into better roadmaps for the next customerHow to frame a great company pitch by thinking bigger than your product, your tech, or your business value, and attaching yourself to a narrative of change that’s bigger than your company on its ownQuotes“In order to do really great demand, you need to start with a compelling underlying story. Without that, no amount of landing page optimization or keyword spending strategy is going to work. The content and the message are really what drives things.”“The way we think about it, this isn't just a marketing strategy, it's a company strategy. And it’s a completely virtuous cycle. The reason to go with us is that we have better data, better insights, and a better product, and we will guide you all the way through to implementation. Then we get access to better data, we find better ways to make our customers successful, and it feeds back into the top of the funnel. We translate that into learnings, content, and assets, and the cycle repeats itself and grows over time.”“I think the essence of a good pitch is…what is the overarching change that's occurring in the market–in the world that you're operating–that gives your company a reason for being. The inevitable change that is happening whether or not you exist as a company. I think the best storytelling companies and the best pitch companies start there.”“Don't evangelize why you have a really fantastic web-based contact management application (i.e. Salesforce), evangelize that there's a massive sea change somewhere in the world…If you really want disproportionate attention from the market and to attract the right talent, the most eyeballs, the most interest from the media and the press, you need to attach yourself to a larger narrative.”“You can't do superficial content, because it’s not interesting. There's so much competition out there now for mindshare and time that you have to invest. You’ve got to have the right people, the right data, and the right narrative that you want to attach yourself to. It's not enough to put out listicles and things like that to drive conversation.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

This episode features an interview with Jen Dimas, CMO of GigsterFor more than 20 years, Jen has led marketing teams at high-growth enterprise software companies like Plex, Demandbase, Egnyte, Polycom, and Hyperion.In this episode, Jen dives into the ever-changing landscape of demand gen strategy, highlighting the importance of understanding and adapting to the needs of the moment. She also emphasizes the importance of a tight partnership between sales and marketing and explains how to go about cultivating it.Key TakeawaysWhich tactics and technologies are best for empowering digital-first, adaptable marketing teamsHow to align sales and marketing teams across performance, strategies, and goal settingWhy measuring everything from first touch to close is essential to marketing’s successQuotes“As in all things marketing, ‘it depends’ is always the answer. There's not a demand gen strategy that is consistently applied that would make any sense. You have to understand your situation and adapt to whatever the needs are and the resources available in that moment.”“I need to partner tightly with sales. I just don't believe that sales and marketing exist as separate functions from each other. They're all connected and a part of driving customer value and bookings and revenue...That relationship with the head of sales, next to my relationship with my boss, is my most primary relationship at work. It's something that has to be strong so that we're doing the best job we can for the company.”“You need to have enough trust in the relationship of the executive team that you can have healthy conflict. That is the goal of having a healthy executive team. When there is conflict, I always consider it a sign of health, as long as it's respectful conflict and you're saying things in the best interest of the business, even things that are hard, that's the goal, right? You want to have a conversation where you can say hard things.”“Your website is your always-on front door, and that needs to reflect your corporate positioning–what is your value to prospects and customers–but it also needs to engage folks from a demand perspective and speak to investors and potential employees, so it’s very, very important.”“Do not try to make decisions about change in a vacuum. Leverage your community. Talk to marketers who've made the same kinds of decisions or faced the same challenges. Talk to salespeople who have struggled. Leverage people with experience because they're out there, and there's no need to reinvent things that have worked and a lot can be learned from other people's successes and mistakes.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

This episode features an interview with Lauren Vaccarello, CMO of Talend.Lauren is an award-winning marketing executive with a track record of accelerating revenue growth for some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in Silicon Valley including Box, AdRoll, and Salesforce.On this episode, Lauren talks about how to hit your numbers in the short term while working to expand the scope of who you’re selling to in the long term. She also discusses how to leverage your executive team to build brand trust, and shares a couple uncuttable budget items that may surprise you...Key TakeawaysThink of demand gen and marketing in both the short term and long term. How are you going to hit your numbers while also expanding the scope of who you’re selling to.Demand gen must start with defining who you are, why you matter, and who you’re selling to, then you can determine how you’re going to execute.With large enterprise deals, it's about emotional connection as much as it's about your product and your messaging.Invest in the backend and the “unsexy” things like tech infrastructure, because they’ll make everything else you do easier and faster.Quotes“Investing in things like executive programs, executive engagement, and building deeper relationships with senior level executives at your target audience is the gift that keeps on giving. You’ll hit your numbers today, and the more they see you as a strategic partner, the more your deal size is going to grow.”“Every CMO who comes in has to get points on the board quickly. The shine wears off our penny probably faster than any other function. You have to show momentum, and I find getting those short term wins buys you time to get long term wins as well.”“What's going to make or break every single demand gen person in the foreseeable future is your ability to be agile and adapt. If you can't move quickly, you're dead in the water. The world is moving too fast...So invest in the backend, invest in the unsexy things that no one sees or understands why you're doing it, because it's those backend, unsexy, tech infrastructure things that make everything else you do faster and easier.”“Our job as leaders is to remove every blocker and every obstacle and to give the people that work for us the ability to be creative.”“Because what we do is so visible, every single person in your company will have an opinion about what you do. And you have to listen to every single person and you have to have thick enough skin to not take it personally.”“I won't cut PR. I cannot ascribe a dollar return to my PR program, but what I've seen in the past is the anecdotal qualitative that just proves that it works...I've seen it enough times-–you're going to get better candidates, better employees, faster velocity, and your inbound interest and brand awareness just start to tick up.”LinksTruth Be Known Podcastwww.talend.comSponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

