Pipeline Visionaries

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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview between Ian Faison and Udi Ledergor, CMO of Gong. A 5-time VP of Marketing, Udi has 20 years of experience heading marketing teams and is an expert in helping B2B companies grow faster by optimizing and transforming their marketing efforts.On this episode, Udi discusses the synergy between Gong’s demand gen efforts and brand plays, and lays out the content strategy that he uses to drive the inbound and outbound motions that create thousands of MQLs every month for a $2.2 Billion B2B powerhouse.Key TakeawaysWays the content marketing landscape is changing in our fast-paced, digital-first worldHow to build compelling content that reaches your audience on the channels they frequent mostThe three basic elements that every successful content machine must includeQuotes“Here's the really simplified truth: we create darn good content, and we use that content to drive both our inbound and outbound motions. Then we create thousands of MQLs every month by looking at who's consuming our content and attending our events.”“Here’s the big secret: [LinkedIn] is my cheapest demand gen channel...we can get thousands of downloads in a day and that doesn't cost me a dime. It’s completely organic. That's why I love this channel. I know that the people are there because they want to be, I'm not chasing them. I could not live without that channel.”“I think the biggest mistake that brands make is they start with what they want to say rather than what their prospects or customers want to hear. By starting from the customer side and working back, you can give them what they want in a way that also serves your brand. That's the right way to do it.”“I'd say 99% of our content takes less than five minutes to consume. We’ve found that with today's attention span, especially of busy executives, that type of content is hugely popular. If you're going to create a 40-page e-book like we did 10 years ago in content marketing, the only ones likely to read it are your competitors.”“The days where we could plan six months ahead for a content project are long gone. I think it's a joke if someone can plan a year ahead on their content calendar in this fast moving market. Either your content is stale or it's just completely detached from what's going on in the market. What plans could you have made six months ago that would be remotely relevant to your audience right now? You have to be a lot more agile than in the past to keep up. The companies that are keeping up, that are producing timely content that’s answering real time questions and solving problems quickly– they are moving quickly ahead, and the others are way behind.”“Become best friends with your CRO or VP of Sales. You have to put your ego aside and understand that you are there to make sales easier. You can't build the right demand gen machine if you don't understand exactly what your sales team needs. If you manage to make sales’ lives easier, you will have built a successful demand gen machine. It’s that simple.”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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Chandar Pattabhiram, CMO of Coupa. Chandar has more than 25 years of experience in strategic marketing and management consulting, including his previous role as CMO at Marketo. As CMO of Coupa, he is responsible for driving all aspects of worldwide marketing including strategic segment marketing, product marketing, growth marketing and corporate marketing.On this episode, Chandar breaks the mold on demand gen, explaining why you should be thinking of it in terms of growth marketing and revenue gen, and he illustrates his flywheel approach to marketing that goes far beyond the traditional funnel model.Key TakeawaysExpand your view of demand gen–view it as growth marketing, and even as revenue gen. Those terms are important because what you call it and how you view it gets permeated throughout your organization.It’s important to view marketing as a flywheel of activities as opposed to the traditional funnel model. The flywheel approach consists of awareness, acquisition, expansion, and advocacy.A step that’s missing in growth marketing in a lot of organizations is adoption marketing. Adoption marketing is about ensuring that your customers are successful with what they’ve already bought before you go about trying to expand your presence in their business.Instead of running big virtual events and claiming victory on vanity metrics, marketers should consider the value of “circles,” which are smaller, more intimate gatherings that are easier to engage and have a much greater impact on deal-acceleration.Quotes“I don’t use the words ‘funnel’ or ‘demand gen.’ We call it revenue marketing. Because why do any marketing unless it’s for revenue?”“Your job in marketing is to find the fastest path to the most dollars for the sales organization. That’s the guiding principle at the end of the day.”“Value is one divided by vanity. You have to take the vanity metrics out of it...We are looking for value, not vanity. If my goal is deal acceleration, I should not be worried about vanity metrics, I should only be worried about value metrics.”“Advocacy marketing is not them advocating for you, it’s you advocating for them. If you’re doing it well, you’re showcasing how your customers are driving transformational change in their organizations.”“Your best salesperson is your customer. if you’ve done a good job of driving value, they’re going to do the selling for you.”