The State of Marketing - Spring 2023
B2B Marketing has shifted quickly. Hear from Sarah Franklin and Kraig Swensrud as they discuss their takes on the current market and their predictions for Spring 2023.
Welcome everybody to Pipeline Summit Spring 23. My name is Craig Swensard. I'm
the
founder and CEO of Qualified and today I'm joined by a longtime friend and
special guest, longtime colleague Sarah Franklin, the Chief Marketing Officer
of
Salesforce. Sarah, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me and
hello everyone. So great to be here with all of you. Sarah, you have a huge
role
as the CMO of Salesforce. I think that's probably an understatement. What's
your
perspective on the state of B2B marketing right now? Well that's a big
question because it is a hard time these days in B2B marketing because the
economy is crazy, the world is changing, everybody is in the state where you
know
the budgets are being cut, there's changes in your organizations, there's so
much
going on and so it's hard times. Yeah, it's hard times. Well speaking of
budgets being cut, I know you're all on the same fiscal year that we're on so
our
fiscal year just ended in January so you probably went through months of budget
planning, you know, cycles and approval processes and you probably got your
budget rolled out and here we are at the dawn of a new year. What's that whole
process like at Salesforce? It's a great question because a lot of people think
in these jobs you do only creative, only you know talking on stage is only
having fun conversations like this but you spend a lot of time in the planning
and working with your teams on structuring everything that you're going to do
and
so the budget process like I'm already in the budget planning for next year
right because especially when you look at events and your campaigns and how
you're going to forecast in your long-range plan you have to be on top of it so
our
budget I mean it's still not fully baked which is a good part of marketing
which is we have to be able to accommodate changes along the way so the budget
process is pretty intense but what I think is important for marketers is
that the budget process is actually very strategic. It's an opportunity for
marketeers and everybody in this role to not just ask for the money but show
the
value that you're going to return back into the business so the budget process
for us was a lot of talking through our long-range plan and talking through the
outcomes that we were going to get from our investments that we were going to
make and really kind of pitching the ideas of we could do this event or this
campaign or make this investment and it's it's hard but it's also a fun time to
think about the the big bats that you can make. Everybody is asking show me the
money right the CFO I'm sure is asking you to show me the money. Tell me the
ACV. They asked me the ROI in our campaigns is more important than ever
because we need to prove every dollar we spend so as you kind of look forward
on
your FY 24 you're now like a couple months in and you guys use the V2 mom
planning process we use that here too. What are the top things that are
priorities for you right now? So yes we anger on the V2 mom and this is
everything that we do is written down in priority order. You know this very
very
well and people here if you don't know it look it up and read it online because
it's a very useful technique to take something very complicated and distill it
down to a way that you can align your whole team. So our V2 mom this year is a
very simple vision statement and simplicity is actually one of our values
for this year because during hard times we need to get back to basics and look
at some of the most simple things and make sure we've got the fundamentals
nailed and so for us as marketers we're storytellers and our vision is to be
the customer or to be the storytellers of the customer company to fuel our
growth with our ACV and our pipeline targets top center metrics in our vision
and that cascades into very simple methods that we're doing between our
events and experiences building out our customer stories building out top 10
campaigns building out our trailblazer motion and then connecting with the C
suite and those are the five things that were focused on this year. I love that
you can do that so simply and clearly well we're here at the pipeline summit
and so everybody I'm sure is wondering where does pipeline rank for Salesforce
's
CMO and your priority list how do you think about pipe gen in today's
environment?
Yeah so if you talk to the head of revenue at our company their priorities
are ACV, ACV, ACV and as the CMO my priorities are pipeline pipeline pipeline
So we'll talk to you a little bit about your relationship with the revenue
leaders
at Salesforce. Are you guys at odds with one another kind of the classic sales
marketing divide? How do you guys think about your strategic planning? How do
you
approach pipe generation? Do you have shared targets kind of what's it like in
your world? Yes to all of the above. It's we between your product organization
your marketing organization and your distribution organization you're the
trifecta of your whole business and you're supported with your customer
success and legal and all of the other organizations but the three of us really
are the strategic arms and I see marketing as the glue between the product
and the sales organization. So yes salespeople want more campaigns more events
more pipeline and product teams want you know more launches more innovations
and
market more pipeline as well but working with the sales teams is really
important
to just show up as marketeers and ask what's important to them build the
strategy together for where the white space is or where the you know accounts
that you want to target are and so we have a great relationship with our sales
teams we're aligned to the sales teams. I think that's an important thing for
marketing organizations to look at your structure and don't create a structure
which is misaligned to the way that your go-to-market is structured because if
you're not aligned then you'll that's where you'll have the fights and the
tension. So do you share the same pipe gen numbers like do you have a pipe gen
number in your v2 mom and that's shared with the sales organization? Yes.