This episode features an interview with Michael King, Senior Director of Cloud Marketing at VMware.Inside the $64 billion cloud computing and virtualization software giant, Michael is responsible for the VMware Cloud Marketing team and is tasked with transforming the customer perception of VMware’s cloud services and products.On this episode, Michael expands on the demand gen strategy that he calls “the relentless pursuit of whatever works,” illustrates his audience-action-measurement playbook, discusses the importance of a consistent customer experience, and explains why your channels must reflect your audience.Key TakeawaysHow the seismic shift away from “broadcast” marketing tactics is ushering in a new wave of conversational marketing tactics that are generating massive ROIWhy marketing’s fundamental measure of success should be revenue-based, and how to make this transition in your organizationWays the most successful demand gen marketers are pushing the envelope to eliminate friction in the buying process and speed up sales cyclesQuotes“Demand gen strategy at VMware is the relentless pursuit of whatever works. I tend not to be dogmatic about these things. I work with a team that is always challenging me, always pushing me to think differently.”“No matter what, things are always changing. You may come at it thinking, ‘I know the audience, I know the market, I know the benefits, here's the play I'm going to run.’ But things change…Anytime you go into any demand gen or any other marketing situation thinking that you have it cooked, you're probably cooked.”“The longer the time frame is from hand-raising activity to benefit achievement, the fewer customers you're going to convert, and then you'll just see leaky funnel left and right...reduction in speed is what kills all good demand gen programs.”“There's a lot of things that you can measure…but when it comes down to it, marketing, I feel, should measure itself on one thing and one thing only: revenue through the door.“As marketers, as product people, we spend 10, 12, sometimes 20 hours a day thinking about our product. The average customer spends 20 minutes a quarter thinking about your product. So you have a very limited amount of time to earn that ear.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more. 

This episode features an interview with Adam Blitzer, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Digital at Salesforce. Adam is truly one of the godfathers of marketing automation and B2B demand generation, having founded and sold Pardot, one of the most important marketing automation platforms ever created for CMOs and demand gen leaders. Adam currently oversees the multi-billion-dollar marketing division at Salesforce, using the products he created to meet internal demand gen goals.On this episode, Adam discusses the evolution of demand gen, how the tools and technologies for marketing automation have changed, why the fundamental challenges for marketers remain the same, what he believes is the MarTech battleground of the future, and the software products he’s building to create the single source of truth for enterprise marketers.Key TakeawaysB2b marketers have two customers – your end customer and your sales team, and sales is marketing’s most important marketing channel at most B2B companies.The tools and technologies for marketing automation have changed, but the fundamental challenges for marketers remain the same. Marketers are trying to do four things: Know their customers, personalize their interactions, engage customers across every channel, and measure all of it. Historically there's never been a single source of truth for marketing. The customer data platform is the battleground of the future, and it’s where Salesforce is building the single source of truth for marketers.Quotes“Marketing has really stepped up and said, you know what, we're the steward of the brand, and we’re now also the steward of the end-to-end customer experience. Even if it flows through a part of the company that we don't own directly, it’s all a reflection of the brand and it's all a reflection of marketing.”“When I got started in 2007 in B2B marketing automation, it was very much about feeding the funnel and moving through the conveyor belt of leads to opportunities to closed-one deals. Now it's much more about customer life-cycle marketing. It's about turning your clicks into leads, your leads into pipeline, your pipeline into customers, and your customers into raving fans.”“It's very easy as a marketer to focus on the end customer and to not focus on the other very important customer, which is your sales team. At the end of the day, if marketing blows out its numbers and they hit all of their target metrics and sales misses their target metric, how many people at the company are happy? No one is happy. At a B2B company, pipeline and sales is where the rubber meets the road. As much as possible marketing and sales need to be joined at the hip, and the more that they can share goals, the better.”“We really believe that the customer data platform is the battleground in marketing for the next five years. With this proliferation of MarTech and the average marketer using 10 to 20 different pieces of MarTech in their stack, you have got to be at the center of it.”“In this world where MarTech has become so diffuse, you can control the data, you can control the workflow, you can control the content, or you can control the analytics…And we think the most foundational of those four pieces is data, so that's really what we want to help our customers with.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