“I view our website as the most strategic weapon in marketing...I view it as a vehicle for conversation, not just one-way information dissemination. It can be a vehicle to start a conversation and move it forward in the journey. It’s an important asset for us in that way, and it’s a top lead-generation tool as well.”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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Melton Littlepage, Senior VP of Marketing at Tenable. Melton has more than 15 years of marketing experience, including as VP of Global Marketing for SAP Concur, and CMO of Schoology. At Tenable, Melton is responsible for driving demand gen for cybersecurity solutions that are used by more than 30,000 organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500.On this episode, Melton breaks down his solution-based marketing approach, how to truly understand the problems your customers face, and how to make your brand synonymous with the solutions they need.Key TakeawaysMarketing has two missions: tell your story to the market, and then when the market is searching for an answer to a problem, be there with the answer.The job of a marketer is to help the buyer understand how to manage their problems. It’s to help them see that there is a solution that can take a lot of pain and effort out of their life, allow them to do a better job, and help their company be more successful.Management of your website is crucial. It's where you express yourself as a brand, develop your category, create community, inform and educate the market on the products you offer, and it’s how you assemble those products into solutions that are important for solving real-world problems.Having conversational marketing on your website is an essential tool. It’s an attractive alternative to gated content forms and it goes beyond being a lead-capture tool. It allows you to have meaningful conversations with your customers and guide them through their buying journey.Quotes“Being a VP of marketing is like being the VP of helping the customer solve a problem. We have a lot of internal processes and KPIs and metrics and all that's really important, but our job is really to understand our buyer and understand what they're up against.”“[Our customer] is not looking to buy a product, they're looking to solve a problem. We need to jump in there and help them solve the problem. That's how they're going to end up buying the product. It doesn't come the other way around.”“We've built a demand gen organization that is dedicated to reaching our target persona and changing their mind. That’s it in a nutshell.”“We start with the buyer and the problems they have in their day to day world. We try to help them understand that there is a better way to do what we do. We hold their hand through the process of learning how it could apply in their organization and what the potential benefit is. And then, in an ideal world, we start a conversation with them. If we can do that, we've succeeded in our role as marketing. If we can't do that, then all the KPIs, processes, tech– it just doesn't matter.”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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Dave King, CMO of Asana. Specializing in B2B enterprise marketing and growth, Dave joined Asana in 2017 to oversee global marketing efforts after having previously led marketing teams at Percolate, Highfive and Salesforce.On this episode, Dave breaks down Asana’s unique, hybrid demand gen strategy that starts with a core belief in an exceptional product experience. Dave discusses how to add value, engender trust, and deliver such a remarkable experience that your customers become your greatest advocates.Key TakeawaysWord of mouth marketing is the future and is still largely untapped. More people hear about Asana from word of mouth than from any other advertising or marketing tactics. Think about how to create an experience that’s so remarkable that people want to share about it.Ultimately a brand is about building trust. Whether you’re B2C or B2B, what matters is that you’re engendering trust within the specific audience that you’re targeting.Demand gen has to be tailored to your audience and the needs of the business. You can’t take a demand gen model that works for company X and apply it to company Y. The first and most important thing you need to do is figure out what you need demand gen to do for your organizationBoth the demand gen team and sales teams at Asana are really focused on how to help customers get even more value out of the product.Asana customers can use the product for free and see the value from day one, which aligns everybody’s incentives in a powerful way, and is a huge driver of word of mouth.Everyone at Asana uses the product, which is a huge advantage to knowing how to explain to customers how it can add value.Big ad platforms still work fine but have likely reached their peak influence. There are exciting new types of smaller channels and communities that are more targeted and intimate (like podcasts).Gated assets are still sometimes a necessary evil, but there’s likely a technology breakthrough coming where you won’t have to make the false choice between customer experience and data capture. Quotes“More people hear about us from word of mouth than they do from any of our advertising or marketing tactics. Our community team does several hundred events per year, on five continents, all about driving word of mouth.”