Everybody knows what to expect because I know a company like Salesforce we all
respect Salesforce for what the company has been able to achieve especially the
sales and marketing team it's the best and Salesforce is so innovative so there
's
so many things in marketing I'm sure as a CMO that you're out there on the
front lines talking about generative AI and Einstein GPT but ultimately at the
end of the day you know your sales team is struggling to close deals like we
all
are and pipeline is obviously core to that so how much of your time if you were
to break down the hours you spend in a given month how much do you focus on
pipeline versus other types of marketing tests? Well everything that we do
ultimately
ladders back to pipeline whether you're building a community that ultimately
ladders back to pipeline because they're the ambassadors and of your brand and
your products into their companies or whether you're working on brand that
ultimately you want to create awareness that ultimately leads to pipeline for
people to want to buy your service or your product so I would say a hundred
percent of my time is focused on pipeline even the time focused on the health
of
my team or doing team bonding if you don't have successful happy team members
they're not going to be helping you deliver a pipeline so I would say that is
my sole focus our goal is a hundred percent aligned to the sales team we
take on the total pipeline goal and there's many generation sources whether
it's AE generated or you know marketing generated on SDR BDR and we look every
week at all of the numbers and we look at all of the growth and all of the
percentages and we go in everything and we do that together with a distribution
team and I think that's so important because if you if you aren't aligned or
you're fighting or your finger pointing which is the worst I don't recommend
participating in that because you're just going to lead yourself down to a
negative pathway well tell me a little bit about events you know we're sitting
here in downtown San Francisco we're right in the epicenter where we're
sitting right now the epicenter of Dreamforce and you know events were tough
for
a few years it went through covid and it was like everything's virtual and then
we tried to do Dreamforce a couple years back and then we did a you know blow
out
event at Dreamforce last year how important is events to your strategy and
how do you think about in-person events versus virtual events like this and so
events are important to our strategy and when you look at the way the budget
breaks down you've got about a third which you put into paid media digital
campaigns etc you have about another third that you put into your events your
hospitality all of your your field engagement and then about a third that
goes into your your brand and your community and all of that and you need
to decide your strategy on what's lever you're going to invest in more and that
all ties back to the beginning of the question of beginning of this talking
about budgets and so for sales force events are a very important part for us
they've been very effective they also double as an enablement tactic so when
you get your employees there and your salespeople there they hear what's going
on they see what's going on so they also can feel the culture and experience
the
brand and so I mean you know this very very well yourself has been in this seat
before and it's definitely an important part for us to do the events and so
they've also been really popular people have wanted to get back and connect
they
wanted to be able to have just like here today where people are getting best
practices from each other learning tips and tricks it's important that people
do that and you get people together so events are important for multiple
reasons but ultimately yes we do hope they drive pipeline so you you broke down
your budget in third third third you said a third was digital a third was
effectively being out in the field field enablement you would you would put
events in that bucket in a third was was brand which is I think probably a good
insight from you in this discussion you know when when you're out there in the
world and you're thinking of the brand of Salesforce obviously brand building
has this this halo effect on pipeline generation right because the things
that you're talking about and the interest that you're driving in the
market drives interest in in in Salesforce which leads to people tinkering
with the product or doing a free trial or or signing up to read content and
then
of course that leads into stage one pipeline Salesforce is always on the
bleeding edge of innovative technology and talking about the new things I think
the team at Salesforce yourself and Mark and all the other executives have
been so great about capturing the interest of the B2B community especially
us marketers what are the hot trends right now that marketers should be paying
attention to from the perspective of yourself and Salesforce yeah so different
I'll just start first though by saying that differentiation and relevance are
so important as a marketeer and as a brand because if you're just saying the
same thing that everybody else is saying if you're saying it the same way if
it's not that interesting just super boring you're not gonna have people's
attention and so relevance is key and driving great marketing and so right now
it's very relevant a generative AI everybody is talking about it it is the
talk of the town it's crazy that in two months open AI had a hundred million
users on chat GPT things that took years sometimes decades for former prior
technologies to get that same level of adoption and usage so generative AI is
incredible Einstein GPT is our marketing led innovation there showing that
everything that you can do across you know sales service marketing commerce
with
generative AI and in a way though that brings your values to bear so is not
just technology for technology's sake is doing it with our values of trust
looking at your trusted customer data which is really important and delivering
value back so that is definitely a big trend right now and then the
underpinning of that is data it is the data foundation data is so foundational
to the world of today and tomorrow just like this building here is built with
bricks and and physical materials the world of the future is being built with
with data and that's the world that's our currency going forward especially as
marketeers and so I think the future is exciting I think that it's a fun time
to
be in this this hard time because it's a time when you need to invent you need
to differentiate you need to go back to basics you need to be creative in order
to win and that's why I think it's a hard time but a great time the what a
great message Sarah I've known you for quite a long too many you know we're
young right I'm always inspired to talk to you I'm inspired to talk to other
sales force executives because with so much stress on our industry right now
we all feel it as marketers we feel it as sales professionals we feel it it is
so tough out there right now but you've always been so optimistic and sales
force and mark have always been so optimistic about the future that's
something I've admired so much what what makes you optimistic about the year
ahead for us marketers it's a very good question because we all feel the like
you said we feel the the pressures and we feel the difficulties but what makes
me optimistic is that just we're simply here and we have so much
opportunity ahead of us and we have the opportunity to build the future the
future is not yet written it's our opportunity to write it and it's a bit
manifest destiny if we decide that it's going to be doom and gloom we will get
doom and gloom if we decide that we're going to navigate it we might not have
the results that we had of you two years ago and things are just bananas crazy
going through the roof but we may reset expectations a little bit but we have
to
have optimism because we just have to believe because if you don't believe then
you're just gonna go nowhere Sarah thank you so much for being here with me
today at the pipeline summit what a great conversation I wish you and Sales
force
all the best this year let's go do it together yeah I think much boom