CMO Roundtable: The Pipeline Problem
Budgets are decreasing but targets certainly aren't. Hear how 3 CMOs are tackling their pipeline problems and closing their gaps.
All right, welcome everybody to our CMO round table focused on the pipeline
problem
My name is Matt Heinz. I'm the founder president of Heinz Marketing very
excited to be here today to moderate this amazing panel
And today we're going to talk about the pipeline problem and specifically the
challenges that CMO's face when it comes to pipeline generation in
2024 you think about all the different things that are roadblocks and
challenges for us today
We've got changing markets reduced budgets headcount changes who owns the BDRs
What is AI doing so many different variables and challenges?
And we've got an amazing panel here to walk us through so I got a bunch of
questions
But I first want to make sure we introduce our panel today. We're very excited
to have
Jim Sinai is the CMO of vanilla here Jim. Thanks joining us. Happy beer
We've got more of Rivera CMO of qualified more a thank you for this overall of
and thank you for doing this event as well
Thank you, Matt
Last but not least Oana
Monalake, how did I do on that name first of all?
Close enough things now, right?
So all right you're Oana from now on she is the founder and CEO of
SQL.io so thank you so much all of you for being here today and
Jim I think we're gonna start with you
I'm not gonna call you the elder statesman of this of this panel
but you already served a very distinguished career as a marketing leader and I
'm sure the idea of
Pipeline for marketing has evolved quite a bit in your time in marketing
overall
Specifically your time as a marketing leader talk about where it's got where it
's come from where it is today
And what are some of the key elements of the change that you've seen that make?
Pipeline relevant and vital for as a marketing
Thanks, Matt. I mean
Jesus as far as I go back my days of marketing the number one metric that we
always looked at was had was and has been pipeline
I you know, I grew up in enterprise SaaS and
all the other measures just
Were secondary and I think a lot of that is because at the leadership level
The only thing that matters is are you hitting your numbers and only way to
know if you have a shot at hitting your numbers is by looking at
Pipeline and I don't know where I heard this but I love it pipeline is oxygen
and if you don't have oxygen in the room
You can't breathe you can't do what you need to do and so
the
you know the discipline of pipeline management is really something that I saw
as a
a place where marketers can be more strategic and
Show up with their revenue counterparts in a way that feels more
in a board level to be frank and
Candidly it's what we're all playing for we're playing for the for the growth
and for the win
And so if you can't speak the language of pipe open pipeline pipe Jen
Net pipeline pipes velocity all those kind of metrics then you're you're sort
of left on the outside
And that's where I feel like we're marketers especially marketing leaders
Get boxed out of conversations because they don't know how to talk about the
overall mechanics of creating revenue
You're really talking about sort of speaking the language of the business and
the language of sort of go to market
Not just a language of marketing and not just using our acronyms, but really
speaking
I've heard some people say like if my language and my acronyms can match what
the CFO already uses and understands
I'm in a much better spot to be perceived as someone who understands and is
focused on the business
Yeah, more I want to ask you, you know relative to running this program in the
conversations you're having
I mean you're seeing and hearing from a lot of people in different marketing
functions
What bubbles up in your head around the biggest?
Halinges marketers are facing right now in terms of pipeline generation
Yeah, I mean we've talked to hundreds of marketers over the last few years of
this program
And it's a hard time to be a CMO. I think that everybody's saying the same
thing
Budgets are smaller teams are smaller
Targets are higher and how do I efficiently hit my pipeline targets?
I think everybody's feeling that I feel like there's this hope that things are
starting to get a little softer things are starting to get a
Little bit better. We're kind of emerging from what was a pretty hard year and
a half or two years
So I think that's the pain everybody's feeling
Everybody kind of is has emerged from that and is thinking about how do I spend
efficiently and make sure that I'm being efficient with my investments
There's been this theme of like I think a gut reaction 18 months ago is to turn
off a lot of your brand investments and turn off a lot of things
You couldn't quantify or measure, but that hurts you long-term. So I think
everybody's trying to figure out the right mix of marketing investments and
kind of the brand verse demand
And then another major theme is just focusing on pipeline quality
Like you can give all the all the first meetings in the world to your sales
team
But if they're not materializing if they're not maturing through the through
the sales cycle
Then what's the point? So I think how do you hit your targets?
How do you spend efficiently and smartly and how do you generate that quality
pipeline to keep your sales team happy?