“We like to say great marketing is about education and delivering an experience. So how do we help people be better at their jobs, and how do you make it an experience that people want to talk about?”“Helping people be better at their jobs rather than selling features is a shift that’s happening across our craft...We view ourselves as community organizers more than as professors.”“Some of the best marketing is not creating things from scratch, but seeing the bright spots–what is working organically, what’s happening naturally, and how do we create programs to amplify or facilitate that. Our most creative ideas come from what we’re seeing in the community, versus us thinking them up in the lab”“I think that the scarce commodity in society right now is trust. We make emotional decisions, and we make them based on trust. That’s ultimately what a brand is: How do I deliver trust?”“Our philosophy is that we believe so much in the product experience that we want to get people into that experience as quickly as possible.”“Speed to market is the new currency of success. You have to be agile and adaptive...Who has time for a one- or two-year software deployment cycle these days? Especially as demand gen marketers, we’ve got to get up and running quickly, and where you can put tools together to be really adaptive and move fast gives you a big advantage.”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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Julie Liegl is used to being a part of big things. As EVP of Global Marketing at Salesforce, she helped create and oversee the world-class corporate event that is known as Dreamforce, and she’s currently overseeing a complete transformation in the way that businesses communicate as CMO of Slack.On this episode, Julie unveils some of the plays that have made her so successful across her career. She talks about corporate events and how they can maintain relevance as digital events in the time of COVID, how to create a demand gen team from scratch, and much more.Key TakeawaysDemand Gen needs to be integrated. Every aspect of it needs to be thought of as a part of one single function, rather than separate one-off activities.In order for an event to be successful, you need to help prepare your attendees to make the most of it before they ever arrive.Brand marketing can work hand-in-hand with demand gen. The top of the funnel is still a part of the funnel.Quotes"You have to think of demand gen as a program rather than a set of tactics and how they're going to go along the way. We used to call it lead gen and that very much reflected what it was, which was marketing, throwing leads over the wall, and demand gen is really about being smarter about the entire thing.""I see events as an amplifying effect to demand gen and as a point in the demand gen journey.""Brand is funny because there definitely are ways to measure it. We do a lot of brand studies. We do research on consideration awareness sentiment, and we try to measure it quarterly.""I still think that flashy things can work, but they need to work in a way that makes sense with your product beyond just a clever marketing tagline."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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tom Butta, Former CMO of SignalFx (acquired by Spunk for $1.05B), discusses the demand-gen mindset that leads to high-dollar acquisitions. On this episode of Demand Gen Visionaries, Tom explains the importance of focusing on marketing fundamentals to see big results, how putting your customers above all will lead to retention and more pipeline, and keeping a company-wide eye to make sure your demand gen leads to more sales. Key TakeawaysThere are three essential elements of demand gen: pipeline creation, revenue metrics, and, often overlooked, customer retention.Customers should be treated as family. They should never find out about a big announcement when the rest of the world does. They should be notified about it before.The most fundamental requirement of demand gen is perspective. Know where marketing is having an impact and make sure customers can find your website.When you spend money on marketing tactics, you need to make sure you’re seeing a return on your investment.Own your content creation. You need to have content that the company can stand behind without question. Quality always starts from within and it needs to be amplified.It’s important to have data to back up your actions. Let your metrics guide your company's strategy, not emotion.Quotes“Demand gen is a function within a function. It's part of a team, but it does not live on its own. It’s reliant upon really good content. It's reliant upon the ability to act appropriately and quickly on opportunities that it creates.”“The validation that you get from customers is just immeasurable.”“Understand that your home is the place that most people will go to and you need that to be your website. You need to be able to ensure that when they get there, they have the best possible experience, but you also need to be sure that they actually can find you.”“You go after the new logos exclusively, and you forget that you can actually have great influence over, building relationships with your existing customers. Those customers are our franchise. They give reason for us to exist.”“My belief (for content) is, it always has to start from within. In terms of turning something over, we did a couple of case studies with external consultants and writers, but for the most part we wrote everything ourselves.”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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.