This episode features an interview with Jamie Grenney, CMO of OwnBackup. Prior to OwnBackup, Jamie spent 11 years at Salesforce learning from the best in the business. Most recently, he led a large product marketing and enablement team as a Global VP at Okta, and is now working on making OwnBackup into his fourth Unicorn. On this episode, Jamie discusses the death of cold outreach, the right way to make impactful video content, how to cultivate a great sales-marketing relationship, and much more.Key TakeawaysThe big shift that we're going to see in demand gen and marketing over the next couple of years is the switch from cold outreach to warm introductions. Companies are going to come up with a way to break through the noise and get to warm introductions at scale. Cultivating a great sales-marketing relationship requires putting yourself in their shoes, having empathy for their job, and maintaining the perspective that sales closing deals that ultimately pay your salary.Video is still a great way to deliver a clear and concise message in a format that’s really easy to share. YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the web, and a YouTube link is a non-threatening way to advocate for a product and help people understand what it’s capable of.Quotes“Inbound pipeline, outbound BDR-sourced pipeline, AE-sourced pipeline, and your partners. Those are the four engines you want to think about. How do you build those for scale, how do you measure them, and how do you grow them 5 or 10X. Think about those engines, and what can we do to increase their respective productivity.”“I think one challenge that some companies have is they have a product that is not verticalized, but they go after vertical messaging. It can take a ton of time and energy to maintain a bunch of vertical messaging. When you go into verticals, you've got to think about what is the vertical and how am I going to solve that problem all the way through?”“Conversational marketing is an uncuttable [budget item] because I think it's the future of how we engage our prospects and customers. It’s less about forms and more about getting them to the right person who can help. It's about improving the quality of conversation, and it's about making sure that you make the connection in real time.”“One thing that I see fading away is cold outreach. Every company has a pipeline gap to fill, but cold outreach makes no sense at all…generally cold outreach is expensive, inefficient, stressful, and it often yields disappointing results. These days, if you're a high value prospect, you're bombarded with unsolicited calls and emails and advertisements that you're going to tune out. So marketers really need to figure this out.”"Sometimes you have to relax your ideals to earn trust. You have to put yourself in [sales’] shoes. Understand that it's more important to be effective than to be right. A really good lesson in bridging the sales and marketing divide is to think about what is the right pace to introduce things to sales and how do you build trust in those relationships."SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

This episode features an interview with Heidi Melin, CMO of Workfront. Heidi has held the position of CMO 6 times over an impressive two-decade career of developing and executing marketing strategies that drive growth. On this episode, Heidi illustrates her approach to pivoting Workfront’s marketing strategies in response to the paradigm shift that companies are experiencing in 2020, and she explains why you need to be viewing your marketing dollars as an investment, not just an expense.Key TakeawaysWe’re undergoing a paradigm shift driven by COVID and the rise of the millennial B2B consumer that is completely changing how companies buy software.Companies can differentiate themselves by deeply understanding how buyers engage with their brand, and then utilizing those insights throughout the selling process.Account-based marketing isn’t enough; the strategy must be hyper-targeted across marketing and sales.Quotes“As marketers, if we have learned anything over the course of the last few months, it's that we have to be able to adapt much more quickly in order to be successful. All the things that we knew were effective are changing and they're changing immediately. So how do we adjust and continue to drive demand to support the pipeline that's required for our selling organization?”“One of the most important things that we have learned out of the pivot in response to COVID is that the entire business process needs to change, not just a marketing tactic here or there. It's a paradigm shift that we're going through right now that is not only going to change our marketing programs and tactics, but it's going to change how organizations buy enterprise software.”“I think in terms of what channels give us the ability to be very focused and targeted in our investments. We're prioritizing those channels that allow us to more accurately target our target accounts. We have the tools today to be very specific about who our messages go to. Leveraging those tools becomes really important, because our spend levels aren't necessarily going up, but the pressure on marketing teams to deliver engagement and demand is going up.”“I always talk about marketing as an investment versus an expense. If we want to make sure that each one of those dollars is used to its fullest impact, we want to make sure we get to the people that have the highest likelihood to buy from us.”“I very seldom use the term ABM because it's been overused and over promoted. Isn't ABM just a category of software that allows us to deliver on the premise of marketing that's always been there? ABM technology provided the ability for us as marketers to do what we've always said we should be doing, which is targeting the right people with our message.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.