I think it's been a trying time for sales and marketing teams
The tension has probably been a little bit higher just to make sure that
everybody's satisfied
But those are the themes in every CMO panel we have every pipeline summit
discussion we have and I think everybody is kind of looking to each other to
try and
Navigate all of those topics. I mean if these are trying times for marketing
leaders
And for sales and marketing teams, Oanna founder CEO
Like you have everything on your shoulders, right?
And so like you know as as the leader of a business through times like this
Um, I heard someone that recently described that as chewing glass and as a
founder myself. I'm like that's pretty damn close
Um, you know, thanks about the marketing role as part of pipeline generation.
What's worked for you with sequel and what do you see?
Marketing's role there relative to all the other groups of the organization
that have their own role in jelly generating pipeline and rep
Yeah, I think that in my case, um, I'm I'm the founder and CEO, but at heart. I
'm also a marketer
I've been a marketer for 15 years before I started the company
So I'm somehow uniquely positioned to understand the role of marketing versus
you know kind of cutting from it
We actually invested in it, but we we built a different type of investment in
marketing
It had to be measurable and still kind of still keep it innovative and exper
iential
Um, a big thing for me was obviously when 2023 hit with all the economic
downturn and all the uncertainties
I actually um went to my team and I made all the all the um, kind of
You know impact and results and goals that I usually present to the board
I made it public my entire company every single person in my company should
know what we're presenting to the board where we're at
And it was incredible because every single person in the company has taken
seriously the investments that we're making and we started working together
towards a common goal
Now everybody in the organizations common goal is revenue. Everybody's tied to
revenue
Including engineering which is counterintuitive, but we should be building
features and we should be building product
That impacts our customers lives that brings more value has brings more revenue
or makes our customers even more successful
And the way I structured the sales and marketing team
I've
come from a background of marketing and sales being inside out and it was not
the right way to work
And now I don't have a sales or a marketing or product marketing team
I have a go-to market team
And then out of the go-to market team or main goal is revenue and then there's
different leaders of projects or initiatives that have
Subgoals that ultimately working together
We're reaching our common goal going to the top and that's proven for us to
work so much better instead of having the specific labels of marketing should
bring top of funnel
But marketing should also influence pipeline should also build you know kind of
give insight into product
So the transparency bringing you know the board's goals into the team
And also pointing the entire organization towards common goal with their
individual
Kind of success metrics have have been really good for us
I mean to have someone who understands and has empathy for the marketing role
to be able to sort of organize that
I mean I saw we're already see more and some sort of nodding their heads
thinking about sort of we both work for marketing CEOs
Yeah, which I think which I think makes our jobs incidentally better because we
speak the same language
You know when we when we come to them and say hey, I have an idea that I think
is going to unlock growth
They they they listen in and they understand how marketing can be that lover or
not. They're not pushing back
Yeah, I think it's unique and it's special and Jim I think back to you
You know the adjustments you've had to make along the way, especially you know
Mora kind of talked about just how hard it's been to sell and to market in the
last year and a half or so and it's it's never easy
There's always something it's trying to like you know sort of you know
He's sort of neuter your ability to drive revenue
But like what what are things that have worked for you and your team in the
last of six
12 plus months to make adjustments to be more efficient at driving more
predictable pipeline in your organization
Yeah, so I think you know vanilla is a
Smaller growing organization. It's one of the smaller teams I've led
But that also has lent a lot of nimbleness to our our sort of our ability to
react
We made a decision a very conscious decision to lean into a bunch of brands
last year
Uh, and the reason being is that we knew that
If we wanted people showing up to talk to us
We wanted them sort of pre-qualified by what our brand stood for and what we
could do for them
And so we spent a lot of time making sure our messaging articulated the right
Problems to write people all the way down to the to the google ads so we weren
't bringing in inefficient
inefficient leads into the system
And you know being trying to like make sure even to the end where our ads were
explicitly calling out what we did and did not do
Uh in google and so a lot of that I think helps
so that the stuff that we do bring in has a higher likelihood of
Of matriculating into pipeline and ultimately revenue so brands been a huge
Differentiator and then the other thing nested in there is really making sure
there's a tight coupling with the bdr's
And I think that for anyone that works in a sales led
Uh software business the the bdr army is sort of you have to think of them as
part of the marketing
Team and you even if they're not and you have to enroll them in understanding
the marketing strategy
Because then they understand how to prioritize what to do and and also how to
help you understand what messages and what what things are working and not work
Jim you brought up there towards the end sort of the bdr army and you know,
yeah, you guys work for sales
Sometimes works for marketing and you know just back to what you but you were
sharing what a lot
I was sharing around this sort of common go-to-market team
It almost doesn't matter
Um as if you have sort of continuity around the jobs to be done
Right and if you have some common understanding of like who needs to do what
and being in this as
Have like a team sport more I'd be curious to hear your perspective at all of i
'd how do you think about that team sport?
