Almudena Maneiro, Field Marketing Senior Director for EMEA Central at Salesforce, shares insights from her 20+ years in B2B technology marketing. She discusses building global partner marketing teams, evolving marketing operations into growth engines, accelerating complex GTM motions, and aligning marketing more closely with pipeline, revenue, and business growth.
Welcome to the interview series, Almudena. Could you tell us about yourself and your marketing journey?
Thanks for having me! I am currently the Field Marketing Senior Director for EMEA Central at Salesforce, where I lead go-to-market in the Mid-Market segment, Austria, and partner marketing strategy across the region.
Before Salesforce, I spent over a decade at BlackBerry, moving from product marketing into industry and eventually into global leadership roles across partner marketing and marketing operations. In 2019, I joined Salesforce to build out EMEA Partner Marketing, and that mandate later expanded to LATAM and APAC. And since 2025, I have had the privilege to focus on key growth areas for Central Midmarket in Germany and Austria.
Looking back over 20+ years, I feel genuinely lucky to have ridden several major waves in technology—the early internet, then mobility, and now AI—and to have had a front-row seat through each one.
What ties it all together is a fascination with how you turn a marketing organization into a genuine growth engine, not just a support function, but a driver of revenue.
With 20+ years in marketing and GTM, what experiences have most shaped your approach to driving growth in complex B2B technology environments?
A few things stand out. First, working directly with sales teams early in my career taught me that marketing only matters if it moves a deal forward; that discipline has stayed with me. Get close to revenue and own your number.
Second, operating across multiple markets and cultures in EMEA, LATAM, and APAC showed me that “one size fits all” campaigns rarely work; you need a strong central strategy but real flexibility in local execution. Take the time to actually understand each market, the buying culture, and the local dynamics, and then trust your regional leaders to make the call on the ground.
And third, living through several major shifts in GTM, the move to digital-first buying, the rise of partner ecosystems, and now AI-driven engagement taught me to build teams that can adapt quickly. Invest in education on your team.
You’ve led global partner marketing across regions. What are the biggest challenges of building marketing programs across such diverse markets?
What I learned building and then scaling the EMEA, LATAM, and APAC partner marketing frameworks is that you can’t force one playbook everywhere. I had to build governance that let global strategy and local execution coexist: documenting what worked and sharing it across regions, running quarterly pipeline reviews that turned data into real dialogue rather than just a report-out, and making sure everyone understood the “why” behind the numbers, not just the numbers themselves.
The other big challenge is talent: managing a multidisciplinary team of 25 people spread across locations means investing heavily in mentoring and career development so the function scales sustainably, not just the programs.
How can marketing operations evolve from being a support function into a strategic growth engine for the broader marketing organization?
When I was leading global marketing operations for the enterprise business at BlackBerry, everything started with data and visibility. When marketing ops owns clean, trusted data and connects it to pipeline and revenue outcomes, not just campaign metrics, it earns a seat at the strategy table. The shift happens when ops stops being “the team that runs the tech” and becomes “the team that tells us what’s working and why.”
That means investing in attribution, forecasting, and enablement, and having ops leaders who can translate data into a point of view on where to invest next, not just report on what already happened.
“Marketers who can speak the language of the business, not just the language of campaigns, are the ones who earn broader leadership roles.”
Can you share an example of a marketing transformation or GTM initiative that significantly changed a business’s trajectory?
Building Salesforce’s EMEA Partner Marketing function from scratch is the clearest one. Going from a blank page to a 25-person global team reshaped how partner marketing showed up in the business. But the deeper transformation wasn’t just building the team. It was changing how partners were valued inside the broader marketing organization. It created a more structured and strategic approach to partner engagement, strengthened collaboration across teams, and established partner marketing as a meaningful contributor to the wider business and growth strategy.
What strategies have you found most effective for creating and accelerating demand in complex B2B buying journeys?
In complex B2B, the buying group is bigger than ever, and you need to see the big picture.
multi-stakeholder execution, instead of isolated campaigns. Integrate demand generation paired with executive marketing and tight partner ecosystem alignment.
At Salesforce, in the Central Marketing team, we’re applying that same principle to accelerate the shift into the Agentic Enterprise: We call it “partners everywhere”: demand generation, executive marketing, and partner alignment working as one motion rather than three separate programs.
Also, I would highlight that to own the lead funnel, having tight collaboration between marketing and sales on lead handoff and follow-up is also critical: even great demand generation fails if the acceleration and conversion motion aren’t equally strong.
What advice would you give marketers looking to move into broader business and revenue leadership?
Get comfortable owning a number, not just a plan. Every role that expanded my scope came from proving results tied directly to revenue and pipeline; the ROI and pipeline growth in partner marketing is what got my mandate extended internationally.
Build fluency with the data side of marketing early, invest in mentoring others as you grow so your impact scales beyond your own output, understand the sales cycle, sit in on deals, and learn how the pipeline actually gets built and won.
Marketers who can speak the language of the business, not just the language of campaigns, are the ones who earn broader leadership roles.
And build cross-functional relationships with sales, product, partners, and strategy, because revenue leadership is fundamentally about influence across the whole business.
About Almudena Maneiro
Almudena Maneiro is a marketing and GTM leader focused on driving revenue growth for enterprise technology companies. Her expertise spans international GTM, strategic alliances, market expansion, enterprise demand generation, and team leadership. A certified coach and mentor, she builds high-performing teams, champions technology transformation, and challenges conventional thinking to create measurable business impact across enterprise software, SaaS, security, and cloud environments.