How do you think about marketing's role in conjunction with the broader efforts
across the organization
They collectively through you know a body of work or drive
Yeah, I mean the way it works at qualified is we basically have our marketing
organization and our sales organization
But I love your idea of like a full fully aligned go-to-market motion
We try and achieve that as much as we can even though we kind of have different
um dotted lines in the org structure
Our bdr team sits under our revenue team so under our sales organization
But I see them as an extension of our marketing team our entire sdr bdr team
and bound and outbound team
Um, I think one thing that's been really important for us is working towards
one target when we were first kind of growing up as an organization
We had too many targets floating around we had to like we had our inbound
targets and our outbound targets and it simply wasn't working
We were finding that tension of arguing for who's sourced certain pipeline
And so we pivoted to do one target and we're really focused on a stage two
Which to us represents like quality pipeline target across the entire
organization
Um, one thing that we also do is we do a pipeline council every single friday
and the marketing leaders the sales leaders
And the sdr and bdr's are all there and during that meeting. It's every friday
at noon rain or shine
We look over status. How are we progressing? You know quarter to date months to
date?
Um
We look at what's working. We look at what's not working if we're trending
behind what are our gap plans
We celebrate the wins so we celebrate like, you know, this sdr had a great play
this week or this
Um bdr had a great play this week and so although we're technically separate
kind of teams the pipeline council
And um in working towards that one target those have been critical to us
because you you need both right and especially in this world
Of account-based marketing it all works together. Hopefully somebody sees an
advertisement and comes to an event and then opens an outbound email
And then comes to the website and then converts and like if those two if those
two teams aren't working together
Everything breaks. Um, so I think you have to have kind of those functions in
place to connect the teams
I'm gonna want to come back to you more if we have time to talk a little about
sort of change management and sort of
Culture management is part of that because I think it's one thing
To have to have a vision for it. It's another thing to have a playbook
But then to get people to buy into it and really sort of lean into that
collective mentality
That's all another thing and is not trivial
Um, oh and I did want to ask you first the question I feel like it's it's it's
actually safe to say we're both at the bleeding edge
And at the very early stages of ai adoption into our go-to-market motions
It's moving so quickly and there's such a wide disparity
Of how different companies are incorporating and leveraging would love to hear
how you are thinking about ai and sort of other
Advanced technologies and opportunities as part of your pipeline development
process
um at sea
Yeah, ai has been so fascinating and the way I tell my team is that ai will not
replace anyone in the team
But if you're but you will replace people who are not using ai
Because it it's you know, sometimes someone would come to me like, oh, we've
done all of this like did you use ai?
And they would feel a little bit scared to say yes
So that they don't feel like they cheated but actually celebrate the use of ai
that means you're working smarter
You're making the most of the technologies and to have a bit of a continuation
from what mora said is
Right now buyers are so much more sophisticated, right? They do so much more
research because shim so much more content
That's why so hard to put you know a sale or an SQL or an mql in the hands of
marketing or sales or sdr
Because chances are that every single person in that go-to-market team has
touched the you know
The prospect before they even booked a call with sales
And we're looking at the entire journey and we're thinking how can we use ai
from a marketing perspective to either automate or to enhance
Automation comes where there's a pititive motion
So are we doing something more than two times three times that can we use ai
for that?
For example when customers are asking questions about, you know, things that
are in our help center articles
Like can we have a chat on our website that answers those questions so much
faster
So it gives them content so much faster. So that's kind of a repeated motion
where we've
Put ai to it and it was it was amazing
And then obviously we'll we'll top up with things where we feel like we can
kind of get involved in it
The second thing is elevation
The one thing that I will never replace
Like humans with ai is original thought and original content
One thing that I don't like my team
See them do is like oh give me a blog post about the importance of ai in the
world
I think that original content is so important so that what we do at sequel we
build
Original content we have something called again changers where we break experts
and talk about
incredible topics and ideas and we use ai to repurpose original content and
Content into different forms like short video long like long written articles
short blog both
um, you know all all kinds of other things so the marketing ai still getting
elevated and we give more
Content to you know to our customers and prospects
Um, but we keep that originality within the team
Can can I can I just build on this ai story because I think there's there's
another thread here
That's really important for pipeline, which is
Ai I think will make the sdr the abdr jobs a lot easier at least i'm hoping so
I'm betting on it
But I think from the content teams they're looking at this and saying how how
am I going to stand out in a sea of
Content that's going to get flooded onto the web
Right and this goes back to
Uh one investments in brand making sure you have a brand that's differentiated
and stands or something
But this is also another opportunity for your bdr is to be more human and to
really lean into places where bdrs can be human
So how are you getting them to show up on linked in more?
How are you getting bdrs to think about creating more video self created video,
etc
And I think that um
You know, it's a scary time because it's going to change a lot of workflows
But it's also like a time where marketers are sort of more more important than
ever
Because it'll be clear the companies that have invested in great marketing
Won't ever look like they're using ai
Yeah, I mean, here's what I know guys. I mean like ai is going to make in more
content faster easy or cheaper
None of those solve the problems we have in marketing they may make it worse
Right like your your whether you are the buyer or the you think about your
buyer
You they have the same amount of minutes if not fewer in their days to get
things done and look at tell robot
Silver robots which might be in our future
Um, I think providing that humanity really separates out the the great messages
Uh from others. I know we got just a few minutes left times going by so fast.
This is so thank you all so much for your insight so far
Uh more. I did want to get back to you and ask that question around culture
chain
Oh, yeah
Managing the culture
Across a team that maybe you know historically look let's not pretend that
there's baggage and scar tissue that didn't exist
Right from teams fighting for you know for credit over time
How do you address that but get through it and create a real team mentality
that we win together?
Uh moving forward. Yeah, I mean we're we're a little bit of a smaller company
Like compared to the sales forces or the giants out there
So I would say changing
Target's changing kind of how we operate is we can be a little bit more nimble
like jim said that if you're at a giant giant
Company or change manager. I've worked at really big companies. It's really
really hard
Um, I think the biggest thing is and one thing that our ceo challenges me with
all the time is
What would we do if we started the company today?
Because it's easy sometimes to say we're going to confuse people or how do we
not scare folks if we're changing too quickly
And he always challenges me to say
Start fresh think big if we started the company today. What is the process? We
would roll out
We have to adapt or else we'll get left behind
So I think as a leader you have to have that mentality that changes
Okay
And then you have to be willing to bring people along for the ride
So it's going to take some time for people to kind of acclimate
Um, we also always say like by the time you're sick of saying it
People are just getting used to hearing it. So you have to always over
communicate and internal communications
Is just as important as external communications when you're running a business
So constantly communicating and then I think celebrating the folks who are
adapting and who are changing and who are seeing success with that
So it is I mentioned our pipeline council earlier. We do these things called
plays of the week
And we're like, you know, look at fey she had this awesome interaction. She
took this new approach
She generated s2 pipeline. Oh my gosh. It just closed last week or whatever
So celebrating the the changemakers the folks that are out there doing things
differently so that their peers want to be like them
I think that's important, but you always have to be
I think I didn't anticipate as a marketing leader how much of my attention
would go into internal communication and not so really
the team, but it's perfect
And I was to just add it that I was fine when things aren't going well. It's
because we haven't communicated internally
Well, like it's not that we're not doing the marketing. Well, it's we're not
marketing the marketing well
And harnessing the power
Oh, sorry and harnessing the power of the team as well
It feels like you can create such a big impact into whatever marketing
initiative that you're that you're running
Mm-hmm
Somewhat real to that when I'm a follow-up question for you as sort of like a
marketer
But is the is the founder on the on the on the call today?
um
Not everywhere the organization thinks they know how to run engineering not
very ready
Where like knows that out of they knows how to run a balance sheet and finance
But everyone the organization thinks they know more and when things are tight
when things are tough
Lots of new ideas bubble up which patons is fantastic like that's part of the
team's spiritment
But it could be frustrating right for a marketing team that's like we are doing
our best here
And we don't need like the you know the the rest of the chickens to contribute
and think they know our business
How do you as a founder encourage?
Ideas innovation creativity across the board yet you your marketing team and
your marketing leaders clarity
And the encouragement to do what they know how to do back
Yes, you are very much spot on on that
It's a very interesting way to encourage people to still share ideas one of
One of our greatest marketing ideas came from an engineer who thought it is
like wouldn't it be great to do this?
And we're like, yeah, that'd be great
So everybody can have a great idea even though you're not a marketer
So we want to foster that culture of sharing interesting ideas
Some people are seeing it with fresh eyes because we live in it and you know
It's a little bit harder to see things that are outside of the box
Yet you don't want the marketing team to be running and building a personal
idea. There is out there
Um, we're also similar to what morn Jim were mentioning. We're also a
Company small enough to be able to move really really fast. So what we do we
have monthly
Gold setting obviously we know for the year for the quarter, but we have
monthly gold setting
Well, we're also deciding on initiatives that we're focusing on either new
initiatives or obviously continuing the ones that are strategies
And we have this idea of experimentation culture
But nothing is a strategy. So basically a successful experiment becomes a
strategy
Nothing is a strategy from the beginning. Even if you're saying i'm gonna be
running like a webinar strategy or not
You're gonna be running it an experiment if you've never done it before and
have certain results from it
So what we do as a marketing team we sit together and we see what strategies
are working the best
We double down on those indeed our great investment
And we map them out to to revenue and impact on the bestness and then we're
looking at experiments
What experiments can we be running this month and then we literally take ideas
from everyone in the team
We look at all of those ideas and then we have a framework that we that we
built every experiment on there is a budget
There's you know kind of success criteria impact on the bestness and we think
the one that have the highest impact
And the way we say it is that
An experiment cannot fail the only way it fails if you don't know if it worked
or it did it
so um this way we
Nurtured that sharing of ideas from the rest of the team
But really led it up to the marketing leaders to decide what our strategies and
what are certain experiments that we want to be running
Because at the same time while we're cutting a lot of you know budget
Generally as you know as as a tech industry
We have to keep innovating we have to invest in new interesting ideas
Otherwise, we're all going to be doing the same old same old they were not
going to be growing so
Keeping that balance um it's been working pretty well for for us in the past
year
Yep, we have just a minute left. Jim. I have a final question for you. It's
super unfair to ask this with a minute
Brand versus demand. How do you think about the right balance of that moving
forward?
I think we've over rotated maybe do a little more of demand in tighter times
But what's your strategy? What's your recommended way to balance brand the
demand movie?
Oh in 30 seconds. Yeah
Yeah, no, but the short answer is think about them together and holistically
and honestly like
If I were to try and go into my linked in spend and say well this this dollar
is demand dollar and this dollar is demand dollar
I don't think I could do it
So I just look at it together as like I need to pay money to create awareness
and demand together and the the total spend
Is?
Translates into both brand awareness traffic growth to the website follower
growth on linked
in but also to
To the bottom line and just trying to pay attention to the what the total spend
is to
To pipeline so we don't try and get too granular because otherwise we're just
going down a rabbit hole
Oh, you certainly are you absolutely are
I mean one of those things I tell CFOs all the times like listen
If you want to spend a lot less on demand to three two years from now spend a
lot more on brand today
Because that is what that balance is going to give you a healthier business
more equity
More predictable pipeline is going to solve it's going to help make those
pipeline challenge a little easier with more of that
investment
Well, guys, but even spent but even spend I mean all this leave over the even
spend you think you're spending on demand
It ends up as brand so like how do you even do that? Yeah, you're right. You're
right
Uh, we can spend a whole nother 25 minutes just on this question. We didn't
even get to
Uh my concerns about your uh your fantasy baseball team for the year, but we'll
we'll do that in another time
Um guys have an amazing mora jim. Ohana. Thank you so much for being part of
this panel for being open honest candid with your answers
Uh, thank you to qualified again for this amazing event
Uh, I think we saw all the few pipeline problems city guys. Uh, so thanks hope
jib and um, we'll see you all next time
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Some people want to eat a bite That's all I, that's what's going on here
They eat a bite, they eat a bite That's what's going on here
And I'm at the end of this video, I'm really very excited, when she makes a
video
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